The Popular, the Absurd, and the Entente Cordiale

Extract

If Strindberg is right that much of the labor of life is devoted to sweeping its dirt under the table, then the theatre's business is to sweep it out again. In the process we may discover some of the dirt wasn't dirt at all, but stray coins, curls, and paper clips, not golddust necessarily but a usable straight pin or two and maybe a piece of string, ravelled around the past. Art is an act of salvage, more so in a universe conscious, as ours is, of running down; not muckraking but recovery, and especially the kind of recovery that comes after crisis. In the Europe of the twentieth century, crisis has obviously not been of dustpan proportions. The salvage job has been immense. But one may yet walk amidst the recovery, as I did recently, brooding on broken wall and tower, and Agamemnon dead.