Response to Charles Mee

Charles Mee seems to find an eternal truth in Aristotle’s meditation’s on the human character; that our culture and our identity and behaviour are inseparable, and hence, any artistic expression is a fuelled by, and composed of the same. If this were so it may be concluded that all art should speak of and to all humanity. With this approach it becomes impossible to reject something as inapplicable to a work; if it has occurred or entered the sphere of work in any way it has to be relevant. The resultant play produced by such a methodology could never be “psychological realism”, as this approach would not reflect the wider events of humanity and information, both historical and current; a play is not an event in time in the same way that a moment in life may be seen, it is rather time in an event; it contains, whether willingly or not, some element of all time. It maybe this omnipotence of information that removes the notion of originality for Lee, for if all of society, history and culture combine with psychology to create an individual, some element of us must always have come from the past. All that has been felt and thought by has doubtless been felt and thought by others; the uniqueness of my character arises not from the originality of my ideas but from the combination of those ideas in me. The same is also true of a play; so that whilst Steven Berkoff’s “Greek” is openly based upon the story of Oedipus, it is the presence of the current political, sociological and philosophical themes that gives the work any originality. It may be argued that an entirely new play could have been written, but this would not highlight the recurrent or rather constant nature of the human experience. It may be argued then, that to “reinvent” a classic text is to apply the current world paradigm to another times expression via the timelessness of the human experience.