In an interview in 1999, the British visual artist and theatre director Tim Etchells, co-founder of Forced Entertainment, gave the following answer when asked about his ‘preoccupations as a director’:

As a director, Etchells is by no means a practitioner of a psychology-based realism, invested in the representation of fully constituted literary ‘selves’ – what he demarcates here as a ‘traditional theatre’ based around ‘great roles’. Describing his working method with Forced Entertainment, he says simply, ‘I work with action, text, video, music, set – with more or less anything that can be placed in a performance arena’, looking for ‘a combination of things that somehow might constitute an event’.Footnote ² Yet the model of theatre practice that Etchells constructs in his response is based in the idea of theatre as a kind of laboratory of the self: a place where performers may engage ‘other possibilities’ of themselves and where spectators may demand such demonstrations take place – perhaps, Etchells suggests, as a means of acknowledging what he calls ‘the fictional side of ourselves’. Theatre, according to Etchells, may be a place where we – performers and spectators alike – go not just to find ourselves but to find our selves.

Etchells's self-professed preoccupation with selfhood is reflective of a much larger preoccupation that has persisted at least since Stanislavski, one that in many ways cuts across the theatrical methodologies, styles and philosophies of the twentieth century. It is a preoccupation with the idea that theatre must have some entanglement with demonstrations of a constitutive self – an engagement that according to Peggy Phelan is central to the theatrical event: ‘Since Stanislavski . . . the actor achieves presence through performing as if another’.Footnote ³ We go to the theatre expecting the actor to create for us ‘a believable “self,” one that is and is not the actor's “own” self’, and we reward and take pleasure in that act: we may even mark that act as the beginning and end of theatre.Footnote ⁴ Phelan is speaking of a tradition derived from Stanislavski's method and its descendants – what Etchells calls ‘traditional theatre’ – but Philip Auslander argues that the concepts at play in Stanislavski's assumptions on self are writ across a much broader history of theatrical approaches and styles, from Stanislavski to Brecht to Grotowski. These approaches synecdochize an array of techniques grounded variously in the psychological, the social or the actor's physical body – and each, for Auslander, depends on a belief in ‘the actor's self as the logos of performance’.Footnote ⁵ All of these approaches, Auslander states, ‘assume that the actor's self precedes and grounds her performance and that it is the presence of this self in performance that provides the audience with access to human truths’.Footnote ⁶

For Auslander, this assumption becomes the grounds for a substantial critique of the theatre's relationship with questions of the self. Most theories of performance, he argues, essentially render the actor as a kind of writing device, performance as a kind of writing and some idea of self as that which is being written; thus they are subject to the same immanent critique that all writing has undergone since deconstruction wherein ‘there is no transcendent logos, no order of meaning which grounds the activity of signification, no presence behind the sign lending it authority’.Footnote ⁷ The implications of Auslander's deconstruction are significant, for they render broad swathes of twentieth-century theatrical tradition inert. Almost regardless of how it is approached, the theatre in Auslander's reading is structurally bound to a reactionary metaphysical agenda: it can only ever reconfirm our suspicions of a constitutive self and can never participate in a radical critique of the same. Etchells's remarks seem easily collapsed under this critique. To hypothesize performance as the moment of ‘playing with possible other versions’ of yourself seems clearly to demand a constitutive selfhood as that which is ultimately revised and re-versioned. And yet Etchells's comments may in fact open the door to a model of performance where there is only ever the refashioning and never the original self that is refashioned. Etchells offers only a few brief thoughts in his interview response, but the vision that he sketches intersects with a larger philosophy of performance and selfhood developed by Friedrich Nietzsche that bears significantly on issues of theatre and the mediation of identity but is often overlooked in contemporary discussions. In a number of his works, Nietzsche deals directly with concepts of the actor and theatrical performance in ways that can help refigure the crisis of theatre and selfhood by defending the suggestion of a seemingly unitary self as a crucial aspect of the theatre's critique of the same. Like Auslander, Nietzsche begins from a place of scepticism towards both the firmly constituted self and the actor as vehicle of that self's expression, but he ultimately resolves in the direction of Etchells's model, figuring theatre as a kind of laboratory of the malleable self. By revisiting the details of Nietzsche's approach, we may prove able to build a revised model of the theatrical event that offers not a reactionary confirmation of the constitutive self but a vital moment of that fiction's exposure, a means by which to render the theatre – ‘traditional’ and otherwise – epistemologically productive once again.

