if a play is to be a weapon in the class struggle, then that weapon is not going to be the things you are saying; it is the interaction of what you are saying and what the audience is thinking. The play is in the air. (Hare 1992: 6) If the aesthetic as a term allows us to place the theatre experience firmly as one that occurs as a meeting between actor and audience, it is also one that offers us a bridge into ideas about education. Just as recep- tion (or response) theory underlines the key role played by the audience in making meanings, so developments in theories of learning have increasingly placed the learner at the heart of the educational process.