BORDERLINE
So what else is new? ask all those who have read The Bonfire of the Vanities and know all about the sordid underside of life in the fast lane. But playwright John Bishop is not interested simply in mapping territory already explored (in the 1960 film The Apartment, among other places). Through the device of a lecturer-commentator, we learn of the Graham family’s legacy of violence and flight. From its beginnings in the region forming the boundary between England and Scotland, the Graham clan was forced to endure innumerable clashing armies and the accompanying rape, siege, and sack. Three hundred years of this existence, remarks the lecturer, “bred a race of hard people.” Eventually the Grahams turned to banditry themselves, and were banished by James I to the outlying colonies, one of which was America. But there the Grahams continue their history of being always in the wrong place at the wrong time, of war and betrayal, and of a continuing quest for a haven of peace and freedom. We come to see Charles’s unease not as an isolated phenomenon inspired by particular circumstances but as a culmination of all that has gone before.
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“Not with a bang, but a whimper” is how T.S. Eliot said the world would end–not in a dramatic cataclysm but through a banal and irrevocable erosion. Borderline is a grimly pessimistic indictment of a universe pregnant with its own Armageddon, doomed to perish in a whimper of small and meaningless deaths.
