So often an action begins as a reaction, or a reaction grows out of an action. In the turning of every revolution, large and small, one changes into the other like yin and yang - some historic action causes a reaction that tries to topple it, and in its turn the reaction becomes a new action. We can see the same circular pattern in the history of Western theatre, a pattern that reflects the history of the remainder of our civilisation. The modern stage play is typically traced back to the public rituals of the Greeks, where, in its purity, it was used as a medium to celebrate the unity of the community in its beliefs and faith. It was a celebration of the status quo, and not necessarily the status quo of the elite either, but a celebration of the whole society's self-image. This was the active period of theatre, and it was an original action, not a reaction that challenged some kind of political order.

By today, this old model of the theatre is called the Theatre of Communion; that is the communion between people and their ideals. It grew and developed over many centuries into differing styles, until eventually it was seen in the form of the Italian melodrama that spread its popularity throughout the West during the time of the Enlightenment. Doubtless, with every growth comes a high-point, and in the history of the theatre that was the Victorian era: the celebrations of the Theatre of Communion came to their apex in the wake of the industrial world's new confidence, and the fantastical ideology of the West was projected across the world. By now of course, celebrating the unity of the community wasn't enough - it had to be glorified by inflating reality to the heavens. And at the height of its rejoicing, the beginning of its decline was seen.

The nemesis of traditional drama's ancient narrative was the Theatre of Revolt. This new model of theatre came into view in the last years of Victoria's reign, as a part of a wider revolution in the world of the arts. That which was oppressive in the western cultures was drawn onto the spotlit stage of the new theatre. The bright light of realism was thrown onto our old hierarchy and onto the conceptual fetters of our intellectual traditions. In the end, the Theatre of Revolt turned against its own realism: the plays of Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco and the Theatre of the Absurd revealed the spiritual emptiness that lurked in the shadows of our daily reality. The theatre had acted for millennia as a medium for the communion of humanity, and in the twentieth century it reacted against that very communion by presenting a mirror to the fat indifference of capitalist society, and our old idealism was seen for a lie. Hand in hand with other modernist movements in the arts, the Theatre of Revolt showed us that there is no meaning to life beyond that which we create for ourselves.

Another example of this historic pattern begins with the beatniks and the Hippies in the 50’s and 60’s. In some ways, these were the children of the modernist revolution that the new theatre was a part of. But the Hippies acted according to their own new idealism, an idealism that was the strange fruit of their experimentation with psychedelic drugs. Their radical action came straight from the imagination: the doors of the subconscious were flung open and the hairy host leaped ecstatically through into the mystic space beyond. Their colourful mash-up exploded over the western cultures, and for a moment it was as if the gods had arrived. But for all that, very early the next morning, the whole lot disappeared in a puff of blue smoke. The Hippies did not posses the self-understanding necessary to turn the energising thrill of psychedelia into a tool for transformation. They failed to ground the dream, and as Hendrix sings "…and so castles made of sand, melt into the sea, eventually …"

In some ways, the Punks were a reaction to the failure of the decadent Hippy generation. During the angry come-down of the late seventies and early eighties, the world's attention was caught by the nihilistic indifference of the new generation. As a result, their anarchic performances were claimed by the mass media, and the anger of youth was watched as a kind of self-justified entertainment by the "moral" classes. The last act of the more famous Punks was to bare their teeth to the cameras like monkeys pretending to be wolves. In the end, the public tired of the show; from the perspective of the audience what began as a statement of radical reactionism was now no more than a fashionable bubble. By the middle of the eighties, everybody had forgotten about the creative nihilism of the Punks, and instead they were staring at the new economic nihilism of the Yuppies, the implications of whose actions we are currently very aware of.

To a large degree, we continue to live in the shadow of these revolutions, large and small, without learning much from their mistakes. The Hippies, the Punks and the Yuppies can all be considered the fruits of the new individualism fostered by the capitalist cultures: the obvious hierarchy of the class system was obscured and in its place, the coronation of every consumer as despot in their own fragile "kingdom" was attempted. Of those aspects that we inherited unquestioningly from these generations, see our failure to use psychotropic "drugs" for anything better than light entertainment, and our failure to do more than react out of anger when the "system" doesn't conform to our expectations. Certainly, protest is a moral responsibility that we should not neglect, but maybe it's also important to remember that we have the ability and the power to choose action over reaction. That is, choose to build something better over challenging something worse, even though the second is by far the easiest to fulfill. That was the true meaning of the Theatre of Communion in its ancient purity, and it's about time our generation tried to remember what the meaning of such a celebration was. We must not allow cynicism to touch the future.