Contre le théâtre politique (Against Political Theatre)

José Maria Vieira Mendes and Rui Pina Coelho

by Olivier Neveux
Paris: La fabrique éditions, 314 pp

Editor’s Note

Olivier Neveux is a Professor of Theatre History and Aesthetics at the University of Lyon’s international theatre research centre, ENS. He is also the Editor of the French journal Théâtre/Public. In his 2019 volume — Contre le théâtre politique(Against Political Theatre) – he questioned the very existence of political theatre as such, a position that has provoked numerous arguments both for and against his thesis.

From time to time, CS Books attempts to underscore ongoing discussions like this by asking theatre scholars to respond to the specific issues raised. In this instance, two Portuguese theatre professors from the University of Lisbon consider first con and then pro Neveux’s arguments. Our hope in publishing this material is to more deeply understand the issues at the center of the ongoing debate as well as to bring such notable books to wider attention in the theatre community.

Anyone (or ideally any two) wishing to offer discussions of other important theatre volumes is asked to contact the CS Books Editor at any time.

Don Rubin

Position I: Arguing Impotence (and Language)

by José Maria Vieira Mendes*

The French philosopher Geoffrey de Lagasnerie has referred to the impasse of political contestation as an experience of “impotence”. In Sortir de notre impuissance politique (2020) he suggests a production of new types of political practice. The diagnosis is not new. Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, Boltanski/Chiapello, Negri/Hardt, Slavoj Žižek, among many others, have written about the challenges of revolutionary movements in the era of advanced Western capitalism. The field of the arts is no exception to this state of affairs, which some characterize as a post-political era, to which the engaged artist, the one who challenges the autonomy of art by eliminating the boundary between life and art and whose model was built up throughout the 20th century, no longer knows how to respond.

Olivier Neveux, in Contre le théâtre politique, a volume whose title can be translated as Against Political Theatre demonstrates familiarity with this description of the conundrum, although his focus is on how theatre artists and their performances deal with the particular experience of impotence. A professor of theatre history and aesthetics, Neveux rehearsed part of his arguments in a 2007 book entitled Politiques du Spectateur, in which he defines “politics” as being inseparable from the notion of emancipation and the transformation of reality.

In Contre le théâtre politique, Neveux explains what he means by “political theatre” with the following words (all translations here are my own): “I opted, unlike previous works, for an extensive definition: all theatre that sustains, manifests, interweaves a political care, inclination, project – and this can be tenuous, flagrant, militant or critical, distant or frontal, in its fables or in its scope” (9).^[1]

Contrary to this definition, which might be too broad to be considered a satisfactory one, the book’s orientation is, according to its author, “clear”: “It is aimed at the countless people who, all over the place, are trying very hard to mobilize theatre against this world” (17).^[2] Political antagonism is, after all, what Neveux calls politics: against this world. What he means by theatre is, however, as I’ll try to demonstrate, a more complicated issue since Neveux seems to remain with practices of theatre that he is apparently not willing to question, contrary to Lagasnerie’s strategy to contradict political impotence.

Neveux argues for the existence of a “political theatre,” and one of the book’s aims is to look for it. Where is it? How can political theatre relate to the present? What defines it? His search is divided into three parts. In the first, he tries to describe politics within theatre itself. In the second, he describes the art of political theatre. And in the third, he looks at several specific performances to find in these worlds “possible alliances between theatre and politics” (21).^[3]

The content of this three-part search is not always easy to follow. Often, I simply could not grasp the author’s point despite the questions posed in each of the sections. One therefore reads Neveux with questions that promise clarification, but which he ends up evading or addressing in what might be called a diagonal way, an elusive partiality. The adverb “perhaps” and the conditional mode proliferate (“perhaps it’s necessary”) as do open-ended hypotheses that allow him both to suggest and reject solutions.

This frustrating rhetorical strategy often resorts to identifying what is not political theatre. Neveux lists a number of threats to “political theatre,” by which he means ways of doing things that, by claiming to be political, undermine the politics of theatre. It is in these inventories that we find Neveux’s most interesting arguments and lucid insights, when he identifies false steps taken by artists and performances that seem to contradict their own intentions.

