The Empty Space

As every athlete knows, repetition eventually brings about change: harnessed to an aim, driven by a will, repetition is creative.

Truth in the theatre is always on the move

The audience too has undergone a change. It has come from a life outside the theatre that is essentially repetitive to a special arena in which each moment is lived more clearly and more tensely. The audience assists the actor, and at the same time for the audience itself assistance comes back from the stage

Assistance—I watch a play: J’assiste à une pièce. To assist—the word is simple: it is the key

there is no reason why one should be hustled from a theatre the moment the action is done, and after US many people sat still for ten minutes or more, then began spontaneously to speak to one another. This seems to me to be more natural and more healthy an end to a shared experience than rushing away—unless the rushing away is also an act of choice, not of social habit

But the essence is still lacking, because any three words are static, any formula is inevitably an attempt to capture a truth for all time. Truth in the theatre is always on the move.

the theatre has one special characteristic. It is always possible to start again. In life this is a myth; we ourselves can never go back on anything. New leaves never turn, clocks never go back, we can never have a second chance. In the theatre the slate is wiped clean all the time.
In everyday life, ‘if’ is a fiction, in the theatre ‘if’ is an experiment.
In everyday life, ‘if’ is an evasion, in the theatre ‘if’ is the truth.
When we are persuaded to believe in this truth, then the theatre and life are one

Can we find, in terms of present need, what Glyndebourne and Bayreuth achieved in quite other circumstances, with quite different ideals? That is to say, can we produce homogeneous work that shapes its audience before it has even passed through its doors? Glyndebourne and Bayreuth were in tune with their society and the classes for whom they catered. Today, it is hard to see how a vital theatre and a necessary one can be other than out of tune with society—not seeking to celebrate the accepted values, but to challenge them. Yet the artist is not there to indict, nor to lecture, nor to harangue, and least of all to teach. He is a part of ‘them’. He challenges the audience truly when he is the spike in the side of an audience that is determined to challenge itself

The audience that came to see an ‘experimental’ evening arrived with the usual mixture of condescension, playfulness and faint disapproval that the notion of the avant-garde arouses.

When Brecht was alive, it was the intellectuals of West Berlin who flocked to his theatre in the East.