Tag: Oliver Marchart

Essay on political theatre – part 2

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There are two ways of thinking about political theatre, two ways of beginning a sentence: I. ‘Theatre is political because…’ or II. ‘Theatre is political if…’. In the first part of this essay, the first beginning was completed and examined and the second beginning was examined in so far as its continuation is considered to be a descriptive statement.. But it is also often the beginning of a normative statement.  This second part of the essay is about the normative understanding of such conditions (‘if’) for designating theatre as political.

Often, this ‘if…’ seems to be heading towards a value judgement. The condition is actually a wish or a demand. Theatre ought to be political. It is characteristic of the discussion in theatre criticism and theatre studies that this ‘ought to’ is not explicitly formulated, but only insinuated.
How is this ‘ought to be’ justified?

II. ‘Theatre is political if…’

b) normative

aa) Hegelian

“But since art has the task of presenting the Idea to immediate perception in a sensuous shape and not in the form of thinking and pure spirituality as such, and, since this presenting has its value and dignity in the correspondence and unity of both sides, i.e. the Idea and its outward shape, it follows that the loftiness and excellence of art in attaining a reality adequate to its Concept will depend on the degree of inwardness and unity in which Idea and shape appear fused into one.”1

For Hegel, art has two sides: the abstract, i.e. thinking or idea, and the concrete, the form or ‘shape’. The criterion for evaluating art is then the ‘unity’ of these two sides in a work of art. Hegel also uses the term ‘inwardness’ (“Innigkeit”) for this correspondence between idea and shape to emphasise that this unity should not be an external juxtaposition, but an inner ‘unity’  that is the result of artistic work. The production of art should be a weaving together of idea and shape.

If the idea of theatre (or its concept or structure) is something political, then the ‘loftiness and excellence ’ (“Höhe und Vortrefflichkeit”) of theatrical  art depends on how far this idea is incorporated into the concrete form. This is roughly what a Hegelian conception of political theatre would look like, which at the same time offers a yardstick for evaluating concrete, individual theatre products. Of course, Hegel’s concept of theatre is not that of a political theatre and, of course, today’s representatives of the primacy of politics in theatre do not argue with Hegel. But the idea that artistic practice must bring to bear what is inherent in the concept or structure of theatre characterises the thinking of many theatre-makers. This often has a kind of super-Hegelian twist, in that this reduction of theatre to its basic structure is exhibited in a self-reflective way.

The idea that theatre is inherently political is rarely explicitly represented in theatre theory, but it forms the background for many statements by theatre-makers when they talk about political theatre. Necati Öziri2, for example, begins his talk about political theatre at the Römerberggespräche in Frankfurt/M. 2017):

‘I would have argued that there is no such thing as apolitical theatre, only theatre that is more or less explicitly political. I would have explained that theatre, by virtue of its form, is one of the most political of the arts.”3

Öziri cites this view that theatre is always somehow political only to distance himself from it. He then defines political theatre in terms of content or at least according to certain political goals: political theatre should be post-migrant, always question the downside of a narrative, have the task of protecting pluralism, demonstrating identities. Öziri says about the arguments for the fundamentally political character of theatre, ‘there is something to that’. But since he is looking for a justification for his own work in the theatre, he justifies political theatre (similar to Piscator) with the current political situation.

Milo Rau 4 takes a similar approach in his speech at the conference of the International Theatre Institute in Antwerp in 2024:

‘Theatre doesn’t ‘have to’ be political, it’s political anyway. Theatre has to be surreal, crazy, hallucinatory, unbearably contradictory. … Which is why the political theatre that I mean shows a clear edge precisely by going between all fronts and asking fundamental questions about our coexistence, our beliefs, and how we represent the world.’5

The fundamentally political character of theatre is assumed in order to then formulate the demands for a specific type of political theatre. The thesis that theatre is political per se serves here as an argumentative springboard for the transition from being to ought. Because theatre is political, it ought to be political in a certain way. In the mouths of theatre-makers who make political theatre, such arguments are attempts to justify their own artistic practice. And on the assumption that theatre is always political, they can then formulate certain political goals for the theatre that arise from the respective political situation.

bb) Moral (Jacques Rancière)

