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Post by Cardinal Pirelli on Jul 29, 2018 18:14:45 GMT
“It was boy scout stuff” as Beckett said, he became very anti militaristic and wary of his exploits being used by others. A devastating war may be useful in order to be able to accurately measure our humanity in extremis but, as he became aware, the same system was rebuilt after the last one, without much improvement.
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Post by crowblack on Jul 29, 2018 20:40:07 GMT
without much improvement. You don't really believe that, do you? That the life chances and expectancies for a woman, a working class person, an ethnic minority in Europe are just as bad now as they were in 1939?
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Post by Deleted on Jul 29, 2018 21:37:26 GMT
“It was boy scout stuff” as Beckett said, he became very anti militaristic and wary of his exploits being used by others. A devastating war may be useful in order to be able to accurately measure our humanity in extremis but, as he became aware, the same system was rebuilt after the last one, without much improvement. Beckett was probably downplaying his role in the resistance because he probably knew others who did much more than he did, but the truth is that he and his partner just about escaped the death camps and many of his friends were killed in them. Beckett’s absurdist poetics were rooted in a horrific reality.
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Post by Cardinal Pirelli on Jul 29, 2018 22:26:38 GMT
without much improvement. You don't really believe that, do you? That the life chances and expectancies for a woman, a working class person, an ethnic minority in Europe are just as bad now as they were in 1939? No, they are better, but the division is still wide in each instance and, looking around the world, the advancement is limited to only a part. I could easily say that I’m alright but to look outwards would tell me instead that I am very much privileged in comparison to the major part of the world’s population. On Beckett having the aecond world war to define him, his work is a denial of heroism and progress; what was a greater spur to his writing was its destruction and failure, leading to a nihilistic view of humanity and our inability to change. My outlook is clearly less positive than many, reflecting my cynicism at the state of the world. Theatre and the arts, however, are a joy to me and cynicism and ennui don’t get much of a look in there.
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Post by crowblack on Jul 30, 2018 9:55:06 GMT
I was talking about Europe, and this play has a VERY European outlook despite supposedly being about the state of the world. It completely ignores the Elephant in the Room, religion, and the supposed cycle of violence it depicts is something that is now largely in those parts of the world that have not been through an Enlightenment or modern industrial revolution with the complete change in lifestyles and - crucially - rights for women that are part and parcel of that. Put simply, when women have control over their own bodies and don't have to spend their lives having kids, there aren't the huge numbers of aimless/hungry/angry/desperate young people to be cannon fodder for wars or economic/political exploitation.
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Post by Cardinal Pirelli on Jul 30, 2018 11:02:48 GMT
What is, on the surface, ‘European’ is easily read as global and the disconnection between the two is made clear as the ‘Trumpton’ setting makes the happenings unthinkable, as opposed to commonplace elsewhere. You are not going to be given direct referencest. Religion is very much there beneath the surface, for example, in terms of belief systems which sustain/divide.
I would love for us to be different to the parts of the world that you reference but, under a very thin veneer, I don’t think we are. The idea that we don’t have huge numbers of aimless etc. young people? Not in my part of the world where one of the only ways ‘out’ is the forces or, when they can get a job, zero hours contracts. We wilfully overpopulate by having too many children, it’s not going to end well, we are much sicker than we acknowledge.
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Post by crowblack on Jul 30, 2018 11:17:50 GMT
Religion is very much there beneath the surface I didn't think it was at all. The red bandana, blue bandana thing reminded me of Swift's Big and Little Endians but that kind of satire does not apply to secular Western Europe now. My neighbour regards the atomic bomb as the peacekeeper - having just finished fighting in Europe, and with many friends dead, he was about to be sent to Japan. The threat of nuclear annihilation as peacekeeper works if you have a population who don't believe in an afterlife. As a child growing up i the Protect and Survive era, despite my Gothy pessimism I thought no-one is mad enough to push the button because in their heart of hearts they don't believe they'll be going to a 'better place' if they do. The people fighting in the Middle East and blowing kids up in Manchester do. They want to bring about some sort of apocalyptic showdown. Norman Cohn's 'Millennium' series are fantastic books for understanding that mindset but it's not a mindset that still exists much in the West, apart maybe from the religious Eastern fringes.
