See you later, facilitator

David Williamson, the man who wanted to nominate Michael Leunig for Greatest Ever Australian, is at it again. He has a piece in today's Australian which I won't even try to summarize - it would be like trying to arm-wrestle a jellyfish. Suffice it to say that the Howard government is apparently lulling us into a lotus-eater obliviousness on the subject of Global Warming by conducting vicious midnight purges of artists and intellectuals, the only people who can warn us of Mother Gaia's impending day of wrath. 'kay? Reading this piece, I was reminded of a tragic figure I used to see at my local market. Jim Cairns, Treasurer in the Whitlam government, ended up self-publishing books with titles like New day: liberated biological human potential and selling them - or rather, not selling them - from a folding card-table. Formerly rational people become enthralled to some deceptively simple theory which explains everything, and they can't understand why the rest of us just don't see it!

Global warming is clearly one of these all-embracing ideas for Williamson, but looking at an article about his latest play, it seems he has at least one other. 'Conferencing' is apparently some kind of technique for conflict resolution (a new 'technique' for this sort of thing seems to come along about every ten years or so). This radical new technique involves people, er, sitting down together and, um, talking. Williamson is so enamoured of it that he trained as a 'facilitator', and has written a trilogy of plays structured as 'conferencing' sessions, of which his current play is the last instalment. Even the Sydney Morning Herald has to admit that, as a way of making plays, it "sounds dire".