ABSTRACT
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that, as a psychoanalytic theorist of performance, André Green should conjure an image of auditory seduction to illustrate his desire for the theatrical encounter to bring about an experience of bodily captivation. The implication seems to be that the sensory impact of performance should be equivalent to that of an irresistible embrace, producing nothing less than passionate abandonment in the face of love’s all-consuming presence. The language of theatre operates, in this formulation, as a metonymic extension of the rhetoric of seduction – a formalised system for the generation of affect and the circulation of emotion. Its overarching ambition and effect is therefore, Green suggests, to sway the audience with the visceral power of seduction (to which one might add, ideological persuasion). But the overwhelming experience of going to the theatre is, for me – amongst others – one of severe disillusion or disappointment. All too often the actuality of the event fails to deliver, as though theatre itself cannot live up to the ‘idea of theatre’ it seeks to actualise and extend, cannot sustain either its own promise or the demands and expectations placed upon it. It invariably seems a letdown. Occasionally – rarely – theatre’s capacity to produce the exceptional is reaffirmed, however, through an encounter with live performance that is experienced subjectively as a matter of primal importance. Such an ‘event’ might be figured as an irruption of theatre’s potentiality – to interrupt its context, to disrupt social stability, to disturb the spectator’s sense of equanimity – that maintains itself nonetheless within those countless disheartening, frustrating, head-shaking performances it appears to be set apart from. This would suggest that the experience of theatre bona fide is not simply contingent on aesthetic quality but also on the ‘chance’
a ‘gut reaction’ to it: a visceral as well as intellectual experience ‘that strikes us first in the belly then runs through our whole body’.
