Theatre has a knotty relationship with decadence. In eighteenth-century France, the author Louis Charpentier dedicated a whole book to the topic of theatre’s ‘decadent’ decline. A century later, and the writer and critic Anatole Baju called for the abolishment of theatre altogether on the grounds that it wasn’t decadent enough. At the turn of the twentieth-century, the North American performance scholar Richard Schechner forecast that theatre would be ‘the string quartet of the twenty-first century’, fit for a tired bourgeoisie. Theatre, it seems, is either irremediably decadent, too grounded in the humdrum for its decadence to be of any value, or a trivial pursuit for the leisure class.

Theatre and decadence evoke multiple and discordant resonances, then, but their framing as fault or shortcoming only tells part of the story.

Staging Decadence: Decadent theatre in the long twentieth century is a two-year research projected that was initially funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and that has since developed into an ongoing platform for fostering new collaborations, opportunities and initiatives. It looks at how theatre makers have been engaging with decadence as an embodied and enacted practice, one that has much to offer to our understanding of cultural politics both historically, and in the present moment.

Theatre can be resource intensive, and is often expensive. Theatres can also be intimidating places, full of codes and conventions, and is regularly accused of being outmoded. But theatre can also be a space for subverting the values and traditions that produce its embeddedness in cultures of distinction and privilege. Some of the most interesting and exciting examples read these cultures “against the grain”, inviting us to engage with the enactment and embodiment of decadence as a transgressive, subversive or anarchic practice. 

There are rich histories of experimentation with ideas and practices of decadence in theatre that exceed its narrow associations with indulgence and profligacy. Many of these histories have been well-documented in art and literary scholarship, particularly in studies of French and British writers of the fin de siècle who sought to express the debilitating effects of industrial modernity in ways that challenged the conservative policing of taste, desire, and appearance. However, decadence is not merely literary or visual; decadence works on and through bodies, both in terms of attempts to discipline desires and behaviours, and in terms of reclaiming decadence as that which is encountered and experienced in the flesh.

Oozing Gloop as Heliogabalus. Decadence @ Iklectik, London. BADS / Staging Decadence club night, 29 July 2022. Photo by Emma Jones.