Venue: Culturgest, Rua Arco do Cego, Piso 1, 1000-300 Lisbon, Portugal

Tickets: Free, tickets available at the venue on the day from 6.00pm

“How can theatre block the flow of a river in a steep valley, thereby storing all the water in a reservoir, which can then be used for hydro-electricity or irrigation?” To which the sensible answer is: You want a dam for that, not theatre.
Andrew Haydon, British theatre critic, www.postcardsfromthegods.blogspot.com

Should theatre-makers, organisations and arts funding bodies be more realistic about what the artform can and cannot achieve? Theatre has certainly set itself some daunting tasks over the course of history. From ancient Greece to German Romanticism, theatre was thought to play a crucial civic role in binding communities together. Modern playwrights like Brecht or Ibsen later sought to reflect, criticise and alter prevailing ideas and states of affairs. And on the British stage in recent years, theatre-makers have attempted to address corporate greed, racism, climate change and school bullying. Is this ambitious approach something to be emulated in Portugal and elsewhere? Should we all adopt the unfaltering belief of British writers and directors that theatre ‘about’ such issues can make a difference? By failing to do so, are we letting down our fellow citizens? Or is this strand of theatre just a naïve repository of good intentions that changes nothing in the real world? Should playwrights with social or political agendas pursue them on their own time rather than inflicting them on theatre audiences?

Some are wary of theatre that puts its intellectual content before its artistic form, regarding it as theatrically impure, especially when that content is a political message, which can sometimes reduce theatre to crude agitprop. Moreover, most political theatre is predictably left-wing or liberal, reaffirming rather than challenging the views of the typical theatre audience. Isn’t the role of theatre to approach ideas from a different perspective, and encourage people to see things afresh? Sometimes it is left to directors’ notes, press releases and reviews to make explicit what has been left implicit in the show itself. But who decides what a play is or isn’t ‘about’? And is it any more than wishful thinking to try to predict the political effects of theatre-making? Self-reflexivity seems like a sure recipe to avoid politics, but shouldn’t theatre change itself in order to change the world? Or is it possible, following George Costanza’s TV pitch in Seinfeld, to imagine a show about nothing?