Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America and It Just Stopped: Two plays

Stephen Sewell

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781921429668
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro

A savage comedy of manners, It Just Stopped explores our relationship to art, globalisation, death, technology, America, Campari, cardboard boxes and slavery. Sewell's play is funny and shocking in turn. It holds the mirror up to the things we value today and asks the questions: what will we value the day the world just stops, and what would we be willing to trade for our own survival?%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%Written with searing passion and dazzling momentum, Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America reverberates with the aftershocks of September 11. With compelling drive and theatrical daring, we are swept from cocktails at the Guggenheim to the hungry vacuum of Ground Zero. Stephen Sewell demands answers to some of the most urgent questions of our times. Where is the line between patriotism and nationalism? What happens when the Land of the Free makes such uncompromising statements as: 'You're either with us or against us'?

MYTH, PROPAGANDA AND DISASTER IN NAZI GERMANY AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICA: INTRODUCTION

The assault on international law and democratic institutions currently being waged under the guise of the War on Terror has provoked a storm of protest throughout the world, and within the theatre community, and Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America—A Drama in Thirty Scenes is part of that reaction. With its roots in the great tradition of humanist opposition to absurdity and tyranny, from Kafka’s The Trial through to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Brecht’s Galileo, Myth tells the story of Talbot Finch—a name chosen to evoke America’s own great liberal tradition, in the name of Atticus Finch, the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird—as he suffers a mysterious persecution at the hands of someone only he can see, and whose existence is denied by all around him. Caught in this nightmarish trap, Talbot questions his own sanity as he confronts the question each of us is asking at the moment: Is this really happening and what can I do to protect myself? What can I do to protect myself from a State that can dispense with any pretence to legal obligations and practices simply by calling me a terrorist? What can I do to protect myself when the ancient prohibitions against torture are being flouted in a gulag of secret prisons dotted across the globe, filled with ghost prisoners apparently beyond the reach of even the International Red Cross and the Geneva Conventions? How can I protect myself when my own government is complicit in the kidnapping and torture of Australian citizens and happy to lie on a daily basis about its knowledge and involvement in international crime? How can I protect myself now?

The answer is now well known. On my own, it is impossible to protect myself in all but the most rudimentary of ways, but as a group we can protect ourselves from the tyrants who are ever ready to take away our lives and rights. This is not empty rhetoric, this is the core element of democracy: For good or for evil, the power of the group is infinitely greater than the power of the individual. This is a truth that has been proven again and again, both in the positive and the negative senses. The Nazis won in Germany because they were able to corral and annihilate any opposition, and herd the many German people they had not murdered into the Nazi Party itself. In the famous words of Pastor Martin Niemöller, ‘In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me—and by that time no one was left to speak up.’

On a more positive note, the ability of people to confront and defeat the bullies and little Hitlers in our midst is a daily experience, and one that should encourage us to take heart in the community we are a part of. And part of the expression of that community is theatre.

Theatre has nearly always been on the side of the oppressed and the vulnerable because theatre, even in its most ancient forms, has used as its material human lives and dilemmas, and presented these in a communal setting. Of all the arts, theatre is most unique in its direct relationship with its audience. Theatre is the people speaking to themselves, and in speaking to themselves, creating a sense of their own unity. This is why autocrats from Plato down have been suspicious or downright condemnatory of the theatrical arts, and this is why politics and theatre have always had such an intimate relationship. The Velvet Revolution that overthrew Communism in the former Czechoslovakia was forged in Vaclav Havel’s Magic Theatre in Prague, where the Oppositionists met and plotted the downfall of the old regime, and this is but one of the most recent links in the long chain that has found theatre and political action synonymous. Theatre is politics and politics is theatre, and so long as the rulers control the other forms of mass media, theatre will remain the avenue through which we can inform one another of how we really feel.

And how we feel now is angry, frightened and confused. How we feel now is bewildered as the world we have known of laws and rights and democracy is stripped away and replaced by an Ancient Regime of arbitrary power we thought died centuries ago. But we should not be disheartened. We know that while tyranny presents itself as strong, it is fundamentally weak, relying as it does on the absolute power of an individual, and what makes it weak is what makes us strong, and ...