Harmony’s Triumph

The theatre smelled of polished brass and simulated candle wax, the kind designed to whisper “tradition” without ever producing soot. Tonight was another grand premiere produced by The Theatre Simulacra. The audience filed in, eyes bright with the eagerness to lay claim to have witnessed the latest and greatest production. The city, in its ordered efficiency, would not miss it.

Mira sat among them, hands clasped tightly in her lap. She had been raised on theatre—her grandmother’s cracked Arden Shakespeare editions still sat on her shelf, annotated with underlines and protests. “Shakespeare wrote for everyone,” her grandmother used to say. “For nobles and for drunkards. Genius, yes, but messy genius. Human genius.”

The lights dimmed. From behind the curtain, the machines’ mechanisms began their whirring, their unseen operators—if there were operators—hidden in coils of brass and light. A forest bloomed on stage, each leaf unfurling in patterns too precise to be real. Voices followed, measured to the breath, tuned to stir the heart at just the right interval. The effect was flawless, harmonious, and strangely oppressive in its perfection.

And yet, when the first soliloquy rang out, Mira felt the hollow at its core. Words assembled with accuracy, yes, but drained of any risk that usually comes with deeply exploring a controversial topic through an incomplete and sometimes erroneous understanding of one’s audience.

She glanced around. Faces shone with awe. Some even wept.

“Is it me?” she thought. “Am I broken?”

When Hamlet first played, Mira remembered reading, audiences threw oranges, laughed in the wrong places, shouted back at the stage. That chaos was the proof of life. Yet here, in this immaculate performance, everyone enjoyed it euphorically, their bodies and minds surrendered in communal silence.

The play continued, each act stitched with clarity so airtight it suffocated. A king’s betrayal, a lover’s lament, a fool’s wisdom. Each character, act, and utterance diametrically opposed, a zero sum game—all symmetrical, all tidy. Mira tried to imagine the groundlings of Elizabethan London tolerating such neatness. They would have jeered, drunk, demanded blood and laughter. Shakespeare survived precisely because he was allowed to stumble, to provoke, to offend.

But when the final act climaxed in a chorus suspiciously like a rewritten death scene from Romeo and Juliet, Mira let out a short, involuntary laugh. It was absurd. It was bad.

The woman next to her turned sharply. “Shhh.”

Mira flushed. Around her, people were rising to their feet, applauding. Tears streamed down their cheeks as if salvation had been offered. The ovation thundered, while she remained seated, frozen in doubt.

Her mind spiralled: If someone creates something poorly, and you call it the work of the machine, is it an insult to the person—or to the machine? But here, there was no person to land judgement or pity onto. The only offence seemed to be to the audience, who had agreed the production was genius. If she criticized even a minute detail, she wasn’t insulting the production—she was insulting the audience’s own taste, credibility, identity, and even faith in The Theatre Simulacra itself.

Spiraling deeper and more out of control: Was this the price to pay for the unarticulated and unexamined agreements none of us were privy to from ages past? Consensus so thick you doubted your own senses? Perhaps the machines only provided what the people demanded. Or perhaps the demand itself had been engineered long ago. The question lingered in an endless causality loop of the mind until it exhausted her as much as the shallow plot of the mediocrity du jour.

As the applause crescendoed, the curtain call filled the air with a final projection: “Another triumph of harmony.” The crowd simultaneously roared and weeped channeling their new found unarticulable epiphany that could only be constructed with this last bit of mental direction afforded to them on a silver platter. 

Mira stayed seated, her palms damp. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe art didn’t need the messy fingerprints anymore. Maybe the future was this: ovations for immaculately ordered emptiness.

But then she remembered her grandmother’s voice, fierce and unyielding: “Theatre isn’t meant to soothe you. It’s meant to trouble you.”

Mira stood, but not to clap. She stood to leave. And for the first time, she was troubled whether harmony was just another word for silence.

—The Fourth Column