Politics and Theatre

Abstract

In a sense, all theatre is political. Theatre’s context and referent is the world, and as John McGrath observed, ‘There is no such thing as a de-politicized world’ (2002: 199). While theatre is not the only art with political dimensions, it offers a unique forum for the political by involving audiences in a perceptible, if ephemeral, social reality through the operation of its conventions. Evidence of the close and perhaps intrinsic relationship between politics and theatre can be found in the long history of governmental regulation of theatre in degrees and forms that have not been applied to music, visual art, or written fiction. Theatre’s most basic political potential lies in its paradigmatic relationship to the polis: within theatre’s space, assembled citizens view and consider representations of their world enacted for them in the immediacy of live performance. As Richard Schechner states, drama is ‘that art whose subject, structure, and action is social process’ (121). Michael Kustow similarly describes theatre as both ‘an art and … a model of living together’ (xv).