ABSTRACT
This book investigates the potential efficacy of theatrical performance. It is about the ways in which, in a particular historical period, theatre practitioners have tried to change not just the future action of their audiences, but also the structure of the audience’s community and the nature of the audience’s culture. Paradoxically, the main lever for such changes has been the immediate and ephemeral effects of performance-laughter, tears, applause and other active audience responses. More fundamentally, the leverage has been applied to shift the culture of communities in particular directions because that might bring about more widespread and lasting modifications in culture and society as a whole. At the heart of this text, then, is the possibility that the immediate and local effects of particular performances mightindividually and collectively-contribute to changes of this kind; that the micro-level of individual shows and the macro-level of the socio-political order might somehow productively interact. Hence, by efficacy I mean the potential that theatre may have to make the immediate effects of performance influence, however minutely, the general historical evolution of wider social and political realities.
