Julian Scutts

There's no clock in the forest Julian Scutts

The title of this play is a quotation from As You Like It by William Shakespeare, a delightful comedy in the fullest sense of that word. Comedy involves more than humour and funny scenes but presents an optimistic view of life and of the world. In As You Like It even the wicked usurper who forces the rightful ruler into exile finally repents and becomes a religious recluse. Come to think of it, all major religions share this optimism, be this expressed in the notion of the New Jerusalem or the concluding prayer in Jewish liturgy, the Aleinu, that looks forward to the day when even the most evil will submit to God. Is such optimism eyewash? At the darkest of times a sign of hope appears in some form or other, the Madonna of Stalingrad or the poetry of Paul Celan, a Holocaust survivor, who wrote on despite Adorno's statement that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. What Shakespeare meant by the "clock" we discover in all systems that seek total control by precise measurements and surveillance. This play confronts that very issue in depicting the flight of university students to the woodlands near Glastonbury to escape the BEAST, Big Brother's ever watchful eye.