It is as good a division of the world as any other to observe that there are and have been societies with theatre and others without theatre. And that in societies that know this strange public place, where fiction is consumed as a repeatable event, this has always met with reticence, anathema, major or minor excommunications, as well as enthusiasm. More specifically, next to the spiritual suspicion that befalls theatre, there is always the vigilant concern of the State, to the point where all theatre has been one of the affairs of the State and remains so to this day!

Another observation to set things in motion: if cinema is everywhere, it is no doubt because it requires no spectator, only the walls surrounding a viewing public. Let’s say that a spectator is real, whereas a viewing public is merely a reality, the lack of which is as full as a full house, since it is only a matter of counting. Cinema counts the viewers, whereas theatre counts on the spectator, and it is in the absence of either one or the other that critics, in a disastrous paradox, invent the spectator of a film and the viewer of a play. François Truffaut deciphers the spectator in the chandelier, but this chandelier is the opposite of the movie projector.

I once saw Guy Debord’s complete cinematographic oeuvre (which, significantly, had been published in book form) projected without pause, centred on the superb In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), indifferent to the emptiness as much as to the fullness (not of the chandelier but of the seat) in a movie theatre in Paris. This was made possible by the grace of the friendship of Gérard Lebovici, whom killers have since then found it in themselves to shoot down (the man behind such an idea of friendship in art, it must be said regardless of all other considerations, is at once a bit suspect for those who traffic in shadows). This pure temporal moment speaks to the glory of cinema, which may very well survive us humans. It is utterly foreign to theatre, which does not take place without spectators, since in this last case the representation (a word that we will put to the test at length) changes over into a supplementary rehearsal – the exact opposite of those ‘dress rehearsals’ and other ‘final run-throughs’ that, through a bit too much of the spectator’s real, turn into the premature event of the spectacle’s already having taken place.

In the midst of the ‘red years’, around 1971–2, a group dedicated to cultural intervention, the Groupe Foudre, took it upon itself to cause a racket against the first outbursts of the ‘revisionist’ malady in the reassessment of the World War II. Movies such as Lacombe Lucien¹ or Night Porter² turned the equivocation between victim and executioner into a fiction, all the while making criminal choices seem innocent. Since then, we certainly have seen where all this would lead. The Groupe Foudre thus readily went to shout down and interrupt those disquieting tripes. Ah, to think of the charming lightness, the polemical health of that era! The watchword invented at the time was: ‘Down with the obscurantism of the obscure rooms!’ The mistake consisted in ignoring the fact that obscurantism can only be public and that cinema, unlike theatre, is by no means a public place, even if it appears to be one. What is wrapped in obscurity is the private individual, to whom after all we cannot deny the right to obscurity just like that. It is useless to intervene in cinema, because there is no spectator to be found, and, by logical consequence, no public. Being a private industry, cinema is also a private spectacle. The time of projection is that of an inconsistent gathering, a serial collection. Cinema, disconnected from the State, proposes no collective signification. The Groupe Foudre was justified in its polemic, full of joy in its action (ah! the ink squirts against the screen on which the colonial paratroopers were strutting, all worked up by the awful John Wayne, in that abomination titled The Green Berets!), but it was mistaken in the choice of its site: theatre alone is tied to the State, cinema belongs only to Capital. The former oversees the Crowd, the latter disperses individuals. Cultural–political intervention, which was what the Groupe Foudre dreamed of, has only one possible destination: the theatre. In any case, even here it risks becoming theatricalized rather than politicized.

So theatre is an affair of the State, which is morally suspicious, and requires a spectator. That much we know.

Unless we have recourse to Mallarmé, whose famous Book (as we know from the calculations with which he, like a dreamy apothecary, enumerated the necessary attendants) after all had the form of a Representation.

Let me add the lesson from Regnault that within him, the Spectator, resides the self-declared Crowd and the untranscendable Action. To him everything is devoted.

Theatre thus distinguishes itself according to the State, of which it is an affair (but why?), according to Morality, for which it is a suspect (but why?), and according to the Spectator, from whom it derives its point of the real, namely, that which interrupts the rehearsals. In this last regard, the essence of theatre lies in the existence of the opening night. The fact that there is a second night, so feared by the actors, touches upon the State. That there is a third presupposes that Morality did not prevent it from happening.…

Let’s posit that there is theatre as soon as we can enumerate: first, a public gathered with the intent of a spectacle; second, actors who are physically present, with their voices and bodies, in a space reserved for them with the express purpose of the gathered public’s consideration; and, third, a referent, textual or traditional, of which the spectacle can be said to be the representation.

But now onto this elementary description another one superimposes itself, as if theatre were isomorphic with that singular activity we call ‘politics’ (I am not talking here about the monotonous administration of the State).

Of the three elementary conditions of theatre (public, actors, textual referent), which are transcendental or a priori conditions, we c...