I’m in fisticuffs with my director.  Irony aside, we’re arguing over whether the act of watching violence encourages violence itself.  It doesn’t help that we’ve spent the day working on a film script about Vikings - possibly the bloodiest culture since primordial man fell out of his soup. We’ve come away on a mini-sabbatical to Paris to work the script (how we’ve managed to convince our other-halves that leaving Greenwich Mean Time is an essential part of the creative process is as much your guess as mine).  So far so good.  We’re in a cottage by a lake, cocooned by forest, and the Louvre only thirty minutes from our door-stump.  But back to the mêlée.  The violence in movies is harmless, he argues.  In films, we buy into a fantasy that nothing is real, and are able to watch unpalatable scenes, safe behind our popcorn (this would explain why horror-theatre, other than The Woman In Black, has never really caught on in the West End).  However, he thinks that violence doesn’t work onstage.  It’s too real.  Do we shy away from brutality on stage?  Bond has a baby stoned in Saved.  That’s as violent an act as I can think of.  But the ‘violence’ happens in the audience’s imagination – there is no close-up, graciously.  Most of my experiences of the Bard’s battles have seemed woefully unconvincing – they sort of have to, otherwise the audience starts worrying about loose battle-axes twirling into the cheap seats and heads really rolling in the aisles.  Do we need more drama in drama?  When a conflict is the physical manifestation of the drama itself, it should only really happen when all other means of psychological activity have been used.  A dramaturg of mine told me a playwright only sticks in a slap or a kiss when they’re at a dead end for vital interaction between the characters.  That makes me fairly guilty.  Although the animal in us is as fascinating as anything, the brute is not — I’d rather see playful decimation than a frustrated thump.  Vengeance aside, I can’t think of any satisfaction in violence unless it comes from an unworthy opponent, like the moment in Wuthering Heights where Cathy’s weedy husband, humiliated by the towering Heathcliff, jumps to his feet and strikes him dead in the throat.  Heathcliff may be the virile lead, but you’ve got to admire Edgar’s spunk. In theatre, there’s something attractive about the threat of violence without the violence itself.  I suppose it’s the same thing that attracts atheists like Richard Dawkins to the idea of God: we obsess over the things we can’t believe in. 

Monsieur Le Realisateur has us up at 4am to get cracking with the Norsemen, so here’s me signing off to retire to Valhalla for an hour or two.  And what with being in a different time zone, I’ve briefly relinquished my un-carnivorous regime.  What better way to think like a Viking than to eat like a Gladiator?