allowed to get away with it?’At a highly abstract, symbolist production:
‘How“realistic”was the performance and how much does that matter?’
At a play about climate change denial:‘Shouldn’t playwrights stop mes-
sing with politics and stick to writinggoodplays?’^4 On the other hand, I
have considered the philosophers, past and present, who have written
on theatre. Philosophers who write about theatre are not hard tofind:
Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Hegel and Nietzsche are just some of the
most recognisable names. Several philosophers were also notable play-
wrights in their own right, including Seneca, Machiavelli, Voltaire,
Diderot, Rousseau, Lessing, Schiller and Sartre–at least four of them
belong to thefirst group, too. There are countless others who have con-
tributed to philosophical discussion about theatre in one way or another.
Sometimes, of course, philosophers address the sorts of questions I just
mentioned, directly or at least indirectly. Often, however, they offer new
conceptual tools, new terminology, new distinctions and indeed new
questions of their own. The aim of each discussion is tofind a balance
between these two considerations–to tread the path between clarifying
or answering everyday questions and engaging seriously with the philo-
sophical contributions at hand. Sometimes, the path was already
well trodden; often, I have had to clear it for myself. In either case, it goes
without saying that many deserving thinkers and thoughts have not found
their way into a book of this size and scope; the suggestions for further
reading are intended to minimise some of the damage. Specific recom-
mendations are to be found along the way in the notes to each chapter. The
selection of‘further reading’at the end of each chapter offers those I take to
be particularly useful or, failing that, unavoidable in some sense.
Aside from thefirst chapter,‘What is Theatre?’, the book is divided
into two sections. The two sections correspond to two directions of
fit: ‘from the world to the stage’ and ‘from the stage to the world’.
Loosely speaking, then, the topics in thefirst section are about the (mis)
representation of reality on the stage; those in the second section are
about the effect that the stage has upon its audiences. This is a cursory
distinction, which doesn’t do much more than give me an organising
principle for the chapters – as we shall see, answers on each side
will clearly impact upon answers from the other – but I hope it’s
clear why questions about truth, imitation or historical accuracy belong on
one side, whereas questions about ethics or the political efficacy of theatre
belong on the other. Although the book is intended to be read from
start tofinish (and the chapters frequently refer to one another), readers
should certainly feel free to turn straight to chapters of particular interest.
There are innumerable ways of approaching theatre from an academic
point of view and there are plenty of ways of approaching it that aren’t
obviously academic at all –watching and performing plays are surely
Preface xi