The Book That Helped Me Stop Apologizing for My Weird Theatre

I do not have the same clear and humourous memory of first reading Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre that I have of reading Eugenio Barba’s The Paper Canoe in Mexico. Barba has a scene attached to it: vacation, sun, 1996, and a theatre anthropology book where a beach novel should have been.

Lehmann sits differently in my memory. I bought the book in 2006 and when colleagues saw the cover, they hit me with that side eyed glance. Admittedly the term postdramatic, at that time, was easily mocked much like postmodernism had been.

Postdramatic Theatre is one of those books I return to when I need to explain why certain kinds of theatre are not failed drama, or the result of naughty children breaking their toys. So much ham-fisted criticism of experimental performance begins from a mistaken assumption: that theatre is supposed to behave like a play, and when it doesn't, something has gone wrong.

Lehmann gave many of us a language for saying: no, something else is happening.

The English edition of Postdramatic Theatre, translated by Karen Jürs-Munby, appeared in 2006, though the German edition was published in 1999. The book had already become a major reference point before its English publication, partly because it named a problem that theatre artists, scholars, and audiences were already facing: how do we talk about theatre that no longer places the dramatic text at the centre?

That is the crucial point. Postdramatic theatre is not theatre without text. It is not theatre after language. It is not theatre that hates plays. It is theatre in which the text no longer automatically governs the event.

This is why the book remains useful.

For centuries, Western theatre has been trained to organize itself around drama: character, conflict, dialogue, action, cause, consequence, and resolution. All that stuff at the epicenter of Aristotle and McKee. Even when theatre became modern, it often kept those structures. Theatre changed. The acting changed. The social questions changed. But the expectation often remained: tell us the story, show us the character, guide us through the action.

Lehmann asks what happens when theatre no longer wants to be that way.

The book proposes that, from the late 1960s onward, many theatre forms began to move away from drama as the master structure. These forms include devised work, physical theatre, multimedia theatre, performance art, experimental writing, and stagings of classic texts that push drama beyond its own habits. Jürs-Munby’s introduction is especially helpful here because it clarifies that the “post” in postdramatic does not mean a clean break from drama, or a simple historical “after.” It means a rupture that still remembers what it has ruptured.

Imagine theatre as a renovated house, but it's haunted by the ghosts of its previous inhabitants. 

This is where Lehmann becomes useful for actors and directors, not just scholars. He shifts attention away from the question “what does this mean?” and toward the question “how is this event asking me to perceive?”

That is a different kind of theatre literacy because in dramatic theatre, signs tend to be arranged hierarchically. The text leads the actor, who serves the character. The design supports the world. Sound and light intensify mood. The audience follows the fable. In postdramatic theatre, that hierarchy loosens. Text, body, space, sound, image, technology, silence, and audience relation can all become equal or competing centres of attention.

Lehmann describes this through categories such as parataxis, simultaneity, density of signs, musicalization, visual dramaturgy, physicality, irruption of the real, and event or situation. These are not meant as a checklist. They are tools for noticing how theatre can organize experience once dramatic plot is no longer the controlling architecture.

That is probably why I return to this book. It gives me permission to describe theatre on its own terms. But it also allowed me to deconstruct scene work in a similar way.

A great deal of actor training still assumes that the actor’s work begins with character inside a dramatic situation. It starts with the initial table read and builds upon those initial discussions. I understand the value of that. I teach it. I use it. But, and this is my opinion, it is not enough. The performer in postdramatic theatre may not be building a character in the traditional sense. They may be composing presence, attention, juxtaposition with an object, physical relation, or a sequence of images. They may be carrying language as sound rather than psychology. They may be part of a visual field rather than the centre of a story.

And going this way is not a lesser task. It is often harder.

It requires the actor to start asking, “What is my function in the total event?” Am I a figure, a witness, an outline of a person, a social sign, a contradiction? Meaning often arrives through collision rather than explanation.

In so many ways, postdramatic theatre is more like cinema than dramatic theatre.

Lehmann helps name the larger aesthetic field in which that kind of acting makes sense.

One of the most useful ideas in the book is the “retreat of synthesis.” In traditional dramatic theatre, the spectator is often encouraged to assemble the parts into a coherent whole. In postdramatic theatre, synthesis may be delayed, weakened, or outright refused. The signs do not necessarily settle into one meaning. The performance leaves the spectator inside perception before interpretation closes it down.

That is not, as some might say, "confusion for its own sake." At its best, it is a discipline that has to be trained as rigorously as old-fashioned character work.

This also connects to my current thinking about cinema and the Dynamic Memory Machine. Some work does not stay with us because we can summarize it. It stays because fragments remain active. Lehmann gives us one way to understand by working through residue rather than receiving the intended resolution.

The book is not without risks. Like any large theoretical term, “postdramatic” can become lazy if used too broadly. It can turn into a prestige label for anything difficult or under-explained. That weakens the idea. Lehmann is actually quite precise. He is not simply celebrating the abandoned plot. He is trying to describe a historical and aesthetic shift in the relationship between dramatic structure, performance, media, perception, and spectatorship.

The practical takeaway is really very simple.

When a piece of theatre or a film does not behave like drama, do not begin by asking what it failed to do. Ask what kind of attention it is building. Ask what it does with a single element like time. Ask how the actor's body functions. Ask what role the spectator is being asked to play.

That is why I keep returning to Lehmann and he keeps delivering.

He gave me a way to defend work that I knew was doing something. But more importantly he gave me a way to teach students that theatre is not obligated to organize itself around a story before it earns the right to matter.

Some theatre explains itself and everything it's doing. Some theatre makes a world or a disquieting dream. Some theatre behaves like a painting, a poem or music.

It changes us before we know what we have understood.