Editorial

Abstract

The first issue of the journal in 2004, and the first under my editorship, is devoted to a special focus on ‘Postdramatic Theatre’. While this term may not be familiar to many readers, the phenomenon it embraces most certainly is. Coined by the German theatre studies scholar, Hans-Thies Lehmann in his book Postdramatisches Theater,1 the concept refers to tendencies and experiments defining theatre outside the paradigm of the dramatic text. Also known, somewhat imprecisely, as postmodern theatre, it questions fundamentally the very tenets of the dramatic theatre. Postdramatic performances usually eschew clear coordinates of narrative and character and require therefore considerable effort on the part of the spectator. For this reason, it has been termed, in the words of New York theatre critic Elinor Fuchs, ‘spectator's response theatre: we write our own script out of the “pieces of culture” offered’.2 Like Lehmann, Fuchs tries to find an over-arching frame within which to make sense of the manifold experiments in theatre and performance that were taking place in the 1980s. Whereas Lehmann sees postdramatic theatre primarily as a question of form and history which affect the configuration of time, space and mediality of theatre, Fuchs regards the same developments as a response to the massive critique of Western models of subjectivity that we associate with terms such as poststructuralism and deconstruction.