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(2014) Encounters in performance philosophy, Dordrecht, Springer.
The theatre, by which I mean that traffic of "the illuminated stage", comes to an end.1 This should not go without saying before we go anywhere else. Indeed, this is saying something quite different from the various, complex, "ontologies' of performance where that traffic is figured as ephemeral, as disappearing, as unrepeatable, all those ghostings that have come to define the melancholic fixation of theatre's sister act, performance study. We know the theatre comes to an end because we watch the people we thought we knew for a while, take a bow and leave, before we leave. And we do go, despite the inclination to stay just where we are. We leave quite rapidly, irrespective of how decent the show was, and we leave as closely as we can to the others who are leaving despite our best intentions to tarry awhile. Gaps in aisles are surreptitiously filled. It is not quite as bad as Richard Yates' forensic formulation of theatrical disappointment at the outset of his novel Revolutionary Road (1962): "When the curtain fell at last it was an act of mercy". But it is still quite brutal. There is little love lost in departure from a spent auditorium.
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Full citation:
Read, A. (2014)., The last human venue: closing time, in L. Cull & A. Lagaay (eds.), Encounters in performance philosophy, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 293-308.
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