This desk has spent the year among people who believe the world is ending. It had not occurred to me until recently that we might also cover the people who stage the end of the world, professionally, for thirty paying strangers at a time — or that they would turn out to have the most coherent doctrine I have encountered all year.
The Classics Department is a theater company. It was founded by Morgane Ciot and Alice Maynwaring, it produces immersive ritual performances about invented religions, and its members will tell you, without visible strain, that this is a form of sacred work. I went in expecting artists with a bit. I came out with eleven pages of notes and a mild professional crisis.
Their argument begins with a complaint about the last century. Postmodernism, as Maynwaring puts it, trained audiences to admire the vessel and never drink from it — to notice the artifice of the art object so acutely that the essence inside it became embarrassing to mention. The result is a culture of enormous sophistication and no sacraments, full of people who can deconstruct a ritual in four sentences and have not been moved by one in a decade. The Department's position is not a rejection of that sophistication. It is that irony was mistaken for a destination when it was only ever a door. You cannot ask a disenchanted person to worship. You can ask them to pretend to worship, in good company, with the artifice fully disclosed — and something happens to them anyway. The ironic distance is not the joke. It is the anesthetic that permits the surgery.
The lineage they claim for this is older than the theater buildings. Before there were playhouses, they say, there were traveling ritualists — bards, mummers, mystery players — who carried a people's cosmology in epic verse and staged it into being at the turning of the year, and who did not distinguish between the performance and the rite because no one had yet thought to. When organized religion assumed custody of the storytelling function, the troupes did not disappear; they went underground, into carnival and jest and the licensed foolishness at the edge of town, and they kept the technology alive without the authority to name it. The Department regards itself as an heir to that underground, resurfacing at what it considers an opportune moment.
Which brings us to the eschatology, and it is the sharpest I have heard from anyone this year. The Department does not predict the end of the world. It observes that a narrative world is ending — that the shared story we have all been swimming in has begun to come apart, that consensus reality is thinning, and that a great many people are about to find themselves without a cosmology and with no experience of losing one. "We are not preparing to survive the end of the world," Ciot told me. "We are the only people who have practiced ending them safely." Theater, in their reading, is the last intact technology for the deliberate construction and controlled demolition of a worldview: build a parallel world, invite people fully inside it, let it collapse on schedule, and walk them out the other side changed and, crucially, intact. They rehearse the apocalypse so that when a real one arrives, somebody in the room will have done it before.
I should disclose, in the interest of the record, that the Department's portfolio includes not only performances but ancillary materials — brochures, artifacts, and at least one news publication concerned with cults. I have not been able to establish which one. When I put the obvious question to Maynwaring — whether this article was itself part of the work — she said that was the wrong question, and asked instead whether I had noticed the exact moment I stopped taking notes.
I had not. I have filed this piece. I am no longer certain to whom.