Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Two things going on Historical accuracy: we all know this never happens. From Shakespeare’s history plays to tv dramas, events are rescheduled, added to, omitted, converged etc etc. We accept this and though many people will always think drama is the truth, you can usually look up the actual events somewhere. Richard III is interesting cos Shakespeare did such a good job on him that nobody would question his villainy for centuries. So how far we believe theatre as history is true is one point which merges with t’other point as to how far the dramatist presents the ‘truth’ pertaining to character and emotion. I would say that the dramatist usually gets it right. We have no idea how Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Zara would have behaved if they had met in Geneva ( think it was ) but Stoppard gets it absolutely right and makes a good, funny, revealing play about of it. The writer’s imagination is what counts. Another example is the meeting of Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I in the Schiller play. Brilliant psychology which I think is perfect but of course they never met. So two examples of plays where it didn’t happen but the writer gets it right about the people.
When there are people who ‘were there’ it becomes even more interesting because we get raw history which is all about our late Queen’s ‘recollections may differ’. We are suffering all the time from this in our time because we now have so much ability to record events but no historical perspective on them as yet. It is like we have concertinered ourselves and it is painful. I welcome a dramatist’s take on contemporary events. Look how sharp James Graham is on current politics. The most striking example of how a dramatist can do better than a documentary or media piece is the Post Office scandal, the Mr Bates play on tv. Seeing how much this has driven public debate makes you wonder again about how plays worked in the past when they were sometimes the only way of expressing dissent.

The song Someone in a tree springs to mind!

When the subject is as feted an event as Live Aid though, you’d better know exactly what you’re trying to say and how you’re going to say it (preferably before previews.)