Theatre – Putting Conflict In Perspective

“The bracing, dizzying state of the world lately has given rise to several plays about politics, and even more articles about plays about politics. The great virtue of plays about political history like ‘Midnight’s Children’ and ‘Golda’s Balcony’ is that they take the seemingly intractable problems out of the realm of finality and return them to contingency, where they belong. They remind us that, although the conflicts in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent owe much to ancient grudges and religious rivalries, they are also a product of individual leaders and the discrete decisions that they made.”