The play’s the thing

I watched a silly but entertaining film, “The Man Who Knew Too Little”, on DVD. It’s a spoof of the James Bond genre. The Bill Murray character thinks he’s playing a role in a reality show being enacted in the streets of London. In fact, he’s in the thick of a real-life war of secret agents with real bullets in the guns. Approaching things as theater, he confounds professional hit men and spymasters to the point where the Alfred Molina character (playing a KGB butcher) pronounces him a “god”. He also gets the girl.

Through the laughs, there’s a message for us in this comedy. We do better when we approach life as theater, or rather improv, because the script changes as we play our roles. The Bill Murray character, like the kid who destroys the alien invasion army in the scifi classic Ender’s Game, doesn’t know that the play is for real. We often suffer from the inverse problem; we fail to realize that the real is the play.

Most of us can quote at least part of Shakespeare’s take on this (in As You Like It):

   All the world’s a stage,
   And all the men and women are merely players:
   They have their exits and their entrances,
   And one man in his time plays many parts.

Yet few of us live this insight. Dreaming can be a corrective to our tendency to forget the play element in life. Quite often, drifting in the hypnagogic zone before sleep, I see a stage where the curtain is being pulled back to reveal a cast of actors who seem to be waiting for me to step into a play with them. Sometimes they are in contemporary dress; frequently they are in the costumes of other times and other cultures. Alternatively, I dream of looking down on a miniature diorama or theater-in-the-round, as I used to inspect my armies of toy soldiers and my train sets as a young boy. Then I notice that all the little figures are alive. If I choose, I can shrink myself to their scale and engage with them in their dramas.

I make it my game to bring this sensibility into regular life, especially when the stakes appear to be high and deadly serious. In more senses than one, the play’s the thing.

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