Architecture Against Theatre

Alain Badiou, in “Rhapsody for the Theatre” (1990), divided the world into societies that have theatre and those that do not. Those in the former group, he observed, “know this strange public place, where fiction is consumed as a repeatable event.”1 Badiou, in his essay, places fairly rigid limits on what constitutes theatre, but I think we can allow these “strange places” to encompass all kinds of live performance, both visual and auditory. All live performance must occur somewhere: there must be a performance venue, and these venues are, indeed, strange places. They exist within a society, yet separate from it, temporarily isolating a fragment of the population to watch or listen to a specifically created work of art. The venues— theatres, opera houses, concert halls, and the like—have a particular appeal for historians. Performance, by definition ephemeral and semiotically complex, is notoriously difficult to document and describe; but theatre architecture is tangible. Even when incomplete, as in the ruins of ancient Greek and Roman theatres, or the foundations of the Rose Theatre in London, these structures can be touched, measured, photographed, and x-rayed, thus lending themselves to academic study and analysis.