Auslander and the contemporary critique of theatre and self

The scope of Auslander's criticisms in his short essay ‘“Just Be Your Self”: Logocentrism and Difference in Performance Theory’ is purposefully broad, the selection of Stanislavski, Brecht and Grotowski meant to highlight the extent of the problem he explores. What Auslander means to point out is a shared epistemic system: the broad history of twentieth-century performance techniques depends on the concept of a stable locus of selfhood that exists somewhere in the moment of theatrical performance. For Stanislavski, a constitutive self must pre-exist performance, for it is from that original self – in fact, from the meeting of the original self and the performed self – that the performance is drawn. Stanislavski ‘insists on the need for logic, coherence, and unity – the “unbroken line” – in acting’, Auslander writes. ‘There is no question but that the presence of the actor's self as the basis of performance is for him the source of truth in acting’.Footnote ⁸ Less obviously, Brecht depends on an original self that exists outside the performance. The Brechtian actor must, as Roland Barthes has observed, ‘present the very knowledge of the play's meaning’ as she ‘guides meaning toward its ideality’.Footnote ⁹ She must project to the audience her own self in a future state of dialectical resolution, modelling the perspectives of one who has transcended and can look back on current social conditions. Auslander concludes that ‘the persona that the Brechtian actor presents alongside of the character that she portrays is a fictional creation’ – a position that brings Brecht much closer to Stanislavski than is generally assumed.Footnote ¹⁰ For Grotowski, the self remains grounded in the performance not through fictional characters but through the ever-present body, which retains its status as constitutive and self-contained. Grotowski, Auslander writes, ‘privileges the self over the role in that the role is primarily a tool for self-exposure’, a perspective that is anchored in Grotowski's belief that a ‘physical language’ of the body-on-stage could prove capable of ‘becoming transparent and making psychic impulses directly visible to an audience’.Footnote ¹¹ Grotowski thus ‘grounds self-presence in physical presence, a seemingly irrefutably originary presence’.Footnote ¹² Again, performance is dependent on a stable locus of the self. In fact, in the whole history of Western performance Auslander claims that he can find only one example of a performance technique that disassumes some notion of a constitutive identity. And it is not a performance at all but a party trick: Diderot's description in Paradoxe sur le comédien of David Garrick's pastime of presenting his fellow party-goers with a different expressive face at each opening of a pair of double doors – no notion of a prefabricated selfhood required.

