Theirs is to win, if it kills them

What do Chekhov and the Flaming Lips have in common?

Well, nothing really. But the two were brought together very nicely on Sunday night in the last performance of the Hayloft Project's "Chekhov Re-cut" adaptation of the early Chekhov play, "Platonov". As the play began to arrive at its emotional and dramatic climax towards the end of Act 2, the beautiful strains of "Race for the Prize" began to rise in the background - initially one of the Hayloft Project's more unusual artistic choices, along with the whole set being covered in a few inches of water, and another musical moment, The Cure's "Friday I'm In Love". At least the latter song served the fairly immediate purpose of irony, something developed in particular when it was heard later in the play, being hummed by one of its more tragic characters. But the Flaming Lips? Was it the interplay of chirpy and macabre that they were aiming for? Certainly anything Wayne Coyne touches turns to off-beat gold, which may have been part of the attraction. And yet, on the surface, these curiosities - water; indie classics forming the "soundtrack"; characters engaging in "dance-offs" - could be nothing more than that; novelties included to "spice up" a genius for a generation who can't be bothered to let genius speak for itself.

But the Hayloft Project aren't in to novelties, or gimmicks. "Chekhov Re-cut" was genius itself, something that, dare I say it, Anton himself might have enjoyed, if he were likely to let himself enjoy anything besides laughing at human absurdity. Certainly there was an abundance of human absurdity, and an abundance of near-Hamletian tragedy. And there were laughs. And the laughs came, more often than not, from Chekhov himself, not from the modern revisioning of him.

The Flaming Lips, in recent years, have become quite a curiously optimistic band. On their "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell" EP of a few years back, Wayne began the last track with a piece of spoken word in which he, in typically pseudo-scientific mode, declared that, "if our ability to feel love is nothing more than a cosmic mistake, I'd like to think that this means the universe is on our side."

Is it? Chekhov imagined a world where the universe was more or less left to its own devices, and the result was not pretty. Most of the time it was lethargic and dull. People sat and stared at ticking clocks and longed for Moscow, or dreaded that first felling of the cherry trees in the orchard. And "Platonov", created by a younger but not really happier Chekhov, is certainly more overtly tragic than any of his later works, which, at least in the case of "Three Sisters" end, with more of a whimper than anything that could be called a bang. But the bangs were aplenty in "Platonov" - false starts, and then that final shot that brought everything to an end, and a beginning, though what kind of beginning we can't say.

At best, for Chekhov the universe has remained neutral. At worst, it's against us. And yet, there's still an ability to feel love, or an ability to love, or make love. And an ability to fight for something, whatever it is - and you feel, at times, like they'll fight for anything, because it's better than fighting for nothing.

After all, they are "just humans, with", in some cases, "wives and children" - or brothers, or sisters, or lovers, and they want to win, but I'm not sure they know what the prize is. It's a pretty watery game of chess they're playing, and it's hard to say where or how it ends. For Platonov, it ends with a bang, but what about everyone else?

And, as is so often the point in Chekhov - What about us?

When "Uncle Vanya" first achieved success, the interval arrived and the audience sat in stunned silence, no idea how to react to something that could kick them so effectively in their existential guts. No-one does it like Chekhov. No-one.

Would Chekhov and Wayne Coyne have agreed about anything? I'm not at all sure. But they created a lovely, meaningful and thought-provoking juxtaposition for me that Sunday evening. The truth, I suspect, probably lies somewhere in between them both.

Are you on my side?

There's apparently some kind of social dictum that says you should never talk about religion or politics. I suspect my family were all away on the day of school when that was taught. Religion and politics are all we ever talk about. And it's often what I talk to my friends about as well.

But a handful of conversations lately with friends who share my religious views but not my politics have made me think a bit more than usual about the connection between the two. Or, more to the point, I've been wondering if there's any connection at all.

My last post (written almost a month ago - sorry about that...) touched slightly on the idea of objective truth - namely, the fact that many are offended by mainstream religions because they claim to know "the truth". In fact, the founder of Christianity, the big man himself, took it as far as to claim to be the truth. Now, in a postmodern, multi-cultural pluralist society, that may seem a tad insensitive. More on that later.

But here's the thing: subtly, we make the same claim about our political views. We argue that America should have gone to war with Iraq, or alternately argue that they shouldn't. We say that Kevin Rudd's recent apology to the indigenous people of Australia was right or, on the other hand, that it was wrong. Do you see where I'm going with this?

Now, put that kind of commitment to ideological truth along with a commitment to religious truth, and what you often get is something that sounds like: "If you're a good Christian, you have to be anti-Iraq", or, "If you're a good Christian, you have to buy Fair Trade coffee", or, "If you're a good Christian, you have to support American foreign policy". Christians on either side of politics are devastated to find their faith being aligned with political agendas that they don't agree with. I'd always felt insulted by the assumption that Christians are automatically right-wing, but a right-wing friend of mine spoke to me just last weekend about feeling that most inner-city churches in Melbourne are strongly biased towards the left to compensate for the perception that, being Christian, they must be right-wing. He himself said that the last four or so years have been a "difficult time to be a right-wing Christian". And, while I'd never felt sympathy for the right before, I had to admit that I could see his point. When all your fellow believers are saying, "We're not like them" - well, how would it feel to be...Them?

Which makes me ask the question again: how interconnected can religion and politics ever be? And I began to see a distinction, while talking with my friend. It's only a work in progress, and not very well-developed at that, but here it is, for what it's worth. Politics looks to reshape the world according to views and values about how the world should look. Sound a little like religion? Well, here's the difference. Politics looks to human and worldly systems to make that change. Religion looks beyond this world.

Bob Dylan, a man that everyone connects with whatever viewpoint that they wish he espoused, once asked "when will I learn that there'll be no peace, that the wars won't cease, until He returns?" The fact that Dylan was, at the time, getting a lot of crap for his quite public conversion to Christianity means that I'm fairly confident in guessing who the He of the song is. And essentially he's pointing out the flaw in all Christian political ideals - that really, as good as things can get here, some things won't change this side of eternity.

If you don't believe in Jesus, then this will all seem irrelevant to you. Why put your faith in the possible second coming of a guy who, we believe, lived 2000 years ago and then died as a criminal? Why wait for his return before making the world a better place?

I don't believe that we should just be sitting passively and waiting, and Jesus criticised those who planned on doing just that. But politics still fundamentally tries to fix the world by human means, while Christianity at least posits the claim that human means will never fix everything, because we as humans need to be fixed.

Christians, if we're to be at all effective in helping a broken world, are going to need to focus on what we have in common. Politics may divide us, and that doesn't mean that we can't believe in politics - but we must not base our faith on politics. After all, Jesus never actively opposed any system of government, even though many of his followers hoped he would. Jesus talked of a kingdom that was not of this world, and that, I suspect, is the kingdom we as Christians should be voting for.