28.

“Theatre can’t change the world,” wrote Michael Billington, approvingly, about My Name is Rachel Corrie, and when it went to the West End, the producers stuck that review up outside the theatre. My habitual answer to this question still feels reliable. Can theatre change the world? We don’t know. Not all the results are in yet. We haven’t made all the theatre. We’ve barely begun to make the theatre that dares to believe that change is possible. Meanwhile the evidence coming the other way is that within two generations, within the scope of current living memory, the world will change again both in and out of relation to our imaginative projections of that change. To have any role to play, theatre must at least respond to and help us live that change. What that means in practice will also change, though it will only arise from a constant dedication to theatre as a distinctive practice, an analogue practice in a culture with an increasingly fragile dependence on the digital. But for theatre not merely to respond to change but to lead and shape it, as well it might, is a challenge to our capacity to want that change, and to testify to that desire.

27.

We encourage a profound level of attentiveness; we hold open the space of desire, we induce an intrepid wanting, in the knowledge that all desire when examined reveals itself as the desire for change. And then we stop, too soon. On purpose. Before the picture is clear, before the argument is clinched, before the perfect cadence is resolved, we stop. The most radical gift we can give our audience, and ourselves, is incompleteness. This is the point at which the promenade performance begins in earnest, where the imperative to participate is at its most irresistible: after the show has ended and the audience has dispersed. The onus to complete the work is on them. Isn’t that how we describe what we value in theatre? That it stays with us, that its power is lingering. That it alters our lived experience for some time after, or makes an indelible change. The theatre maker is the one who renders the frame through which the outside world is viewed in the aftermath of the encounter. (And how much more true this would be, incidentally, when the piece never ends, but the audience leaves only when they’re ready to re-enter the world.)