For Auslander, the problem with assuming some display of selfhood to form a part of the theatrical event is that it indicates a self-contradictory and untenable epistemological strategy. Auslander likens the idea of a performer manifesting a stable locus of self to the idea that writing might just as easily manifest a stable locus of meaning: it is a line of thought that believes that some stable referent can exist beyond the means of its articulation and, conversely, that the act of articulation can consistently and unproblematically communicate that independent referent. ‘In discussion, we often treat acting as philosophers treat language – as a transparent medium which provides access to truth, logos, or a grounding concept which functions as logos within a particular production’, he writes.Footnote ¹³ As in any deconstructive move, the grounds for this assumption's collapse are embedded in the terms of its own expression. Stanislavski's advice, for example, that the actor search her own memories for correlatives to character experience already meets its own moment of theatrical articulation when he acknowledges that the actor must also reshape her memories to be ‘more interesting and suited to the theatre than the actual truth’.Footnote ¹⁴ As Auslander writes, ‘Stanislavski states that the actor's self is the basis of performance, but his own working out of this idea leads him to posit that the self is produced by the process of acting’ and that ‘the self does not exist independently of the processes by which it is revealed to itself and others’.Footnote ¹⁵ Brecht's approach suffers the same fate in the moment where the Brechtian actor must simulate a cohered self to look back upon the character being presented. The Brechtian actor's self, which looks askance at the character during the performance, is as much a fiction as the Stanislavskian actor's self, which merges with the character prior to the performance. The Brechtian actor, Auslander writes, ‘must endow another fictional persona with the authority of full presence, a theoretical movement which makes Brecht's performance theory subject to the same deconstructive critique of presence as Stanislavski's’.Footnote ¹⁶ The self of the Grotowskian actor proves equally fictitious. The actor's visible body is no more unproblematically unified than the actor's invisible self, and yet it is on this fiction of unity that Grotowski's method depends. ‘Because it is organized’, Auslander writes, ‘the body is not an organic, undifferentiated presence. The internal division of the body means that we are “several” to begin with . . . and permits confusion between self and other, mind and body’.Footnote ¹⁷ The tangible presence of the actor's body onstage, in other words, is as much a creation of the moment of performance as any Stanislavskian character.

At this point, we might add to Auslander's catalogue Etchells's own approach, where in the moment of assuming other selves the self acknowledges its limits and its possible multiplicities – but also asserts its initial existence. And yet, Etchells's theatrical practice complicates any easy critique along such lines, as the seemingly originary self that explores its own multiplicity in his work frequently finds itself as problematized as the performed selves it assumes. Such is the case in Speak Bitterness, one of Forced Entertainment's signature works. From behind a long table covered in pages of text, actors take turns making ‘confessions’ read from the papers around them. Always phrased in the first person plural, the confessions range from the horrendous (‘We committed genocide’) to the humourous (‘We listened to “Stairway to Heaven” thirteen times in a row’) with no discernible pattern between them.Footnote ¹⁸ After only a few minutes of performance, it becomes clear that no person could truly commit the crimes to which the actors confess: there is no regard to internal logic among the statements (they seem randomly culled from the papers on the table) and the offences never cohere towards identifiable fictional selves. Rather, the actors seem to be staging characters who constitute themselves in the act of confession, using it as a play for attention and competing for ever greater heights of recognition or revulsion. Yet the actors themselves seem engaged in the selfsame game, such that it becomes difficult to draw a line between the ‘real’ self of the actor and the ‘fictional’ self he or she means to embody. In a performance where there is no way to draw a line between the circumstances under which the characters are making false confessions and those under which the actors are making the exact same false confessions, it becomes difficult to land on any stable locus of the self. Speak Bitterness can be read as a statement on the theatre's ability to blur the line between a seemingly constitutive self and a performed self – a contemporary demonstration of what Nietzsche calls in The Gay Science ‘the problem of the actor’.Footnote ¹⁹ For Nietzsche, as for Etchells, the actor is always a problematic flag bearer for the constitutive self, always as capable of unsettling notions of selfhood as of confirming them. And it is from the grounds of this problem that Nietzsche builds a philosophy of theatre and selfhood that can be seen to undergird and, more importantly, to explicate Etchells's methods, offering to today's theorists and practitioners a vision of the theatrical event far more radical than anything Auslander's critique would seem to allow.

