The Big Issues and the Happy Few

From the late 19th into the mid-20th century, well before the dominance of the public sphere by mass electronic media, theatre was an agora: the meeting ground where issues of concern to society were exposed, debated, and contested. Think of Ibsen, Shaw, and Brecht. Enemy of the People, A Doll's House, and Ghosts; or Mrs. Warren's Profession, Heartbreak House, and Major Barbara; or a whole panoply of Brecht's works. Nor were these three exemplars alone. They were at the crest of a tidal wave of theatre that dealt directly with social issues and operated in the public sphere, arousing discussion that formed opinions on things that mattered. Directors as well as writers participated. Recall, for example, Meyerhold's productions in the early 1920s, at the height of utopian enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution. At one of these, in the words of Edward Braun:

The first performance, timed to coincide with the third anniversary of the October Revolution, took place on 7 November 1920 at the former Sohn Theatre [in Moscow]. The derelict, unheated auditorium with its flaking plaster and broken seats was more like a meeting-hall; this was wholly appropriate, for it was in the spirit of a political meeting that Meyerhold conceived the production. Admission was free, the walls were hung with hortatory placards, and the audience was showered at intervals during the play with leaflets. [...] Critics rightly compared the production with Greek tragedy, which, as Meyerhold himself said, furnished the precedent for the chorus in the orchestra pit commenting on the peripeteia of the drama. The chorus was assisted in the task of guiding and stimulating audience reaction by a claque of actors concealed throughout the audience. At a fixed point in the play the character of the Herald would enter and deliver a bulletin on the progress of the real Civil War still being waged in the South. Meyerhold's highest aspirations were gratified on the night when the Herald announced the decisive break into the Crimea at the Battle of Perekop and the entire theatre rose in a triumphant rendering of the "Internationale."

(in Meyerhold 1969:163)

In our day, we can hardly imagine such a display of fervor without suspecting it of total manipulation and bad faith. The closest we come to it is the ironic and parodic preaching of Reverend Billy in his Church of Stop Shopping.

Who today dares call "the public" to the theatre? Who can identify a cause that "everyone" supports? Even war—a time-tested unifier—divides the nation and its people. This fracturing and fragmenting of the public sphere is endemic; it is even more severe in the experimental or avantgarde theatre and performance art because these can address only relatively small and isolated audiences. The break between the mediated and the immediate has become absolute. Live performance is actually besieged on two fronts: from the mass media and from the Internet with its extreme individuality. The mass media is owned, and its content delimited, by corporate and governmental agencies. The Internet is open to individual expression—but it spins so many threads that a consensus or public sphere is not possible.

I experience around me a very deep-seated pessimism concerning what can be accomplished either via mass media or the Internet. Certainly people can "express" themselves on any issue to any extreme, but this expression is not linked to action. In so-called open societies, one is permitted to say and exhibit just about anything, but increasingly with little effect beyond the pleasures of self-expression. Ironically, the more open the means of expression are in a society, the more superfluous both the openness and the expressions become. We are in the pitiable situation of being able to say or show everything but change nothing. The powers to govern or change society are out of the hands of the people.

Turning back to the performing arts, even pop music, which has the potential to reach large numbers of people through concerts, is attached to an enormous recording and video industry—the live appearances of bands and superstars are extensions of...