Abstract
The paper proposes an exploration of the politics of perception in relation to four contingent concerns: (postmodern) ethics, provocation, spectacle and spectatorship. Referring to work by Crimp, McDonagh, Harrower, Hare, Greig and Crouch, it outlines the ways in which a spectrum of British theatre produced since 2000 has played with audience complicity and confusion, ethical ambivalence and transgression and solicits attention in terms of the possible relation of ethics to aesthetics.