Does anyone recognise that text?

That was the beginning to Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. What I want to ask you about is not what the words themselves mean, but how it feels to be asked those questions in such a way? Framed by silence. To be asked, what do you offer your friends to make them so supportive? […] What do you offer?

Does it create a sense of awkwardness? Shame? Embarrassment? Confusion? How do the silences in between these questions make you feel?

The experience of these questions is something quite aside from the rather straight forward meaning, and it is this experience that we are going to look at today.

So, what is phenomenology?

[ADVANCE SLIDE]:

Put simply, phenomenology is the study of our perceptions, of our consciousness , of how we experience the world. The word comes from the Greek phainomenon, which means that which shows itself, i.e. that which is apparent to our senses, that which we experience first hand.

Generally speaking, if we describe something as phenomenal, we tend to mean something extraordinary, something amazing, something out of this world. But when we use the term philosophically, we mean something very much of this world. We mean only that which we experience directly.

[ADVANCE SLIDE]:

Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy started by Edmund Husserl, and amongst its numbers are such illustrious names as Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For a concise overview of what it is, we can turn to Merleau-Ponty’s definition on your handouts:

Phenomenology is the study of essences; and according to it, all problems amount to finding definitions of essences: the essence of perception, or the essence of consciousness, for example […] but it is also a philosophy for which the world is always ‘already there’ before reflection begins—as an inalienable presence; and all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status. (Phenomenology of Perception, vii)

It is a philosophy that tries to logically examine experience, perception and consciousness. It looks at the essence of things, and at the essence of being. Who are we? What is the essence of me being me, you being you? How are we aware of ourselves as separate individuals? What is the essence of selfhood? Are we created by language, as Deana asked us last week, and which will be looked at again when looking at Lacan? Or is there something else?

[ADVANCE SLIDE]:

Edmund Husserl and Intentionality

When we examine the nature of consciousness, of being conscious, it becomes clear that consciousness exists as consciousness of something. If there is nothing to be conscious of, we cannot, logically, be conscious. We don’t just think, we think about. One of the central concepts within the field of phenomenology is that of intentionality: our experience is never experience per se, but is experience of something, be that a physical object, an emotion, a thought, or our own existence; it possesses object-directedness, and it is this object-directedness that Husserl calls intentionality.

The Natural and the Philosophic Attitude

Another important aspect of Husserl’s thinking was that we conceive of there being two attitudes: the natural attitude and the philosophical attitude. The natural attitude is the attitude of everyday life. It’s the attitude that allows us to interact with the objects and people around us unquestiongly. The philosophical attitude, then, requires us to take a step back from or to transcend the natural attitude and learn to see things in and of themselves, without the prejudicial attitude of what it is or what it is for.

To use a simple example, if you were to describe this pen in the philosophical attitude you could describe only the aspects of it that you could immediately perceive. That is to say, you could not discuss its use, or its cultural connotations, or the fact that you know the lid comes off,

or that it makes a mark for writing - you must even discard your knowledge that the object is called a pen. You can only think about and describe your sensory perception of the pen; you can only think about and describe the object as given. This kind of thinking is called reduction. In the philosophical attitude you reduce the object to what is immediately given. The point of this is to allow the philosopher to concentrate on how the object constitutes itself in consciousness before we start imbuing it with semiotic meaning. In other words, we view the object in its raw, un-interpreted state, we try to see with, in Gaston Bachelard’s words, “the original amazement of the naïve observer.”

Fact and Essence

Related to this are the concepts of Fact and Essence. For Husserl, objects fall into one of two fundamental categories, that of Fact, and that of Essence:

Under Fact fall all “real” individual objects, occurring in space and/or time. Here are enduring objects such as stones, trees, birds, humans, planets, stars. Here too are events or processes such as earthquakes, sports events, political revolutions, thoughts, plays.

Under Essence fall all “ideal” objects or eidos that “determine” concrete objects. Here are the qualities of concrete objects: for example, on the level of Fact, we can refer to a human being as a physical thing. On the level of Essence, we look for humanity.

So, on the factual level, we can have the theatrical event as thing, i.e. a series of decodable semiotic objects and gestures. On the Essential level, we look at the quality of experiencing the live event.

