We should perhaps be grateful that there has been no call in the past few months for plays about oil spills. Drama as Disposable Detritus of the theatrical experience is the perspective that lies beneath the effort to render theatre more relevant, more accountable to those who would like to see the stage reflect not the spectator but the newspaper.

Those dramatists who consider their work mere aesthetic mayflies, written for the moment as a justification for their own right thinking, a justification for a lecture or a justification for a party, can’t expect their work to  be taken seriously as either literature or as theatre. Admitting that their work is disposable, they undermine the form they claim to love. True, it’s ephemerality and not permanence that differentiates theatre from electronic media, but those who write only for themselves and for the moment neglect the echoes of the past that inform their own work and the echoes that may emanate from their work for the future. No one seeks immortality, at least no one with wisdom; but the shared dynamics of the word and the body reach into both yesterday and tomorrow, in the bodies of those who came before and will come after us. They will think of us, even if we have no say over what they will think of us. Theatre and drama are gifts to time. Knowing this, what dramatist can risk writing for anything other than posterity?