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The Power of Yes

Claire North News

So, went to the theatre!  (For the first time in far too long… amazing how the process of learning about the theatre prevents you from ever having the time or money to go to the theatre… anyway…)  And, by random chance, as most things seem to be, I ended up seeing The Power of Yes, by David Hare.  And it was very, very good!

I’m not a huge fan of didactic writing – I’ve always been of the opinion that the story should be put first, and any profound moral messages should emerge as a result of the story, rather than as a thing imposed on the narrative as prime purpose.  I’m definitely not a fan of putting the writer into the story, since it seems anywhere between a cop-out and utterly wanky.  But!  In praise of The Power of Yes, the one hour forty five minutes I spent watching it may have gone a very long way to reforming my opinion of both.  The story was, from line one, put first, but the passion, anger and morality of the story was always its heart, and the device of having the writer directly telling it became practically charming as the characters unfolded.  In brief, it’s the story of the financial meltdown that’s been the source of so much of so much for the last… well, more than a year now, eighteen months, perhaps?  Of how, why, what, who.  The fact that it spends so much time trying to maintain an open mind means that by the end, when the sheer outrage that, for the sake of the rich many, the poor many have had to pay up trillions – trillions – to bail out the banks, makes what could have otherwise been a cold lesson in fiscal politics a far more emotional experience.  I know very little about economics – although, I suppose in my defence, I have a fair grasp of how it has affected history and politics, even if I couldn’t tell a hedge fund from a government bond – but came away from this play feeling both enlightened and, perhaps more importantly, determined to find out more about just how the governments of the world, the UK included (if not especially) found themselves in the pretty mess we’re in now.

As for what a pretty mess we’re in… this is possibly the first election campaign I can remember (not that the election has been called, but hell) in which there’s competition over who’ll bring in the better cuts!  Yeah; we’re in that kind of a mess.  I’ve always kept out of political debates… I think my problem has always been that the people I’ve been arguing politics with are so passionately committed to their views that I lack the ability to sway, or the willingness to be swayed by arguments that are practically religion.  My own views are, alas, perhaps too simple to serve as apt policy – trouble about being a wishy-washy left-wingish environmentalist liberal is that you want everyone to just buckle down, be nice and do the right thing, and when the unlikelyhood of that is presented, the reality of complexity and difficult decisions tends to corrupt any argument before it even gets off the ground.  It is extremely difficult for a liberal like myself to admit that sometimes, perhaps more often than we’d like to admit, the big decisions are being made by people who just don’t care about the bigger picture.  Perhaps because to concede that, particularly when it comes to matters like the environment, is to look a little too deep at a future none of us want to live in.

One last thought on The Power of Yes… as a graduate of the LSE, I’d run into one of the play’s key characters a few times, and it was a deeply strange experience seeing someone I’ve known being portrayed on stage.  I can’t help but wondering… did he go and see himself saying these words up on the stage?  And if so… did he recognise himself?

I’m told that no one ever does.