The mid-eighteenth-century French théâtre clandestin, comprising more than a score of plays of foul language and obscene subject matter, presents a number of problems. It is not clear if they were actually performed and, if so, how and before what audiences. Did they serve the purpose of pornography, arousing their consumer? The language in which the plays are couched is conventional both in its literary form and its scurrility; it needed to be supplemented by pantomime and elaborate tableaux. Those elements are remarkably similar to theatrical innovations suggested by Diderot in a different context. Ultimately, however, the mere presentation of bodies in action cannot incarnate desire except superficially. The distancing element of performance as well as the communal presence of a coterie at an organized spectacle were probably counterproductive to achieving the pornographic aim.

This article examines a particular aesthetic experience that is brought about by a destabilization, even a collapsing, of the dichotomous pair of concepts the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’. While a tension between the two, even in differing degrees, proves characteristic of all kinds of theatre, recent developments on European stages emphasize this tension. In the paper it is examined with respect to 1) the actors' bodies and 2) the theatrical spaces. In each case, the point of departure is two examples which are analysed with regard to the particular function that the tension between the real and the fictional might serve. It is argued that what in everyday life is neatly separated into two different worlds to be fully grasped by the dichotomous pair of concepts becomes blurred in the performances discussed here. The particular aesthetic experience coming into being in such performances is an experience of ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner) – a liminal experience. This way, they stimulate a new discussion of the concept of aesthetic experience, so central to all forms of art in the Western world since 1800.