How would you describe the theatre to a child who had never been?

Would you start with the building? “It’s big and dark, and everybody’s quiet.” Or perhaps with the performers? “The actors wear make up and costumes, and do funny things on stage.”

You’d probably explain the rules (or the rituals): “Everybody’s quiet. We turn off our phones. There’s a break half way through, so we can go to the loo. At the end we clap until the actors have gone, and then we can go home.”

And to an extraordinary degree, you’d be right. Over 40 years ago, Peter Brook coined a term for the kind of theatre that can be easily defined by its physical parameters and tired conventions. He called it the “Deadly Theatre”, and he defined it best using the example of Shakespeare:

“We see his plays done by good actors in what seems like the proper way – they look lively and colourful, there is music and everyone is all dressed up… Yet secretly we find it excruciatingly boring…”

The Deadly Theatre kills theatre, and it is everywhere. The most simple antidote to it is that suggested implied by Brook, in the opening lines of his short, classic text, ‘The Empty Space’:

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

Theatre, Brook was suggesting, needs none of the artifice of convention in order to be vital and true.

For the past ten years or so, companies in the UK in particular have being taking Brook’s description as a prescription: they have been taking their theatre out of the theatres.

The company Punchdrunk is the queen this movement, leaving their audience free to wander around abandoned factory sites (in ‘Faust’) or converted arts centres (in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’), having individual encounters with, and sometimes participating in, the play.

Their manifesto is simple: “Punchdrunk rejects the passive obedience expected of audiences in conventional theatre. Our desire is for the audience to rediscover the childlike excitement and anticipation of exploring the unknown and experience a real sense of adventure.”

This year’s fringe festival in Dublin – now known as the Absolut Fringe – starts today, and a host of companies are following the entreaties of Brook and Punchdrunk. Either they’re bringing their theatre to the people, or they’re bringing the people to strange places to view their theatre.

Artist Dominic Campbell takes the former description to the ultimate: the venue for his show, ‘Box’, is “your house”. The programme explains: “It’s created to order, by invitation, in your bedroom… Choose a date. Call the Box Office. Leave a contact number, name and postcode. Let us know if you prefer a male or female performer. We’ll be in touch.”

For those who’d rather go somewhere more exotic, Anu Productions invite people to join them at that hidden oasis just north of Parnell Square, the Blessington Basin, for their multimedia show, ‘Basin’. And there are more adventurous Northsiders at work in ‘Nurse Me’, for which Louise White and Kate Nic Chonaonaigh have created a performance in the old psychiatric hospital of St Brendan’s, Grangegorman.

Semper Fi’s earlier, low-fi hit, ‘Ladies and Gents’, took place in the public toilets at Stephen’s Green. Their new play takes them a step further from “civilised” society: it takes places in “a bush” in Merrion Square, and tells the story of a homeless woman, ‘Black Bessie’.

Peter Brook needed just an empty space, a person walking, and somebody watching. But British company Rotozaza have put a “Web 2.0” spin on that, using technology to break down the distinction between the person performing and the person watching. They call it “autoteatro”: the audience members perform for each other.

Rotozaza previously brought ‘Etiquette’ to Dublin, in which the audience of two sat across from each other at a café table, following commands relayed to them via personal MP3 players. For their new show, ‘Wondermart’, you put on a MP3 player and are guided around a supermarket, “immersed in a private soundscape”.

Is it theatre? Is it dramatic? Whatever it is, and however you describe it, there’s a wealth of it in this year’s Fringe: the website, www.fringefest.com, lists shows by genre, so you can easily find the outdoors, site-specific and participative work. (It also lists them by price, and some are free, such as ‘The Readers’, an exercise in gentle “collective choreography” taking place in St Patrick’s Park at 2.30pm next Saturday.) The box office phone number is 1850 374643.)

Some will be awful, of course: abandoning convention is no guarantee of quality. Like bird flu, the Deadly Theatre mutates quickly, and there’s nothing to stop it adopting the new conventions of a new era. Enthusiasm, though, is a good antidote, and it’s spilling out of the Fringe programme.

Written for my weekly theatre column in the Irish Independent  Saturday Review.