'Cosi_Shows_That_Love_Is_a_Universal_Human_Experience'_Discuss.

Love is the main theme in Cosi. Do you agree' Although Cosi is concerned with the politics of the 1970’s and an exploration of the treatment of mentally ill, and the boundaries between realities, it is primarily a play about love in is various aspects –trust and betrayal, fidelity and infidelity and commitment, friendship, compassion and acceptance. The asylum setting and the constant referencing to the worlds of madness and the opera, the “play within a play” are a corollary to the lives of the characters and their interconnections. The play explores many aspects of love, by different perspectives from the cast. Each character has their own way of describing love, and Cosi Fan Tutte is just the right ground for them to discuss it. Roy believes that “love is what you feel when you don’t have enough emotion left to hate”, despite this negative impression of love, Julie thinks that, “Love was being foolish and stupid”. From this point, we can see that Nowra’s play considers the ideas of love, without giving the definitive opinions about it, after all, “Mozart is about love not madness”. Love is not only the main theme of the opera, but also the major one in Cosi. The certain aspects of love that is the focus of both the opera and the play are fidelity, faithfulness, and commitment that we see from the interconnections within the characters. From fidelity, comes the concept of free love which against it. Nowra portrays free love in a negative way by aligning Doug and Nick to be the supporters for it. “Lucy’s not possessive about you. I’m not possessive about her. What’s the fuss'” as Nick says to Lewis, describing that he is into free love, and fidelity is not important to him. On the other hand, Henry believes that fidelity and commitment are the bonds that keeps love lasts, as he said, “Whether women can remain true is tttragedy”. Nowra encourages us not to think the way Nick and Doug do as they are the most unlikeable character in the play, but he makes us think that fidelity is one important aspects of love and it is the foundation for love to keep long-lasting, by Lewis’ monologue in the end which saying that Lucy and Nick’s relationship didn’t stay last because both of them are not into fidelity. Although Cosi’s main theme is about love, it also covers the ideas of politics as well. Lucy and Nick are the characters who most strongly support the idea of, “Love is the last gasp of bourgeois romanticism”. They believe that other social and political issues are much more important than love, as Lucy justifies in her speech, “After bread, a shelter, equality, health, procreation, money comes maybe love…” This statement proves how love has a very little meaning to her. Although Lucy and Lewis are having a relationship, it seems to have more to do with pleasure and sex than it does with love, as she says, “It’s only a fling. It doesn’t mean anything… I have sex with him and sleep with you”, implying that people can do sex without love, and so fidelity does not matter. Nick says, “It’s only sex” as well to Lewis, indicating less meaning of faithfulness to him either. Although the play, through Lucy and Nick, strongly presents an argument for the fact that love is not that important, at the same time it supports the notion that love takes a major part in the play. Some of the characters are firm about their point of view from the beginning until the end, and others change their mind along the play. Lewis at the start of the play shares Nick and Lucy’s political beliefs. When Roy first introduces the idea of doing Cosi Fan Tutte, Lewis objects because he believes that love is not important nowadays. This idea turns out as the play progresses. Lewis begins to change his perspective towards love. He comes to see love as something that is always important, as he says, “without love the worlds wouldn’t mean much”. He develops this conception through his experiences by working with the cast from the asylum and how they relate to the themes of the opera. He could have just leaved the opera when he gets the chance but he wouldn’t leave because of his love for friendship and compassion toward the opera that gradually growing. The concept love in this play is without doubt the main theme. Nowra covers heaps of perspective from the characters about love, although he does not give the definitive opinion until the end and the word love still remains ambiguous. The play also offers the importance of fidelity, by putting Nick and Doug as the one against and Henry and other characters as well as the supporters of fidelity. Lucy and Nick’s beliefs about love as a secondary human need are indicating how love is actually really important. Otherwise, Nowra would not write such a lot of debate about love if it’s not the main theme of the opera. Lastly, the main character, Lewis discovers that love is really important, that it underlies everything in the world.