Celebration and Escape

Abstract

Theatre’s effect on an audience depends in part on the evaluative stance taken by a particular performance towards the worlds from which it draws its raw material and in which its audience lives. The same may be said of biblical parable, spoken or enacted, and indeed of ‘theatrical’ or ‘incarnational’ revelation in general. Thus far, with respect to the theatre, we have considered predominantly formal relationships — between text and performance, between time and space on stage, between dramatic image and ‘real’ world, and between performance and audience — and we have sought points of contact between these and parallel relationships in what the biblical witnesses understood to be God’s mode of self-revelation. Now we turn from the manner of performance and revelation to the matter; specifically, to their respective assessments of human time and space, at one their medium and motif. For, in both the classical and Christian traditions, no less than in the modern theatre, there is often found barring the way to that mirth of which we spoke in the last chapter, a deep suspicion of human time and space.