The laureate of intractable conflicts

10 September 2008

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Clemency Burton-Hill talks to the American playwright Christopher Shinn about his new play about a US presidential election night in the era of MySpace and YouTube

Indeed, Shinn — who lists on his own MySpace page Aeschylus and Ibsen as ‘heroes’ — has previously described writing about tragic themes as a ‘democratic responsibility’. Talking to him, a young man with a wise old head on his slight shoulders, you suspect he takes such ‘responsibility’ very seriously indeed. He was a vociferous critic of the New York Theatre Workshop’s decision to cancel a production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie last year due, as the authorities claimed, ‘to the nature of the subject and the possibility that it could offend many people’ (the play described the death of an activist who was killed by Israeli Defense Forces bulldozers in Palestine). The possibility of causing offence to people — or rather, the quasi-Voltairean right to cause that offence, through one’s freedom of expression — is something analysed with compelling intellectual force in Now or Later. But as John Jnr’s friend Matt says: ‘It’s so hard to think about this stuff. It’s so huge...’. Expect to emerge with your head ringing; just don’t expect to know which side to take.

Clemency Burton-Hill is contributing editor of The Spectator. Now or Later is at the Royal Court Theatre until 18 October (www.royalcourttheatre.com).