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Editors' notes Nicholas Stern's imaginary dialogue | Al Gore proves David Hare's point | Christopher Hampton imagines hurricanes savaging New York | Constant Gardener and Syriana lose the plot | Ibsen's wild duck is the first laboratory animal on stage
Nicholas Stern's imaginary dialogue
The Economics of Climate Change - The Stern Review has been hailed as significant because it represents the sober reflections of an economist. This is a man who
deals, it is said, in hard facts. It is particularly telling, then, to find that one of the most powerful sentences in the Stern Review's new
postscript deals with an imaginary conversation.
Stern writes, 'It is as though a grandparent is saying to their grandchild, because you will live your life 50 years after mine, I place far less value on your well-being than I do on myself and my current neighbours, and therefore I am ready to take decisions with severe and irreversible implications for you.'
Al Gore proves David Hare's point about lectures
In his most recent book, Obedience, Struggle & Revolt (Faber 2005), the playwright David Hare defends the maligned institution of the public lecture. Hare points out that the Collins dictionary gives six definitions of the word 'lecture' and only one of them means 'to reprimand at length'. For Hare, 'the lecture is attractive as a form precisely because a lecture so resembles a play.'
Hare, whose latest play The Vertical Hour deals with the impact of the Iraq war, dismisses the commonly-held idea that plays need to be about conflict. He believes a good play contains the same key ingredient as a good lecture. 'It depends on engagement - engagement between the action on stage and the audience which attends ... The effort put into the thinking, is, in some wonderfully proportionate transaction of courtesy, rewarded by the concentration with which it is received.'
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| Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland writes, 'Sure, I had heard the warnings and read the reports: for two decades environmental activists have been sounding the alarm. But, I confess, none of it had really sunk in the way it did after seeing An Inconvenient Truth. I can think of few films of greater political power.'
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There couldn't be a better demonstration of the power of the lecture than Al Gore's recent movie An Inconvenient Truth in which the former Vice-President employs maps, statistics, diagrams and photos, along with a raft of skillfully judged arguments, to warn us of the runaway dangers of climate change.
The DVD of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is now out in the UK. The movie has grossed more than $20m, making it the fourth highest-ever-grossing documentary. It has also been a grassroots phenomenon. The Paramount Classics President, John Lesher, said: 'People are buying group tickets to see the film and having discussion groups afterwards to talk about the lessons learned from the movie. Audiences who love the film are purchasing tickets for those who are still sceptical about the issue. And major corporations have bought tickets for their employees; it is pretty incredible.'
Christopher Hampton imagines hurricanes savaging New York
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A new book of interviews with Christopher Hampton reveals that in the 1990s he wrote an unproduced screenplay about global warming.
| Hampton's screenplay is one answer to Bill McKibben's challenge: 'Where are the plays that place climate change deeply in the imagination?' See pick of the web and our climate debate
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In Hampton on Hampton, (Faber, 2005) the playwright tells Alistair Owen that he rewrote the disaster movie The Day The Earth Caught Fire. In the 1961 version, two H-bomb tests take place at the same time and the earth is knocked off its axis.
For Hampton, best known for writing Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Carrington, a blockbuster was a distinct change of tack.
He could see that Hollywood was busy making one disaster movie one after the other, so Hampton thought, "Wouldn't it be great to make one which actually had something to say about the way the world was going? I liked the idea of doing a blockbuster action movie with a message, as opposed to a blockbuster action movie where the message is that you should have bigger weapons than everyone else."
| "I liked the idea of doing a blockbuster action movie with a message, as opposed to a blockbuster action movie where the message is that you should have bigger weapons than everyone else."
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Hampton didn't realise how bad things were until he went to a Global Warming Conference in Oakland, California. "Speaker after speaker stood up and reeled off these terrifying predictions."
One detail inspired the story's setting. "One of the things I learned," he tells Owen, "was that, as global warming proceeded, hurricanes would move further and further up the east coast of America and therefore it was only a matter of time before one hit New York. That's the middle act of the script: when the hurricane hits New York and knocks over the Citicorp building, which I discovered had been built without whatever they put in to resist high winds."
Constant Gardener and Syriana lose the plot
The films The Constant Gardener and Syriana both turn contemporary political issues into movie thrillers.
The Constant Gardener turns the way the drug companies operate in Africa into a Hollywood-style film. While the film is a good thriller, it fails to do what le Carré's book did, which is to explain properly what the drug companies are doing and why that is worth investigating.
Marcia Angell, author of The Truth About Drug Companies , gives her informed view on The Constant Gardener in 'The Body Hunters' for the New York Review of Books, 6 October 2005.
Likewise, Syriana uses the global oil economy as the basis for a thriller, but falls short of exposing the realities of the political and corporate corruption. For another view of the corporate oil situation, see unravelling the carbon web.
It is not hard to imagine a similar type of film exposing an environmental scandal.
The question about whether thrillers can deal adequately with environmental subjects is explored in an essay by Richard Kerridge, 'Ecothrillers: Environmental Cliffhangers', reprinted in The Green Studies Reader (Routledge, 2000).
Kerridge highlights certain aspects of environmental stories that make them problematic for thriller writers. One aspect is the considerable timespan that can elapse between the cause and the effect. Another is the unlikelihood of a single person, the hero or heroine in the thriller, being in a position to reverse that effect.
Ibsen's wild duck is the first laboratory animal (onstage)
When Michael Grandage's award-winning production of The Wild Duck opened at the Donmar Warehouse in 2005 it was greeted with critical raves. The Guardian's review spoke of the play's 'permanent relevance'. The Observer said the play was 'unquestionably a demolition
of moral absolutes and fundamentalism'. The Independent said 'the play demonstrates the dangers of imposing your own skewed, self-interested idea of liberty on others'. None of the critics picked up on another, highly relevant aspect of the play. The Wild Duck appears on
timeline because of its commentary on the way humans regard animals.
Ibsen’s Enemy of the People is better known as an environmental work, dealing with freedom of speech and the repercussions of whistle-blowing on polluting activities. The storyline of one principled man who threatens the complacency and livelihood of a town was later used by Steven Spielberg in Jaws.
The semi-domesticated animal has an important role in The Wild Duck in showing how animals were perceived. What is staged in The Wild Duck is the struggle between a scientific and a romantic perception of animal behaviour. In current revivals of the play, this passes unnoticed.
Nicholas Stern's imaginary dialogue Al Gore proves David Hare's point about lectures Christopher Hampton imagines hurricanes savaging New York Constant Gardener and Syriana lose the plot Ibsen's wild duck is the first laboratory animal on stage
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