Jacques Rancière is probably the most influential philosopher for the theory and practice of theatre (especially in Germany), and at first glance he does not appear to be one of the theorists who make moral demands on political theatre. He firmly separates the realm of art from that of politics and calls the union of art and politics, the assertion that art is always political, ‘ethical confusion’. 6 But he distinguishes between ‘politics’ (la politique) and ‘police’ (la police).7 ‘Police’ is the organisation of power in a state, while ‘politics’ means the inclusion of the non-represented. For Rancière, then, politics is a normative term that contains an emancipatory concept of participation. 8

For Rancière, politics is not a subsystem of society or an attitude with which one can view the whole of society, but a process that ought to take place. That is why Oliver Marchart accuses him of an ethicalisation of politics and calls his conception of politics ‘emancipatory apriorism’.9 The tension between art and politics, which Rancière calls for us to maintain, is the tension between art and an ethical, normative concept of politics. Political art, that is, art in the unresolved field of tension between art and politics, is for Rancière an art in the field of tension between art and an ethical concept of politics.

Despite his distinction between the realms of politics and art, Rancière sees a close connection between politics and art. This arises not from artists setting political goals, but because art, like politics (in Rancière’s emancipatory understanding), is an experience of dissensus, of rupture.

‘If aesthetic experience concerns politics, it is because it is also defined as an experience of dissensus, in contrast to the mimetic or ethical adaptation of art products to social purposes.”10

For Rancière, art is therefore not political because it has political content or because it pursues political goals, but because it creates new forms of structuring sensual experience.11

‘The effect of a museum, a book or a theatre lies much more in the divisions of space and time and in the modes of sensual presentation that they establish than in the content of this or that work.”12

Rancière also opposes ‘critical art’ (e.g. Brecht) because the social conditions for its effectiveness are lacking in the present.13 He describes the present (the beginning of the 21st century) as an age of ‘consensus’. The ‘obviousness of the struggle against global capitalist domination’ has disappeared. His rejection of art that sees itself as political through its political content also arises from the experience of the ineffectiveness of such art forms:

‘One does not go from watching a play to understanding the world and from intellectual understanding to deciding to act.”14

His rejection of the previous ‘critical art’ is therefore both the result of his analysis of the way art works and an expression of resignation in the face of the political conditions of his present. Rancière rescues the political character of art, despite his rejection of an art that defines itself through political content, by assigning a political function to its structure.

‘Cinema, photography, video, installation and all performances of the body, the voice and sounds contribute to reshaping the framework of our perceptions and the dynamics of our affects. In doing so, they open up possible transitions to new forms of political subjectivisation…. A critical art is an art that knows that its political effect is achieved through aesthetic distance.”15

But this rescue is only possible through his normative concept of politics. An art that enables new forms of police subjectivisation would be a mockery of his concept. Ultimately, then, for Rancière, political theatre is only possible if it subordinates itself to this emancipatory conception of politics. And this is a moral or ethical concept of politics. Politics is good and police is evil, and art is good when it is political.

One example of the impact of Rancière’s theory is the German women’s artists’ collective Werkgruppe 2 (Julia Roesler, Insa Rudolph, Silke Merzhäuser), which produces theatre productions and films. They describe their work:

‘In artistic projects – especially in theatre and film works – Werkgruppe2 attempts to describe social reality from the perspective of people who belong to social minorities, the invisible, the excluded.’16

This corresponds exactly to Rancière’s demand on politics:

‘To deny a category, for example workers or women, the quality of political subjects, it has traditionally been sufficient to determine that they belong to a ‘domestic’ space, a space separate from public life, from which only whimpers or cries as expressions of suffering, hunger or anger can penetrate to the outside world, but not a speech that announces a common aisthesis. The politics of these categories has always consisted in redefining these spaces, in revealing the location of a community, even if it is only a simple dispute, in revealing and hearing each other as speaking beings that contribute to a common aisthesis.’17

For Rancière, politics is precisely this process by which the unrepresented gain visibility and a hearing. On its website, Werkgruppe2 cites Jacques Rancière’s statement as a motto for its work:

‘The real must be fictionalised before it can be thought.’18

This corresponds to their approach of first conducting interviews with members of groups that are not very present in public, and then editing, condensing and arranging these interview transcripts in a dramaturgical way, and then using these texts and professional actors to create a theatre production in which the real (the statements of the interviewees) becomes fiction (the theatre performance with actors).

