The Performer, My Other?

Abstract

In the mid-1980s the term ‘imaginaire’, used to describe the theatre stage, emerges with some force in French commentaries. Suggesting that “[to] represent or not to represent, that is theatre’s question!”, Georges Banu (1986) explores the recent northern European fascination with Japanese theatre, made concrete in the Mnouchkine/Théâtre du Soleil presentation of Richard II In so doing he takes up the thread of inquiry into otherness (and its relation to the one, or the given) which has marked twentieth century theatre theory across the writings of Artaud, Brecht, Barthes and — rather later — Derrida and Lyotard.