Nietzsche's concepts of the theatre, the body and the self

Perhaps the most important premise in Nietzsche's contemplation of theatre and self is simply that the actor, from the standpoint of creating a coherent philosophy of selfhood, is an epistemological problem. ‘The problem of the actor has troubled me for a very long time’, Nietzsche writes in section 361 of The Gay Science.Footnote ²⁰ He would devote seven sections across the five books of The Gay Science to exploring the problem of the actor, and he would touch on these themes repeatedly throughout his career. Much of Nietzsche's philosophy would seem to predispose him in favor of the actor – from his insistence that the body is the only valid means of assessing truth to his explorations of the manifold ways in which we assume and disassume roles to construct our sensation of inner being. Yet ultimately Nietzsche realized that the actor served as a kind of boundary on what the self could be in a system of knowledge based around the body and its actions. Thus any attempt to understand what Nietzsche means by ‘the problem of the actor’ must begin with the body, where Nietzsche's epistemology itself begins. ‘Once upon a time’, he writes in ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, ‘there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history”’.Footnote ²¹ This tale, told at the beginning of one of Nietzsche's first forays into epistemology, renders knowledge as such an invention. What is real, what pre-dates and allows for its invention, is the existence of the creatures who invent it – that is, the existence of their bodies. For Nietzsche, the body lives on both sides of knowledge. On the one hand, we know things intellectually because our bodies know them physically. This is not a matter of the kind of uncritically self-coherent body that Auslander ascribes to Grotowski. The Nietzschean body is a body of parts: an assemblage of sensations, stimulations and processes that describe a series of shifting and often incohesive impulses and reactions, each tied separately and variously to elements of truth recognition and truth creation.Footnote ²² No philosopher has been more interested, for instance, in the multitudinous varieties of smell or taste as elements of a proof statement: ideas themselves are recognized and made real by our physical sensory functions. Likewise, truth and falsity reverberate for Nietzsche in the reactions of the variegated body. Tremors, headaches, nausea – these were the realities of Nietzsche's chronically ill existence and were equally for him the realities of knowledge itself. Few philosophers have so unequivocally made sick a synonym for false and healthy a synonym for true, the aligned or disaligned functioning of the disaggregated body becoming a kind of proxy for intellectual self-consistency.Footnote ²³

At the same time that our bodies inform our knowledge, though, so too for Nietzsche must our knowledge inform our bodies. As he writes in The Gay Science, his philosophy is meant for those who ‘want to become who we are – human beings who . . . give themselves laws, who create themselves’.Footnote ²⁴ For Nietzsche, to understand is to change – to change not just what we think but, more importantly, what we do, or, more precisely, what our bodies do. Knowledge cannot become real unless it is accepted and transmitted through the body, unless it allows us to re-create ourselves. ‘What are these leaps and flights of thought to me?’ Nietzsche has the body say in Thus Spake Zarathustra. ‘A detour to my end.’Footnote ²⁵ Only that knowledge that can make an inpact on the body is even to be counted as such: everything else is just the irrelevant invention of ‘clever beasts’. It is no surprise, then, that in formulating a concept of the self, Nietzsche sees no distinction between doer and deed. His most famous passage in this regard is from On the Genealogy of Morality:

The point here is not the primacy of action over actor but the irrelevance of the question. The body is nothing more than the actions it performs and the varied and ongoing processes that constitute its functioning. We begin in our bodies and end in our bodies – and thus so too must anything that we have the right to call knowledge and anything we have a right to call our ‘selves’.Footnote ²⁷ For Nietzsche, a question of the body is always a question of action, for bodies exist in time. Bodies do. Our selves, such as they are, must also do. They must constitute themselves in action, which is to say they must not constitute themselves as stable at all. There is no room for a stable locus of selfhood in Nietzsche's epistemology: there is nowhere for it to rest.

