Speaking theatres: the ‘Olimpico’ theatres of Vicenza and Sabbioneta, and Camillo’s Theatre of Memory

The present chapter considers how theatre spaces were intended to act on the audience. By referring to the Olympic theatres of Vicenza and Sabbioneta as speaking theatres, I attribute agency to them, appearing to posit that they –inanimate structures – could say something and, by ‘speaking’, do something: that they could act on the audience. Austin’s theory of the performativity of language, summed up in the title of his book How to do things with words, ¹ could be adapted for this occasion to ‘How to say things with theatres’.