Contents: the cradle of Western civilization? Athens as beginning – Myth, community and the myth of community – Can we deal with the chorus? Performing collective identity and the decline of union – the obscene' and the limits of representation: false etymologies, censorship and performability – Constructing the audience as the demos of democracy: spectatorship and/as citizenship – the myth of the simultaneous birth of theatre and democracy in Athens – How can theatre and performance deal with, and respond to, the persistence of these mythologies? – Neither actualisation nor reconstitution: a manifesto in six points.