Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series

Passionate Amateurs tells a new story about modern theatre: the story of a romantic attachment to theatre's potential to produce surprising experiences of human community. It begins with one of the first great plays of modern European theatre-Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in Moscow-and then crosses the 20th and 21st centuries to look at how its story plays out in Weimar Republic Berlin, in the Paris of the 1960s, and in a spectrum of contemporary performance in Europe and the United States. This is a work of historical materialist theatre scholarship, which combines a materialism grounded in a socialist tradition of cultural studies with some of the insights developed in recent years by theorists of affect, and addresses some fundamental questions about the social function and political potential of theatre within modern capitalism. Passionate Amateurs argues that theatre in modern capitalism can help us think afresh about notions of work, time, and freedom. Its title concept is a theoretical and historical figure, someone whose work in theatre is undertaken within capitalism, but motivated by a love that desires something different. In addition to its theoretical originality, it offers a significant new reading of a major Chekhov play, the most sustained scholarly engagement to date with Benjamin's "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theatre," the first major consideration of Godard's La chinoise as a "theatrical" work, and the first chapter-length discussion of the work of The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, an American company rapidly gaining a profile in the European theatre scene.

Passionate Amateurs contributes to the development of theatre and performance studies in a way that moves beyond debates over the differences between theatre and performance in order to tell a powerful, historically grounded story about what theatre and performance are for in the modern world.

Scenes from Bourgeois Life

by Nicholas Ridout

Published 22 June 2020

Scenes from Bourgeois Life proposes that theatre spectatorship has made a significant contribution to the historical development of a distinctive bourgeois sensibility, characterized by the cultivation of distance. In Nicholas Ridout’s formulation, this distance is produced and maintained at two different scales. First is the distance of the colonial relation, not just in miles between Jamaica and London, but also the social, economic, and psychological distances involved in that relation. The second is the distance of spectatorship, not only of the modern theatregoer as consumer, but the larger and pervasive disposition to observe, comment, and sit in judgment, which becomes characteristic of the bourgeois relation to the rest of the world. This engagingly written study of history, class, and spectatorship offers compelling proof of “why theater matters,” and demonstrates the importance of examining the question historically.