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More on Mark Ravenhill

From a Guardian interview

“In Product, Ravenhill plays a script executive who’s pitching his film to a young, unseen starlet, ‘a Sienna Miller type’. He tells her the story as a Hollywood action adventure, though actually, it’s about her falling in love with a suicide bomber. ‘So there’s always this tension between corny story-telling and quite real story-telling,’ he says. ‘Sometimes it’s almost Bridget Jones goes Jihad: because she falls in love with this man, she’s prepared to go on this suicide bombing mission.’

Ravenhill is interested in both the idea of terrorism as a subject (‘it’s been floating around for a while’), and as a form. ‘An al-Qaeda bomb, or planes going into a tower, doesn’t have a story, unlike an IRA bomb. That had a story, in that the IRA would say, “This is going to happen”, then there would be a bomb, and afterwards there would be a claim saying, “Yeah we did it, and we want troops out of Ireland”. That’s your beginning, middle and end. But with al-Qaeda, there’s nothing like that, they just do it. I think that’s one of the things that unsettles us, because we want a story. So my character tries to give suicide bombing a story.

‘Also,’ he points out, ‘if you look at today’s TV news, it’s always oscillating between a real emotion and a Hollywood one. We do it ourselves: you find yourself telling a story of your life that’s quite true, and then slipping into a way of talking about your life that you’ve learnt from Heat.’”

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One Response to “More on Mark Ravenhill”

  1. Theatre » Sarah Kane on October 12th, 2005

    [...] Mark Ravenhill (see previous posts) writes very thoughtfully about Sarah Kane, here. [...]

  • About me

    I'm a playwright and investment analyst. I have a broad range of interests: food, gardening, innovation & intellectual property, sustainability, architecture & design, writing and the arts. I sit on the board of Talawa Theatre Company and advise a CIS investment trust on socially responsible investments.

  • Recent Work

    Recent plays include, for theatre: Nakamitsu, Yellow Gentlemen, Lost in Peru, Lemon Love. For radio: Places in Between (R4), Patent Breaking Life Saving (WS).

  • Nakamitsu

  • Yellow Gentlemen