It is, among other things, the arena wherein power is contended, reverberating between the characters involved and affecting their physical environment. Writers, like myself, wishing to speculate on a fragile sense of identity at the end of the twentieth century find a ready audience in this generation, who are all too aware of the provisional and fluid nature of their experience In life, as in storytelling, there are no givens or universals, nor should there be. All that matters is what works. Sadly, the modern market-driven obsession with presentation and packaging neatness and tidiness has spilled over from America into the arts here, mitigating against distinctiveness and the unorthodox, in favour of other forms of baked goods. Fortunately for the art form, there seem to be a number of indications that theatre writers are less willing to restrict the terms of their stylistic invention to the Procrustean bed of traditional criteria by which critics, directors and cultural legislators continue to assess them.
Theatre is a demanding art, for all involved in it.
But it is not legislative. It's worth pointing out that these formulaic presumptions do Ibsen a disservice, as he was also the author of the wild, supernatural, associatively freewheeling and remorselessly unsentimental anatomy of the modern soul that is Peer Gynt, a marvelously unruly modern myth which Michael Billington conveniently forgets when he regularly yearns for a more 'Ibsenite' British theatre. Theatre is not instruction how to live, because if it were its presumption of a moral infancy in its audience would be offensively authoritarian. The laws of gravity need not apply. Beyond Peer Gynt, there are many further examples of the sort of harrowingly poetic, searchingly fantastic drama to kick over the monochrome statues of literalism.