The Book of Mormon

(The Prince of Wales Theatre, 4 July 2017)

Two sets of beliefs co-exist: science and religion. Science organises knowledge. Science’s political instantiation is democracy. Religion makes statements about that which cannot be verified from experience. Religious beliefs help cope with whatever cannot be controlled. Religious beliefs also help affect individual behaviour by postulating non-verifiable threats and inducements at a sufficient distance from common experience. Religion’s political instantiation is church, an authoritarian state. A well-designed religion promotes the beliefs that favour desirable social outcomes. As any authoritarian regime, however, centralised religion is liable to be closed to change and vulnerable to being hijacked by a malevolent leader.

"The Book of Mormon" is about the power of creating and sharing one’s own narrative and about distilling dreams into a collection of principles, not a particular instantiation of these principles. A good story is not necessarily a true story but rather a story that resonates, gives hope, and leads to socially better outcomes. Of course, an untrue story should be universally recognised as a metaphor. Art and some branches of mathematics deal in such metaphors. (Good art and mathematics are true in the sense that they are internally consistent but may not be true in the sense that they need not correspond simply to observed phenomena.)

Religion designed right is art.

There is no virtue in being boring when it costs the same to be unique. Seduced by the exclusivity of the experience, theatre audiences can handle uniqueness. In the wild, the exercise of uniqueness is an effective sorting device for identifying friends and fellow travellers and is the only way to bet on finding one's niche.

“The Book of Mormon” is subtle and intense. The intensity stems from the show's occasional directness, from Cody Jamison Strand's owning his part, and from the musical format, which has been perfected over decades to fuse acting, singing, dancing, and a notch of surrealist madness into an efficient universal language. The ephemerality of the art form renders the artwork immortal.