You Have to Listen to This

David Mamet's The Shawl was broadcast last week on BBC World Service as part of the World Drama series. This dramatisation was recorded by LA Theatre Works. I really, really encourage you to listen to it. Not only if you happen to have some free time. If you can carve out one hour even despite a busy schedule, this is something that you will find worthwhile to spend that hour on.

Originally, I had heard it on the bus, travelling from town to Parkway for a family dinner. Back then, there had only been time to listen to the first twenty minutes of the play, but just before I reached the restaurant, I seriously considered just wandering around outside, or finding somewhere to just sit down, so that I could finish listening to it. It was captivating; it was powerful enough to have my spine tingling. But there was no time. And luckily, I was able to find it online at the BBC website tonight, and listened to it in entirety.

And it was spectacular. The play is able to draw you in against your will, hijacking your skepticism and turning it against your own inexorable anticipation and curiosity, to create a very complex tension. It's finding yourself needing to know something that you definitely do not want to know. And when the ending arrives, you feel the twist is all the more ingenious precisely because you can see it coming.

It did something for me that I haven't felt in a long, long time: awakening a delight in the use of language and observing the interaction between the ideas that it awakens. This is drama of the highest order, not only using language beautifully, but also using language to deftly handle amazingly complex ideas. And being able to only hear it, rather than to watch it live, makes each word all the more sensorily significant. I can't really describe it: I can only say that the words become tactile. It's a fascinating effect, how the pacing, tone, volume, and supplementary sound effects can sketch out in one's mind such a detailed and surprising landscape. It is really breathtaking.

Anyway, the play is about, apparently, one of Mamet's main fascinations. It deals with the nature of magic and the mystical, toying with the idea that what seems like magic is really just an elaborate trick, while deftly contrasting this with the curiosity and desire to believe in mystical forces that most people feel, almost involuntarily. The play leaves one dumbfounded at the seeming clairvoyance of the psychic, then causes one to marvel at the ingenuity of his techniques, and at the end, still manages to maintain just that little bit of credulity in one to allow the idea that he really is, somehow, supernaturally gifted. At the end of the play, despite the evidence of trickery, we still find in ourselves enough room to entertain the prospect that he is, in fact, psychic; to seriously consider the notion that his assertion that he is nothing more than a conman is the real con. Therein lies the ingenuity of the play; it highlights our inalienable desire to believe in something supernatural, despite our own wariness and skepticism. It shows how being duped answers a part of our desires, and how we are more interested, at the end of the day, in the satisfaction of that desire than how exactly that desire is satisfied.

Some nuggets that merit further consideration: firstly, John the clairvoyant mentions that a seance is about "truth, not belief". He challenges his client to put his powers to the test, and presents her what looks like incontrovertible evidence. On a meta-level, he presents the audience evidence of his trickery technique. But, just like the client, the audience finds itself in the uncomfortable position of having to settle for belief, rather than truth, for what looks like proof may really just be another sleight of hand. And that raises an interesting point: that what we take for granted as true may actually just be a belief, and at the end of the day, what we perceive as reality is really just built on a collective consent to believe some things over others. Fact and opinion are thus indistinguishable.

Secondly, John says that the job of the psychic is not to deliver truth that is unavailable to the senses (either from beyond the grave or in the depths of another's mind), but to create an environment in which the client's own mind will make the connections that it needs to find a solution to his problem. He uses an interesting phrase: the mind is "freed by magic". I don't think he means that he says a spell over the mind and thus liberates it from its sensory limits; rather, the idea that magic does exist and can give one extrasensory powers legitimises mental connections that, in other settings, would only seem ludicrous or occult. The idea of magic, then, is a lens through which one can perceive the world differently, and from there, one is permitted to make connnections that one would not otherwise perceive or consider as realistic. Magic's power then lies in it being a viewpoint rather than a technique, a perspective rather than a procedure.

Listen to the play: then tell me what you think. Also, if you have time to spare after that, do consider listening to the other plays as well. The BBC will run a play every week; and if you can't catch it live on 88.9FM, then listen to the podcast. Given present circumstances, I daresay there really are very few more rewarding ways to spend an hour of your weekend!