Pre-reflective and Reflective Self

One of the central concepts of the self within the field of phenomenology is the difference between the pre-reflective self and the reflective self, which Husserl spoke of as the functioning body and the thematized body.

The functioning body is the pre-reflective self of pure experience, whereas the thematized body is the reflective self, the self that interprets and makes sense of experience and experiences the body as an object. There is a time delay between the two, even if it is only very small, perhaps imperceptibly small, but there is a time delay nonetheless. This means, quite strangely, that we don’t quite exist at the same time as ourselves. There is, in effect, an existential schism at the heart of our temporal being.

The initial experience happens first, and the interpretation and reflection on it comes second. Therefore, at the risk of over-simplifying somewhat, I will suggest that the field of phenomenology belongs more properly to the pre-reflective self, whereas that of semiotics belongs to the reflective self, the thematized self that decodes our experience.

[ADVANCE SLIDE]:

Heidegger and the Dasein

Heidegger modified some of Husserl’s thinking, seeing Husserl as too subjectivist. Heidegger conceived as the self as a functioning aspect of the environment, not an observer of it. We don’t just talk about being, but about Being-in-and-of-the World. If consciousness is consciousness of, then what we are conscious of radically impacts upon what and who we are. Likewise, if we exist as functional aspects of the environment, changes in that environment again radically impact upon who we are and how we function. This being-in-the-world, this self-in-environment is not an autonomous entity but a system. This system is called the Dasein, it is our physical body operating in its immediate functional environment. If we apply this logic to the world of theatre, perhaps particularly immersive theatre, we can perhaps begin to get a sense of the potential to create a profound impact upon the spectator.

Embodiment

Merleau-Ponty was to stress the physical reality of phenomenology. He emphasised that our consciousness is somatic (of the body) – it is sensory – it concerns our whole body rather than just the mind. We are all familiar with the Cartesian dictum “I think therefore I am”? The problem with this is that it splits the body and the mind into two different things, suggesting that the body may be illusory and the mind is all that is real. But phenomenologically speaking, this is not the case. Thought, just like seeing, touching, smelling, etc., is something we experience in and through our body, which

is the centre of our experience. We exist, first and foremost, as physical beings in the world.

This, importantly, also entails our being as objects for other people to look at and experience. As such, we become aware of ourselves not only as subjects, but simultaneously as objects. I can touch my hand: on the one hand, I am the subject touching something, on the other, I am the object being touched. Our awareness of our own embodied selves is of a self as both subject and object. This opens up the potential to blur the boundaries between subject and object.

Intersubjectivity and Empathy:

Phenomenology also looks at how we relate to other people, at the nature of our relationships and how we experience each other, and how we experience being experienced by them. It looks at how we co-exist as both subjects and objects, both to ourselves and to each other.

Put simply, the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals is known as Intersubjectivity. It is a bridge between Self and Other via the sharing of the same world and the same environment; it allows me to understand how you experience the world subjectively. When this is on an emotional level, I can intuitively feel and experience what you do. This is the basis for empathy. And empathy, as you know, is of enormous import in theatre.

I can tell you that I am in pain by saying “I’m in pain.” “Oh, shame” you might reply. But if I show you my pain, then you will start to feel slightly differently.

Recent neurological research has demonstrated how this concept of intersubjectivity and empathy operates on a physical, bodily, neural level. The following clip should hopefully clarify:

[ADVANCE SLIDE]: MIRROR NEURONS CLIP

Moreover, if we accept for the moment that theatre is, in essence, a means of storytelling, which is a tradition as old as humanity itself, neurologists are discovering some very interesting aspects to this practice. I will play you another clip from the same programme to explain.

[ADVANCE SLIDE]: NEURAL COUPLING CLIP

Likewise, different styles of music have been proven to have clear and definite but unconscious effects on people’s breathing, heart rate, temperature, stress or anxiety levels, to release chemicals in the brain that influence our physical, mental and emotional state. And so we can begin to see the actual physiological potential of art and theatre, to actually physically, viscerally affect the spectator through their phenomenal experience.

