{"id":77,"date":"2009-03-18T08:08:19","date_gmt":"2009-03-18T08:08:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=77"},"modified":"2010-04-12T18:09:54","modified_gmt":"2010-04-12T17:09:54","slug":"mark-ravenhill-playwrights-are-more-important-than-politicians-so-why-do-powerful-people-mesmerise-me-stage-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=77","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Playwrights are more important than politicians&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/stage\/2009\/mar\/16\/mark-ravenhill-playwrights-politicians\">Mark Ravenhill comments in The Guardian<\/a>: &#8216;Playwrights are more important than politicians. So why do powerful people mesmerise me?&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>He claims: &#8216;I think what playwrights do is more important than what most politicians do. Being a dramatist isn&#8217;t just about writing. That part often takes just a few weeks. But we do spend a long time thinking about how people behave, how they live together, how they might live together better &#8211; as well as the great cruelties they are capable of. And we&#8217;re constantly testing language, time and space in our work, to extend the possibilities of human experience. Politicians are concerned with the pragmatic business of running the world; artists, meanwhile, dedicate themselves to finding new insights into our existence. Most of the insights are feeble or crackpot &#8211; but some are visionary.&#8217; And, as he says, many are about politicians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Ravenhill comments in The Guardian: &#8216;Playwrights are more important than politicians. So why do powerful people mesmerise me?&#8217; He claims: &#8216;I think what playwrights do is more important than what most politicians do. Being a dramatist isn&#8217;t just about writing. That part often takes just a few weeks. But we do spend a long &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=77\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;&#8216;Playwrights are more important than politicians&#8217;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[57],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theatre","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":226,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions\/226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}