This method originated in Great Britain and is called ‘verbatim theatre’ there.19 This method, which is indebted to Rancière’s political aesthetics, reached an ironic climax in their most recent production: ‘Hier spricht die Polizei’ (This is the police speaking). In this production, police officers, as a minority group neglected in public, have their say. It was produced with the help of the police union and co-produced by the Ruhrfestspiele, which is sponsored by the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB), and the Staatstheater Hannover, and shown in Recklinghausen in 2024. Here, the executive body of the state, the police, was represented in the theatre as a group of ‘those without shares’.20 Rancière’s opposition between politics and the police was ironically suspended here.

Rancière, too, does not provide a descriptive concept of political art and thus also of political theatre.

  1. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on fine art. vol. 1. Transl. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19 75 p. 72. „Indem nun aber die Kunst die Aufgabe hat, die Idee für die unmittelbare Anschauung in sinnlicher Gestalt und nicht in Form des Denkens und der reinen Geistigkeit überhaupt darzustellen und dieses Darstellen seinen Wert und Würdigkeit in dem Entsprechen und der Einheit beider Seiten der Idee und ihrer Gestalt hat, so wird die Höhe und Vortrefflichkeit der Kunst in der ihrem Begriff gemäßen Realität von dem Grade der Innigkeit und Einigkeit abhängen, zu welcher Idee und Gestalt ineinandergearbeitet erscheinen.“ G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Bd. 13 Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970 (=Theorie Werkausgabe), S. 103 ↵
  2. Necati Öziri  (*1988) is a German author of theatre plays and novels, and has been working as dramaturg at Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin ↵
  3. Necati Öziri, Römerberggespräche 2017  Here, and in the following quotations (with the exception of Hegel) all translations from German to English are by G.P. ↵
  4. Milo Rau (*1977) is a Swiss director and author. At present he is artistic director of NT Gent, Belgium and of Wiener Festwochen, Austria. ↵
  5. Milo Rau, speech at the International Theatre Institute conference, Antwerp 2024 ↵
  6. ‘The becoming-political of art thus becomes the ethical confusion in which art and politics mutually efface each other in the name of their union.’ Jacques Rancière, Ist Kunst widerständig?. Berlin: Merve, 2008 p.34 (in French: ‘Si l’art résiste à quelque chose?’ Lecture 2004) ↵
  7. ‘La politique s’oppose spécifiquement à la police.’ Jacques Rancière, Onze thèses sur la politique. Thesis 8. In English: “Politics is specifically opposed to the police.” Thesis 7, Ten Theses on Politics. London: open university press, 2009 p. 24 ↵
  8. “The essence of politics, then, is to disturb this arrangement by supplementing it with a part of the no-part identified with the community as a whole. Political litigiousness/struggle is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police that is, in turn, always attempting its disappearance either by crudely denying it, or by subsuming that logic to its own. Politics is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable.” Rancière, Ten Theses, p. 32 ‘ „L’essence de la politique est de perturber cet arrangement en le supplémentant d’une part des sans-part identifiée au tout même de la communauté. Le litige politique est celui qui fait exister la politique en la séparant de la police qui constamment la fait disparaître…. La politique est d’abord une intervention sur le visible et l’énonçable.“ Rancière, Onze thèses ↵
  9. Marchart on Rancière: ‘Politics is the politics of equality, therefore emancipatory – or it is not politics.’ Oliver Marchart, Die politische Differenz. Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010, p. 183 ↵
  10. Rancière, Der emanzipierte Zuschauer. “Die Paradoxa der politischen Kunst”, p. 74. ’Art and politics are related to each other as forms of dissensus, as operations of reshaping the common experience of the sensible. There is an aesthetics of politics in the sense that acts of political subjectivisation redefine what is visible, what can be said, and which subjects are capable of this. There is a politics of aesthetics in the sense that new forms of circulating words, exhibiting the visible and generating affects define new abilities that break with the old configuration of the possible.” p.78 ↵
  11. ‘the effect of forms of structuring sensual experience in the field of politics’ p. 78 French: ‘l’effet, dans le champ politique, des formes de structuration de l’expérience sensible’. ↵
  12. p. 78 ↵
  13.  It is certainly unfair and at most permissible in a footnote to point out that both Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière attempt in their theories to preserve the legacy of their political past in the years around May 1968 in Paris, also in view of the lack of success of their political actions. Badiou was one of the leading minds of the dogmatic-Maoist UCF-ML, Rancière was in the circle of the spontaneous-Maoist ‘Gauche Prolétarienne’. Both taught at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII) from the 1970s onwards. Unlike Badiou, Rancière did not make loyalty to Maoism in 1968 the criterion of truth, but his understanding of ‘politics’ as an emancipatory process in contrast to ‘police’ as the power structure of the state is also the conceptually differentiated elaboration of his convictions of 1968. ↵
  14. p. 82 ↵
  15. p. 99 ↵
  16. https://www.werkgruppe2.de/ueber-uns/ ↵
  17. Rancière, Zehn Thesen zur Politik. Berlin: diaphanes, 2008, p. 35 ↵
  18. p.38. Jacques Rancière, The politics of aesthetics. The distribution of the sensible. (G. Rockhill transl.) Continuum, 2000/2006b ↵
  19. The video by the National Theatre London, Introduction to verbatim theatre, provides an introduction to the methods and history of verbatim theatre. ↵
  20. Ranciere, Zehn Thesen, p.32 ↵