The fact is Neveux finds it difficult to deal with positive assertions, and perhaps this reflects the impotence to which Lagasnerie refers. The following quote illustrates this rhetorical enigma:

It is certainly possible for a spectator to emancipate himself in front of an emancipating spectacle. Or not (164).^[4]

The yes and no in the same statement make the author’s own position inconsequential, which, he argues, is justified by the topic itself. Neveux seems to know that “generalities” do contradict the “enigmatic character of emancipation and mobilizations” because “there is no automatism of devices for politics” (194)^[5] and that “Political theatre cannot, in all obviousness, constitute a unified genre” (196).^[6]

And even though he considers the need for an immanent relation with theatre contrary to a totalizing transcendental one, he does not shy away from suggesting his inclination towards a certain idea of what theatre actually is.

We perhaps have the impression, then, of returning to the starting point: All theatre (because it establishes this present) is political. (…) But that’s not all. This present arises through the creation of an ‘intermediate space’, a ‘potential space’, framed by the fictitious (271).^[7]

So, for Neveux, there are two characteristics of theatre as a discipline that make it ontologically political: its relationship with the present and the intermediate space it occupies between fiction and reality. Thus he says, going back to the beginning of the book, that it is insufficient, although apparently unavoidable, to consider all theatre political. Faced with a conclusion of this kind, and accepting that it is restricted to theatre and not to other media or even to everything that exists, we are forced to accept a transcendental definition of theatre as a medium, in line with the “medium-specificity thesis,” which argues, as the American philosopher Noël Carrol explained in an essay first published in 1985, that “each art form has its own domain of expression and exploration” (6).

One criticism that can be levelled at this position is, for example, the one that Carrol himself puts forward: “why suppose that the essential characteristics of a medium necessarily have direct consequences for the art made in that medium?” And Neveux, quoting Stuart Hall, who rejects the generalization of form or genre as producing an effect or carrying an intrinsic quality, doesn’t seem to disagree with this position.

In Neveux’s defense, we can use his own words when he brings political theatre closer to impossibility: “What if ‘political theatre’ had to do with this impossible – the resolution of which, however, is imperative?” (204). ^[8] It is from impossibility that he arrives at a culinary reduction that brings the theatrical political gesture closer to the “small” referring to “the relationship that must be invented between incommensurable dimensions: the universe in the hands of a baker” (229).^[9]

The demand for the singularity of theatre (the particular performance) is its politics (which is why Neveux resorts to describing various performances he has seen). But this singularity doesn’t detract from the book’s project, which inevitably hangs over all the assertions it contains and even the performances it talks about: the idea that “theatre” is a collection of performances with their own generic (and essential) ontology; in other words, a transcendental idea of theatre and art that trusts that the genre or medium surpasses the performances themselves and could live without them.

Which is why Neveux — with the help of modernist thinkers such as Benjamin, Brecht, Breton, Pasolini, Boal, Piscator, Genet or Vitez — only questions the adjective “political” and never the word ‘theatre.” As if theatre for Genet or Brecht is the same thing as contemporary political theatre.

It must be said, a large part of politics in theatre has been made in recent decades by the rejection of a certain idea of theatre, or even of theatre as a genre, and by expansions have made the word “theatre” either obsolete or mutable.^[10] If this is the case, how can we talk about political theatre without talking about theatre and new types of theatrical practice?

Probably not by talking about political theatre.

Endnotes

^[1] “Tout théâtre qui soutient, manifeste, entretient un souci, une inclination, un projet politique – cela peut être ténu ou flagrant, militant ou critique, à distance ou frontal, dans ses fables ou ses attendus.”

^[2] “Il se destine aux innombrables personnes, qui, ici et là, s’échinent à mobiliser le théâtre contre ce monde.”

^[3] “…d’éventuelles alliances entre théâtre et politique.”

