Anyone For Heidegger?
Lunch with my old friend Peter Ansorge, formerly editor of Plays and Players, film producer and television mastermind behind such top series as The Boys from the Black Stuff and Traffic.
He’s written a play about the on/off love affair between German philosopher Martin Heidegger and American (German-born) political theorist and critic Hannah Arendt.
They both died thirty years ago and represent a mainstream European intellectualism. divided by Hitler, that will doubtless have today’s arts editors and feature writers saying “who”, “why” and “so what.”
I hope they don’t. The play sounds like a cracker and I gather Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson have both read it with interest.
It’s important that some sort of cultural historical continuum prospers in the theatre and too few plays have any reverberation for anyone who remembers anything beyond last week’s episode of Big Brother or EastEnders.
Which is why, Ansorge tells me, he can only read Philip French in The Observer among the current crop of film critics with anything like relish. If you see a film like Moliere and don’t care about (or don’t know) Tartuffe or The Misanthrope, what on earth will you make of it, beyond taking it as some kind of superficial costume drama?
Ansorge’s play has been picked up by producer David Aukin and may well be directed by Aukin’s wife, Nancy Meckler, before the end of the year, or early next. Rickman would be perfect as Heidegger. Stevenson would be a good Hannah, but maybe not Jewish enough. What’s Zoe Wanamaker doing after Much Ado, I wonder?