by Eric Goudie

Created on: January 22, 2009

The post-modern theatre is a place of infinite possibility wrought with infinite peril. Most of the people who are engaged in it do so clumsily, only partially committed to its tenements, and for the most part totally unaware that they are even a part of the post-modern experiment.

Post-modern theatre encompasses all the social, philosophical and literary features of post-modernism: a rejection of order as meaningless, a revolt against historicism, and an emphasis on the process rather than the goal. It does so, however, within the bounds of a very long, very specific performance tradition. Depending on the culture (Eastern, Western, Northern or Southern) audiences have some very specific ideas about what constitutes "theatre." To run riot over the conventions of the Japanese Noh theatre, or simply to bring in an impressionist set designer to a theatre that has only ever had realism-based box sets can send audiences running for the exits. Since theatre cannot exist without at least one actor and one audience (as Jerzy Growtowski, the Polish minimalist director so eloquently deduced) it is impossible to take the post-modern experiment too the same extremes as in other genres, for no other reason than the unwillingness of the audience to engage too directly in the post-modern experiment.

As I said, much post-modern theatre is unconsciously so. We live in a post-modern world, so we think post-modern things, and thus we often make post-modern theatre, whether we intend to or not, and we often do it even when we are actively trying not to. How often do we watch a classic or a period piece and notice something out of step with the time in which the play was set - a prop that did not exist at that time, a costume too risque or too modest, or a word or phrase from our own time. That is post-modernism creeping in, subverting the work, calling attention to its theatricality, essentially accusing the play of lying to the audience by pretending to be real, but not being quite good enough to fool us. And while we can blame a poorly-chosen prop or costume on a limited production budget, and an incorrect word or phrase on poor research, we cannot question the post-modern element of the show we cannot see - the actors, in performance, are engaging with the audience as we have demanded, not how the actors would have engaged with the audience in the original production, and in doing so they are re-creating their work as post-modern theatre.

I'll give you a rare example. A couple

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