Theatre: Theory Practice Performance Performing the Testimonial

Performing the testimonial offers a new critical engagement with verbatim and testimonial theatre that draws on an analysis of a number of international contemporary verbatim and testimonial plays. Moving beyond discourses of the real, the book argues that testimonial theatre engages in acts of truth telling, performing new modes of witnessing. Providing one of the first critically sustained engagements with the new forms of verbatim and testimonial theatre that emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the UK and in other parts of the world, this book examines what distinguishes verbatim theatre from the more established documentary theatre traditions developed initially by Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator.Drawing on a range of different dramaturgical styles and approaches, the arguments developed in the course of this book advance our understanding of the dramaturgy of testimonial theatre and the political possibilities and challenges for theatre-making that bears witness to personal lived experience and real events. Drawing on examples of verbatim and testimonial plays from around the world, this book looks beyond the discourses of the real that have tended to dominate scholarship in this area and instead argues that this kind of theatre engages in modes of truth telling. Through its analysis of plays from the UK, Germany, America, Australia and South Africa, the book explores the dramaturgy of enacted testimony and considers how the act of witnessing itself is reconfigured when relocated outside of the psychoanalytic frame and positioned as contributing to a decolonisation of testimony.Engaging with interdisciplinary debates that address critical questions about truth, authenticity and the ethics of speaking on behalf of others, the book is primarily aimed at performance and theatre scholars and researchers but also has relevance to scholars working in the fields of trauma and memory studies and literary theory. Providing one of the first critically sustained engagements with the new forms of verbatim and testimonial theatre that emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, this book examines what distinguishes verbatim theatre from the more established documentary theatre traditions developed initially by Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. Examining a wide range of verbatim and testimonial plays from around the world, this book looks beyond the discourses of the real that have tended to dominate scholarship in this area and instead argues that this kind of theatre engages in acts of truth telling. Through its analysis of a range of international plays from UK, Germany, America, Australia and South Africa, the book explores theatre’s dramaturgical interrogation of testimony and how the act of witnessing itself is reconfigured when relocated outside of the psychoanalytic frame and positioned as contributing to a decolonisation of testimony.