The climber and writer M. John Harrison speaks, in his novel Climbers, of cutting through a nylon rope suddenly to discover, hidden in its interior, brilliant reds and blues, ‘as if you had cut into a sparrow only to find beneath its skin the colours of the macaw’. Peter Brook has spoken of the theatre in similar terms as the place where the invisible can appear. As he observes, ‘We are all aware that most of life escapes our senses’ and that a powerful explanation of various arts lies in their power to detect and present the invisible through rhythms or shapes. It should not surprise us to see Sam Shepard, an admirer of Peter Brook, express much the same sentiment.

Shepard has no desire to stage the bland exterior of experience. He wishes to slice through the rope. For Peter Brook, the knife was provided by ritual, which had to be rediscovered and rearticulated; not the rituals borrowed or adapted from primitive tribes (though he was to conduct his own experiments in that direction) but those which touch a contemporary nerve. He found an example in pop music; so did Sam Shepard, whose own experience as a musician alerted him to the importance of rhythm in more ways than one. Peter Brook looked for a ‘holy theatre’; Sam Shepard played with a group called the Holy Modal Rounders. The rhyme was accidental; the intent less so.

Peter Brook suggests that a search for an underlying unity implied in the notion of ritual might, in an age of images, require resort to the image before language could re-emerge as a primary mechanism; Sam Shepard enacted that process in plays in which character and language were indeed subsumed in image.