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Post by Cardinal Pirelli on Jul 30, 2018 11:29:43 GMT
We are clearly of very different minds. As I also grew up in the cold war era of potential nuclear annihilation the idea of it being feted as creating peace is horrifying. We are still one small step away from oblivion and, in recent years, we have edged closer to it. You may disagree. The Middle East is a sideshow, any apocalyptic event would be perpetrated by people who think they can win it, those who wield the greatest firepower, not because they want to go to ‘paradise’.
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Post by crowblack on Jul 30, 2018 12:02:51 GMT
The Middle East is a sideshow I suggest you read Norman Cohn's books - he wrote them after serving as a translator at the Nuremberg trials and was interested in the nature of Millennarian thought. It's an aspect that is weirdly sidestepped in so many 'school' accounts of history yet when you go back and look at the writings of the time they are saturated with such beliefs. The Middle East isn't a sideshow - we've based our civilization in recent decades on petrochemicals and that has led to a very awkward situation regarding who we are beholden to and what they do with the money. It's a region where my father worked - along with the USSR, Africa and South America, so we've always been very conscious of its politics.
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Post by Cardinal Pirelli on Jul 30, 2018 12:31:33 GMT
The Middle East is a sideshow I suggest you read Norman Cohn's books - he wrote them after serving as a translator at the Nuremberg trials and was interested in the nature of Millennarian thought. It's an aspect that is weirdly sidestepped in so many 'school' accounts of history yet when you go back and look at the writings of the time they are saturated with such beliefs. The Middle East isn't a sideshow - we've based our civilization in recent decades on petrochemicals and that has led to a very awkward situation regarding who we are beholden to and what they do with the money. It's a region where my father worked - along with the USSR, Africa and South America, so we've always been very conscious of its politics. Did Cohn say that any apocalyptic event would come from the Middle East? Global resources are an issue but the political positioning as a result is a transitory thing and that part of the world is not powerful enough to wreak havoc on that scale. A much larger problem that might emerge from there is the one of climate, the likelihood of mass migration and rupture of the food chain is one of those high level events that have been the cause of earth’s real and lasting changes.
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Post by crowblack on Jul 30, 2018 13:09:55 GMT
Did Cohn say that any apocalyptic event would come from the Middle East? His focus was on Europe, particularly medieval to 17thc Europe, witch rails and later, the Holocaust , but looking at patterns - he doesn't touch on South America either but their ancient civilizations did similar. I think if we have any nuclear threat, it'll come from the Middle East. I think the more pressing threat to stability is population growth and environmental pressure but the former is a huge taboo and even the likes of David Attenborough get criticised for discussing it.
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Post by foxa on Jul 30, 2018 15:54:08 GMT
Heh - you guys are much cleverer than me. I thought this was just a play by a guy who likes to blow things up. For fun.
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Xanderl
Member
Not always very high value in terms of ticket yield or donations
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Post by Xanderl on Jul 30, 2018 16:32:14 GMT
Heh - you guys are much cleverer than me. I thought this was just a play by a guy who likes to blow things up. For fun. Yes, but bear in mind that the semiotic thickness of a performed text varies according to the redundancy of auxiliary performance codes.
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Post by foxa on Jul 30, 2018 16:56:28 GMT
Ha - yeah. Me - I was just there for the ersatz tombola.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 30, 2018 19:24:57 GMT
It wasn't even a tombola, it was a raffle. I *know* my village fete-style entertainments damnit.
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Post by foxa on Jul 30, 2018 19:27:29 GMT
:-) I know Xanderl pointed that out a few pages ago. That's what made it ersatz.
But soi-disant would have been better.
Let's get Rory on the blower I'm sure he'd be open to our comments. :-)
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Post by joem on Aug 7, 2018 23:26:23 GMT
Promising start but downhill all the way. Despite the efforts of an energetic and enthusiastic cast and an excellent performance from the Royal Court's technical team - they deliver an aural and visual treat - the text itself is a sub-Gilliam grotesquerie which fails to deliver the laughs it seems to promise and fails to deliver any kind of coherent political critique.
End of the day it is a self-indulgent nihilist comic rant which reminds me of that song by Groucho Marx "Whatever it is.... I'm against it" which is kind of a shame as there are some good performances in meh roles here.
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Post by lichtie on Aug 9, 2018 18:54:58 GMT
Well the theatre was probably less than half full for this afternoon's performance. Young audience, many of whom seemed to love it. I thought it was tosh from the off, only redeemed by a cast trying their best with this stuff. At least I now know not to try Mullarkey's effort again, since this managed to be poorer even than just NT effort.
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