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.