read, not to be performed; often they are excluded, as theatre, for precisely
this reason. Brecht wrote Lehrstücke –‘teaching plays’–which, he
claimed, were designed to help the actors to learn, not for the benefitof
any audience.^6 Some of the‘happenings’organised by Allan Kaprow in
the late 1960s certainly included, as part of the overall event, activities
that did not have any spectators whatsoever.^7
We have seen that each of these three elements–location, performer,
spectator–may be dispensed with in certain non-typical forms of theatre.
Nonetheless, we’ll take it that all three are typically present. (When they
are present [when the performer and spectator are together in the thea-
trical space] we alsofind a fourth element: something like ‘liveness’,
which I discuss when comparing theatre with other art forms at the end
of this chapter.) This discussion helps us when we turn to some of the
better-known definitions of theatre, which we are now in a position
to assess.Definitions
The earliest definitions of theatre focus on the concept ofmimesis(roughly:
imitation); for Plato, theatre is characterised by imitation without narra-
tion. I can describe what Agamemnon and Clytemnestra said and did;
I can describe what they did and also include some of their speeches,
during which I might impersonate them and others; or I can cut out the
description altogether and pretend to be Agamemnon, while my friend
pretends to be Clytemnestra and we talk to each other, becoming the
story ourselves for the benefit of a third party. Theatre, for Plato, is the
latter. Because it plays such an important role in philosophical discussions
of theatre, we look atmimesisin detail in the following chapter. But as we
have already seen, there are recognisable forms of theatre in which imi-
tation or impersonation do not play a significant role. So althoughmimesis
merits close attention, we shouldn’t think that theatre is impossible
without it. For similar reasons, Eric Bentley’s celebrated definition of
theatre–‘A impersonates B while C looks on’–seems unnecessarily
restricted in its appeal to impersonation.^8
For a definition that does not appeal to imitation or impersonation, we
can turn to Peter Brook’s famous claim:‘I can take any empty space and
call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone
else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to
be engaged.’^9 In this minimal set of sufficient conditions, wefind the
three central elements that we examined above: location, performer,
spectator. One or two features of Brook’s claim are importantly ambig-
uous and we might respond to this differently depending on how we are
meant to understand him. The most important ambiguity, it seems to
4 What is theatre?