Most theatre today remains deeply spectacular. Whether through elaborate scenography, psychologically complete characters, or literary narratives translated into visual action, audiences are often invited into a finished world whose meanings have already been carefully arranged. The stage becomes an object to be viewed, interpreted, and consumed. In this sense, theatre has long been dominated by what might be called the logic of spectacle.

Watching this production, however, reminded me that the history of theatre may also be understood as a gradual struggle against spectacle itself.

Since Hans-Thies Lehmann introduced the concept of postdramatic theatre, much discussion has focused on the apparent transition from dramatic text to theatrical event. Yet this evolution seems to represent something far more fundamental. Rather than simply replacing scripts with bodies or narratives with images, postdramatic theatre shifts the center of gravity from representation to experience. It asks audiences not merely to understand a work, but to inhabit it.

This distinction is more profound than it first appears.

The literary tradition has undoubtedly given theatre extraordinary richness, but it has also encouraged a particular mode of spectatorship. Text organizes meaning before performance even begins. Characters possess psychological motivations, stories unfold according to recognizable structures, and audiences arrive prepared to decode symbols and narratives. The stage becomes the visible manifestation of a pre-existing literary architecture.

In this process, theatre increasingly becomes spectacular—not only visually, but conceptually. Spectacle is not simply a matter of elaborate scenery or technological display. It is any theatrical structure that asks audiences primarily to observe rather than to experience, to interpret rather than to encounter.

Postdramatic theatre seeks another possibility.

It is often described as a break with dramatic literature, but perhaps it is more accurate to understand it as a return—a return to an earlier understanding of what theatre originally was. Long before theatre became an institution of representation, tragedy emerged from communal rituals, from the collective performance of the Dionysian dithyramb. Participation preceded observation. Theatrical experience was not organized around a completed performance presented before passive spectators, but around an event unfolding in real time among bodies sharing the same space.

Theatre, in this sense, was never fundamentally about watching.

It was about presence.

Its purpose was not to deliver a stable meaning but to generate a collective sensory experience through which every participant entered an intensely private psychological state. This paradox remains fascinating: the experience was communal, yet what emerged within each individual was profoundly personal. The audience did not simply witness ecstasy—they entered it.

Of course, even these ancient rituals contained elements of spectacle. There were performers and observers, leaders and followers, voices that guided the collective experience. Absolute freedom has perhaps never existed within theatrical forms. Even in moments of ritual abandon, the individual remained situated within structures permitted by the community.

Yet the ambition of postdramatic theatre is precisely to move closer to that original condition of theatrical presence.

This explains why contemporary theatre increasingly emphasizes everything that happens within theatrical space rather than privileging the literary text alone. Light, sound, movement, rhythm, architecture, duration, silence, proximity, even smell and temperature become equally significant expressive materials. They are not decorative additions to a script but active agents capable of transforming consciousness. The body is no longer merely illustrating language; the space itself becomes a producer of meaning—or perhaps more accurately, a producer of experience.

Literature remains one component of this process, but no longer its unquestioned center.

Nevertheless, throughout most of theatrical history—and indeed throughout much contemporary theatre—the dominant structure has remained one of performance and observation. The audience watches; performers perform. This physical separation gradually solidifies into a conceptual separation. Theatre becomes increasingly concerned with communicating recognizable meanings, while spectators search for coherent interpretations.

Both artists and audiences become participants in the production of spectacle.

Under such conditions, subjective experience is not eliminated, but displaced. It is replaced by emotions that have already been culturally organized. Rather than discovering one’s own emotional responses, one often inherits collective ones.

Consider something as universal as family.

The mere appearance of familial love on stage frequently moves audiences to tears. Yet these tears do not necessarily emerge from deeply personal memories. More often, they arise because the cultural concept of “family” already carries an enormous emotional weight. The audience responds to a socially shared structure before encountering their own individual experience.

The collective memory of kinship quietly displaces the unfinished memories of personal life.

As a result, emotion itself risks becoming spectacular.

We cry not always because something uniquely true has happened to us within the theatre, but because we recognize familiar emotional codes that have been successfully activated. Feeling itself becomes a form of performance.

In this sense, theatre mirrors contemporary existence with unsettling accuracy.

Modern life increasingly encourages us to perform ourselves before we experience ourselves. Social identities become spectacles designed for observation; authenticity yields to representation; lived experience is replaced by images prepared for public consumption. Our lives become carefully curated stages upon which we continuously present versions of ourselves to others.

Theatre and everyday life thus begin to resemble one another.

Both risk substituting genuine presence with recognizable performance.

What makes this production so compelling is not that it rejects spectacle altogether—that may well be impossible—but that it persistently asks whether another mode of theatrical experience remains attainable. It does not seek to communicate a singular meaning as much as it invites each spectator into a state of heightened presence, where perception precedes interpretation and sensation arrives before explanation.

Perhaps this is the deepest promise of postdramatic theatre.

Not the disappearance of narrative.

Not the rejection of literature.

But the recovery of theatre as an event in which meaning is no longer simply observed from a distance, but lived from within.

For perhaps the most radical act a theatre can perform today is not to show us another world, but to return us, however briefly, to our own experience of being fully present within this one.