The Theatre of the Everyday

by The Ambiguous Architect

We spend our lives in scenes we didn’t write, under lights not calibrated for us. The city is less a backdrop than a stage: banal, absurd, beautiful. In the theatre of the everyday, we perform without rehearsal, surrounded by sets we call buildings, props of permanence in a play that never ends.

Tom Stoppard once observed that “theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster”. What he said of the stage applies neatly to the street. Every journey is an act, every threshold a moment of suspense. Architecture doesn’t

merely contain our lives; it directs them, cueing entrances, framing monologues, setting

the tempo of tragedy and farce alike.

Peter Greenaway understood this theatricality better than most architects. His films are constructed , not shot, each frame composed with the logic of a plan drawing and ornamentation of a baroque chapel. In ‘The Draughtsman’s Contract’, architecture becomes the scene of seduction and betrayal, a geometry of deceit, Greenaway’s world reminds us that space is never neutral; it’s scripted. It’s all Perspective.

We are all drawn to different artists that we can read in a thousand and one ways. I am repeatedly returning to Mona Hatoum, whose art work transforms fragility into structure. Her translucent grids, her maps of wire, her haunting installations where domesticity becomes dangerous, the everyday can be both theatre and trap. She shows us that light and transparency can conceal as much as they reveal.

Perhaps this echoes why poetry belongs here too. The line, like a wall, divides only to connect. We might say that every building is a poem trapped in matter. Like a verse, it carries rhythm, pause, and contradiction.