Nietzsche's problematization of the actor

All of this seems to say that the actor should not be a problem for Nietzsche. Indeed, Nietzsche seems almost poised to deliver a theory of the actor far more attuned to the impossibilities of the constitutive self than those of Stanislavski, Brecht or Grotowski. And Nietzsche does deliver such a theory – to a point. He posits in section 361 of The Gay Science that ‘it is only’ with the concept of the actor in mind that one can approach the concept of the artist, who for Nietzsche is (almost) the model of the self-creating self, of the self properly conceived.Footnote ²⁸ As he writes in Nietzsche contra Wagner, ‘Is this not precisely what we are again coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit . . .? Are we not . . . adorers of forms, of tones, of words? And therefore – artists?’Footnote ²⁹ If the actor for Nietzsche is the best way to understand the artist, then the actor may also be the only way to conceive of the self. The actor's qualities, Nietzsche explains, are those which he himself would seem to applaud: ‘Falseness with a good conscience; the delight in pretence erupting as a power that pushes aside, floods, and at times extinguishes one's so-called “character”; the inner longing for a role and mask, for an appearance’.Footnote ³⁰ Here, the actor all but is the Nietzschean self – and this is precisely the problem. For what are to Nietzsche the actor's seemingly admirable qualities can also easily veer into the undoing of everything Nietzsche advocates: the actor is a self-negating proposition, a walking immanent critique. Unchecked, the logical extremes of the actor's art seem to represent the actual negation of that art. In the actor Nietzsche sees what Alexander Nehamas ultimately comes to see in Nietzsche's philosophy itself, a seemingly insurmountable paradox of a selfhood based in nothing – what Nehamas calls ‘the problem of explaining how a self that truly must be created and that does not in any way appear to exist can be considered that which an individual is’.Footnote ³¹

The problem of the actor is essentially this: if she is too good at what she does or if she is too bad at it, she ceases to be an actor altogether. The truly great actor runs the risk of becoming nothing, of becoming only the changing between her roles.Footnote ³² It is not just that she lacks a constitutive selfhood, as the actor must in Nietzsche's vision, but that she lacks even that which is mistaken for selfhood: she lacks even the flash that is taken for lightning, so busy is she changing into something else. She can never truly become, she can only ever be different. For the great actor, there is only directionless shifting, a world in which ‘everyone experiments with himself, improvises, experiments again’.Footnote ³³ The great actor, in other words, has no will: a concept that for Nietzsche survives the collapse of the constitutive self. To fold the self into the disaggregated body and the disaggregated body into its constituent actions is still to leave open the possibility of at least a partial, contingent reconstruction of self through the avenue of action. One can literally will oneself into being in Nietzsche's philosophy, engaging in actions that demand coherence or alignment among one's other actions – contingent as that coherence may be. Willing oneself into being and then into still greater states of being is what Nietzsche's philosophy means to celebrate and enable: hence his claims that he writes for those who want to ‘create themselves’.Footnote ³⁴ Selfhood is not given in Nietzsche's philosophy, but its temporary (and temporal) approximation can nonetheless be claimed, with no damage done to the intellectual foundations of the non-constitutive self.Footnote ³⁵ The problem is that this avenue is closed to the great actor, however much she may model the characteristics of the Nietzschean ‘self’ in other ways. The great actor has at best only a copy of a will, that of whomever she inhabits. She can have no true will to overcome herself, for ‘herself’ is always changing – and thus the will she is copying is always changing. She is change without direction, without progress. According to Nietzsche, we must always become ourselves and then become ourselves again. The great actor is only the again, never the becoming. ‘The actor has spirit but little conscience of the spirit’, Nietzsche writes in Zarathustra. ‘Tomorrow he has a new faith, and the day after tomorrow a newer faith.’Footnote ³⁶

