On Theatre

Abstract

What are the long-term effects of watching and thinking about theatre? This essay seeks to register some of the subtle ways in which repeated engagements with theatre - an activity that, for all its variety, maintains reasonably consistent spatial and temporal dimensions - might shape a particular mode of relating to, and perceiving, the world. The essay identifies the combination of imaginative possibility conjured from relative material constraints as a distinctive feature of theatre that can progressively shape a sense of the world as rich and strange, but also rather small and short-lived. By way of a short case study, the essay considers how theatrical performances conventionally begin, and asks what this might contribute to an understanding of the phenomenology of theatre; one that then spreads in diffuse and barely-perceivable ways through personal and social attitudes more broadly.