Essay on political theatre – part 1

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There are two ways of thinking about political theatre, two sentence beginnings: I. ‘Theatre is political because …’ or II. ‘Theatre is political if …’.

I. ‘Theatre is political because …’

Then general conditions would have to be outlined which theatre as a whole fulfils in all possible variations and which justify the qualification as political.

II ‘Theatre is political if …’

a) descriptive

This sentence structure seems to introduce a description of a genre of theatre, a purely analytical statement that names the conditions under which a certain type of theatre can be described as political. There would then be a kind of theatre that is not political and one would have to name the difference between political and non-political theatre.

b) normative

Often, however, this ‘if …’ seems to be heading towards a value judgement. The condition is actually a wish or a demand. Theatre ought to be political. It is characteristic of the discussion in theatre criticism and theatre studies that this ought to is not explicitly formulated, but only insinuated.
How is this ought to justified?

aa) In Hegelian terms: it follows from the concept or basic structure of theatre that it is political, and only if it fulfils this concept it is theatre in the full sense. If not, is it somehow inferior? So, as with I., one would have to define the concept or basic structure of theatre more precisely. And explain how an ‘ought’ emerges from this ‘being’ of theatre.

bb) Or is the demand for a political theatre simply a moral demand like any other? Theatre should be political because it then promotes the interests of the greatest possible number of people? It would be more than just a demand that theatre meets the requirements of politics (‘politically correct’), but that it makes a morally valuable contribution to politics. The theatre would therefore not be autonomous, but subordinate to politics, which in turn would be subordinate to morality.

I.+II. Politics or the political

For both analyses, the question arises as to whether the quality ‘political’ refers to politics or to the political (in  English often polity). For in the philosophy of politics and also in the discussion of theatre theory, the distinction between ‘politics’ (la politique) and ‘the political’ (le politique) has become established. So does political theatre refer to the realm of politics or to the political or both? So what is the relationship between the noun ‘politics’, the attributive adjective ‘political’ and the substantivised adjective ‘the political’ in the case of theatre?

In her encyclopaedia article ‘Politisches Theater’1 Erika Fischer-Lichte distinguishes between four conceptual understandings:

1. structural politicality of theatre, 2. anthropological impact of theatre as political, 3. thematic politicality of theatre, 4. new politics of the aesthetic.

Conceptual understandings 1 and 2 are of the type ‘theatre is political because …’ (I.) and are aimed at theatre as a whole, at its structure (1) or its effect (2). 3. is a definition of a certain type of theatre, i.e. II a), but often also II b) bb). However, Fischer-Lichte’s term no. 4 is the most interesting because it has occupied the theatre studies debate in recent years.

In the following, the questions arising from I, II a) and b) as well as Fischer-Lichte’s No. 4 will be examined, in each case with reference to the philosophical or theatre studies literature and occasional references to current theatre practice.