[ADVANCE SLIDE]:

Merleau-Ponty’s phrase: “we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world” is key to this. Likewise, he says:

“Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization.” (xvii)

This introduces into the equation quite an old concept in the field of art. In 1817, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said this of his collaboration with William Wordsworth:

Mr. Wordsworth […] was to […] awaken the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

Viktor Shlovsky in 1917 (Art as Technique) was likewise to claim that “art exists in order to recover the sense of life, in order to feel objects, to make the stone stoney. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”

Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the verfremdungseffekt (a word he first used in 1936) was a politico-aesthetic aim of making the familiar seem strange.

This perhaps provides us with the clearest separation between semiotic and phenomenological analysis: the phenomenological approach wishes us to engage our pre-reflective senses, to experience the object for what it is,

not what it means. If we strip away the meanings we ascribe to objects, we are left with the object itself, and we can rediscover that object for what it is, as it appears to our senses rather than our interpretive or reflective faculties, its colour, its texture, size, weight, temperature, etc. We can remove the film of familiarity from objects of everyday and see them anew, make the stone stony, see objects with all the amazement of the naïve observer. It is, if you like, a means of revealing the world to us, not as a collection of signifiers, but as a collection of strange and wondrous objects and experiences. Think of finding a strange object that you don’t know what it’s for, think of how you scrutinise it, touch it, explore and examine it with a sense of fascination. Then someone explains it is a bit that has come off the couch, and how quickly your interest dies once it has been explained and given its proper place and meaning within the familiar world. The object loses its essence and acquires, instead, meaning.

To think of the opposite process, have you ever said a word over and over again until it loses all meaning, and what you are left with is this strange sensation of saying this strangely unfamiliar yet familiar word; that is the phenomenological experience of saying the word rather than appreciating its meaning. The French have a term for this sort of sensation, which is jamais vu. Jamais vu is the opposite of déjà vu. Déjà vu is that sensation of feeling like you have had a certain experience before, which we are all familiar with. Jamais vu is the opposite, it describes doing something you have done a thousand times before but somehow there is this strange sensation of doing it for the very first time, the familiar becomes

strangely unfamiliar. The phenomenological approach could be said to aspire to the sensation of jamais vu.

Phenomenology then concerns itself with essence, with the newness of authentic, bodily and sensory experience.

Applied to theatre, we need to find ways of revealing something of the essence of the world, of theatre, and of life, to make the stone stony again.

Bert O. States

The reading for today was from Bert States’ Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, and it is probably useful to turn to him to offer some more concrete examples of the implications of phenomenology in theatre.

If we look at theatre semiotically, everything there is a sign for something else. An Actor is the sign for the character, fair enough, but if we follow this logic through, a table is not a table. It is a sign for a table. A chair is a sign for a chair. States claims that we cannot look at theatre exclusively from a semiotic perspective, but that a mix of semiotic and phenomenological approaches is necessary. Sometimes a chair isn’t a sign for a chair: it’s a chair! He warns us that if we use solely semiology, then everything on stage is something else. If we use solely phenomenology then everything on stage is only itself.

Bert O.States suggests that Art seeks to give us an encounter with the real thing, to see the stoniness of the stone rather than the sign value of it. It can be argued that

it is often the sign value that familiarises the object – when an object functions as a sign rather than the thing itself, it destroys the very essence of the object.

States uses the idea of a dog on stage. The dog, framed in the illusory world of theatre, does not know it is in a play and refuses to operate as a sign for a dog. It is essentially a dog. But in this unexpected context, it somehow becomes more doglike to our perception than if we saw it in a park with its owner. Its doglike qualities become magnified because of its unfamiliar and unexpected setting. As such, it has a greater level of interest to us than the dog in the park.

Likewise, a child actor is something we can never fully accept as the character the way we can accept the adult actor.

A clock on the stage that is telling the real time is likewise strange to us, because we are colliding “theatrical” time of illusion with “real” time of reality.

Water and fire likewise resist semiotic encoding because they are natural elements and not subject to theatrical conventions. They have “a certain primal strangeness” of the sort Merleau-Ponty was speaking about.

