'A constant raging of words'

THE ARTS:Media and advertising have created a culture of 'soft fascism', and theatre is part of it, writes Edward Bond

A contemporary dramatist quickly learns that reality has lost its voice. Those dramatists no longer have a language we can use to understand ourselves or allow others to understand us. There is TV, the internet, chat rooms, talkies, mobile phones, adverts, sermons, orders - a constant raging of words. But nothing is said because nothing has any meaning any more. Microbes and animals do not need meanings. Even the gods cannot give themselves a meaning, because clearly each community gives its own god a different meaning. So meaning is what human beings give to things. But as human beings no longer have any meaning themselves - how can they give meaning to anything else?

Two and two still makes four. We go about our lives. We still use things. But if we, as people, have no meaning, no purpose that marks us off from things, then things are really using us. They turn us into things. That fits in well with the technology and consumerism which are now society's driving forces. Things don't have problems - instead, they break down. Now, we would say to Hamlet: "You don't have a problem, you're suffering a break down. Take this pill." But when Hamlet says: "To be or not to be," he doesn't just mean to exist, he means to be human. Our problems make us human, but to solve them humanly we need another language of reality, a language in which we may "know ourselves." All other solutions - however technologically brilliant - slowly barbarise society. Reality can no longer speak to reality. Yet the logic of our situation - our niche in the universe, so to speak - is to be human. We can be content only when we seek to create our humanness and when we are persuaded that we have the means to do so. That is the purpose and logic of drama.

When the Greeks founded our democracy they had also to found our drama. Drama is the only place where self and society must converse, the only place where we can truly talk to ourselves. Our mind is the duality of "self-and-society", and to exist, the mind must dramatise the relation between the two. We are the dramatic species. The universe "knows" that two and two is four but only humans have the imagination to consider "why" or "how" or "what". In drama, "why" can interrogate "how" or "what". That is the severe discipline of the Tragic and it is why the state of democracy depends on its drama.

But now we have no drama. Instead we have "theatre" and that is the enemy of drama. We live in a media world that theatricalises everything - ultimately, so that the economy may be kept running by consumption for consumption's sake. Our species must seek self-understanding, but in the past, society imposed misunderstandings, false dramatisations, on itself. What else could it do when the tasks were so demanding and knowledge so limited? We inherit these myths, religions and reductive science. They are a sort of cement-floss clogging the brain. Now at last we know at least enough to be free of all this. But instead, the media assault us with fake problems so reductive that their solutions must be trivialising. Once the press was the defender of democracy, now it and the media degrade it.

DOES ANYTHING DEGRADE democracy more subtly than the way TV news-presenters pass glibly from murder in the Middle East to the glitter-glitter of the Oscars? What destroys civil decency more insidiously than TV detectives' vigilante-like prosecution of the law? - which has nothing to do with Antigone's pursuit of justice. What is more irresponsible than chat-show hosts reverence of "celebrities" while complaining of the irresponsibility of the young? The media and advertising have created a culture of soft-fascism.

And theatre is part of it. Sometimes it is used to give this degradation a fake literary respectability. One of its most decorated playwrights is known for his "silences". Whatever gurus and literary critics might think, silence is not the language of reality in the age of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. What have the pleasure of adultery and the unease of furtive middle-class consciences to do with Phèdre's tragic passion? How can dry-as-dust politico- documentaries answer questions so complex we do not yet even now how to ask them, though our future depends on the answers? How can odes to nostalgia and our schooldays help us to live in this angry present? What use are plays that show young people in bedsits taking drugs to escape the fatigue of living in the modern world, when outside that world is marching angrily to their doors?

To escape from this waste I took an interest in drama for the young. After the age of 14, it seems that we can learn nothing, except perhaps to be patient. But by that age we have lived through all the tragedy, despair, rage, hope, exuberance and sublimity of our common humanness. We have walked on our streets and the edge of the universe. Later we acquire information and skills of the body and mind. But if we forsake that first self then we become lifeless and, in time, corrupt. Drama's role is to confront the audience with their young, urgent self, but at a time when it is burdened with the weight of later experience.

I found this out in my early play Saved. The language of reality did not use jaded rhetoric but the language of the street. When dramas confront that language with the extremes of the human dilemma, then its shortcomings may have a Greek power and lucidity. Drama may free this street-language from the corruptions that so easily distort the language of politics, law and religion. It is a language far more profound than our conventional language of good and evil. In Saved, a baby is stoned to death: stoning is an ancient form of rectitude. The play deals with the unavoidable paradoxes through which "self-and-society" searches for its humanness. And, in the end, it is not the violence that shocks us in our society-of-things; it is, in fact, the humanness.

Saved opens in a new Abbey production at the Peacock theatre tonight and runs until May 26