Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance

Alan Read suggests that there is no split between the practice and theory of theatre, but rather between the written and unwritten. InTheatre and Everyday Life, the author retrieves this unwritten theatre, the theatre of spontaneity and tactics which grow out of the experience of everyday life -- a theatre which defines itself in terms of people and places rather than the idealized empty space of avant garde performance. Read analyzes the tactics of everyday life and the way we construct our own knowledge systems. He examines the relationship between ethics and performance, a politics of place, and a poetics of the urban environment. He argues that an understanding of theatre demands a critical theory that is as mentally supple as theatre is physically versatile and cites the work of Gaston Bachelard, Humphrey Jennings and Antonin Artaud. Drawing on his experience of directing the Rotherhithe Theatre for the last decade, Read provides a book which is of interest topractitioners and theorists in its intergrated approach to the practice, criticism, and history of theatre.