States therefore lays down the challenge of finding new ways of keeping the theatrical experience fresh in this way, of finding new ways of making the stone stony. Furniture on the stage used to be painted on the scenery, and this was the norm, the accepted convention. But the first time real furniture was used was something new and

unexpected. The chair was no longer a pictorial representation on the backdrop and became an actual real chair on the stage: it existed not as a sign, but as a thing in itself. However, now that has fallen into convention and we are no longer surprised by the presence of a chair. Theatre, according to States, consumes reality in this way. He says:

[ADVANCE SLIDE]:

Theater is the medium, par excellence, that consumes the real in its realest forms: man, his language, his rooms and cities, his weapons and tools, his other arts, animals, fire, and water – even, finally, theater itself. Its permanent spectacle is the parade of objects and processes in transit from environment to imagery. (States 40)

Theatre is to be viewed as a living beast, feeding on reality – its medium is not paint or clay, but objects of real life – and we must stay one step ahead, finding new ways to retain the essence, to keep the experience alive.

So theatre can be seen as an experience rather than a set of meanings to decode. Certain types of theatre performance have as their goal an attempt to reject or subvert meaning, such as certain types of avant-garde theatre, dada and, to an extent, surrealism. What tools do semiotics give us to approach those? Or does the very use of those tools mean we will read the performance wrongly, being inappropriate tools, trying to decode meaning from work that rejects meaning?

The phenomenological approach does not mean we don’t have to analyse, or deconstruct, but what we deconstruct is not the same thing as that which is deconstructed through the semiotic approach.

Catharsis

Now, we have looked at the phenomenology of empathy, and seen that the empathetic response is physical, neurological, visceral. It is a strange phenomenon that exists outside of linguistic codification. Let us now look at another great theatrical phenomenon, catharsis. Catharsis is likewise an experience, not an understanding, and catharsis is at the very core of tragic theatre. It is what the spectator actually experiences rather than what he or she may be supposed to understand from the performance. Bert O States says:

[SLIDE]:

. . . catharsis is our best word for what takes place at large in the theater. It is precisely a purging: […] [A] play plucks human experience from time and offers an aesthetic completion to a process we know to be endless. (States 49-50)

In other words, the structure and experience of theatre gives a sense of time and place to specific emotions and experiences that are a condition of life – ongoing, endless processes (desire, fear, yearning, love, suffering, etc.) – and gives them a sense of closure; it allows us to temporarily purge ourselves of the pressures of the continuum of life, and these unending things that

characterise our everyday life are, through aesthetic means, temporarily resolved, offering us respite and a sense of freedom from them. On this level, catharsis is different to escapism as it does not offer us a way out of dealing with these issues, but confronts and resolves, offering us a sense of resolution and respite.

Phenomenology and Aesthetics

Moreover, French philosopher, Mikel Dufrenne, says:

[ADVANCE SLIDE]:

The work of art is the perduring structural foundation for the aesthetic object. It has a constant being which is not dependent on being experienced, while the aesthetic object exists only as appearance, that is only as experienced by the spectator . . . As aesthetically perceived, however, the work of art becomes an aesthetic object. (Mikel Dufrenne, 1953, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience)

In simple terms, something on the stage, say, a chair, may well represent a chair. But, whether it is shabby or beautifully ornate, on the semiotic level it will signify something of the opulence or lack thereof, but on the aesthetic level, our experience of its ugliness or its beauty is not something that can be codified or explained by semiotic analysis. Our aesthetic sense, the aesthetic experience, which I think is an issue you have looked at in Critical Theories 1, is not a semiotic but a phenomenological one. Our emotional response to

aesthetics is arguably something quite outside the capabilities of semiotics to explain.

At the risk of reigniting the “what is art?” debate, a work of art, be it a painting or a Greek tragedy, could be said to be the essentialisation of an aspect of human reality, of our truths, hopes, fears, emotions, sufferings, etc. – all those irrational things that make us human and not robots – and this essentialisation gives form, expression, externality and, ultimately, a sense of resolution to those unending sensations. This aesthetic essentialisation, due to the irrationality of its content, will often resist semiotic codification, which is, in some ways, limited to what we can directly signify, but we all know that emotions and experience fall beyond that which it is possible to contain in worlds and signs alone. As such, can catharsis be said to be part of the phenomenal, aesthetic experience rather than the meaning-making, semiotic process?

