This Guardian column touches several issues that are familiar to me. Balancing the demands of an artistic life and a family is something I deal with daily. He also makes the good point that without other life experiences, we have nothing to make art about.
Ravenhill is probably right to recognise that, for him, a family would be a burden on his creativity. But who is he kidding when he claims that his life is all art and nothing else? His claim that abstaining from life is good for your art just doesn’t add up. Life feeds art.
Some other good lines:
I have been able to plough a furrow of childlike creativity in my work. I believe that people younger than me, particularly children, have a clearer and more valid world view than my generation (I’m 40 this week); certainly more so than the older and so-called wiser people who should have known better than to leave us a legacy of impoverishment, pollution and war. The adult world is childish, foolish. A child’s world is passionate, glorious. Through theatre we can recapture that vestigial idealism in all of us.
…without the fuel of life, artistic inspiration will run out of juice. In short, it will be all work and no play. If you’re an artist, you enrich the lives of others. Your own life, therefore, needs to be enriched to start with.