This week I went to Eden cinema to watch the live transmission from Covent Garden of Verdi’s Macbeth. I must admit I am no great fan of opera, but the play is well remembered from my school days and the London production was impressive. The stage was a dark, padded cell with doors sliding open and walls going up to reveal the scenes of horror and increasing madness that culminate in the devastating finale where a wood attacks the tyrant’s last stronghold and a man not born of woman finally kills Macbeth. It is a world turned upside down by the killing of a monarch. Throughout, the presence of evil is heavily manifested by a trio of witches, dressed in total black but with scarlet turbans, who weave in and out most of the scenes.

The hollowness of power

It was claustrophobic and it was upsetting. I was glad to get out into the open air again. I am not referring to this production just because it was powerful but because it brought certain home truths to the fore. Conscience is a powerful theme in Macbeth. Just before he succumbs to his fate, Macbeth blames all the lives he subsequently destroyed on his desire for the hollow crown kept in a hollow cage in his bedroom. His wife too breaks down because she couldn’t clean her hands of the bloodshed she encouraged.  In the trilogy The Lord of the Rings, Frodo, despite his real and honourable intentions, finds it difficult to throw the magic ring of power into the cauldron of the volcano and it only happens despite himself. Power may be hollow but it has never stopped anyone from aspiring to be vacuumed into it.

Mercifully, Malta is not Macbeth’s Scotland, and thankfully we have nothing like what Shakespeare depicts happening there. Though we are not short of false ambitions, false judgements, selective consciences and widely believed corrupt practices, not to mention the sins of office that come home to roost once power is lost. Nor do our politicians hesitate to embark on adventures of dubious value simply to retain power. The mounting revelations of creaking administrative systems that are past their prime and exist only to shield and support special interest groups should inspire people to demand that the political class change its modus operandi. We find it easy to blame the Church for the absoluteness of its message and the systems it has created to prevent error (as it sees it) creeping in, but we fail to notice that the political body is not all that different. The arrogance of political office may be different from that of the Church, but arrogance it remains.  Except that we can of course vote politicians in or out while we cannot do the same to church leaders.

Levin’s choice

Bernard Levin was a highly respected journalist, author and broadcaster. On a walking tour of France, he arrived at the small city of Arles on the river Rhone. According to him, Arles boasted of only three things: a Roman arena, the 12th century church of St Trophime, and Van Gogh who had lived his most creative period there after he had self-mutilated.

At the time of his visit, the arena was being used to stage simulated bullfights; the aim was to try and rake the bull’s back with a special glove not kill it. Moving from this pointless and noisy spectacle to the peaceful cloisters of the ancient church, Levin could not fail to be struck by the tremendous difference between the two. For him here was a representation of the eternal dichotomy between Church and State, between ancient Rome and Christ. He could sense the almost unimaginable gulf between the two: the blood sport for which the arena was built with its trappings of power and of Empire appealing to the world, the flesh and the devil. All these are still with us in their modern forms and it is impossible to wish them away.

Facing them is the principle for which the cloister was built, offering its eternal and unchanging vision of another world: le rouge et le noir. Bernard Levin ironically states that when Christ told us to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s he was neatly sidestepping a dilemma in a way that most of us cannot do. We cannot square the circle so easily. We have to choose and for most of us the choice is limited. As for Levin himself, he concluded by saying that while he did not know whether St Trophime was true, he was sure that the arena was false.

We are a nation that has spent too much time in Levin’s arena. Like the bull baiters he saw, we applaud a transient glory, for there is very little else to be won by throwing yourself at a bull. Despite the communication revolution, as a people we still seem to lack the ability to analyse affairs on this island and are happy just to copy what goes on in other lands, certain – as we have always been – that almost anybody can do a better job than we can. This may be often true but is not infallibly so. In any case it is no excuse for failing to think things through, like running out of money for a new road when it is half built or the present embarrassing debacle on the traffic flow through Bisazza Street.

Coalitions of ideas

I am a working doctor and my job is to diagnose ills and offer remedies for those same ills. I am therefore little given to philosophical musings and perforce do most of my reading strapped in airplane seats. But we are living in an age where ideology is on the wane, where choices are being squeezed into a middle ground that offers as much choice as one supermarket from another. The experience we have just shared, strengthened by similar events in Europe, teaches us that to highlight ideas and aspirations buried under the pile in the middle ground, we need to form coalitions based on shared aims and beliefs. Such coalitions must work to change, or to preserve, or both, what an informed society decides it needs in its time. This is why education is absolutely essential to the workings of democracy.

We need to learn when to leave the arena for the cloister and when to reverse the process, using our experiences in both areas to guide us fallible creatures to what is true, and honest, and principled.