2016 January

Ashley Pearson’s Coverage opens at the Courtyard Theatre in London this evening. It’s a modern take on the story of Julius Caesar as told through the lens of a right wing US 24hr news station. We spoke to Alexander Grant, who plays Julius Caesar in the production.

Coverage introduces a sense of modern day 24/7 news reporting to Julius Caesar… what is the balance between the original material and this modern interpretation?
“It’s a completely contemporary rendering of teamwork that falls apart because of human ambition and frailty,” said Grant. “Ashley Pearson’s script lands us in the bustle of a TV newsroom, broadcasting live news of contemporary political events in a Roman/American republic. The shifting relationships of the news team mirror the crumbling allegiances of the Roman senators as they plot to murder a political leader who reaches beyond the republican ideal of the equality of every citizen. The senators speak the Shakespeare text, intercut with the Aaron Sorkin-like dialogue of the newsroom.”

Please give us a brief introduction to your role…
“I play Julius Caesar. In Coverage, Caesar is a liberal-minded presidential candidate, reaching for sole leadership of the state. He believes in gun control and the individual responsibility of citizens to run their own lives. But he also believes utterly that his own powers of leadership overtop all others.”

Are people today blind to the influence of the media and in particular its right wing bias?
“No. People select the news they watch, hear and read and react to it in a manner of their own choosing. Fewer people choose centre-left channels than centre-right and beyond. There is a greater volume of noise and further reach in the right-wing channels. In the UK the BBC largely holds the ring. In the US, money talks even more loudly, so the right-wing volume is very high.”

Can we draw parallels between the Roman Empire and modern day America?
“Only with a broad brush. The Roman Republic was very different from the American republic that has emerged from the 18th-century Enlightenment and the movement to votes for all in the 20th-century.  But Rome was built on the management of a very stratified society, with slaves at its base; military might; and, from the fourth century AD, a Roman emperor keen on imposing an evangelical Christianity across his empire. Like all empires – the Chinese, the British, the Islamic – there are fundamental similarities which reflect the fact that people don’t change much.”

In a world of non-stop media, does theatre have a stronger role than ever to play in connecting art with audiences in ‘real life’?
“Theatre is wonderful for that. At its best moments, the human life and fire that is created by actors is reflected back in a response ‘in the moment’ from the audience. This forms a connection between people of such openness that is unbeatable in any other medium.

Coverage runs at the courtyard Theatre on Tuesday 26^th January – Sunday 31^st January. For more information visit: http://www.thecourtyard.org.uk/whatson/654/coverage.

‘We can’t cope with the numbers any longer. We need to get a grip on this’, said Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, yesterday. (The Guardian). In the first three weeks of 2016, 37,000 migrants have crossed Europe’s external borders. Between Europe’s constituent countries, fences are going up – physically, with barbed wire, in the Balkans, around Hungary; bureaucratically, with new border controls around France and on the bridge between Denmark and Sweden. Even Germany is wondering what to do. We are beginning to accelerate down a slippery slope.

Once a fence goes up, there is a temptation to throw things over it – sticks, stones, bullets, bombs, missiles.   People.

Stefan Zweig, in his autobiography The World of Yesterday, first published in 1942 in Stockholm, says ‘Before 1914 the earth belonged to the entire human race.   Everyone could go where he wanted and stay there as long as he liked.   No permits and visas were necessary….After the war National Socialism began destroying the world, and the first visible symptom of that intellectual epidemic of the present [20th] century was xenophobia….People were defending themselves against foreigners everywhere.   All the humiliations previously devised solely for criminals were now inflicted on every traveller…’

He also describes the shifting sense of self of those being forced to flee.   It upsets ‘your equilibrium…you lose something of your upright bearing if you no longer have the soil of your own land beneath your feet; you feel less confident, more distrustful of yourself…I have not felt that I entirely belong to myself any more’.

The fences, the borders, the civil wars, the human catastrophes, the movement of millions of refugees that were the deep wounds people inflicted on each other in the First and Second World Wars are being carved open once again.   Last night 45 more people, including 17 children, most fleeing the war in Syria, drowned off the coast of Kalolymnos, in the eastern Aegean between Turkey and Greece.  Blood, misery, despair are flowing freely.

None of these catastrophes has a natural cause.   Every catastrophe, every element of each catastrophe, arises because a person thinks the action she or he undertakes is a better idea than not taking the action.   Whether fleeing or persecuting, the action is generated by a human mind.   None of it need happen.  It happens because a person makes it happen.

The only response is to be humane.    We citizens of Europe cannot indulge in beggaring our neighbours.    Drones are not the answer to suicide bombers.   Allowing people to live in mud in the Jungle outside Calais is not the answer to terror.   The British Conservative government’s opposition to creative engagement in how to save refugees is not the answer to the four million people who voted UKIP in the 2015 election.

It’s hard work helping to make the world a better place, but no harder than making it worse.   We must do the work.

 

The World of Yesterday is published in the UK by Pushkin Press