"Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" is a particularly nasty cliché. It is usually quoted by people who have never read the Kipling Ballad of East and West. The last two lines of that famous refrain go like this:
But there is neither
East nor West,
Border nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face
to face, though they come from
the ends of the earth!
Metaphysical Darkness
Playwrights, being a breed much given to cliche these days, have shown a special taste for this one--but turned upside down. The original racist point of it was that a benighted East and an enlightened West simply had nothing material, moral, or spiritual in common. But if you go to see any "concerned" play about the West and the Third World (which these days does most of the conceptual duty once done by East), you will find that it is supposed to be the West that is now most definitely inferior, morally unsanitary, sunk in metaphysical and spiritual darkness, with a great deal to learn from those other, older, lovelier cultures. This is a pity, because the theater above all other arts is well placed to flesh out the full Kipling refrain and allow strong men to face each other on terms that give the clash between them a genuinely tragic sense and meaning.
In 1986 a British writer, Michael Wall, had a good chance to do just this. The year before, two young Australians, Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers (Barlow was an immigrant from Britain) had been caught and convicted of smuggling heroin in Malaysia, where this is a capital offence. The mills of Malaysian justice, based on the British system, ground inexorably fine, and in due course the two smugglers were condemned to death. During the week when they were to be hanged, Wall was a guest at a dinner party where the case was discussed. He was astonished to find that the other guests, including one who worked for Amnesty International, felt no sympathy for Barlow and Chambers. "I mentioned that I felt a sympathy for them--as one would for anyone condemned to hang for a relatively unimportant crime. No one agreed with me. Everyone else said that the young men knew the laws and deserved exactly what they got." Wall had been to Penang and met "people like the two young men," and decided to write a piece that was "informed with the brutality and non-feeling" that he had encountered at the dinner party. It was a rewarding decision for him. His play, called Amongst Barbarians, won the first prize of ten thousand pounds in Mobil Oil Company's annual International Play Competition, run by the Manchester Royal Exchange Theater in the United Kingdom.
The execution of two Westerners by an oriental government for smuggling heroin might furnish a framework for a clash of East and West, highlighting two strong ways of dealing with a common menace. We in the West do not execute such people, for (as we see it) good reasons of our own, having to do with charity and the value of human life. But the Malaysians, using a judicial system inherited from the British, have decided differently. The case in question makes this difference very important to people from the East and from the West alike. If the playwright were to make both sets
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