More on Alienation... with Sartre and a very special guest...

'Hello and welcome to Excavating Existentialism.'

'I think you can stop right there, Gareth. You are just going to give me a comedy French accent and make jokes about garlic and libidinous Marxists. You know that my philosophy denies any kind of essential nature, especially national ones.'

'I'm sorry, Jean-Paul. I wanted to ask about the god-shaped hole, that's all.'

'Is this in the context of alienation? Are you seeking to make a connection between one of my catch-phrases and the Marxism that inspired me to become a hero of The French Resistance?'

'I thought that the kind of existential despair felt in Matthew Arnold's Sea of Faith in the nineteenth century became a meme in the twentieth: when faith in God retreats, a gap is left behind, which is what you identified.'

'Indeed: but this God-shaped hole represents a longing for the divine that cannot be satiated. It is in Pascal and CS Lewis - Christian writers both. God does not exist, it is a contradiction, and the longing to fill the hole is self-defeating.'

'Isn't this longing similar to experience of alienation? The sense of something missing?'

'Alienation is complicated. Maybe you could ask Brecht - if you can stop yourself from giving him a comedy German accent?'

'Hello and welcome to Divining Dramaturgy. With me, I have Bertie 'Cushions' Brecht...'

'I display alienation on stage, not make it. It already exists inside the individual, thanks to capitalism. The
audience, while smoking a cigar, spots it in the drama, and considers alternative actions.'

'I'm actually more interested in sound at the moment. My feeling is that the history of music since the rise of atheism has been the attempt by the musician to express the profound sense of alienation the human feels from nature, in recognising their inevitable death. That art and music are attempts to both articulate this madness and to create a community that replaces the church.'

'They are simultaneously expressions of alienation and a weapon against it? Like my plays?'

'I like to think so, Bertie.'

'The way I worked with Weill - like Wagner in his Ring cycle - had the words working against the grain of the music. That disparity could represent the gap between word and emotion, life and potential happiness. The music is the emotional subtext, you think?'

'If I may just go back to Jean-Paul for a moment... in your Huis Clos, you picture a hell - which could not exist in your philosophy. But you are happy to present one on stage. Is this another example of the disjuncture between the possible and the real? If you like, a way of highlighting alienation?'

'I could tell you, but I won't.'

'Why not?'

'If you reject my opinion, you are reading against the script's author's intentions (I am not one of those 'Death-of-the-Author' maniacs). But f you accept it, it would be bad faith on your part.'