Theatre and Everyday Life - An Ethics of Performance (Paperback, Revised)

From Theatre and Everyday Life, director Peter Brook claims he can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. The problem is that those responsible for theatre have wilfully disregarded the fact that there is no such thing as empty space. They have been surprised, mystified, and sometimes dismissive when people who inhabit that space have a point of view concerning the theatre's arrival. Alan Read asserts that there is no split between the practice and theory of theatre, only a divide between the written and the unwritten. In Theatre and Everyday Life, he sets out to retrieve the theatre of spontaneity and tactics, which grows out of the experience of everyday life. It is a theatre which defines itself in terms of people and places rather than the idealized empty space of avantgarde performance. In a synthesis of theatre aesthetics and postmodern philosophy, Read examines the relationship between an ethics of performance, a politics of place and a poetics of the urban environment.