me, is what the‘performer’and the‘spectator’know about their situation:
does the watcher know that the empty space has been called a ‘bare
stage’? Does the walking man know that he is walking across the‘bare
stage’and that he is being watched? When Ifirst taught a class on what
theatre is, we followed Brook’s instructions: we designated the centre of
the seminar room a bare stage; one student walked across the room; others
watched. It may not have been the best theatre–but theatre it was.
Looking out of the window of my office, I see plenty of students walking
past, and I see others watching them; and, even if I designate the concrete
path a‘bare stage’, it doesn’t seem much like theatre to me. Many the-
orists of theatre speak of the mutual awareness of performers and specta-
tors as an essential component, thus of theatre as a kind of collaboration
between the two. Hence, Grotowski emphasised the ‘actor–spectator
relationship, a perceptual, direct living community’ irreducibly at the
heart of theatre.^10
Does every event that consists of a marked-out location, with perfor-
mers and spectators who know about each other, amount to a piece of
theatre? Most of us, I take it, would say that it does not. For one thing,
plenty of non-artistic events look like they would count: sports, public
ceremonies, board-room presentations, political rallies, courtroom trials
and public executions all arguably contain these basic elements. These
sorts of events, together with theatrical performances, may be studied
under the broad, umbrella term of‘Performance Studies’–performance
being deliberately chosen as a broader and less culturally specific category
than theatre. For some, then, it’s a feature of theatre–but not necessarily
a feature of performance in general–that what’s going on is a kind of
playing (which doesn’t necessarily involve impersonation, as we have
seen). Hence, Balme writes that, ‘reduced to the simplest common
denominator, theatre, or more generally a theatrical event, consists of a
simultaneous and mutually conditioning act of playing and watching by
performers and spectators gathered together in a common space’.^11
There’s a clear sense in which the public execution is not‘playing’, in the
way that the execution scene inDanton’s Death certainly is.^12 Others,
though, have been drawn to the conclusion that‘theatre’should be used
to cover all such artistic and non-artistic events. Thus, when Paul
Woodruff defines theatre as‘the art by which human beings make orfind
human action worth watching, in a measured time and place,’he delib-
erately intends to revise and redefine it, to include weddings and football
matches within the category of theatre.^13 Within this broad category of
‘theatre’, Woodruff identifies what he calls‘art theatre’(the art form com-
monly known as‘theatre’) as a sub-category–one that is important in
some ways and unimportant in others. The appeal of such an approach to
theatre is evident, in that theatre becomes something much broader and
What is theatre? 5