theatre of ideas

Tomorrow night sees part one of BBC2's climate-change thriller Burn Up. Since this is a blog about theatre and climate change, it seems timely to link to Denis Dutton's 1990 essay on the theatre of ideas. Dutton leaves the 'theatre of entertainment' to one side and examines a theatre of ideas that 'calls into question current human social arrangements'. He finds a rich tension in this form between the 'complexity of lived experience' that a good play presents and 'something that can be formulated in terms of generalization'. (Antigone would be a good example.) A thriller about climate change would also be looking to tick both boxes. We'll see.