Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter: What's On This Week (Oct 8-14)
The Rent Boy and the Sailor. Plus Northern Ballet's Merlin and what the caddish Mr Wickham did next.
I believe in miracles. They’re part of my upbringing; we did ‘the loaves and the fishes’ at Sunday School.
But I also, as part of my university degree, read Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s essay ‘Of Miracles’, which trashes the whole idea.
In fact, there’s something a bit odd about the concept of a miracle and I feel queasy just trying to think about it.
And so I muddle along with two different paradigms in my head — religious and scientific. Praying for a miracle is fine when Liverpool are three goals down in a UEFA Champions League Final. But it’s not something you should rely on when designing bridges.
The concept of transgender causes me the same intellectual unease. There’s something about the idea of being ‘born in the wrong body’ which doesn’t quite hang together. If ‘sex’ is biology and ‘gender’ is the socially constructed bit — then what is someone’s ‘gender identity’? Is it a fixed part of people’s biology (presu…