^[4] « Il est possible, assurément, qu’un spectateur s’émancipe devant un spectacle émancipateur. Ou pas. »

^[5] « … le caractère énigmatique de l’émancipation et des mobilisations … il n’y a pas d’automatisme des dispositifs pour la politique. »

^[6] « Le “théâtre politique” ne saurait, de toute évidence, constituer un genre unifié. »

^[7] “On a peut-être l’impression, alors, d’être revenus au commencement: tout théâtre (parce qu’il instaure ce présent) est politique. (…) Mais ce n’est pas tout. Ce présent advient par la création d’un ‘espace intermédiaire’, d’un espace potentiel’, tramé de fictif. »

^[8] « Et si le ‘théâtre politique’ avait trait à cet impossible, don’t la résolution cependant est très impérative? »

^[9] « … le rapport qui doit s’inventer entre des dimensions incommensurables : l’univers dans les mains d’un boulanger. »

^[10] Florian Malzacher’s latest book, The Art of Assembly. Political Theatre Today, offers a number of examples of political theatre performances that think of theatre as an “art that is self-reflective” without falling “into the trap of pure self-referentiality” (122).

Bibliography

Carrol, Noël. “The Specificity of Media in the Arts.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 19, no 4. U of Illinois P, 1985, pp. 5-20.

Lagasnerie, Geoffrey de. Sortir de notre impuissance politique. Fayard, 2020.

Malzacher, Florian. The Art of Assembly. Political Theatre Today. Alexander Verlag, 2023.

*José Maria Vieira Mendes is an Assistant Professor and researcher in the Centre for Theatre Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lisbon. Director of the Post-graduate course Theatre and Performance Studies, he has published three volumes of his plays, a fictional diary, and an essay, One Thing Is Not the Other. On Theatre and Literature (2016; 2^nd revised edition 2022).

Position II : Arguing Essence (and Irony)

by Rui Pina Coelho**

–Le théâtre crée, parmi d’autres, dans l’étouffement du présent, une brèche.
(Olivier Neveux 270)

I don’t think there is a more important discussion in the performing arts today than the one Olivier Neveux calls for in Contre le Théâtre Politique. Indeed, the debate on the role of the performing arts and their alliance with politics (or, in other words, with life, the world, the present) has long been at the centre of many debates in theatre and performance studies.

As examples, I would briefly mention The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, edited by Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan (2019) where going beyond the traditional formats of political theatre-making, new ways of “being political today” in theatre are rehearsed; or, more recently, The Art of Assembly: Political Theatre Today (2023) where Florian Malzacher expands his reflection on pragmatic utopias and radical imagination, in the wake of the ideas of Chantal Mouffe. These are just two examples of this lively (and necessary) ongoing conversation.

Neveux has certainly made himself part of this debate. The title of the volume — Contre le Théâtre Politique – is itself ironic. It’s not a work against political theatre, but a work about theatre and politics, expanding on the reflection begun in his Politiques du spectateur: Les enjeux du théâtre politique aujourd’hui (2013) which theorised that the political in theatre is the performance’s own conception of who the spectators are and the relationship it seeks to establish with them.

Declaring itself an “intervention text,” Contre le Théâtre Politique is divided into three parts: “Cultural Unpolitics;” “Too much realism;” and “The Art of Theatre” (all translations here are my own).

The first part deals specifically with the current offensive against the whole notion of theatre and politics. The second is an interrogation of the forms that contemporary political theatre – specifically works of opposition – take. Part three looks at the range of possible alliances between theatre and politics. Taken together, they form what I believe is a new form of resistance rather than simply being an intervention.

As I see it, the first part is positively melancholic, but a left-wing melancholy if you will. Taking French cultural policy in recent decades as a paradigm, Neveux describes how the state has turned political theatre into a prop, emptying it of meaning, echoing Baudrillard’s prediction: “when everything is political, nothing is political anymore, everything is insignificant” (in “After the orgy”).

The second part has a much more dialectical slant, the term used here in the best Marxist sense. Neveux exposes and comments on a vast kaleidoscope of performances that somehow claim to be “political.” There are many. From the extraordinary Ça ira (1): Fin de Louis, by Joel Pommerat, to La Reprise, by Milo Rau, to performances by the South African Brett Bailey, Bernard Sobel, Olivier Py, Jacques Delcuvellerie, Mohamed el Khatib. Many.

In this exercise, he discusses the frictions and impasses that the traditional formats of “political theatre” experience in the contemporary world. He speaks of the unpolished edges of militant theatre, agit-prop theatre; proletarian, popular, realistic, epic, oppressed and documentary theatre; street theatre and participatory performances; theatre concerned with current affairs and theatre that simplifies philosophical discussions.

It is in the last part that Neveux reveals the argument’s ontology, its utopian socialist bent.

