The universal and the specific
Friday, May 16th, 2008How often have you heard the claim that a playwright has “found the universal in the specific”? It often seems as if such an observation is the highest form of critical praise; as if finding “the universal in the specific” is the greatest achievement a playwright could make.
However, it seems to me that this obsession with the seemingly boundless possibilities of “the specific” is often an apologia for the banal and the downright parochial. Jah Wobble may lyricise that “the Glaswegian check-out girl is the Divine Mother”, but try turning that into a play.
Surely the greatest achievement of any playwright or poet (and all great playwrights are poets, as surely as the artform to which theatre is closest is poetry) is not to “find the universal in the specific”, but, in fact, conversely, to touch the specific, the individual life, through experiences and ideas which they have made universal. Is that not what Shakespeare does? And Beckett, Pinter, Barker?