Anti-theatricality and the limits of naturalism

Abstract

In the broadest and most transhistorical sense, the anti-theatrical prejudice can be seen as a trope whereby the long-standing Western anxiety about secondariness or supplementarity finds cultural expression. This metaphysical problematic leads by implication to other familiar moral hierarchies, most notably the binarisms that set essence against appearance, feminine against masculine, writing against speech, fiction against truth. For the anti-theatrical polemicist, theatre stands in for the ambiguities and indeterminacy of history itself, metaphorically invoking, as Jonas Barish so eloquently puts it, ‘a whole shoal of evils, of varying shapes and sizes, from the social sea’.1 The reading of anti-theatrical discourse in the Western tradition that Barish gives us reveals the startling paradox that anti-theatricality is ultimately not about the theatre and always about something else: the stage is inevitably a mere symptom for some other, less effable social or metaphysical malady. The case ‘against’ the theatre is fascinating precisely because it stages such a broad spectrum of transhistorical anxieties in historically and culturally specific terms, such that anti-theatrical diatribes often come to powerfully dramatize conflicts and antipathies that are essentially local and radically contingent. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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