Theatre is the most dead of all arts. The fact that it is more dead than other arts is an indication of how all art practices now are to do with necrophilia: good art is dead (warm body) —bad art is more dead (cold body). If I extend the metaphor it can be stretched to the verge of breaking: galleries, theatres, museums, pubs, cinemas are all morgues; works of art and entertainment are flesh for other bodies to eat: and audiences are zombies inhabiting such terrains, eating such flesh. It all constitutes not an arena of Life, but an arena of Life Hereafter.
Theatre is the most dead of all arts because it dwells in the land of the Living—of life, spontaneity, improvization, actors and actresses. There is only one way that theatre can live. That is to take its life out of the land of the Living. Theatre isn’t acting—it is performance. Theatre isn’t the play—it is the event. Theatre isn’t the script—it is the text. Theatre isn’t people—it is things. The notion of the theatrical only exists when held in relation to the real. The profitable future of theatre is to be found in a definition of the theatrical that has neither consideration nor comparison with the real whatsoever.
Theatre is the most dead of all arts because it fails even when it tries to commit suicide. People do Beckett falling hook-line-and-sinker for texts that taunt, seduce and fool directors into realising works that never wanted to see the light of the stage. Happenings merely reaffirm how theatrical life is anyway, substituting the order that theatre constructs reality into with the disorder that only exists when reality is viewed through the order of theatre. Brecht (whose practice of theatre was its theory and not the other way around) forever suffers the torture of skilled execution, artistic interpretation and professional presentation, banished to purgatory for all the sins of execution wrought upon his works, And wake me when you’ve finished with the aesthetic suffocation of Pina Bausch; the non-eventfulness of Chris Burden; the dumb parade of Art & Spectacle; the painful predictability of New theatre. All these resorts to modernism and post-modernism (who cares which is which) live a life of patheticness typical of the failed suicide—stuck in the land of the Living and refused entry into the Life Hereafter.
Theatre is the most dead of all arts. Other arts live better in the Life Hereafter because they are dead before they start. Images; frame; representation; forms; substances; figures; textures; surfaces; levels; gestures; layers; processes—a whole world of markings, tracings and signs. Theatre hides beneath a snug blanket of reality: time, space, occurrence, development, delineation, chance. Its context is both theatre and reality. Its form is both theatrical and real. Its workings are both theatricalization and realization. It thrives on a duality that is neither connoted nor denoted in concepts of realism, recontextualization or interpretation.
Theatre is the most dead of all arts—but could it be less dead? Where might the profitable future for theatre lie? It lies lost. Lost in Olympic opening ceremonies; public execution; Théâtre du Grande Guignol; body building displays; snuff movies; supreme courts of law; live sex acts. These are the lost souls of theatre—lost because they cannot be transformed, translated or transfigured into the world of theatre proper. Theses are ghosts of the real, the ghosts of theatre, the phantoms of the opera. Successful suicides. The Living Dead. Theatre is the most dead of all arts because it lives too much.