in Hong Kong

Just arrived in Hong Kong tonight

Foreign Correspondence Club

it's 33 deg here (yesterday in Katoomba it was 5!!!) so we are certainly warm enough, and our Ice House St hotel has ethernet so we can blog on as usual and were able to Skype Sydney and London...amazing

On the plane we read David Hare's article about his pay Stuff Happens here's a part of it...

"The power of theatre is its unpredictability, the strange alchemy of response that happens only when a group of people examine something together. It's a bad playwright who seeks to demand a particular reaction. Everyone knows that in performance unpleasant people may begin to acquire charm through energy. Good people may seem dull. It was interesting how often members of the audience came out of the show saying "Goodness, I never knew that." But even more often they emerged uneasy to have found their view of the leading players not quite the one they might have anticipated.

I admit I went into the writing of the play already doubting the received wisdom about Bush. I had never thought that an inability to handle language was quite the same thing as being stupid. If Bush was really that dumb, why has he come out of Iraq with a number of his policy goals achieved, even if at the most terrible cost? Bush's standing, at least with his own electorate, seems to have suffered nothing like the damage you might think it deserved, given the terrible scale of the killing and the shocking incompetence of the occupation

One way of looking at Stuff Happens is as the eternal story of how a supposedly stupid man can always get his way with a clever one - at least if he is cunning and ruthless enough. Yes, I do, as it happens, have a fresh take on the story. But that's not the point. Hytner observed at one packed matinee that it was theatre itself that was doing its job here; animating the themes of history, showing you the people and seeking, perhaps, some universal resonance beneath the particular narrative."
read more