The reason the theater is uniquely valuable is because you have to concentrate. In other
words you’re hijacked for two hours and you’ve got to turn off your cell phone.
You’ve got to stop talking to your neighbor and you’ve actually all got to examine something
together. Now some people would and some people will look away while it’s happening and
other people will cough, another will head straight for the exit. And some people will
not choose to focus. But at a good play what you get is this extraordinary act of concentration.
I suppose what I’m talking about is scrutiny. In other words it’s one thing to look at
an idea on the page and run it through your brain. But it’s a completely different thing
to be in a room where a whole group of people make a moral examination together of actions
and words. Now clearly for the next generation after mine who were brought up on television,
cinema, video, the moving image, beginning of computers they weren’t really interested
in theater. And in England at least it’s not a very distinguished bunch of playwrights
that follow mine. However, the young who are now bored stiff with computers, bored stiff
with film, bored stiff with television. They actually have taken up theater again. And
what we have is a brilliant crop of young writers, a lot of them female, working in
Britain. And the theater is being regenerated by the young. And particularly at time when
public discourse in Britain at least is so impoverished. And so one track, you know.
We eat now for anyone to descend from orthodoxy about neoliberal economics. That the only
way of the world advancing is apparently through deregulated markets, cheap labor, you know.
If you say anything else, if you start talking about workers’ rights you’re now treated
like a lunatic in Britain. They want to put you in a white coat and take you away. And
so the theater’s the place where people can look at ideas again. There’s a very
beautiful saying of Raymond Williams who was my old tutor. And Raymond Williams once said
if people cannot have justice officially they will have it unofficially. And unofficially
at the moment means by going to the theater.