What does it mean to have aesthetic experience? Is it something we are all capable of? Or is our capacity for aesthetic pleasure something we develop, like a skill? What do we mean when we declare something ‘beautiful’, or when we dismiss a performance because it is ‘not to our taste’? Is taste something we possess, concerned with our own personal likes and dislikes? Or is taste part of aesthetic experience, something that happens? Indeed, what is aesthetic experience? And what is the place, in theatre and performance, for the aesthetic qua aesthetic? In this thesis I explore and develop the Kantian notion of aesthetic experience by taking three terms central to the Critique of Judgment – taste, beauty, sublime – and considering their value in the experience and analysis of contemporary performance. In exploring these ideas, the thesis centres on a range of works from the early avant-garde, including extended analyses of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896) and Edward Gordon Craig’s Dido and Æneas. The contemporary works central to the thesis are Proto-type Theater’s Virtuoso (working title) (2009), 3rd Person (redux)(2010) and Whisper (2008). The study also looks at contemporary work from Reckless Sleepers, Station House Opera, and Societas Raffaello Sanzio. The primary theoretical framework is drawn from the field of philosophical aesthetics, and, specifically, the works of Immanuel Kant. In the post-Kantian era, the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wendy Steiner, Jean-Luc Marion, Arnold Berleant, and Christian H. Wenzel provide a connection to the world of post-Enlightenment aesthetics and interconnect Kantian philosophy with developments in performance and aesthetics. In aiming to uncover the value of the aesthetic as such, the thesis looks to reflect on taste, beauty, and the sublime in a way that offers a fresh and vital perspective on the experience of performance.

From the establishment of the English Stage Company at The Royal Court Theatre in 1956 through to the late 1960s, the Court was widely viewed as a champion of theatrical freedoms and progressive ideals, playing a decisive role in the abolition of censorship as exercised by the Lord Chamberlain until 1968. Narratives of the ensuing 1968-1975 period tend to recount an era when the Court was out of step with contemporary developments in theatre and blame is frequently placed on intergenerational tensions between the Court's established management and a band of emerging English male playwrights who claim to have been unsupported by the theatre at this time. This study goes against the received scholarly grain concerning these years at the Court, and maps an alternative reading of this narrative. This thesis provides evidence that the Court of the early 1970s experienced a time of significant seed-sowing, that these were years in which the Sloane Square institution experimented with alternative theatre and enthusiastically programmed subaltern and female playwrights, and that this was a move instep with contemporaneous international trends in theatre. By revealing this understanding of events, the thesis contends that the artistic directorship of Oscar Lewenstein (1972-1975) was a direct reaction against an elitist culture at the Court and an institutional habitus which was rooted in and informed by the decline of the British Empire and a related fear of the foreign. This thesis proposes that the subsequent occlusion of this version of events is due in great part to the consistent and ongoing privileging of negative accounts of the period by the emerging young white English male playwrights of the era, over the more positive commentary provided by their subaltern and female counterparts who were empowered under Lewenstein's aegis.

Live performance lacks the durability of art practices such as photography, film and painting, and so definitions of ‘live’ acts have traditionally been formulated in terms of ‘transience’ and ‘disappearance’. In this context the archive and archival documents are often described as the antithesis of performance’s ontology. An archive’s primary function is to preserve material for future, undetermined uses, whereas a live event is temporary and cannot endure as ‘itself’ outside of the temporal-spatial zone it unfolds in before an audience. Yet archival documents are intimately imbricated in the creation of live acts. This can be seen in all performance practices, from written plays in the dramatic theatre, to the assemblage of materials used in devised performance, to the ways sites are framed as sources of historical knowledge in performance reenactments. By examining the role documents play in performance practice I argue that archival materials have the potential to act as the genesis for live acts. The archive’s generative function makes performance a potential method of historical research, where documents can help engender an interactive reciprocity between spectators and the past. The archival mode of performance practice I advocate in this thesis requires spectators to become participants inside the performance sphere, just as historians participate in the writing of historical discourses in the archive. There are several practice-as-research components to my project. These include the Audience as Document events and two workshops. The primary practice-as-research event is a participatory site-specific performance Voices from the Village. The Olympic Village in Stratford, East London, is framed as a type of authoritative historical document that works as a meta-narrative of London’s past. The Olympic Legacy anchors the memories of East London’s residents to a time they are encouraged to re-live in their everyday lives. At the centre of contemporary urban regeneration projects is a firm conviction that the future can be built in the here-andnow. Participants are guided through the Village and by two tour guides who attempt to inculcate them into the Legacy Project – a new type of citizenry based upon the neoliberal hegemony. In the third part participants explore what would happen if the neighbouring Hackney Wick estate was ‘regenerated’ in the future. My practice 4 examines how documents in performance can act as interlocutors between a site’s past(s) and a participant’s ‘live’ experience. The enduring form of digital documents creates a manifold afterlife for performance on the Web, which is the home of an evolving network of people who connect to each other through their re-interpretation of the Olympic Legacy. I am arguing that the life of a performance does not end over a fixed duration, but is instead a dialogic process with a multitude of access points.

The Royal Court Theatre has forged its reputation on its ability to source and produce some of the most important new plays of the last sixty years. Its long-standing identity as a ‘writers’ theatre’ has cemented the Court’s allure to playwrights from across the world. Indeed, it is due to the theatre’s, at times, contentious history and continuous dedication to the playwright that the Court has also received substantial academic attention, which has resulted in extensive scholarship and interrogation of the theatre’s work. However, very little consideration has been given to the Royal Court Young Peoples’ Theatre and it is through engagement with this initiative and its development into the Young Writers’ Programme that this thesis provides a long-overdue assessment of this overlooked strand of the Court’s work. This thesis presents an original account of the Royal Court’s history from the perspective of its work with young people and playwrights. Primary sources of material for this thesis are shared between information gathered from the archive of the Royal Court, housed within the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collections at Blythe House, and interviews conducted by the author with key figures from this part of the Royal Court Theatre’s work. This material is located alongside the changing contexts of education, politics, the Royal Court and British theatre more widely, between 1966 and 2007, and looks to assess how each of these areas came to inform and influence the policy of the Young Peoples’ Theatre (YPT). The thesis proposes that the YPT adopted an unusual and alternative approach to working with young people that was at times both radical in its practice and fiercely political. The nature of its work often saw the Scheme ostracised from both a growing theatre-in-education movement and the Royal Court itself, where its survival is often credited to the tenacity of certain individuals. Indeed, the thesis posits that the YPT, despite its breadth of activity, was most welcomed within the theatre’s eco-system during the periods in its history when it focused its policy on young writers and therefore fed into the Court’s fundamental identity as a writers’ theatre.