Introduction

Summary

… ut Hymettia sole

cera remollescit tractataque pollice multas

flectitur in fades ipsoque fit utilis usu.

Ovid

This self-encounter which I consider the major source of the potency and success of beneficent fictions may be defined also as imaginative identification. Things are then not merely happening before us; they are happening, by the power and force of imaginative identification, to us.

Chinua Achebe

When we go to the theatre, we make a deliberate surrender. As a vital part of what theatre is, we agree to let the play control in large measure the tempo and terrain of our experience for the next two hours' traffic. In this, drama differs from poetry or prose narrative. We cannot, no matter how we might wish to, speed up, slow, review, reject, or skip. We cannot shut the book and wait for the right mood to return; we cannot tame an evil or ecstatic moment by avoidance or repetition or some other readerly strategy. And though in this theatrical performance is like other arts that unfold in real time, such as film or music, it is unlike these in that it acts at once in two different moments. One is the remote moment of the story being told, to which the audience (and the actors) are only ever admitted by the fact of a common fiction. The other, more specific to the theatre, is that real, immediate, and vulnerable moment where the performers put together the play by word and gesture in the audience's presence. From this latter moment actors can appeal directly to their watchers, and vice versa, at times both planned and unplanned, as no film character can do.