Storytelling is as old as the campfire. As narrative streams go, drama and poetry—that is, spoken poetry like Homer’s Odyssey—form the headwaters. Novels, musicals, Byronic verse, and even TikTok reels are all downriver.

To be fair, poetry came first. But while theater’s origins in publicly recited, often long-form verse are clear enough, verse alone pales next to drama’s reach as mass entertainment. Some twenty-five hundred years after the last annual performance contest in Athens, drama soldiers on—if not in outdoor amphitheaters, then on everyone’s phone screen.

Sorry, poets.

Maybe five out of every hundred people can name a poem they’ve read, but all of them have seen a Key & Peele skit. In honor (or lament) of that, this here’s a mid-level dive into dramatic structure and tragedy in particular, all with the example of the 2013 thriller ‘Locke,’ and the marathon Tom Hardy performance you probably haven’t heard about.

The Strike Zone

Drama you can watch alone or anywhere lacks the charged atmosphere of a live theater, but that’s no hindrance to the building blocks. Aristotle, one of the very first drama critics, devoted much of his Poetics to tragic plot construction, and how those blocks stack up and tumble like dominoes.

‘Tragic pleasure’ he argued, lies only at the end of a careful sequence moving an admirable character (tragedy is about our ‘betters,’ comedy our ‘lowers’) from one reversal1 to another and then to a final ‘unraveling.’ Glimpsing ourselves and our flaws in the hero, and having ran with him toward one plausible but ultimately doomed solution after another, we arrive at a place that’s sequentially probable and yet downright astonishing.

Probable yet astonishing is the tragic strike zone, the necessary though not entirely sufficient conditions for the audience’s ‘pity and terror’ (if you took Drama 101, you’ve probably heard that phrase.)

Condensed to a movie logline, a tragic plot holds both of those conditions:

-After assassinating a generous King and taking his place, a once-loyal general turns into a paranoid tyrant, destroying the Kingdom he once defended in a hellish fight to the end.2

-A broke, terminally-ill chemistry teachers starts cooking meth to provide for his family after he’s gone… but his rise to meth kingpin destroys soul and family alike.3

If the irony isn’t clear enough, here’s one more:

-The King of a city cursed by the gods seeks the cause of said curse… and finds out it was his own actions, done in ignorance.4

David Mamet’s quip that the end of a drama is (or should be like) the punchline of a joke is relevant here. In a smaller way, a punchline is the astonishing (funny) result of a probable setup, not to mention a good way to measure that setup and assess its components.

In drama, as in joke-telling, the leaner the better. If some detail (a line, a scene, or a whole character arc) isn’t necessary, out it goes.

Properly calibrated, it’s this structure of events that rattles us to the core, and distinguishes tragedy from kitsch, melodrama, or pure spectacle like The Lion King. Tested over time, on large stages and small, events that quicken to a punchline prove to hold an audience. When the events add up but startle nonetheless, when the stakes are high and the hero’s actions brave and necessary in the face of darkness, then the plague on Thebes (like our own murky motives) becomes more real and less of an onstage fiction.

Greek Tragedies famously did not show the most violent moments onstage. For one thing, they weren’t permitted—onstage violence was another form of ‘pollution’ —and for another, they didn’t need to. For Oedipus, Creon, King Macbeth, and any audience who’s truly along for the ride, the news of what happens is usually enough.

As it happens, that’s true of real-life tragedy as well.

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On a lighter note, drama poured straight is refreshing to watch. In the age of podcasts and live chickens at the Minecraft movie, it’s a rare treat to see the bare elements working powerfully and to full potential.

Steven Knight’s Locke, a one-man drama starring Tom Hardy and a very British BMW X5 (drives on the left, driver sits right) is an example of this—a dramatic exercise in plot, character, and restricted filmmaking. There’s no frills, no special effects or flashbacks, and this being a little before peak woke, no race or gender hatchet job.

Just one man onscreen, and every wall closing in.

From a craft standpoint, ‘Locke’ fascinates. It’s a reminder, via Aristotle, that you don’t need lighter fluid to start a blaze.

