ABSTRACT
Murmuring beneath many of the pieces I have looked at in this book is an anxiety about the ability of both community groups and individuals to effect social change in today’s techno-present world. In these final two chapters, the murmur comes to the surface. I find inspiring and generative responses to anxieties about the degradation of agency and of civic space in contemporary re-animations of so-called ‘traditional’ forms—the very forms that are often seen, especially by simulationally immersive ‘solutions’, as part of the problem of disappearing agency. This chapter considers three, ostensibly very different works, all of which interrogate their own ‘theatre-ness’—the presence of audience as audience, and of facilitators as facilitators, in a constructed space. Chris Thorpe and Hannah Jane Walker’s I Wish I Was Lonely (2013), what happens to the hope at the end of the evening (2013) by Andy Smith and Tim Crouch, and The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland (2014) all engender participation, but also place participation in crisis, to enrich thinking about the causes, implications and effects of that crisis. Like Will Eno’s Thom Pain (based on nothing) (2004) and Lady Grey (in ever lower light) (2011), monologues on which I focus in the final chapter, these works mine the poetic, prefigurative, world-making capacity of theatre. Rather than ‘burning the seats’ (as Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett urges), all these theatre-makers urge us to re-occupy them, to harness the potential of sit-down spectatorship and theatrical address to inspire agency in the forensic turn.
