Theatre and everyday life

the long version

Alan Read asserts that there is no split between the practice and theory of theatre, only a divide between the written and the unwritten. In Theatre and Everyday Life he sets out to retrieve the theatre of spontaneity and tactics, which grows out of the experience of everyday life. It is a theatre which defines itself in terms of people and places rather than the idealised empty space of avant-garde performance. In a provocative challenge to theatre aesthetics and postmodern philosophy, Read brilliantly examines the relationship between an ethics of performance, a politics of place and a poetics of the urban environment. Theatre and Everyday Life is a persuasive demand for a critical theory of theatre which is as mentally supple as theatre is physically versatile.