If in the first two parts we see the shadows of Piscator, Brecht, Weiss and Vitez – all undoubtedly political artists – it is in the last part that his critical apparatus comes from elsewhere: Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse and, above all, Ernst Bloch, the German Marxist and utopian. And here the discussion clearly changes focus. No longer discussing which approach is more revolutionary or whether form or content is more important, the discussion turns to poetry, imagination and utopia.

For me, the final chapter is a whole litany of theatre, arguing in favour of the form’s ability to interrogate the collective imagination and to rehearse new ways of living together. In short, it is a new opportunity to think of alternative alliances between theatre and politics, theatre and life, theatre and the present.

For Neveux, “utopia makes…the present its strategic place.” But, he adds, “the present of politics and the present of art are different. The present of politics is that of opportunity ….The present [of theatre] is neither direct nor immediate” (262).^[11]

In other words, in the inevitable friction between theatre and politics, there is an “intermediate zone” (in other places it will be described as “liminal”), a zone that escapes the established order and that “[i]n the suffocation of the present…. creates…a breach” (270).^[12] It’s a time that launches the infinite play of life’s possibilities, of multiple paths, of other ways, of diverse thinking.

This is what the alliance between theatre and politics could be: giving life, through the play of specific intelligences, to a present that is incomparable to the rhythm established by domination. Its quality is greatly dependent on the place it outlines for its spectators, on the experience available to them (273).^[13]

In the end, the author’s argument brings the work back to its starting point:”‘all theatre (because it establishes this present) is political” (270)^[14] or can be political or, I might add, should be political. Should be “a secret sign, secret passages: in periods of bad weather, perhaps we need to rediscover the attractions of conjuration and conspiracy. It would thus be possible, like a strategist, to go to the theatre to observe the furtive appearance of the passages and galleries where, whatever one may say, the mole continues his work” (275).^[15]

I think here of the old mole Pelagea Vlassova in Brecht’s The Mother who continues her work underground then suddenly appears. This is also the old mole that is a metaphor for the ongoing revolution itself, of whom Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (here paraphrasing Hamlet) says: “Well burrowed, old mole.” That is, the old mole we can still call (political) theatre continues to work.

Endnotes

^[11] « L’utopie fait dès lors du présent son site stratégique, elle n’est pas ce qui permet d’enjamber les temps ou l’inconséquente projection sur les avenirs enjolivés. Toutefois, le présent de la politique est celui du repli ou de l’opportunité, entre ‘déjà plus’ et ‘pas encore’, celui du repli ou de l’offensive, d’une vie alternative qui se déploie sans attendre, d’hypothétiques grands soirs à venir, des réunions et des tâches, etc. »

^[12] « Le théâtre crée, parmi d’autres, dans l’étouffement du présent, une brèche. »

^[13] « L’alliance du théâtre et de la politique pourrait être cela : faire vivre au gré d’un jeu d’intelligences spécifiques un présent incomparable à celui que rythme la domination. Sa qualité est grandement tributaire de la place qu’elle dessine à son spectateur, de l’expérience qu’elle dispose.»

^[14] « Tout théâtre (parce qu’il instaure ce présent) est politique. »

^[15] « Un signal secret, des passages secrets : par période de gros temps, il faut peut-être retrouver les attraits de la conjuration et de la conspiration. Il serait possible, ainsi, stratège, d’aller au théâtre guetter l’apparition furtive des passages et des galeries d’où la taupe poursuit, quoi qu’il s’en dise, son travail. »

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. La transparence du mal : Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes. Éditions Galilée, 1990.

Eckersall, Peter & Helena Grehan, eds. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics. Routledge, 2019.

Malzacher, Florian. The Art of Assembly. Political Theatre Today. Alexander Verlag, 2023.

Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1952], 1999. Accessed here.

Traverso, Enzo. Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. Columbia UP, 2016.

**Rui Pina Coelho is Assistant Professor and Head of the Centre for Theatre Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon and has, since 2010, worked with Teatro Experimental do Porto (TEP) as a playwright and dramaturg. He is the author of numerous titles including A hora do crime: A violência na dramaturgia britânica do pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial (1951–1967) published by Peter Lang in 2016 and coordinator of the volume Contemporary Portuguese Theatre: Experimentalism, Politics and Utopia published by TNDMII/Bicho do Mato in 2017.