3 Truth and Illusion
Antonin Artaud’s provocative collection of essays, The Theatre and its
Double, is a call to arms for those who care about theatre.‘Life itself is in
decline’, he announces in the opening lines;^1 but the theatre, which could
be a source of significance and vitality, has been stifled and suppressed:
‘we have for too long been told theatre is all lies and illusion.’^2 Certainly,
the claim that theatre is bound up with untruth, with falsehood and
illusion, is long-standing: one ancient source reports that the veryfirst
tragedian, Thespis, was called a liar by Solon, the renowned Athenian
lawmaker, for making things seem other than they are.^3 In a sense,
Plato’s complaints (which we explored in the previous chapter) are a ver-
sion of this. But even without Plato’s metaphysical commitments, the
idea that theatre is somehow mendacious or illusory has echoed through
the ages.
In the Preface, I pointed to the long-running antagonism between
philosophy and theatre. We will look at a number of tensions between
philosophy and theatre during the course of this study, but perhaps the
most significant centres on the questions of truth. To put it provisionally:
philosophers have always characterised themselves as truth-seekers,
whereas–it is often claimed–theatre requires a certain kind of falsity or
illusion. By way of a response, defenders of theatre have often claimed
that plays, for all their apparent falsity or illusion, can somehow teach us
about the world. This claim also goes back a long way: Gorgias the
sophist, for example, claimed that tragedy is a form of poetry in which
‘the deceived is wiser than the undeceived’.^4 Dramatists have frequently
claimed that their works contain truths, even if such claims have been
treated with scepticism.^5 The aim of this chapter is to investigate the
claim that theatre rests upon falsity and illusion, and to examine the
response that plays can, in fact, teach us about the world. There are, as
we shall see, a number of different and apparently contradictory claims
made about the relationship between theatre and truth; an important part
of my task, therefore, is to try to disentangle them.