I. ‘Theatre is political because …’

1 Alain Badiou

From Alain Badiou, the French philosopher who has always been politically active to this day and who was also present in the theatre as an author, one could expect an answer.2

For Badiou, there is a ‘formal analogy’ between theatre and politics (‘la politique’)3 He also calls this relationship of similarity ‘isomorphism theatre/politics’. It is not based on thematic congruence, but on structure. However, he also sees a distance between politics and theatre, which he calls ‘figurative’4. To show the analogous relationship between theatre and politics, he lists the elements of both areas:

‘So: place, text, director, actors, set, costumes, audience are the elements of theatre that can be deduced a priori. And organisations, textual speakers, thinkers, proper names, the state, different points of view and eventful masses are the mandatory ingredients of a political situation.’ 5

For Badiou, politics is nothing permanent, ‘politics takes place’ and so does the theatre: ‘The performance takes place.’6. For Badiou, theatre and politics (‘la politique’) have the complete precariousness of time in common. For Badiou, ‘substantial’ theatre, unlike cinema and commercial ‘theatre’, is a matter for the state and therefore requires subsidies.7.

‘Of all the arts, theatre is the one that most persistently leans towards politics (or presupposes it).’ 8

For Badiou, events produce truths, both in art (and thus in theatre) and in politics. For Badiou, truth is the process of fidelity to an event.9

This conception of politics10 can be criticised because it does not take into account the antagonistic element of politics11. But regardless of his political theory, it can also be said that even Badiou does not claim an identity between politics and theatre. For Badiou, the sentence ‘Theatre is political because …’ could not be continued in this way. It should read: ‘Theatre is similar to politics because …’.

With his definition of the relationship between theatre and politics as a relationship of proximity without identity, Badiou hits on a point that other theories of political theatre also consider.

Oliver Marchart, for example, also states

‘a certain similarity of theatrical and political action’, “a fundamental comparability of the boards that mean the world with the public space of politics.”12

Marchart examines two of the prime examples of political theatre, the occupation of the Theatre Odéon in Paris in 1968 and the re-enactment of the Russian October Revolution in 1920 in St. Petersburg by the director Nikolai Evrejnoff. However, Marchart uses these examples to show the fundamental unrepresentability of antagonism, which is the essence of politics. For him, there is therefore only a rough approximation, a ‘passage à l’acte’ to antagonism. For him, the genre of theatre that most closely corresponds to the antagonism of politics is melodrama (whereby he is referring to the French and British stage melodramas of the 18th and early 19th centuries, not the musical genre). However, because he can hardly recommend melodrama to contemporary theatre as a future-oriented model for political theatre, he leaves the conclusion for future theatre to the English theatre scholar Janelle Reinert:

“In casting my comments within the discourse of what might be called ‘democratic civics’, I am attempting to theorize a theatrical space patronized by a consensual community of citizen-spectators who come together at stagings of the social imaginary in order to consider and experience affirmation, contestation and reworking of various material and discursive practices pertinent to the constitution of a democratic society.” 13

For Marchart, political theatre seems to be possible without all theatre being political for him or theatre being part of the political or of politics. Only an approach to politics is possible.

It is therefore impossible to find a valid reason why all theatre is political per se. The sentence ‘Theatre is political because …’ remains unfinished.

2 Jens Roselt

A completely different philosophically based definition of the structure of theatre can be found in Jens Roselt’s habilitation thesis ‘Phänomenologie des Theaters’ 14. It does without any reference to politics. However, Roselt does examine the particular structure of the community that a theatre performance creates. He analyses the theatre situation between performer (actor/actress) and audience (spectators) as a we, without any reference to politics.

Unlike Badiou, he does not parallel audience (theatre) and ‘eventful masses’ (politics), but rather defines the specificity of theatre closely oriented to the manifestations of contemporary theatre. Its audience is constituted in the ‘interplay of seriality and dissidence’15. Seriality is the interdependence of a collective, but one that is purely external, without individual reciprocal influence. On the other hand, a theatre audience is not completely determined by this seriality; everyone can reclaim their individual freedom at any time (by heckling, booing, leaving the auditorium, etc.). As an audience, one acts ‘together in individual difference’16.

