Democracy Is Always Feared

Michael March: In her novel, History, Elsa Morante said we're "condemned to hope". What do you think?

Howard Brenton: Well, I think we're condemned to endlessly projecting forward into what we are going to do in the next hour, next day, next year. You live in a fantasy of the future. You imagine the houses you will build and the people you want to meet and the way you want to conduct your life, all this before you actually live it. You have to project forward all the time.

MM: We tend to be disappointed.

HB: Yes, often. You look at the week ahead, and you say, "Well look, Thursday is great, I'm going to eat in that restaurant" - and it's just the same old terrible restaurant and everyone says exactly the same things they've always said and nothing really wonderful happens. It's part of the human condition, of being conscious: this endless projection towards a fabulous, bright life.

MM: You said that "culture is what we do to each other". What do we do to each other?

HB: There's a character in this play of mine who turns into a terrifying Stalinist tyrant. He's on the left, and he begins to kill all his old collaborators. At the end, against all evidence, he makes a speech, saying that people are fundamentally good. And I think I do believe that as well.

MM: 'Fundamentally' is a difficult word these days.

HB: Nevertheless, there is probably a basic truth about what we are.

MM: What brought you to the theatre?

HB: I've always written plays. I wrote my first play when I was 10. I was copying my father, who was an amateur producer in amateur theatre, and I copied the way he marked his books. I wrote my own play based on a comic that I read at the time and got my friends to perform it. When I was a student I wrote a huge, completely unworkable play which the students performed, and received some of the worst reviews of my life. There was a speech which lasted 20 minutes and the walk-out record was 40 people. Once every 30 seconds there was the sound of a seat going blip - one of the most dreaded sounds in the theatre. But I've always done it, there's just nothing else I can do. It defines you.

MM: So what's missing?

HB: Jean-Paul Sartre. When I was 15, I came across a small book called Existentialism and Humanism. It was tucked into the library next to a volume about Robespierre, can you believe it, in my state school. It was one of those experiences where your sense of reality is torn to bits. And then I read into Sartre - his ideas about who we are, what we do and what in our hidden nature cannot be explained with Descartes' phrase "I think, therefore I am" - because while looking at that sentence, it's already left you, is in the world, as breath and sound. Fundamentally, we are unknowable. We make our own world because we have no choice. This is really the answer about culture.

MM: Martin Heidegger, not an ideal theatre critic, believed that "the light of the public obscures everything".

HB: Some of the great liberating ideas of the 20th century - the whole existentialist tradition - have a very dark side. Heidegger did get very near describing what existence actually is and, at the same time, threw in his lot with an evil regime. You think, "what does this mean and why?".

MM: Hannah Arendt coined the concept "the banality of evil". What is evil, for you?

HB: You judge people by the harm they do, and evil by harm. As a playwright, you've got to understand that no one thinks that they're a shit. Everyone thinks they're good, everyone justifies themselves.

MM: Adolf Eichmann saw himself as an idealist.

HB: Yes, exactly - the theatre dramatises monsters. Shakespeare's most evil characters are those most loved by the audience, because Shakespeare realized that when a character speaks, you must write from his point of view. As far as that character is concerned, he is a political genius and therefore the rightful heir to the throne.

MM: Who sits on the throne nowadays - a reformed monster?

HB: I thought Russia was going to reform. I thought the Soviet Union was going to turn itself inside out and that an extraordinary social democratic force was going to emerge and it would be an unexpected check to the uncontrollable development of the world economy. But Reagan and Thatcher really gave it no quarter; they were determined to destroy it. My hopes were an illusion, and that depressed me. I felt, along with many others, that the socialist idea died in this Russian autocratic mess. Russia had appropriated the whole project, tyrannized it, distorted it, and then failed to make it work. It was a 20th-century disaster from which we have not really recovered. And we're now in the position of having an uncontrollable world economy and a political superpower behaving rather like the Roman empire.

MM: Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize lecture described Blair and Bush as war criminals.

HB: I think it's too crude, though there's something very cynical in the present administration in Washington, which seeks social control through fear: the fear of democracy. Democracy is always feared. Britain fears it. Tony Blair fears it. That's why they invented spin-doctors. They're not insane, religious fanatics in the White House. They're intelligent, cynical men. Bush has a political animal's cynical intelligence. He's a businessman who became president.

MM: Let's speak about your new play, Paul.

HB: I had a religious upbringing, but I lost my faith. Methodism is like Catholicism: you may try leave, but you never truly do. It informs the way you think. Anyway, in the play I ask an almost adolescent question: "if Jesus did not rise from the dead, if the resurrection didn't take place - what happened? How did such a virulent and powerful religion develop, based on something that did not happen? How can faith encompass both truth and it's opposite, and how can we live with it?" This dilemma is described by Kierkegaard in Sickness unto Death -that's what I was trying to dramatize. And so I thought, well, I'll have Paul confronted by the truth of what actually happened. I'll work out a possible scenario of what happened and confront Paul with it and see what happens. And, of course, he slams the door on it - reality is too much for him. The door closes and his faith is even stronger. That's how fundamentalism works.

MM: Repeating '"Christ is risen, Christ is risen" - like sour dough.

HB: Yes, like a mantra. My character, Nero, is right. Ritual sustains religion and underpins faith. Churches have always understood that practice maintains religious beliefs.

MM: As creatures of habit, Nero seems sensitive to our needs.

HB: We are Nero, but Paul, the biblical Paul, is a moral genius - both profoundly wrong and mysteriously right - an absurd oxymoron, but it's the only way I can put it. In a way, he invented the western world. His concept of love was new - an existentialist state of feeling, of being. He also invented justification by faith, which is, oddly, why the Catholic church never really liked him. It's a very Protestant position; it's what Martin Luther took up. In the play, Paul says "Look, I have this revelation from Christ directly. No human being has taught it to me. I have received it myself". In other words, I have a direct line to reality, by simply waking up in the morning - and that idea is at the basis of western capitalism. You wake up in the morning and you believe you have the right to shop. The phrase, "the God-given right" comes out of the Pauline notion, and the whole business of the way we actually think of ourselves was invented by Paul and put onto the screen of western culture. The Enlightenment would have been impossible without it.

The Guardian

PWF 2006