Performing the testimonial: Rethinking verbatim dramaturgies

Amanda Stuart Fisher

doi:10.7765/9781526145758

Responding to the resurgence of verbatim theatre that emerged in Britain, Australia, the United States and other parts of the world in the early 1990s, this book offers one of the first sustained, critical engagements with contemporary verbatim, documentary and testimonial dramaturgies. Offering a new reading of the history of the documentary and verbatim theatre form, the book relocates verbatim and testimonial theatre away from discourses of the real and representations of reality and instead argues that these dramaturgical approaches are better understood as engagements with forms of truth-telling and witnessing. Examining a range of verbatim and testimonial plays from different parts of the world, the book develops new ways of understanding the performance of testimony and considers how dramaturgical theatre can bear witness to real events and individual and communal injustice through the re-enactment of personal testimony. Through its interrogation of different dramaturgical engagements with acts of witnessing, the book identifies certain forms of testimonial theatre that move beyond psychoanalytical accounts of trauma and reimagine testimony and witnessing as part of a decolonised project that looks beyond event-based trauma, addressing instead the experience of suffering wrought by racism and other forms of social injustice.

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Performing the testimonial

Rethinking verbatim dramaturgies

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Contents

Front matter
pp i-iv

Dedication
pp v-vi

Contents
pp vii-vii

Acknowledgements
pp viii-x

Introduction: Performing the ‘promise’ of truthfulness: the hybrid practices of contemporary verbatim and testimonial theatre
pp 1-26

Part I: - Verbatim theatre and its histories
pp 27-28

1 - Germany and the pre-histories of contemporary verbatim theatre: Piscator, Hochhuth and Weiss
pp 29-58

2 - The genealogy of contemporary verbatim theatre: Shifting dramaturgies and performances of truthfulness
pp 59-98

Part II: - Towards testimonial theatre
pp 99-100

3 - Theatre of witnessing: Towards the decolonisation of testimonial theatre
pp 101-142

4 - Testimony as speaking out: Performing the ethico-political imperatives of witnessing
pp 143-177

Conclusion: Performing witnessing in a post-truth era
pp 178-185

Bibliography
pp 186-195

Index
pp 196-200

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Performing the testimonial

Rethinking verbatim dramaturgies

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