About: Alan Read (writer)
Alan Read (born 21 September 1956) is a writer and professor of theatre at King's College London. Read is known as a theatre theorist and cultural activist, with scholarly interests in ethics and the everyday, performed communities, event architecture, and subjectivities of capitalism. Read's work stands as a critique of modernist theatrical orthodoxy critically contesting Peter Brook's idealism of the ‘empty space' awaiting its theatre, a tabula rasa for professionals to enter and exit at will. Read counter intuitively perceives theatre to have been superseded in that populated place by the quotidian performances of everyday life, those that remain for good and ill. Read took up this provocative critique on the National Theatre stage in London in 1994 in public dialogue with Brook's space