[ADVANCE SLIDE]:

I will give you a couple of fairly diverse examples of artistic or aesthetic works that seem to challenge immediate and easy semiotic explanation, but that may work on a phenomenological level.

ADVANCE SLIDE: Jaws opening

ADVANCE SLIDE: Sheet music and link to explanation

ADVANCE SLIDE: Jackson Pollock’s Number 8

(How do we experience this? How do we experience its energy and movement? How do we track our intentionality through the picture and how is that journey experienced? Is it emotional?

ADVANCE SLIDE: Some Egyptian hieroglyphics

Clearly these hold semiotic meaning, if we happen to read hieroglyphics, but what if we do not? How do we experience them? We experience a sense of meaning unavailable to us, a sense of something beyond our understanding. How do we experience the aesthetic quality of the carvings? The individual characters? What is the emotional impact of its antiquity, knowing this was made by people who have been dead for thousands of years? Does that add to its sense of mystery?

ADVANCE SLIDE: A scene from Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis.

What about this? What do we get, if anything, from this? I will return to this shortly, but for now I want to return to the subject of tragedy and Catharsis.

Catharsis & anti-structure (Kane)

Hans Lehmann, author of Post Dramatic Theatre, which you will certainly encounter at some point, asked the following questions at a recent lecture here at Royal Holloway:

How does the structure of tragedy relate to the essence of tragedy?

How does, if at all, the tragic experience adhere to tragic structure?

And if we might risk a little conjecture, what was the essence of tragedy in ancient Greece?

Aristotle, in Poetics, famously came up with the essential structure of tragedy, identifying key elements that the plot and characters must adhere to in order to be effective. I won’t go through them in detail, merely highlight a few key elements such as peripetia, a moment of reversal; The hero must exhibit hamartia, a fundamental mistake that precipitates the tragedy, and experience a moment of anagnorisis, or recognition that his or her downfall has been brought about by their own mistakes, and so on…

The result, according to Aristotle, is the experience of catharsis, the purging of emotions (particularly fear and pity).

Lehmann suggests that Aristotle has missed the essence of tragedy in his structural definition. The essence of tragedy for Lehmann lies not in its structure, but in the experience of the event. After all, the inherent contradiction in Aristotle’s definition is that these specific, technical and quantifiable elements lead to the phenomenon, or experience, of catharsis, itself something entirely untechnical and unquantifiable.

Catharsis is something essential, something we experience, not something that carries meaning or has

structure. As such, if we are to examine the essence of tragedy, we must concentrate on the experience, and for this, we cannot do without phenomenology.

Lehmann sought to demonstrate the inadequacy of the Aristotelian model by applying it to Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, which he argues contains the essence of tragedy – it encapsulates the tragic experience – but does not contain the structural or linguistic elements demanded by Aristotle. A semiotic reading of 4.48 does not account for its tremendous power to affect us in a profound way.

[ADVANCE SLIDE]: Recall of opening lines

It continues as follows:

[ADVANCE SLIDE]:

a consolidated consciousness resides in a darkened banqueting hall near the ceiling of a mind whose floor shifts as ten thousand cockroaches when a shaft of light enters as all thoughts unite in an instant of accord body language no longer expellent as the cockroaches comprise a truth which no one ever utters

I had a night in which everything was revealed to me.

How can I speak again?

The play continues with various voices, articulating moments of lucidity with moments of psychosis, moments of despair and moments of dark humour, cold,

factual listing of medications and flights of murderous fantasy, all together tracing the unravelling of a mind and a descent to eventual suicide. One such scene is given as follows:

[ADVANCE SLIDE]:100

9184

8172

6958

4237 38

4221 28

127

Now, whilst a semiotic reading of 4.48 Psychosis is certainly possible and in itself highly rewarding and illuminating, we can see the potential duality in scenes like this one. Within the context of the play we can ask what this scene signifies, or we can ask how do we experience it?

We can interpret it as a common psychiatric technique, which is to count down from 100 in intervals of 7 in order to regain our control over our own mind when it starts to run away from us. But we see that the intervals are arbitrary, and their positioning on the page is erratic. From this, semiotically, we can speculate that this

symbolises the unravelling of a mind and its vain attempts to regain control of itself. But from a phenomenological perspective, how do we convey this feeling of futile desperation to an audience? There are clues here written on the page, just as music is likewise scored on the page, but putting this into practice, capturing the essence of this, achieving a direct and primitive contact with its reality, is something far more challenging for the theatrical practitioner. We can cop-out and merely symbolise, or we can look at how to achieve the intersubjectivity of this experience.

