Rendering 5: The article from "The Telegraph" called "Bruce Norris: 'I think we are doomed’"

The article called “Bruce Norris: 'I think we are doomed’” which was published by Jasper Rees on 7 March 2013 in “The Telegraph” reports at length that uncompromising American playwright Bruce Norris has the super-rich in his sights as his latest work prepares to open at London’s Royal Court.

The article carries a lot of comments that they’re changing the guard at the Royal Court Theatre. Speaking of the situation it is important to note that for his final act after six years in charge, Dominic Cooke has returned to the American playwright whose work he introduced to these shores upon becoming artistic director. It is an open secret that a new play by Bruce Norris can mean only one thing - theatre-goers should start quaking in their Louboutins as he prepares to give them another bloody nose.

Norris’s specialty is pointing a finger at his well-heeled, self-satisfied audience. There is a general feeling to believe that he likes to disrupt is what he likes to do, he has just liked to disrupt situations, he doesn’t like when people seem to think they know the answers or their mind is made up about something.

It is very likely that his play “The Pain and the Itch” won the Olivier and Tony Awards for best new play, and then in 2011 the Pulitzer Prize.

The article discusses the situation that for Cooke’s swansong — and Norris’s first Court commission — the playwright has chosen to alight on the era’s defining theme: money. It’s very unlikely that the Low Road diverges from his claustrophobia-inducing single-set domestic dramas with 20 scenes, 60 characters, a historical sweep and transatlantic reach.

The author is sure that you can’t write an interesting play about what happened in the past five years, because it’s so mundane. He believes that you have to write about human beings rather than about how computers work. He guesses he is writing about why people think the way they do, feel the way they do, about money and status. And why it is important that you want your child to grow up and not just succeed, but exceed others. That kind of structural need to ensure the status of future generations is almost a species problem and one that really can’t be addressed until we evolve.

In this connection it is worth while mentioning that his theory is that we’ve never really left the cave and that the amoral law of the free market is the law that we obeyed when we had hair all over the majority of our bodies and hunted and gathered. He thinks we are kind of doomed, and our responsibility is to have just been perpetually vigilant to our worst tendencies.

There is every likelihood that Norris looks like one of those springy bantamweights who lands jabs and cuts rather than haymakers. His sharp, alert features are framed by a geekier brand of spectacles, and his mordant drawl suggests perpetual bafflement. Born in 1960, he grew up in Houston, the middle in a brood of three.

It would not be wrong to assume that his plays began to be performed in earnest in the early 2000s. Purple Heart (2002) is currently enjoying its UK premiere at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill. Though set during Vietnam, it gives voice to his dismay at the US invasion of Afghanistan, “a despairing moment because whatever last atom of optimism I had about my own generation was kind of crushed at that moment”. 

The reporter gives no details as to his personal opinion, but I think that it is great that we have lots of talented, young men of art. Unions should help them, protect their ideas and give opportunity.