The Empty Space

[tablesaw]

Worked late tonight as part of a production rotation for deployment emergencies. There was one, but I addressed it early, then spent most of the night waiting for other teams to deal with things.

Spent some time reading Peter Brook's The Empty Space. I thought I'd read it before, but I think I'd only read the chapter "The Holy Theatre" as an excerpt before. I'm trying to season the polemics with the appropriate salt, but it's still fun to read about "The Deadly Theatre." I find it amusing, over half a century later to apply the descriptions of Deadly Theatre to cinema in the age of the dying blockbuster: "There are occasional new movements, good new writers and so on, but as a whole, the theatre not only fails to elevate or instruct, it hardly even entertains." That certainly addresses how I feel about the Marvel output. But at the same time, the wide applicability counts against the argument. The Deadly is not theatrical, but aesthetically universal.

Haven't gotten deep into "The Immediate Theatre," but already I have taken a hit.

The actor who believes he may one day play Hamlet has endless energy: the one who sees that the outside world is not convinced he will ever play a lead is already tying himself into painful knots of introspection with a consequent need for self-assertion.