A Life of Ethics and Performance

Ethics is, in an important sense, a matter of ‘being good’ but it is also a question about how to live a ‘good life’. This book’s emphasis on the theatrical and performative and their relationship to ethics, highlights that being good is, a matter of acting good and that acting good is a question of performing (or not-performing) certain roles and duties. This book surveys the most recent work in the field of ethics and performance, organizing this research through the metaphor of ‘the good life’. Each chapter explores a question about what it means to ‘act good’ at a different point in life and thus the book moves from natality to fatality, and beyond in its meditation on the relationship between performance and life itself. In this, it offers an important contribution to the contemporary debate about the relationship between ethics, theatre and performance studies.