Even worse, however, is the bad actor.Footnote ³⁷ If the great actor becomes change itself, the bad actor becomes permanence. Like any actor, she performs a role not of her own willing. But the role itself never changes: the bad actor (because she is a bad actor) is never able to inhabit anything new; she cannot become each new role as the good actor does. Regardless of the part she is assigned, she offers the same tired performance. She does only the same sets of unwilled actions again and again – they become not even actions but poses not born of any particular circumstance. They have lost all context; they belong to nobody at all, not even to herself. They are a ‘whole hocus-pocus of gestures’, as Nietzsche calls them, a collection of ‘many dramatic attitudes’.Footnote ³⁸ All that is left to the bad actor, in other words, is mimicry – a copy of an action, not an action itself. ‘Effects, nothing more’, Nietzsche says. ‘Espressivo at any price’.Footnote ³⁹ The bad actor is still in the realm of Nietzsche's corporeal epistemology. She is all deed and no doer. But she has not even the copy of a will, as the good actor does. She in essence does not even have a body, only a copy of a body – her body belongs neither to herself nor to the figures she inhabits. Thus in the two versions of the actor we see for Nietzsche the peril of a corporeal epistemology and the threat of intellectual stasis that a world without at least a partially redeemable concept of self might bring us – a world like the one that Auslander describes. The actor is ultimately all of us in Nietzsche's schema: act too well or act too poorly, he warns, and we can lose any hope of self-overcoming, trapped instead in constant changing or in not changing at all. In a world of actors, Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, ‘the strength to build is now paralyzed’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Nietzsche's dramatist and the solution to the actor

There is, for Nietzsche, a path between the two extremes described here and a means of rescuing the self-overcoming that is his philosophy's purpose. But it is critical for Nietzsche that his ultimate model of a theatrically embodied knowledge be more fully conceived than the treatment of actors alone will allow. It is the actor in the larger context of the theatrical event – the actor harnessed to a character and a story – that may prove restorative. For Nietzsche, the solution to the problem of the actor lies in the work of the dramatist, an idea that is spelled out most explicitly in The Gay Science, section 78, entitled ‘What We Should Be Grateful For’ – that is, what we should be grateful for in the theatre.Footnote ⁴¹ Here, Nietzsche explains the essential ability of narrative drama to present moments of self-recognition that can model and guide our understanding of the process of dynamic self-construction at the heart of his philosophy:

The twin recognitions that Nietzsche outlines here are critically important to his project. The theatre is used to ‘simplify’ and ‘transfigure’, to move us beyond our own ‘foreground’ so that we may ‘get over certain lowly details in ourselves’. Theatrical storytelling disrupts the totalizing, all-consuming narrative of selfhood that we impose on ourselves – it forces us to acknowledge the imperfections and inconsistencies of the myth of a constitutive self that we live inside, and at the same time it models for us another vision of the constitutive self that is ‘simplified’, that is ‘hidden’ behind the totalizing one, and that is ‘transfigured’ beyond the lowly details of real life. In other words, a deliberately false, literary vision of the self. The theatre – even and especially the theatre of character and story, what Etchells calls ‘traditional theatre’ – offers a vision of the self that acknowledges the self as a myth even as it insists on the usefulness of that myth: the self is modelled as a fiction that can only be partially and imperfectly constituted but that we should will ourselves into constituting nonetheless, partially and imperfectly. Theatre teaches us ‘the art of regarding oneself as a hero’, rendering the self as a fiction that we must aim to create. It is, according to many commentators, the necessary move in Nietzsche. Stanley Corngold concludes that the self in Nietzsche is a fiction but that it ‘is not a simple fiction, it is not a vacuous fiction, and it is not urgently in need of disabusing’.Footnote ⁴³ It is, in other words, a necessary fiction. In Nehamas's words, Nietzsche asks us to aim at ‘the perfect unity and freedom that are primarily possessed by perfect literary characters’ – to ‘become both a literary character who . . . really exists and also that character's very author’.Footnote ⁴⁴ He asks us, in other words, to think of ourselves ultimately as the actor who is onstage and in character, creating a coherent self in the moment of performance.

