Sanja Perovic’s chapter treats one of the most significant events in French history and an unprecedented period in theatre history. While the Revolution is often overlooked as a ‘dead period’ in French theatre, Perovic describes the scale and ambition of this extraordinary period. Never before had so many newcomers been able to forge successful careers as writers, actors and directors. Artistic innovation peaked, as revolutionary performance was more akin to what today is termed performance art, than to the kind of repertory theatre that preceded or followed it. Covering some of the major events, influential figures and key texts of this extremely fertile period, Perovic shows how theatre addressed the questions key to revolutionary culture: who is the audience? Where is it located? Who speaks on its behalf, and in what (theatrical, artistic) language? She concludes by contrasting two utopian works – Louis Beffroy de Reigny’s Nicodème dans la lune, ou la révolution pacifique (Nicodème Goes to the Moon, or the Peaceful Revolution, 1790) and Sylvain Maréchal’s Le Jugement dernier des rois (The Last Judgement of Kings, 1793) – with Beaumarchais’ La Mère coupable (The Guilty Mother, 1792), an altogether more sombre assessment of the effects of revolution.

This chapter argues that it was unlikely that an Attic theatre audience, many of whom will have studied with a sophist, could not tell the difference between Socrates and a sophistic teacher of rhetoric, and that it was significant that it was only well into the play, when Aristophanes had established his ‘Socrates’ as like the ‘real’ Socrates in several respects, that he started to bring out the role of his stage-figure in teaching rhetoric – a role he gave him because his purpose in Clouds was to κωμωιδεῖν, ‘make fun of in a comedy’, both Socrates and sophists. This argument hangs to some extent on the socio-economic distribution of spectators in the theatre of Dionysus in Athens, and on the size of that theatre.