Following the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, Roselt distinguishes between three dimensions of we-experiences: partnership (“Partnerschaft”), community (“Gemeinschaft”) and covenant (“Bund”). All three can characterise the situation of a theatre performance:17 the encounter in a role (partnership), the experience of affiliation (community), emotional fusion (covenant). However, Roselt cites the Living Theatre’s production ‘Paradise Now’ (which was shown in January 1970 at the Berlin Akademie der Künste) as an example of this seemingly antiquated terminology from the 1930s18. Roselt can thus analyse the effect of the avant-garde theatre of the 1960s ‘as a new form of social experience’ 19 without declaring it ‘political’, although the Living Theatre explicitly saw itself as a political theatre in the radicalised succession of Erwin Piscator20. Roselt thus shows through precise analysis that new experimental theatre forms that overcome the traditional ‘viewing and listening arrangement’ of the theatre and offer an ‘exploration of the situational aspect’21 of theatre, do indeed make new forms of social experience possible for the audience, but these do not have to be equated with a political experience.

Or in the words of Oliver Marchart:

‘Not every social practice is a political practice.’22.

II ‘Theatre is political when …’

a) descriptive

1 Erwin Piscator

Erwin Piscator coined the term ‘political theatre’ in the 1920s. He was referring to his own  theatre, the Piscator Theatre. The term therefore originated from the perspective of the theatre makers, not as an analytical term of theatre observation. Because by ‘political theatre’ Piscator meant his theatre, which he created as a director and theatre manager, ‘political’ was not a descriptive term for him either. For him, political theatre is therefore necessarily a ‘proletarian-political theatre.’23. For him, the necessity of this theatre was based on the present, in which he developed his theatre in the 1920s and 1930s.

‘A time in which the relationships between the general public, the reorganisation of all relationships are on the agenda, can only see man in his position in society, as a political being.”24

Conditions that make every expression of life a political one also require a political theatre.

For Piscator, there is also non-political theatre, but only if a ruling class wants to keep theatre out of the power struggles of a society. For Piscator, the sentence would therefore be: ‘Theatre is political when it is necessary.’

2 Siegfried Melchinger

This view that political theatre is a special subspecies of theatre, alongside entertainment theatre, commercial theatre, children’s theatre, etc., is rarely held today. A prominent example of this view in the 1960s and 1970s, when the concept of ‘political theatre’ came back into the discussion, is Siegfried Melchinger’s comprehensive ‘Geschichte des politischen Theaters’25.

Melchinger’s account of theatre history is of little use for today’s discussion because, despite his knowledge of Living Theatre and Bread and Puppet Theatre, it only refers to theatre texts, to plays, and only to those that were still being performed in 1970. For him, theatre is always an object of politics. But politics is also a subject of theatre (plays).

‘Politics is an important and at times urgent theme of the theatre. But it has never been the only one, and it will and can be as little so as in life.”26.

For Melchinger, not all theatre is political, but his definition of the difference between political and apolitical theatre remains imprecise:

‘Political theatre sets up situations, processes that are important for many, most, perhaps all. It shows possible forms of behaviour in these situations; it shows them critically and appeals to criticism. To the criticism of the audience. Only when political theatre succeeds in involving the audience in the situations and events does it create the public sphere that is its most distinctive feature.’ 27.

The criterion of publicity applies to all types of (contemporary) theatre, as long as they are not private events. This also means that theatre tries to be important ‘for everyone’ – which it can never achieve in full. The counter-image of apolitical theatre is only pejoratively labelled with common terms such as ‘sentimental emotion’, ‘strange identification’, ‘beautiful or uplifting illusion’28.

Melchinger’s initially descriptive concept of political theatre becomes more normative in the course of his presentation. Not only should political theatre be critical, it should not serve the ‘intentions of ruling systems’ 29, but there should always be political theatre. Despite the ineffectiveness of political theatre, which Melchinger states at the end of his passage, he demands:

‘Now that nothing has been achieved, the task remains: to intervene in the arrogance of politicians through political theatre.’ 30

Melchinger’s ‘History of political theatre’ is written from the perspective of a theatre critic, and any critic cannot refrain from making judgements.

Preliminary conclusion:

There does not seem to be a truly descriptive concept of ‘political theatre’. But why?

