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Is Fantasy So Fantastic?Dateline: 18th January, 2004I have a confession to make. I have spent six and a half hours over the last two days swallowed up by Nicholas Hytner's wonderful sold-out adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials - and I hardly enjoyed a moment of it. I love the National Theatre and have nothing but admiration for Mr Hytner but, regrettably, I just cannot see why anyone over the age of about 13 would find fantasy novels, films and plays such as this production, Harry Potter and Lord Of the Rings anything but tedious. This phenomenon of regression to childhood seems to be taking over the country at a rate of knots. The BBC recently launched its Big Read in an attempt to find the most popular novels in the nation. When the votes were counted, approximately half of the top selections were books written for children. The cynical would undoubtedly suggest that the remainder were, in many cases, chosen because they sounded good, not because they had actually been read. It is generally a good rule of thumb that the protagonist in any novel or play is somebody that the target audience will need to identify with. Therefore, if you want to attract a senior citizen, make your hero 80 years old. It follows that if a play is about a 12 year-old heroine, it is aimed at the pre-teen age group with a little bit of spillage, say to age 15. Why then are all of these fantasies apparently supposed to be as attractive to adults as they are to the pre-teens who have every right to enjoy them? Certainly this critic finds all of the fantasy conventions remarkably tedious. This isn't just to do with the nature of the beast, my favourite style of writing is magic realism and I can be as romantic as the next man or woman. Where I fail is in suspending my disbelief as more and more monsters with silly names are beaten by a couple of kids armed with a little more than a wry sense of humour. The Greek tragedians were not above using a Deus ex Machina (even if it is a Latin phrase) to change a plot but not a dozen times in a single play. It sometimes appears that when a writer is stuck, he or she just invents a new name for some wonder that turns out to be the saviour of the seemingly defeated hero or heroine, if not the whole world or universe. I know that as a result of writing this article I will make lots of enemies and probably find that no reads any of my reviews in future, but I feel like the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Why is it that nobody else wishes to see through the thin veneer of sophistication to realise that there is often almost nothing underpinning it at all? Surely, it is time that the country made a collective decision to grow up, put behind them Harry, Bilbo and Lyra and exercise their brains a little with Don Quixote, Hamlet and Anna Karenina. Articles Indices:
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