From a viewing standpoint (rated ‘R’ for language) ‘Locke’s a tense, turn-up-the-heat slow burn. Squarely a thriller, it reaches for moral depth where other thrillers scratch the surface. These dimensions rise in protagonist Ivan Locke, a construction foreman and astute family man, driving to the hospital where the baby he fathered in a forgettable one-night stand is arriving soon. Writer/director Knight builds this time crunch into a sharp moral dilemma, a tragic probing of integrity, manhood, and life choices. One mistake, Ivan grumbles—correcting a co-worker but stating a theme at the same time—and it all comes crumbling down.

As a character study, ‘Locke’ challenges you to peel back the layers of what you watched. I did this with some friends and relatives recently; we watched it and then discussed for an hour.

Getting into why, I’ll keep spoilers light. If you can’t stand them, here’s your cue to park yourself on the couch and watch the movie first.

‘I’m Not Coming Home’

Like baking, tragedy follows a recipe. Held up one at a time, the ingredients are straightforward enough. Steven Knight’s ‘Locke’ proves this by setting up devastating reversals (each one probable), with one simple action—leaving a work site and driving for two hours.

As you probably guessed, Ivan Locke is Tom Hardy, the only actor/character we see onscreen, or need to. With the exception of what we hear from other characters over the BMW’s speakerphone (Andrew Scott, Ruth Wilson, ‘Spiderman's Tom Holland and ‘The Crown’s Olivia Coleman make up this heard-but-not-seen cast), Ivan stepping out of the glaring, portable lights of the construction site and getting in his car are the movie’s only actions.

Framed entirely on Ivan, the die is cast. The drive itself from somewhere near Birmingham to London is the inciting incident, an impromptu decision compelled by the news that Bethan, the co-worker carrying Ivan’s baby from an encounter seven months ago, is in premature labor.

First, Ivan calls to tell his sons Sean and Eddie that he’s not coming home. Over their objections that he’ll miss the soccer match they’d planned to watch— ‘we’ve got the sausages, the German lager, Mum’s even wearing the shirt’—we glimpse an active, pleasant family life. Even more than Ivan’s high-profile job as a construction foreman (a few phone conversations later, that job falls like the first domino), is that fact that his sounds sounds happy, loved, amply provided for.

The next call is from Bethan, alone in the hospital and in pain. Ivan reassures her that he’s coming, but when she asks ‘do you love me?’ he replies ‘how am I supposed to answer that?’ Here, we learn that Ivan’s no playboy—he and Bethan have had no ongoing relationship since the affair.

In fact, when Ivan scowls at the rearview and imagines his deceased father (we don’t see him; again, the suggestion is enough) mocking him from the backseat, we learn why he needs to be there—Dad abandoned him as a youngster and he will not make the same mistake with this child. Of course, the desire to both redeem himself and make sure his father’s sins stay in the past will cost him plenty. When Bethan asks when he is going to tell his wife that she’s having his baby, we get a chilling sense of how that conversation will go.

With that hanging over him, Ivan faces another struggle—prepping a bewildered, (and as the night goes on slightly drunken) Irish co-worker named Donal to oversee the high-stakes, early morning concrete pour he just abandoned. ‘You’re a good man,’ Ivan insists, shoring up Donal’s shaky confidence. ‘You can do this.’

When a call from Ivan’s boss Gareth, (nicknamed ‘Bastard’ in Ivan’s phone contact list) comes in, we learn why Donal’s knees are knocking. The construction project is no Seven-Eleven but a skyscraper, with over ten million dollars riding on the concrete pour alone. As Gareth fumes about the ‘biggest, non-nuclear, non-military pour in Europe’ Ivan nods like a man ready for the firing squad.

He knew walking off would mean never be coming back. When Gareth calls Ivan back to fire him we have our first reversal. Doubling down on the very integrity the film examines, Ivan resolves to see the concrete pour is done right remotely, via telling Donal what to do.

This choice buttresses Ivan as someone ‘better than us’ (who doesn’t admire someone who works with their hands and their brains?). The choice to guide Donal is a good one, setting up a dozen goals and conflicts that test Ivan as the phone rings and rings. One step at a time, Locke holds Donal’s hand as he inspects the construction site, checks with companies delivering the concrete, and makes calls to ensure road closures. When they discover a faulty rebar job, and with a nervous Donal having drank too much to drive down the road and hire a group of Polish laborers who will be gone in half an hour, Ivan tells Donal to start running. ‘I know you,’ Ivan grins, clenching the wheel but not about to give up. ‘You can run like the wind when you’re drunk!’ Anyone who’s gone crazy taking a work project to the bitter, hair-pulling end can relate.

