House Stage and Temple examines the social history of ritual and space in premodern Kerala. It engages with what Roland Barthes called the subtlety of life and focuses on a form of domestic ritual—tēvāram—and its ‘translation’ into the space of theatre. Tēvāram is articulated through different types of places; the intimate space of the house, in dialectic tension with the space of the temple and the public space of the theatre stage, allow us to investigate the question ‘what is the space we live in?’—a question of wide impact that still needs singular answers.