Some Failures in the Theatre: Modernist Performance, Failure and Utopia

This chapter looks at the aesthetics of catastrophe within the modernist experiments in the theatre, and rather than read this either as a shortcoming or as part of the long duree of the anti-theatrical legacy, it reads this tendency as part of the utopian aspiration of much of the modernist experiment in stagecraft. Drawing on the work of Alain Badiou, it claims that this utopian dimension, so often read as part of the received failure of the Historical Avant-garde, is not only necessary but desirable within formal theatrical experimentation.