I've often admired the capacity of the German theatre to address, appropriate, and problematise philosophy. Naturalist theatre traditions seem to me much more prone to fall into circular 'common knowledge' where familiar ideas are circulated around ad nauseum. In Germany, it has seemed to me, there is a long tradition of the theatre being a place where one can go to access difficult ideas in public. There's an embarrassing element to this - everyone collectively engaged in thinking in front of one another, but at its best it combines intuitive and cognitive learning into the kind of 'shared learning ritual' that you just don't get in a public lecture.
Vierte Welt has launched a new performance series in which it invites philosophers to write for the theatre. Im Toten Winkel 1 is an ambitious first attempt. The first performance comes on the back of 10 days of workshopping by the company in the performance space, which will be followed by two performances later this year, which I understand will be of the same text.
The text is about as translucent as you might get in the theatre. Based around the loose concept of the 'Plebs', it picks up from Foucault's theorising of the term in several texts of the 1960s and 70's and proceeds through a number of narrative examples, each elucidating a new angle on the concept, or perhaps complicating it further.
