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This article examines the work of the Situationists and their leading member, Guy Debord, as it relates to theatre history and the history of the manifesto. The Situationists privileged the writing of manifestos over the production of art works in order to avoid the fate of the historical avant-garde, whose provocative art had been co-opted by the cultural establishment. Despite this pro-manifesto and anti-art stance, the Situationists drew on the theatre, envisioning the construction of theatrical ‘situations’ influenced by the emerging New York happening as well as modern theatre artists such as Brecht and Artaud. This theatrical inheritance prompted a recent theatrical representation of their activities based on Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces. What this theatrical rendering demonstrated, however, is that the theatricality of the ‘situation’ is different from that produced on a stage, reminding us that the strategies of the neo-avant-garde cannot be easily transferred to a traditional theatrical form.

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Two views of anti-theatricalism emerge from Jonas Barish's Antitheatrical Prejudice (1981). According to the predominant one, anti-theatricalism is a prejudice that is inextricably woven into the very fabric of Western thought, from its Greek origins to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers of modernity. Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche, St. Augustine and Theodor Adorno, Pagan Rome and the Puritans — the most disparate philosophers apparently share one troubling flaw: their hatred of the theatre. When faced with such stubborn opposition, such a repetitive history of a prejudice seemingly untouched by the most revolutionary social, philosophical, and artistic upheavals, it is not surprising that Theatre Studies would go into a defensive mode, that exposing this prejudice would be seen as a first and necessary step to bring about its demise.