Theatre of Disillusions

STAG elections are a-coming, and spurred by this I am beginning to write a play, although not one particularly meant to be performed with the humble (hence, we would remind you, honest, noble, genuine etc.) resources of Glasgow, or at all. The feel of it owes a great deal to a short excerpt of The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus which featured on a radio interview I heard. There doesn't seem to be any readily available English translation, boo! But even the short section of prologue struck me to the bone. It was a hysterical and darkly hilarious blurring of the line between reality and fiction - which, come to think of it, is an alright description of the official world culture of the 21st century. So I've decided to start writing something inspired by it and by Hollywood, entitled, ekhem:

Theatre of Disillusion: being a burlesque show in X Acts.


Prologue.

Lights up. Stage empty but for the Master of Ceremonies, a tall, athletic man, very good-looking in a chiselled masculine way, dressed immaculately in Edwardian fashion. Young, but old enough for stubble. Could be a bit ethnic, but only a bit. Energetic and active: strides about and accompanies his words with expansive gestures. Distinctive voice: histrionic, but with a slightly tinny, grating, artificial note – as if heard through a loudspeaker.

Master of Ceremonies: Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, welcome, welcome, welcome to the International Theatre of Dreams and Illusions, the greatest magic-show on Earth! And those of you who have witnesses our earlier performances this season will know that this is no empty boast.

With us you have been transported, without ever leaving your seats, to every part of the globe and to all the extremes of human emotion! Not only have we made you, as that no-good amateur Shakespeare said, ‘Suppose within the girdle of these walls / Are now confined two mighty monarchies,’ but we have also made you believe that they both look astonishingly like southern California! These and other marvels are accomplished by our mastery of hypnosis. Any C-list hypnotist can send a theatre of intelligent adults to sleep, but only we can send them into fits of laughter or floods of tears! Not content with such trifles, we have altered the past and the future! Through the miracle of modern science, we have turned strings of numbers into human beings, and human beings into strings of numbers in our formulae! In your minds we have elevated this theatre into a temple, and reduced temples to so many theatres!

And tonight, tonight, tonight we will demonstrate and expose the greatest, most audacious illusion of them all! For you, who have marvelled at our seemingly limitless power over your very minds, do not realise that compared with you we are as nothing. You are the kings and queens before whose hundreds of rather cramped thrones we poor jesters caper! You are the stern Caesars whose raised or lowered thumbs decide the fate of we gladiators – and where the primitive Romans fought with swords, we nightly bludgeon each-other to death with Love, Adventure, Comedy, Tragedy. What! [Falls to knees, head in hands.] Kings? Emperors?! What a tasteless and inferior bunch, compared to you! Ladies and gentlemen [Springs smoothly back to feet], you are the gods for whom we ministering angels nightly create new worlds! And tonight, tonight, TONIGHT we will reveal how each of these worlds which we construct, juggle for your amusement, and toss over our shoulders in fact owes its origin to you!

Ladies and gentlemen, will you please applaud… yourselves!

Curtain down.

I aim to go on to chart the creation of a Hollywood film in a sort of surreal allegorical music-hall fashion. My Big Idea is that at the end, the rather grotesque finished product is presented to the audience and they are, once again invited to give it their applause - begged, even, with great stress on how without their approval the whole edifice will crumble. The ending is left up to them.