Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance

Abstract

Director Peter Brook claims, I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. The problem is that those responsible for theatre have wilfully disregarded the fact that there is no such thing as `empty space'. They have been surprised, mystified, and sometimes dismissive when people who inhabit that space have a point of view concerning the theatre's arrival. Alan Read asserts that there is no split between the practice and theory of theatre, only a divide between the written and the unwritten. Here he sets out to retrieve the theatre of spontaneity and tactics, which grows out of the experience of everyday life. It is a theatre which defines itself in terms of people and places rather than the idealised empty space of avant garde performance. In a synthesis of theatre aesthetics and postmodern philosophy, Read examines the relationship between an ethics of performance, a politics of place and a poetics of the urban environment.

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