"Theatre Applications" was an international conference convened by the Central School of Speech and Drama, London, in April 2010. Framed by the subheading "Performance with a purpose", the call for papers invited contributors to consider how theatre making in different settings can "make a difference" to those who inhabit the social contexts that it operates within. Rustom Bharucha was one of the conference keynotes. This article presents an edited version of Bharucha's keynote address. Bharucha asks one to reconsider the role and responsibility of the spectator who, he argues, is traditionally overlooked by theatre and performance studies. Through his examination of Augusto Boal (1979, 2006) and Jacques Ranciere (2009), Bharucha problematises the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed, the spectator and the spectated. Engaging with Ranciere's critique of "theatre as a specifically communitarian place", Bharucha reflects on the "communitas" of the theatre event itself, and considers how theatre can engage with the material specificity of the lives of the participants who created it. Questioning the ethics of what he calls the "incipient self-righteousness", that tends to determine socially orientated theatre practice, Bharucha challenges individuals to reject normative constructions of beauty, which he argues are "predominantly liberal and emphatically "white"". (Contains 2 notes.)