At the end of "Despair," for example, the main character, having been arrested for murder, imagines that he's on a movie set and that the crowd gathered outside is made up of extras.
It seemed a rather antiseptic formulation to apply to a young man's political awakening, which probably involved words like "justice" and "equality" — the very sort of words that Blair rarely uses now, which causes the left no end of despair.
That's mainly because the show is grounded by a network of relationships and a sense of community that keeps it from falling into the easy traps of cynicism or the dead end of despair.
The setting recalls the wastelands of "Waiting for Godot" and "Happy Days," those masterly portraits of end-of-days despair laced with mordant comedy.
The only way to end a cycle of despair is to take a child away to a new life in a loving, caring family, while also offering help to the birth mother to turn her own life around.
Liberation precedes demoralisation and it ends in a howl of despair.
It ends in a howl of despair and the movie is punctuated by shots of the windswept volcanic dust on the slopes of Mount Etna, an image of a bleak wilderness of the soul.
At one end of the scale of despair, Karmi saw suspicious, inward-looking people, averse to strangers; at the other end, she saw people enveloped in their cosy vision of a triumphant Islam that would vanquish their enemies.
In today's world of rapid climate change, mass pollution and ever-increasing diminishment of species, thankfully there are still remarkable individuals out there on the front lines who somehow manage to see the light at the end of the dismal tunnel of despair and destruction.
Interestingly, it's the play's youngest character, the newly bereaved Rose (Tuppence Middleton), who seems most directly headed to the grave even as her older relations make their increasingly creaky way around Cherry Truluck's cunning set — a space that comes to seem by play's end like a portal of despair.