There’s some choice comedy here—and after a painful scene that sees Ivan tell his wife Katerina all about the one-night stand, Bethan’s pregnancy, and his decision to be there for the baby’s birth, we sure need it. Here, at a reversal so devastating it clenches the stomach, the restriction adds potency.

With no screentime and nothing but her bewildered, broken vocal delivery, actress Ruth Wilson fully embodies a married woman whose entire world has collapsed around her. Calling later to tell him it’s over, and that he shouldn’t come home after Bethan’s delivery, Katerina’s words sear the conscience. ‘The difference between never and once is everything.’

Tom Hardy carries weight here too. He knows he’s given her cause, but her rejection breaks him—and the relationship he’s built with his sons will be altered forever if not completely wiped out. With job, marriage, and fatherhood up in smoke before Ivan can reach London, all that’s left is the drive itself.

If the building riding on the successful concrete pour signifies Ivan himself, his life and moral integrity (the film gives several nods to this: Katerina accuses him of living for his work, and Donal tells him: ‘Stefan [a Polish worker] says you’re the best man in all England’), then the drive itself is his effort to sustain it. That effort culminates in his promise to Bethan, himself, and the baby he created.

Admirably enough, it’s a doomed effort. Like Oedipus setting out to roll back the plague and save his people, the heroic, moral action tainted by hamartia (a fatal, but not completely damming character flaw) is what triggers destruction. Like Oedipus, the further Ivan Locke takes the right decision, the higher the cost everyone around him pays.

Up to here, and with an ending that’s worth saving for those who will go and watch it, ‘Locke’ courts heavy-duty tragedy… but with a glimmer of hope for our exasperated, seat-belted hero. With a few minor questions (‘would the football game Ivan and his sons planned to watch really start that late?’ and things to that effect), the premise fires like a spring-loaded catapult.

Truth, pathos, moral consequences, and bloody-minded determination to maintain a foundation (for Ivan, that’s one of redemption and concrete) all resonate. Events unfold probably, if a tad predictably, and land hard nonetheless, prompting me to ask for yet another time… why can’t Christians make art like this?

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All Considered

Here, and in a long list of plays, films, and novels created by non-Christians, ‘Locke’ captures the paradox of man’s attempts to justify himself to God (or this being secular, soon to be Islamic England, to some ideal version of himself) through moral effort.

The harder man tries, the more fully cracks appear.

As I’ve written about before, literature that cries no meaning and no transcendent right and wrong is kidding itself. Whether it’s ‘Locke,’ or even ‘Macbeth’ the trying itself implies knowledge of a moral standard man can’t change, live up to, or rewrite himself. As St. Paul put it in Romans, chapter seven, there’s ‘perfect law’ that awakened and aggravated his sin.5

To put the existence of that law, the written on every man’s heart another way, ‘The difference between never and once is everything.’ But where ‘Locke’ shows us how wide and unforgivable that difference is, and offers a vague hope of something better, leaves no ultimate solution.

On the one hand, that’s fitting.

Tragedy depicts (and in some ways, celebrates) man’s subjugation by a higher, usually unforgiving power. Greek tragedies emphasized man’s smallness by making that power ‘the gods’—fickle, arbitrary, warring with each other and using mortals as pawns.

Over two millennia, tragedy developed, with Shakespeare’s ‘Christian tragedies’ adopting the framework of sin, redemption, and damnation. ‘Macbeth,’ like ‘Breaking Bad’ depicts sinful pride, and follows the natural, logical consequences of choosing it to damnation. In that, I’d argue, and whether it’s before ‘gods’ or God himself, pagan tragedy captures man’s moral brokenness, and the fact that we live on borrowed time like nothing else. But with a direct answer to the brokenness calling out spiritually, in the witness accounts of scripture, and as of Easter two-thousand years ago, physically,6 the Ivan Lockes of the world have some time left to pick a different lane.

Before a just, righteous Creator (where else would a moral law we all acknowledge, and apply to others if not to ourselves originate?) no one will, or can stand on their integrity alone.

No matter how the concrete pour went, no one’s building will last.

So which way, foundation-laying man?