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Weekend Talk: The world is a stage

From William Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It, comes the popular statement, “The world is a stage.”  

The line is spoken by the character Jaques, who says, “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts.”

Comparing the world to a stage and people to actors, Shakespeare stated that people play different roles in life. The same person can be a student and a worker, or a parent and a teacher.  

He reasoned that in real life as in a drama, we are actors, constantly putting on a show with hidden motives and ulterior agendas.

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My first theatre

The first time I sat among the audience at a makeshift theatre to watch a play, I was 10 years old. Our teacher wrote a musical play full of characters who fascinated me with memorable human traits. 

The stage was not a formal theatre. There were no curtains, lighting or sound effects. Just tarpaulin-covered tables pressed against two doors that opened to a hall.  Those doors served as “entrances” and “exits”.

All the characters were my schoolmates and playmates.  But when they appeared on stage, they became different personalities.

For example, there was the lively girl Doris, the protagonist, who was happy and lively in real life, but who became sad and broken in the play.  

She who had the voice of a nightingale now sang only sorrowful songs that told the story of a deprived and lonely girl who sold flowers.  

I still remember the lyrics of her mournful song: “Who will have pity on me? / I didn’t know I would be hungry in life; / But here I am, a wandering poor girl; / Someone, please buy my lovely flowers; / Else I will sleep on an empty stomach tonight!”

For a moment, that wasn’t Doris the lively girl from a well-endowed family that we knew. She was in a different world, acting in a different role.  And she was so grief-stricken that she actually persuaded the audience to buy her flowers!

Putting up appearances

From that day, I understood how we live in a world of pretences, putting up appearances, wearing masks and faking our personalities like characters on a stage.

Every playwright, such as the legendary William Shakespeare or our own celebrated Ebo Whyte, is a creator who populates their plays with major and minor characters.

The director of the drama carefully looks for the right people to play the roles that the playwright has created. These characters enter and exit the stage according to the roles mapped out for them in order to tell the story the playwright has imagined.

In real life, however, God is the Creator who determines who gets born and who doesn’t.  But unlike the play director’s cast who act according to the director’s will, human beings in real life behave according to our own will.

Since we are our own directors in real life, we choose what to say, where to go, and what to do, with consequences for the choices we make.

Tragedies

Tragedy is the fatal or near-fatal calamity that befalls the protagonist in a drama. Shakespeare’s popular tragic plays include Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.

In all these tragic plays, life’s never-failing principle, “We reap what we sow” (Galatians 6:7) affected the protagonists, just as it affects us in real life.

What we sow, which are the causes of most tragedies, are the same in real life as in a drama. We reap disaster when we sow carelessness, selfishness, greed, covetousness, wickedness and similar vices.

On the other hand, when we sow goodness, we reap its fruit.  If tragedy befalls us despite the goodness we sow, we can confidently entrust our life to God who judges justly and overturns evil for good.

In Him we live

Actors play their roles on stage and then exit when their parts are over, only to reappear to play other roles. That scenario mirrors the stage of the real world where we are constantly on the move.

Hence, the apostle Paul declared about God, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). If everything we have comes from God, then idolatry and idol worship are an affront to God.

Actors who live only for the moment have this philosophy: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (Isaiah 22:13). Those who live like that have lost hope, the anchor for the soul.  

While hope on earth may be uncertain, hope beyond this world is assured due to God’s acts of love, mercy, kindness and clemency.

But our relationship with him must go beyond acting and be real. 

The writer is a publisher, author, writer-trainer and CEO of Step Publishers.
E-mail: lawrence.darmani
@gmail.com

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