Theatrical Duality in Milo Rau’s Five Easy Pieces
Theatre has always been fascinated with the relation between the make-believe world onstage and the reality of everyday life. According to Erving Goffman, when in a theatre, performers and audience agree to assume the make-believe world onstage and ignore out-of-frame activities that do not belong to this world. It implies a double awareness on the audience’s side that many scholars have addressed. In an eighteenth-century essay on ‘illusion’, Marmontel points out that theatre spectators are simultaneously seeing a fictional story and a real event (95). This is echoed by Pavis who names it ‘the double game of illusion’, in which theatrical illusion and reality or ‘disillusion’ can never stand alone but appear ‘always as a pair’ (178). Walton describes the experience of theatre going as between two poles: one distanced from the represented world and the other immersed in it (273). His observation reveals that this duality is not a dichotomic relation, but rather a continuum betwee...