ABSTRACT
Historically, religion has hated theatre while being unable to give it up. Fear and hatred of theatre is not exclusive to what might still be called the west. We can find in every culture, around the world and across time, the persecution of theatrical performance and theatre people. But Plato’s and Aristotle’s disagreement over theatre suggests something that underpins the cross-cultural anxiety over theatre. Plato thought theatre too dangerous to allow. Aristotle thought theatre a valuable tool. Of the two, Aristotle’s trivializing of theatre did the more long-lasting harm. In the Aristotelian tradition, theatre is essentially fake and is, therefore, harmless. The so-called paradox of fiction shows that Plato was right to treat theatre as something that can warp reality. The attempts of literary theory to resolve the paradox have not succeeded. The problem is not that representational art challenges reality, but that we still don’t know reality when we see it.
