The Playwright As Polemicist a Map of the World

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

All theater is about ideas, but in this century George Bernard Shaw and his disciples have evolved an explicit Theater of Ideas, a vision of playwriting as a means of conducting urbane debates on great issues of the day. In these plays, beauty of language, depth of character and universal truths of human nature are subordinated to the stately combat of conflicting points of view, whether about feminism and prostitution in Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1902) or about the moral impact of colonialism in Tom Stoppard's Night and / Day (1978). The excitement comes from hearing important arguments stirringly phrased: plays of ideas lend themselves more to epigrams than to cathartic resolutions, and typically end by depicting a withered landscape on which there are only losers.

Among active playwrights, perhaps the most prolific and far-ranging exemplar of the Theater of Ideas is Britain's David Hare, 38. His comedy Pravda, a broadside attack on the political inertia of Fleet Street, co-written with Howard Brenton, has become the hottest ticket in London. He wrote potent screenplays for two current films, Wetherby and Plenty, the latter an adaptation of his 1983 Broadway hit about postwar British decline as reflected in the tormented life of one politically involved woman. Now Hare's A Map of the World, being given its U.S. premiere at the off-Broadway Public Theater, has emerged as the most stimulating new play of the season.

Map epitomizes the Theater of Ideas: its centerpiece is a literal debate about what duties affluent nations owe to the impoverished masses of the Third World. The contestants are an idealistic young left-wing journalist (Zeljko Ivanek) who argues that the prosperous West must hand over money and power and expect no deference in return, and a lordly novelist (Roshan Seth), Indian by birth but British by choice. He replies that Third World cultures, economies and politics must ripen over time, and that the most the older nations can do to help is to set a rigorous example. The setting for this ambitious exchange is a world conference on hunger being held in Bombay in 1978. By this device, Hare introduces a second spokesman on behalf of the Third World, a Senegalese diplomat (Ving Rhames) who voices the helpless rage of mendicant nations forced to accept aid on conditions that effectively rescind their hard-won independence. All three polemicists are superbly played as variations on a theme of personal dignity.

The complicated narrative interweaves events in Bombay with a subsequent movie about those events. But rather than push toward deeper understanding, Hare lampoons his argument in dopey scenes from the putative movie and shifts toward melodrama in more elegant but equally sentimental scenes for the "actual" characters. In the most implausible sequence, an American actress offers herself as the prize to the "winner" of the debate between the novelist and the journalist. Even after this conscious retreat from political complexity, Map remains lively and provocative. Yet it leaves a viewer with the sad sense that its author shrank from the dangers of attempting a genuinely great play.