PHILOSOPHICAL language or, more accurately, the language of philosophers is always difficult to unravel and never more so than with French philosophers, however finely tuned the English translation.

Alan Badiou, one of the most potent social and political analysts of the left, has the advantage of being not only a leading academic philosopher but a practising playwright and actor. He understands the “fragile clarity of the stage.”

Nevertheless his fascinating observations on the nature of theatre, here organised around a series of searching questions from Nicolas Truong, make for demanding but rewarding reading.

For Badiou, theatre is the living embodiment of ideas —creative thought in action — which questions its audiences and reveals the absurdity of that which we learn to respect, forcing us to recognise the “obscenity of the real.”

He sees both right and left attitudes to current theatre damaging, with the former demanding theatre as a museum or an entertainment, conventional even when modernised, and which is dedicated to reinforcing the cliches of “the dominant opinions.”

The latter reacts against what it considers an artificial treatment of reality. The left criticises theatre as spectacle, “a representation for a separated public.” It looks for audience involvement.

Badiou, too, does not want theatre to be purely “spectacle,” designed to be received passively by its audience.

He distinguishes theatre from cinema, where if there is no-one to watch it a film, once made, remains “totally indifferent... to the existence of a public.”

The very immediacy and transience of the true theatre experience “makes appear on stage the alienation of those who do not see that it is the world itself that has lost its way and not bad luck or personal incapacity.”

The conversational tone of this short book lightens the weighty ideas explored and Badiou’s humour also enlivens his discourse.

In illustrating the “politics of theatricality,” he describes the deceased President Mitterrand as reminding him of the traitors and double dealers of Italian opera, while the fidgety, emotional obfuscations of Nikcolas Sarkozy come straight from the vaudeville of Fedeau-type farce.

A book for anyone interested in theatre and its critical role within society today.

Review by Gordon Parsons