"Taking the piss" (or the "scandal of realism")

Critical theatre not only rehearses verbal or discursive provocation, but also offers visual or gestural challenge to the manifold sense of the “politically correct”. Often understood in terms of identity politics (especially regarding attitudinal anachronisms), theatre’s embodied practices symptomatize hegemonic matrices of power (including in forms of theatre making itself). Ques ons of care, however, are often experienced as simply “performative” (the proverbial “tick box exercise”). “Political correctness” is even interpreted as a mechanism of (self-)censorship, as a constraint on the civic space of theatre within “culture wars”. This may be seen as a “liberal” substitute for more fundamentally addressing dynamics of the poli cally incorrect; that is, the structural violence that generates forms of identity as an attempted defence (as with the entangled questioning of “our violence, your violence”). Politically in-correct theatre concerns the poli cal in terms, precisely, of the theatrical – of “attitudes becoming form” critically. With the example of urinating on stage, my presentation will explore symbolic forms of the “incorrect” that, in English, could be called “taking the piss”. Interplay between the real and the representa onal is of the very definition of the theatrical and will be addressed here with examples from Oliver Frljic and the Mladinsko ensemble.