There's Fighting in the Streets...

Mark Fisher recently accused me of confusing the romantic and modernist strands of theatre. He is quite right - although I conflate them rather than confuse them, because they are both vessels for the bourgeois theatre that has dominated for the past three hundred years.

After that provocation, here's an assumption to get up your nose.

I am afraid so. Because it is created within that culture, its hidden assumptions are all based on the dominant culture. Words like 'art', 'genius', 'dramaturgy', 'architecture': notions like 'playwright', 'actor',
'theatre' are all defined within a conversation developed by Diderot and the philosophes, and they were all about using art as a weapon against the power of the monarchical state and the church.

Even those performances that think they are presenting protest or an alternative perspective are doomed to remain within the dominant culture. 

Patriarchy, for example, lurks in the margins of feminist theatre. The state infects anarchist theatre. Those who speak of community are adopting a consumerist narrative. To put it another way...