Ondřej Pilný and Clare Wallace Intervention, Interaction, Insufficiency: Theatre’s Critical Repertoire? Keywords: community, immunity, the emancipated spectator, witnessing, post- modern detachment, political theatre Ondřej Pilný: E-Mail: ondrej.pilny@ff.cuni.cz Clare Wallace: E-Mail: clare.wallace@ff.cuni.cz As a public and communal art form, theatre has long been understood as a space for the exploration and performance of power, protest, intervention and identity. Indeed, debates around theatre’s civil purpose could be said to be as old as theatre itself. Certainly when the etymology of the adjective, “political,” is con- sidered – pertaining to the polis in Greek – all theatre by nature is in some general sense political. Such generous inclusivity has, of course, been vigorously con- tested and imaginatively reconfigured by theatre-makers, critics and theorists in diverse ways, in particular throughout the twentieth century. Narrowing the field to political theatre per se may lead to the conclusion that only work that directly engages with issues of power and representation to intervene in the world of governance is truly political; the rest is mere entertainment. Such are the conven- tional first signposts in discussions of theatre’s relations with the political, yet they point to an ever more uneven and complex terrain. One might argue that the heritage of Brecht and the history of activist theatres of the 1960s and 1970s have met crucial challenges in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century with the transformations wrought by the convergence of neoliberalism and globalisation. What place culture, and more precisely theatre, might have in this field is moot, for both practitioners and commentators. How to define the political? What might or ought to be the outcomes of engaged or activist cultural practice? Can these ever be measured? In theoretical terms, the status and efficacy of ‘critical’ art has been the focus of substantial and at times caustic attention ranging from Elin Diamond’s Perfor- mance and Cultural Politics (1996), Baz Kershaw’s The Radical in Performance (1999), Jacques Rancière’s work on aesthetics and politics, Nicolas Bourriaud’s claims for relational aesthetics and Alan Read’s reflections on theatre and en- gagement, to Joe Kelleher’s succinct analysis in Theatre & Politics (2009), to cite but a few recent scholarly interventions. Among the many ideas the discourse around these issues has generated, we wish to pinpoint two that speak directly to DOI 10.1515/jcde-2014-0001 JCDE 2014; 2(1): 1–7 Authenticated | klara.wallace@gmail.com Download Date | 11/21/15 4:37 PM