30 May 2012

Poor Shakespeare

The final image of this production by Israeli company Habima is a stark one. Small and crushed, as if weighed down by history itself, Jacob Cohen's broken Shylock – a man who has lost daughter, fortune and home – is seen, suitcase in hand, walking away from Venice, an eternal wandering Jew. But it was impossible not to think of other displaced people, too, most particularly the Palestinians.
Curtains, please.

And this.

4 comments:

BHCh said...

Can someone pleeease give me a bag right now

SnoopyTheGoon said...

One barf bag coming.

Noga said...

" But it was impossible not to think of other displaced people, too, most particularly the Palestinians."

"most particularly the Palestinians."?? Are the Palestinians MOST PARTICULARLY displaced people?  From the millions and millions of displaced people in the world after 1945, the Palestinians are the MOST DISPLACED?

How come this is the first analogy that springs to this author's mind? Wouldn't it make more sense for her to remember the displaced people fresh out of concentration camps being intercepted by the Brits as they make their way to Mandate Palestine and re-routed to other concentration camps? Wouldn't it make more sense for her to remember how the Arabs rejected the Peel's commission plea to allow those who were about to be exterminated to enter Palestine?

Too much complexity for such a simpleton. Ignorance is so much more comfortable. We are all so impressed by the compassion and love of humanity that shine out of this paragraph. It makes you practically go weak in the knees.

Martin Amis in a recent interview  said this about British brand of lachrymose humanitarianism:

""He has a well-rehearsed explanation for this, to do with Britain’s long and
slow post-war decline from world power to, as he puts it, 'a second- or even
third-echelon state’.


The whole philosophy that we call “pc”,
levelism, cultural relativism and so on has been tremendously handy for
England because it got us through the loss of Empire. Because under
that ideology you don’t want Empire – so we felt a little bit cleansed
by losing it. But it was all illusion. In fact, we thirst for Empire."

SnoopyTheGoon said...

Martin Amis is right, I think too. But in this case we are talking about stupidity that most frequently causes a resort to obvious trite tropes.