Stephen Atkins

I read Peter Brook’s The Empty Space as an undergraduate in 1983. That sentence feels almost too simple for what the book did to me. It was an oldie even then. First published in 1968, it already carried the authority of something people had been handing to theatre students for years: here, read this, this will explain something. The uploaded copy I’m looking at is a later Touchstone edition, but the book itself belongs to that earlier theatrical moment when theatre still seemed capable of...

I have not recently discovered Eugenio Barba’s The Paper Canoe. I bought it very close to the date it first came out in English, around 1996, and read it on vacation in Mexico. Yes, let that comedic image sink in. In 1996, beach-book chic was John Grisham. I was reading theatre anthropology. Since then, the book has lived on my shelf, but not passively. It is one I return to when I need a phrase, a provocation, a reminder, or a way back into a problem I see returning year after in the studio....

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...