Laws of Dramatic Necessity

That which governs my life. Have you ever felt like you're living in a soap opera? I feel like that all the time... Truman Burbank has nothing on me. Sometimes I feel like the only reason I don't float up off the ground is because if gravity was repealed, it would be just too unbelievable for the hypothetical viewers.

I'm not sure if this is a feeling that everyone gets. But when I look around at other people, the kind of things that happen to me just don't seem to happen to them.

My life, to date, has been a series of dramatic scenes. There has been crisis, deadly peril, humour, romance, and sex and drugs and rock and roll. A cast of thousands, a budget of millions, incredible locations, amazing costumes, big explosions and special effects. And it's been one hell of a lot of fun to star in... if a little exhausting at times.

Scratch that last bit. It's been bloody exhausting. Over the course of this movie, I've had blood gushing from so many places I've lost count, been dangling from precipices with no hope of survival, got god-knows-how-many scars and come twenty years nearer to death than I was when it began. And yet, even if the rest of the movie is as dull as Beaches, I can still claim to have lived by my motto Though I may not have lived a virtuous life, at least I can say "I've lived".

Dramatic Necessity (and yes, it deserves the capitals) affects us all. But the extent to which it affects us depends as much upon the person being affected as the Dramatic Necessity themselves...

Let me use an example. There is a scream, of fright and terror, cutting through the air. What do you do? Do you ignore it, and hope it goes away? Or do you let the laws take over, and go with the flow Dramatic Neccessity? Unfortunately, far too many people take the first route.

I know this through firsthand experience. A couple of years ago, Lagrange, myself and another friend of ours were in Hull city centre when just such a scream occurred. A girl, frightened out of her mind by someone that claimed to be her boyfriend. Easily 200 people hear the scream. The most they did was look round. The three of us were the only ones to act. It was the dramatic thing to do, and we would do no less, not then not now.

It's because of my openness to Dramatic Necessity that I can say that I can agree with Lagrange's motto, and say for myself: "Though I may not have lived a virtuous life, at least I can say "I've lived".