To be continued

  1. Erika Fischer-Lichte, {Lemma} ‘Politisches Theater’ in: Erika Fischer-Lichte e.a. (ed.), Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 2nd ed. 2014, pp. 260-262 ↵
  2. Badiou was a leading member of the ‘Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste’ UCF-ML from 1969-1985. In 1974, he was the leader of the group ‘Foudre’ (Lightning Strike), which blew up film screenings by throwing paint bags at the screen, and which also disrupted Ariane Mnouchine’s performances because it considered her work with immigrants to be wrong. He is the author of a tetralogy of plays ‘Le Cycle Ahmed’, his dialogue ‘La Républic de Platon’ was performed at the Avignon Festival in 2015. Detailed references to Badiou’s plays and their reception can be found in note 6 of Bruno Bosteel’s foreword to the English edition of Rhapsodie pour le théâtre {Alain Badiou, Rhapsody for the theatre. Edited and introduced by Bruno Bosteels. London: Verso, 2013 p.X-Xi}. This volume also contains an English version of a text by Badiou on his ‘Ahmed’ tetralogy {ibid. p.139-159}. The original French version of this text, including the play text of ‘Ahmed le subtil’ on the occasion of the performance in Reims and Avignon in 1994, can be found at numilog.com. ↵
  3. Alain Badiou, Rhapsodie für das Theater.  Eine kurze philosophische Abhandlung. Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2015. p.49 ↵
  4. ‘Isomorphism {of theatre} with politics (taking into account the figurative distance).’ ibid. p.36 ↵
  5. ibid. p.33 ↵
  6. ibid p.34 ↵
  7. ibid. pp. 38, 43 ↵
  8. Ibid, p. 49 ↵
  9.  Oliver Marchart, Die politische Differenz. Zum politischen Denken bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben. Suhrkamp, 4th ed. 2019, p. 169 ↵
  10. An English version of his essay on justice ‘Philosophy and Politics’ from 1999 is available on the Internet ↵
  11. Marchart, p. 177: ‘Badiou is led to his ethical narrow-mindedness because he does not want to understand politics as a space of immanence of intertwined forces {…}, but wants to maintain a strict separation between the state and a politics of truth in his two-world doctrine.’ trsl. G.P. ↵
  12. Oliver Machart, “On the stage of the political. The Street, the Theatre and the Political Aesthetics of the Sublime” {2004} https://transversal.at/transversal/0605/marchart/de ↵
  13. Janelle Reinelt, ‘Notes for a Radical Democratic Theatre: Productive Crises and the Challenge of Indeterminacy’, in: Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (eds.), Staging Resistance. Essays on Political Theatre, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 1998, p. 286. cited in German translation in: Marchart 2004 ↵
  14. Jens Roselt, Phänomenologie des Theaters. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008 ↵
  15. Roselt p. 333 ↵
  16. Roselt p. 330-333 ↵
  17. Roselt p.345 ↵
  18. In my memory, it was a chaotic mess on stage that barely touched the audience, who were seated in two blocks on the two long sides of the stage in the middle. ↵
  19. Roselt p. 355 ↵
  20. Judith Melina: ‘Without question, the Living Theatre was always a political theatre. That was also always Piscator’s view.’ Erika Billetter, The Living Theatre. Paradise Now. Ein Bericht in Wort und Bild. Bern: Rütten + Loening, 1968, p.15f ↵
  21. Hans-Thies Lehmann, ‘Wie politisch ist postdramatisches Theater?’, In: H-Th.L., Das Politische Schreiben. Essays on theatre texts. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002 {= Recherchen 12; first in: Theater der Zeit, October 2001}, p.35 ↵
  22. Oliver Marchart, book presentation Conflictual Aesthetics.University of Applied Arts Vienna ↵
  23. Erwin Piscator, Theater der Auseinandersetzung. Ausgewählte Schriften und Reden. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1977, p. 17. This formulation can be found in an article that Piscator published in the ‘Rote Fahne’, the party newspaper of the KPD, on 1 January 1928 ↵
  24. Piscator p.26 ↵
  25. Siegfried Melchinger, Geschichte des politischen Theaters. Velber: Friedrich Verlag, 1971, developed from a series of lectures at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts in 1970/71 ↵
  26. ibid. p.9. From today’s perspective, Melchinger’s addition is amusing: ’There is no doubt that the dismantling of constraints and taboos that we are experiencing in this area also has a political relevance. But nobody will be so silly as to relegate the fact itself, the division of the human race into two sexes that relate to and mate with each other, as such to the responsibility of the politician.” trsl. G.P. ↵
  27. ibid. p. 17 ↵
  28. ibid. p. 17 ↵
  29. ibid. p.18 ↵
  30. ibid. p.418 ↵