Thus it is in drama that we find some resolution to the problem of the actor. Nietzsche's criticism is almost always of the actor outside the theatre: she who lives as an actor. Nietzsche does not criticize actors immersed in narrative drama but rather the dramatists who fail in guiding them – Euripides, Wagner, sometimes Shakespeare.Footnote ⁴⁵ Immersed in a constitutive dramatic self and guided by a skilful dramatic hand that Nietzsche does not abjure (Goethe, perhaps), the actor seems no problem at all to Nietzsche. Her being seems guarded against disappearance and stagnation, held up as a model for others to assess their own selves to overcome. In fact, the ‘problem of the actor’ becomes in a properly structured theatrical context an asset of the drama. The fictive nature of the self presented onstage is made all the more apparent by the actor's embodiment. Nietzsche speaks of the characters onstage as literary characters: ‘simplified’ and ‘transfigured’, offering a ‘pure and finished image’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The fiction of their finished state is underscored by the actor's performance: the finished self presented by a figure who has no self. The actor, confined and directed within the boundaries of narrative drama, becomes the very model of the Nietzschean reconstitution of self: the figure devoid of a constitutive selfhood acting so as to create the fiction of a constitutive self. Outside her specific dramatic role, the actor is a warning against the perils of action without will. Inside a dramatic role, the actor is the figure who might lead us to understand the ways in which we may overcome ourselves.

Nietzsche's contribution to contemporary questions of theatre and self

Ultimately, for Nietzsche, fictions of the constitutive self are a central part of the appeal of the theatrical event, yet that need not reduce theatrical performance to a simple recapitulation of unproblematized selfhood, as in Auslander. The theatre for Nietzsche becomes not unlike Tobin Nellhaus's theorizations on the relationship of theatre and self. Nellhaus reads the theatrical event as fundamentally concerned with ‘the constitution and exercise of agency’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The seeming connection between theatrical practice and questions of subjecthood is merely for Nellhaus a particular instance of theatre's more basic role in modelling personal agency, one premised on the historically specific idea that subjectivity ‘is what agency is’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Agency may be founded in assumptions of a constitutive selfhood, but, as Nietzsche has shown, it need not necessarily be so: agency, via the will, can survive the collapse of the self and transcend the disaggregation of the body. Thus the theatre may just as easily model a vision of agency derived from non-constitutive bodily action, as in Nietzsche's descriptions, as it might model an agency derived from the fully formed self. In fact, in Suzanne M. Jaeger's response to some of Auslander's critiques, the theatre proves itself always better suited to a Nietzschean model than it is to the constitutive one. Jaeger builds from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theories of bodily perception to a vision wherein ‘the object [serves] as the motivation for the unity of perceptual experience’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Applied to the theatre as Nietzsche describes it, the actor-as-character becomes the motivation for a partial reconciliation of the diverse elements of a collapsed selfhood. What Nietzsche calls ‘the art of putting oneself on stage before oneself’ can be figured as the art of motivating a partial reconstitution of the self: the actor as perceptual object instigates viewers to see the self as a literary whole – as a discrete character but one that can be rewritten, the first step towards Nietzsche's necessary project of self-overcoming.

This model of the theatrical experience helps to answer one of the lingering questions of Auslander's critique – whether a theatrical practice that foregrounds the contingency of self is even possible, beyond the David Garrick party trick that Diderot describes. As Auslander writes, ‘Perhaps the actor can deconstruct her own work only to a limited extent within that work . . . Whether or not the person who inevitably records the play of difference in art can also point it out is an open question’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nietzsche's answer to whether the theatre artist can (or should) self-consciously foreground the ‘play of difference’ seems to be a qualified ‘no’: the drama of the contingent self can be embedded in the structure of theatrical performance already; to try to foreground that drama further could only disrupt what is already an effective demonstration of the principles Auslander means to convey. The actor for Nietzsche is always by definition the gesturer of Diderot's description, presenting actions that precede rather than derive from the possibility of a fully formed selfhood. But that gesturer for Nietzsche must live inside a performance, not simply behind a pair of opened and reopened double doors. She must embody a character and in so doing draw a contrast between the rounded selfhood of the literary creation and the unwilled gesturing of the performance. The actor as actor calls out the fiction of the character as character: the actor calls out the necessary but temporary fiction of the self. The theatre becomes its own vehicle for conveying Auslander's critique.

