ABSTRACT
To value theatre is to value life, not to escape from it. The everyday is at once the most habitual and demanding dimension of life which theatre has most responsibility to. Theatre does not tease people out of their everyday lives like other expressions of wish fulfilment but reminds them who they are and what is worth living and changing in their lives every day. The lay theatre derives from these convictions and can be examined through the nature of images and their relation to an ethics and a politics of theatre practice. While I have considered the potential of these categories for a language of theatre, there is the concern that such a vocabulary remains twice removed from the theatre I set out to examine. This is a problem given my emphasis on practices of theatre, where the traditional axes of production and consumption demand rethinking. It is not surprising when one considers the divisions driven between understandings drawn from everyday life and those considered endemic to cultural practices and intellectual pursuits. The languages available to us derived from these pursuits are ones which in discreet and subtle ways make sure that divisions between the professional and the profane endure. In other words, theoretically it is only ‘in other words’ that theatre and everyday life can be acquainted. In practice, if the lay theatre is a viable example, they are infinitely linked and negotiable. It is however necessary to enter the tract between these practices and theories if only to demonstrate that the central problem is not the split between them, but that which is documented and that which remains unwritten. The purpose here is to explore the provocation to theatre of the everyday realm, that is when the everyday itself is taken to be a set of identifiable practices which have more or less logic. If the importance of the imagination has been concealed by criticism reaching for objectivity, equally the everyday, left unthought and unwritten, threatens to exile theatre to an inconsequential margin. Conceptual advances achieved on behalf of theatre only by the exclusion of the everyday are retreats for theatre from life.
