Staging Ritual, Ritualizing the Stage: A Dramaturgy for Forging Community in David Greig’s The Events

This paper examines how David Greig’s The Events transforms theatre into a participatory ritual that draws the audience into a performative community. While terrorism enacts rupture and division, the play seeks to respond by staging processes of healing through ritual performance. Greig’s dramaturgy unfolds across three interwoven layers: the shamanic ritual of the Boy, the healing ritual led by Claire and the choir, and the play itself as a choral ritual. Each layer, composed of strips of “restored behaviour,” recursively echoes and mirrors the others. By dramatizing ritual and theatre as performative practices that can be re-imagined and re-enacted, the play opens up the possibility of alternatives to violence. At the heart of this dramaturgy lies the community chorus, which acts as a liminal hinge between stage and auditorium, inviting audience participation. Through its interactive dramaturgy, the play creates a shared space of affective and synaesthetic exchange between performers and spectators, thereby envisioning a form of communitas grounded in a cosmopolitan ethic—one in which cultural and ideological boundaries temporarily dissolve. In this sense, The Events is not merely a representation but an event in itself: a collective rehearsal of connection, healing, and transformation.