The model that Etchells provides may thus be a way of seeing Nietzsche's theatre in action. In the full text of the interview, Etchells expands on the necessary role of revealing theatrical illusion in the process of performance, even in something so simple as when characters die onstage but the ‘actors continue breathing’:

Etchells seems to point again towards the idea of an originary self – towards ‘what is real’ – but his full picture of the theatrical process belies this view. For that which is ‘real’ in Etchells's description is also capable of being remodelled and revised: the theatre for him is ‘a way of measuring yourself against other possibilities of yourself’, an acknowledgement of that reality's contingency and thus constructedness. Etchells posits a model of the theatrical event in which we the spectators take delight in other selves – selves that, as ‘other possibilities of yourself’, seem to have the same degree of constitutive reality as the selves we think we already possess. Yet they are also acknowledged as ‘a fiction’, that which is ‘pretended’. Such is essentially the condition of Speak Bitterness, where the means by which the fictional characters construct themselves and the means by which the actors reveal ‘themselves’ are one and the same even as we know that these two figures must be distinct. Just as the actor's process of revealing himself or herself lends a kind of reality to that of the characters we assume they portray, so too does the constitution of fictional selves that is taking place before us work backwards to destabilize what we think we can know of the actor's ‘self’. What Etchells describes in his interview statements and what he achieves in a work like Speak Bitterness is a kind of collapse between the real and the fictional, a means by which the initial assumed reality of the fiction ultimately opens up the realm of ‘reality’ to questions of fictionhood.

For Etchells, all of this is embedded in the process of theatrical performance itself more than it is the product of a particular production. Etchells describes a work like Speak Bitterness as an exploration in extremis of the basic dynamics of the theatrical event: ‘We don't hate theatre’, he says of his company. ‘We love its codes and conventions . . . Every time we set out to break theatre up, we are trying to find a way to put it together again that really allows it to fly’.Footnote ⁵² Etchells goes so far as to see the same principles at work in what he calls ‘traditional theatre’ as in the event-based performances of his own company, a radical alignment between the traditional and the experimental. Etchells's view implicitly lines up with Nellhaus's description of performance strategies, which separate modes of theatrical performance based on the tactics they apply but read the basic import of the theatrical event, no matter how it is conceived, as a modelling of agency. ‘Performance strategies involve an overarching goal’, Nellhaus writes, but they may involve ‘an umbrella strategy under which various substrategies are possible’.Footnote ⁵³ Those substrategies, Nellhaus contends, can look very different onstage and yet, in the end, ‘assume essentially the same concept of agency’.Footnote ⁵⁴ And, for Etchells, that agency always looks something like the view of agency and selfhood that Nietzsche describes.

Perhaps, in this view, Auslander has simply taken the purposes of Stanislavski, Brecht, and Grotowski too seriously: perhaps the degree to which they are necessarily bound to failure is part of the point. As Auslander demonstrates, neither Stanislavski nor Brecht nor Grotowski ever perfectly model an uncollapsed self, much as they purport to. They are always subject to and secretly exemplary of Nietzsche's ‘problem of the actor’. Yet for Nietzsche, and it seems for Etchells, the purpose of the theatrical event itself is to render a meeting between the ‘problem of the actor’ and the fiction of the self: it is in the theatrical event that they are at last resolved to one another, the collapsed self of the actor demonstrative of both the necessity and the impossibility of the self that the drama presents. It is a reading of the theatrical event that is, contra Auslander, perhaps best seen as analogous to Phelan's famous definition that ‘performance's being . . . becomes itself through disappearance’.Footnote ⁵⁵ In a similar vein, we might read a resolution to Auslander's critique as equally premised on a generative paradox, one that renders even the most traditional theatrical form far more radical than Auslander is willing to admit. Perhaps we may read Nietzsche to say that the theatre's true engagement with the fictions of the self is constituted at the moment of their failure.