Is there drama on the agenda? Let’s put it to the vote
IF you think of places where high drama might happen, certain settings come to mind: a palace seething with intrigue perhaps, where historic kings and queens do metaphorical (and sometimes real) battle over territories and family lineages. Or maybe a distant planet where astronauts are chased by five-headed creatures, not realising that their oxygen is dangerously close to running out. Or indeed on a ship at sea in a storm with the wind lashing the sails and the rain hitting the faces of the sailors like sharpened confetti.
These you would think, are the places where epic things happen and emotions run so hot you could fry eggs on them, and maybe that’s true to a certain extent, but lately I’ve been thinking about that other arena of excitement, the committee meeting. Don’t laugh: you at the back, don’t laugh. Save it for Any Other Business.
They say that all the really important work in parliament gets done in committees, where people pore over line after line of legislation to make sure they get it completely right; they ask questions of those in power and those with expert knowledge, and after debating and ruminating they come to decisions. Now I know that’s not as noisy or as apparently dramatic as a leaky vessel in a Force 10 gale, but I still think that committees are places where exciting and profoundly important narratives can happen. Let’s face it, without committees of all kinds, lots of things wouldn’t run and indeed much of the structure of the country would fall apart.
And yet I don’t see many awardwinning novels or Hollywood Blockbusters set in those often unassuming rooms where committees meet. In a sense it’s obvious why, because on the surface nothing much seems to happen. A chair welcomes the committee. Apologies for absence are heard. The minutes of the last meeting are agreed on. The matters arising are discussed. (I can tell that some people are starting to nod off at this point. Their eyes are getting heavy and they are trying to stifle yawns the size of Leeds Town Hall. Stick with me. Wake up!)
The meeting goes on. Slight and not so slight disagreements are aired. Points of view clash. The chair has to intervene. A vote is taken. The meeting proceeds. You’re right; it’s not Ben Hur. It’s not 2001 A Space Odyssey. And yet, and yet: this is dramatic. Decisions are being made that will affect people’s lives in big and small ways. The world, or part of it, will be different once the things talked about in this committee are implemented. So how, as a writer, would I write about these groups of people, these procedures, and turn them into art?
At the moment I’m working on a Yorkshire translation of the famous opera The Barber of Seville and it struck me, after a quiet but purposeful session of the committee of Darfield Museum, of which I’m a member, that it would be a very interesting artistic task to have a go at writing a grand opera based on an average committee meeting, by which I mean a fairly unruffled meeting where voices didn’t get raised and the exchanges were in no way heated. I think it would be an interesting exercise to underline the plots and sub plots of a committee by making them into arias and recitatives. The minutes as a piece for chorus? I think it might just work! I’ll have a go and report back.
And if you have any comments about this week’s column, could you kindly address them through the chair? Thank you.