never beaten. Blundered orders, in particular, can cause severe harm to
those who obey them (‘Charge for the guns!’). In both cases, we could
well expect the questioner or commander to be able to justify what they
have said in terms of some kind of knowledge. But in both of these cases,
the harm done by the mistaken question or command is clear: a false
conviction, perhaps, or the death of the soldiers. The theatre is neither a
court of law nor a battlefield. We might, for all sorts of reasons, prefer the
questions or demands of one play to those of another; my point is that, by
moving away from thinking about the political play as informing us
towards thinking about it as demanding certain kinds of attention or
thought, we place different and perhaps less stringent demands on its
creators. Playwrights may not deserve the authority to tell us about the
world, but anyone can ask us to look or to think.
Politics in performances
We have been talking, so far, about political features of play texts. But, as
I said at the start, discussions of political theatre must also look beyond
the words, to the performances. There,atthe theatre, wefind a number of
features that make theatrical performance a tool for political engagement.
Given, as we have said, that political issues are highly context dependent,
there may be little to be said that is completely general about relations
between theatrical performances and politics. A Greek tragedy, organised
by and performed in front of the citizens of Athens at a Dionysian festival,
is obviously already not the same kind of event–political or otherwise–
as a West End production of Shakespeare. The following categories and
examples are intended to give a sense of some of the variety in question.
Location
Afirst thought looks to the theatre itself–the location of the perfor-
mance–as a venue. Theatres typically gather large numbers of people
together and unify their attention on a particular action or event. Such gath-
erings of people, as we have said, are de facto political in the broad sense.
They also have the potential to be political in a narrower sense. The
Greek example illustrates this neatly. There were two Athenian venues
that had the capacity to hold thousands of citizens and enable them to focus
on the speeches of just a few: the Theatre of Dionysus and theekklesia
(Assembly), in which democratic debate took place. Scholars have noted their
comparable structure, capacity and, perhaps, spectators’ seating arrange-
ment.^18 One early Greek text on Athenian politics, the treatise of the so-
called‘Old Oligarch’, strongly connects the institution of comedy in particular
with the process of democratic decision-making (to which he objects).^19
174 From the Stage to the World