ABSTRACT
Sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, I went, on two occasions, to see versions of a show by the avant-garde Belgian director, Jan Fabre, entitled The Power of Theatrical Madness. By no stretch of the imagination would this kind of work fall within the ambit of the at-that-time-unused designation applied theatre – indeed it might even be described as being at the opposite end of that spectrum, as unapplied theatre, being work that appeared to be made solely for an art-crowd audience, with no declared goal of social change, art for art’s sake (whatever that means). However, on both occasions, the work succeeded in provoking quite extreme reactions, and indeed interventions, from members of the audience. Whether this was the desired response or not, to this day, I have no idea, but, apart from being a very beautiful, concentrated, strange and difficult meditation on the nature of theatre, paradoxically there were also things to be learnt from it which overlap into the subject areas discussed in this book, and how an audience may be coaxed or challenged into moving beyond the role of passive spectator into active critic or subversive participant.
