ABSTRACT

In September 2002, the Brisbane-based Grin & Tonic Theatre Troupe presented a new version of cult classic Japanese television series Monkey. Theatre was moving in an entirely different direction, away from the presentation of words as display or as entertainment. The changes to theatre generated at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century came too late to be encoded into law, which retained the dramatic expectations laid down in the mid-late Victorian, as already traced. The moral theatre describes the demands of response and responsibility bound up in Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre, and which grounds theatrical jurisprudence, and it’s sitting in plain sight in the dumbshow in Monkey. In briefly tracing the features of Grotowski’s work during Theatre of Productions, accounted for in Towards a Poor Theatre, some words and concepts immediately jump out as reading jurisprudentially, that is, as a practice of prudence.