Introduction

Abstract

This book is an encounter between two vocations: theatre and philosophy. Vocation itself is here evoked in its sense as a calling, an unready response to an insistent demand from elsewhere, rather than as a profession or occupation for which one is appropriately qualified. Such an encounter offers itself as an invocation to a theatre-philosophy, conceived neither as a philosophy of the theatre armed with the rigour of properly philosophical critique and analysis, nor as a corrective programme for thought considered lacking in a general theatricality — projects to which many others have been called since the beginnings of both theatre and philosophy. Instead, it finds itself suspended between the consolations of theatre and philosophy, seeking little more than to throw off the mourning and melancholia that hides out in the backward look of whatever is offered as consolation, in preference for the alien pleasures and possibilities of what was overlooked and what is yet to come.