Synopsis of Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance

From Theatre and Everyday Life : At the beginning of his best known work, director Peter Brook claims: I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. This of course is not in question, any more than rulers throughout history have said: I can take any empty space and call it my country. The problem is that those responsible for theatre have wilfully disregarded the fact that there is no such thing as empty space'. they have been surprised, mystified, and sometimes dismissive when people who inhabit that space have a point of view concerning the theatre's arrival. Alan Read asserts that there is no split between the practice and theory of theatre, only a divide between the written and the unwritten. In Theatre and Everyday Life he sets out to retrieve the theatre of spontaneity and tactics, which grows out of the experience of everyday life. It is a theatre which defines itself in terms of people and places rather than the idealised empty space of avantgarde performance. In a stunning synthesis of theatre aesthetics and postmodern philosophy, Read brilliantly examines the relationship between an ethics of performance, a politics of place and a poetics of the urban environment. Theatre and Everyday Life is a persuasive demand for a critical theory of theatre which is as mentally supple as theatre is physically versatile.