All My Sons

(Apollo Theatre, 26 June 2010)

Each aspires to dignity, none is obviously mistaken, each treats others unequally. All are human, which is unacceptable to some characters.

Not knowing or unable to practice the second-best strategy in life, one can resort to the safest strategy, integrity. (Which is also the first-best one.) Integrity requires constrained selflessness, which is unconstrained selfishness.

It is hard to forgive a friend's or a relative's offence, as such an offence is aggravated by the concomitant deception, without which the offence would have been anticipated. It is harder still to forgive one's own self-deception, which exposes the disturbing lack of control over one's own life, not just the lives of others.

An ideal society is not that which creates no temptation, but that which allows for temptation but teaches individuals to overcome it when they would benefit from doing so. Teaching requires forgiveness. Because individuals differ, for some, freedoms will be excessive and punishments too harsh, and their lives' value will lie in the lessons to others. The society evolves as its members learn---through arts, education, and lucky encounters.

The actors convey the passion without forcing the characters to appear extrovert. Voices are raised only infrequently, to emphasise an idea, never to broadcast an emotion. The assumed accents, consistent across players, emerge from characters, not from actors.

For two hours, the actors live on stage. It is hard to live the life of a bad man (unless this is the live of one's own). Hence, out of necessity, each actor has crafted a good, rich life to portray. When these lives clash, no amplification is required.

A character must be more subtle than the audience expects him to be. Subtlety creates suspense, makes the audience think and thus contribute to the play. In the Arthur Miller's minimalist play, much of the subtlety is created by the actors (David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker) and the director (Howard Davies).

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1926)

Gatsby—the man that he thought the woman he loved thought he was—was mistaken, owing to his not-yet “thinning briefcase of enthusiasm’’ (unlike that of the novel’s narrator), the flourishes of New York, and the insufficiency of his five-months’ overseas education.

The novel reads as a movie script waiting to be animated. The characters engage neither individually nor as a class. They are no class. Foreigners to the East, they are attracted to New York by its conspicuous features, which often are its most superficial ones. The characters' failings point not at a class, but at the lack of due diligence in the era of National newspapers, large-scale frauds, and affordable travel.

Singing on the River

(Trinity College Cambridge, 6 June 2010)

Melancholy shuns neither misery nor comfort. In misery, it inspires despair; in comfort, it inspires beauty. Despair is forgotten, beauty is immortal. He who finds comfort may live on through beauty, in songs centuries old, in voices young and happy.