ABSTRACT
Denis Diderot, the eighteenth-century French philosopher who also took a special interest in theatre, gave the following instruction to stage actors: 'Don't think about the spectator anymore, act as if he doesn't even exist. Imagine there is a big wall at the edge of the stage separating you from the parterre. Act as if the curtain was never raised' (1970: 453). In all the theatre theory that was to follow, this imaginary wall was known as the 'fourth wall'. Diderot writes this at a time when both the theory and practice of theatre and drama in France – and elsewhere – are subject to profound changes. He develops a different idea about theatrical credibility and 'naturalness' – an idea which, as I will try to demonstrate in this paper, reaches much further than the stage and the theatre venue. An idea about politics not as a spectacle but as a democratic event which, in ancien régime France, for the time being exists only in theory. This new type of theatre, by contrast, is already coming into being in practice.
