If I had known about the Frankfurt School in time, I would have been saved a great deal of work. I would not have said a certain amount of nonsense and would not have taken so many false trails trying not to get lost, when the Frankfurt School had already cleared the way.

Michel Foucault, 1983
Quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus
The Frankfurt School:
Its History, Theories and Political Significance (p 4)

The idea that an acknowledged metaphysics underlying a drama necessarily leads to a thesis play, an intellectualized representation of experience, is easily dismissed: the Greek tragedians worked during the era of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and though they share a deep-rooted commonality of perspective, the dramas they produced have endured not because of their intellectual but because of their broadly human content. This philosophy was the ground in which the aesthetic work took root and flourished. As the quote above suggests, the work of Critical Theory, that of Adorno, Horkheimer and so many others, seems to have been the most significant of the twentieth century, presaging both the postmodernists and the structuralists: certainly its nearly century-old status as a central body of thought for twentieth-century experience must be reckoned with. It demands a claim on our attention. The project of a revival of tragedy in its philosophical light is a life-long project. But for that reason it is essential, and we should be cheered by the prospects it offers for knowledge through our lives, and not downcast by the impossibility of the project’s completion.

Between the political materialism of Marx (and its optimism for progressive improvement of the race) and the psychological darkness of Freud (and its pessimism for the ability of the human individual to finally adjust to the tragedy of experience), and therefore between their forebears Hegel and Schopenhauer: this is a dynamic in which the dramatic work operates not as the statement of a problem but as the exploration of bodied consciousness, both a historic construct and a metaphysical condition. It should come as no surprise that aesthetics is central to the project of Critical Theory, as it was to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics: each informs the other, and any reconciliation between the two appears impossible. But again, this is not a problem, but a condition, perhaps the condition of the race, and it is informed too by the bloody history of the twentieth century, perhaps the bloodiest of histories. As the Greeks knew, it was the dramatic stage upon which the philosophical dynamic plays itself out, the speaking human body the fleshed dynamic: but offering in the end not a dead conclusion, but an organic experience; the start of a new road into the unknown, into the dark, and possibility.

It is difficult not to acknowledge the difficulty of the task, and the responsibility of the dramatist and performer towards not only history (the history of the form as well as the history of the race) but also the autonomous self within it … it is dangerous, thankless work … but why else write or stage a play at all …

An audience for a theatre that does not yet go to the theatre. Perhaps the worst advice ever offered in creative writing classes is: “Write what you know.” All too often, this leads to a paralysis of imagination — that it is the immediate cultural world, the class, the biographical anecdote that should be the inspiration for the dramatic work. It values the knowledge of immediate personal experience over that of the imagination; the knowledge won by a deep penetration of imaginative experience is the knowledge proper to the theatre; the knowledge of immediate personal experience, the anecdote, proper to the barroom conversation. Perhaps this is an American trope; perhaps too this is a reason for the paucity of imaginative political theatre on U.S. stages. The denial of the knowledge provided by individual imagination keeps the theatre in the immediate neighborhood. It does not create a larger world.

Sarah Kane’s statement “I am quite happy to aim at the smallest audience possible, which is myself, because I am the only person who is definitely going to see this play anyway. That’s why I try to please myself” is not a motto of artistic arrogance but more a motto of humility. It speaks instead to common humanity, not an aristocratic conception of imagination or the aesthetic project. If a British woman in her 20s with a fairly conventional education and upbringing can draw parallels between a middle-aged man and a developmentally-disabled woman in a Leeds hotel room and a battle in a Bosnian city, her statement implies, anyone, any audience, may be able to draw these same parallels. They are available through the same imaginative power of the individual audience member, should they be open to it and despite the efforts of the Culture Industry to kill the individual imagination itself. But these parallels are won not through personal experience but through an individual imaginative reach inwards towards the core of their humanity and outwards towards the world beyond the self. The resulting drama is an offering of this personal imaginative experience to the audience, not an imposition of a perspective that seeks to tie up loose ends — to teach or to entertain. The Culture Industry’s corporations through the media (its music, its newspapers, its television channels, its plays and its films) increasingly suffocate the individual imagination through this so-called education and entertainment to provide the kind of puling, paralyzing resignation (room for the natural disasters of Haiti and Chile, none for the genocides of Rwanda and Bosnia) that is a far cry from Schopenhauer’s conception of the word. And yet, the products of this industry are what contemporary American dramatists apparently “know” best.

David Ian Rabey on Howard Barker, although his comments offer a perspective for other dramatists and theatre practitioners as well, rather than being limited to Barker’s individual body of work:

Barker aims to create an authentically theatrical art, different in style and objectives from film and television; he sees no point in the theatre trying to compete with these other media, or seek a reflected glamour by what must inevitably remain a second-hand association with their style and effects. He aims to move theatre onto a different ground. He repudiates both entertainment and pedagogic enlightenment (which both offer to answer all questions and resolve all contradictions) as ultimate objectives of the theatrical experience. Rather, he creates a theatre which offers a deeper imaginative opposition to society through speculations involving a questioning relief from prevalent social ideals. This theatre becomes a space which is resistant to social pressures and necessities; and the suspension of these forces and promises entails anxiety, rather than more conventional forms of pleasure. Here the actor, through his/her diction, rhythm and movement, has to mesmerise and fascinate the audience to continue and extend their considerations of possibilities. It may be that the audience for this theatre does not yet go to the theatre. But it might, if it encountered a theatre … which offered something more than what is currently conventionally associated with “theatre.” This is a theatre that proposes that nothing is impossible.

“Raising Hell: Introduction”
Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker (pp 13-14)

Emphasis my own.