The layers of artificiality and all the self-designation never completely suppress the feeling that the table, the chair, the bed and above all the body on stage are taken from real life, however the latter may be defined. If all art is a supplement to nature, 3 the stage is both using and denouncing a closeness unequalled by any other artistic practice. They could suggest that such “visual” understanding be immediate, while the duration and diffraction that drama implies tell another story. 2 More perhaps than any other art, theatre allows us to understand the link between sight and knowledge that is betrayed by such expressions, often to be heard on Athol Fugard’s stage, as “you see,” hinting not at sight but at comprehension. There is the gap between actors and the audience but also that of language, between signified and signifier. If theatre is performed in real time and in the real world, what is shown on stage reaches us through a series of screens, lenses and filters, through a distance that no avant-garde experiment could fully abolish.

Put differently it calls into question the relation of perception and interpretation. Theatre, an artform that derives etymologically from the realm of sight, can be sketchily defined as an attempt to interrogate appearances on the one hand, and their specific hermeneutics on the other. Indeed, drama does rely heavily on masks and costumes, and not only in European traditions. 1 Visibility does not entail anything obvious. 3 The now common notion of supplement needs to be traced back to Derrida 144-5.ġIn The Empty Space, Peter Brook – the director who has staged Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead at the Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris (2007) and whose film Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979) casts the South African playwright – states that theatre is the art that makes the invisible visible.2 This paper excludes the marginal, but thrilling, experimentations in utterly speechless theatre (Sa (.).1 The definition of the “Holy Theatre,” also called “The Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible,” is t (.).

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