The Practitioner’s Perspective:

So how can we approach theatre, as practitioners, from a phenomenological perspective? Several practitioners can be said to work from the phenomenological level, I will give you just a few:

- Brecht, as has already been discussed, looked for the Verfremdungseffekt, making the familiar seem strange, or the stone stony.

- Artaud and total theatre as an experience, attacking all the senses rather than offering a semiotically decodable piece of “bourgeois” theatre. The Artaudian actor is supposed to be akin to “a moving hieroglyph,” loaded with a sense of primal meaning without actual everyday, rational , decodable meaning.

- Grotowski and the total act – a form of actor training that aims at a state whereby there is no difference between the actor and the action: the movements on

stage capture the essence of truth – they do not signify truth, they are truth. From this principle Grotowski developed his own style of theatre that was devoted to essences, and as such was avant-garde, primitivist, anti-semiotic insofar as it resisted normal decoding and favoured the event as an encounter.

- Jacques Lecoq and Physical theatre – the essence of the self as a lived, embodied being, reconnecting with and relying on impulse, the connection with the pre-reflective self, the functioning rather than the thematized body, through which an actor achieves “presence.”

Now I am not saying that the pure phenomenological approach is the only one to be taken in isolation. States makes it very clear, as I mentioned before, that a combination of the two is important. States uses the example of Jastrow’s duck-rabbit figure to illustrate that we can and should take both approaches. Look at the duck-rabbit figure on your handout for a moment. Concentrate on how it appears to your consciousness. You’ll notice, as numerous philosophers have pointed out, that you can hold it in your consciousness as a rabbit, or you can hold it in your consciousness as a duck, but you can’t consciously perceive both figures at once, although both are there.

When you switch your concentration from the duck to the rabbit, you’re choosing arbitrarily how to view reality. This realization serves to draw our attention to the idea that there isn’t one correct way to see reality, but different interpretations, none more ‘true’ than others.

And so we look for essences, not just of objects and things, but of theatre itself. And if we are to look for the essence of theatre, we can do worse than to look at its (Western) origins in Ancient Greece. Athenian Tragedy took its themes and stories from Mythology, which for the Greeks was a fundamental part of their shared identity. What was seen on the stage were the Gods and Heroes of antiquity, reinterpreted in the light of contemporary events – which is the essence of myth – it’s aliveness, it’s willingness to change and adapt and be reinterpreted in accordance with the shifting context of present circumstances.

But why theatre? Why were these stories not just told?

The theatrical experience of classical Greece was not as we know it today. It was part of a religious ritual in honour of the god Dionysus, god of theatre and wine. The plays were accompanied by sacrifices, the chorus was a highly trained group of performers who would dance and sing and without whom, no theatrical tragedy was conceivable. But why? I would argue that the reason is that the liveness of the event, the essence of theatre, was heightened by these phenomena, by the music and the dancing, and this, contrasted with the deep semiotic and structural meanings of the myth, brought it straight into the now in ways that simple verbal storytelling cannot do. Rather than the gods and heroes existing conceptually through their semiotic signifiers, they existed there in front of you, they are shown as being in the world and of the world, sharing the same space and time as the spectator in a heightened sense of reality.

Naturally the Greeks were too sophisticated to think that the actors on stage were actually the Gods and heroes themselves, but that is not what is important, because their essence was there in the masks animated by the performers in a celebration of the community and its ancestry, its values and its character. This is the essence that cannot be captured by words or signs alone. It is something else, something beyond, something that is experienced viscerally. This is why theatre, of all the art forms, was the centre of civic life. That which binds a community together is not just a shared language or meaning, but also, and fundamentally, shared experience. And no other art form can offer all of this. So yes, we need semiotics in order to interpret meaning, but if we forget the phenomenological aspect, the liveness of true experience, the essence of theatre, which is, let’s face it, the very essence of life itself, then we lose its, and consequently our own, soul.