Two upcoming productions based on painful news stories – ENO’s ‘Between Worlds’, dramatizing 9/11, and Park Theatre’s ‘An Audience With Jimmy Saville’ – raise serious questions about the extent to which artists can and should engage with tragic events.
Tom Service writes about the former in The Guardian, meeting a writer and a director that see it as imperative to engage with the source material to treat it “seriously and with love”. John Drakakis, commenting on the latter in The Conversation, notes that good art “forces us to confront ourselves,” continuing, “that we may not like what we see is not a reason for supressing it”.