Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present

Over the past two decades, theatre practitioners across the West have turned to documentary modes of performance-making to confront new socio-political realities. This has led to an astonishing range of performance styles, ways of working and modes of intervention in varied sites of theatrical production. The essays in this collection place this work in context, exploring historical and contemporary examples of documentary and 'verbatim' theatre, and applying a range of critical perspectives that elaborate its impact and significance today. Focusing on examples from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa and the Middle East, this collection, now in paperback for the first time and with a new Preface, raises provocative questions about documentary theatre's relationship to new technology, media, the body, the archive, memory, autobiography, and national identity. It examines the viability and resonance of documentary theatre in an era of infotainment, globalisation and postmodernity, and explores its past and potential contribution within the public sphere.

Alison Forsyth is a lecturer in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at Aberystwyth University, UK. Her main publications include Gadamer, History and The Classics: Fugard, Marowitz, Berkoff and Harrison Rewrite the Theatre (2002). Alison is currently writing a book titled Arthur Miller's Holocaust Plays: The Trauma of Articulation, preparing an anthology of adaptations and editing a volume about the performance of trauma. Chris Megson is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway College, University of London, UK. His recent publications include The Methuen Drama Book of Naturalist Plays (2010); his book on The Seventies, for Methuen's Decades of Modern British Playwriting series, is forthcoming in 2012. He has published widely on British theatre culture since 1968 and documentary/Tribunal theatre.

Preface to the Paperback Edition
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction; A.Forsyth & C.Megson
The Promise of Documentary; J.Reinelt
Mediating the 1930s: Documentary and Politics in Theatre Union's Last Edition (1940); B.Harker
History in the Driving Seat: Unity Theatre and the Embrace of the 'Real'; C.Chambers
The Documentary Body: Theatre Workshop to Banner Theatre; A.Filewod
Living Simulations: The Use of Media in Documentary in the UK, Lebanon, and Israel; C.Martin
Looking for Esrafil: Witnessing 'Refugitive' Bodies in I've got something to show you; A.Jeffers
Remembering the Past, 'Growing Ourselves a Future': Community-Based Documentary Theatre in the East Palo Alto Project; L.Smith
Ngapartji Ngapartji: Telling Aboriginal Australian Stories; M.Casey
Performing Trauma: Race Riots and Beyond in the Work of Anna Deavere Smith; A.Forsyth
History, Memory and Trauma in the Documentary Plays of Emily Mann; A.Favorini
When Heroes Fall: Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife and the Challenge to Truth; N.P.Highberg
The Performance of Truth and Justice in Northern Ireland: The Case of Bloody Sunday; C-A.Upton
Half the Picture: 'A Certain Frisson' at the Tricycle Theatre; C.Megson
Verbatim Theatre in South Africa: 'Living History in a Person's Performance'; Y.Hutchison
The 'Broken Tradition' of Documentary Theatre and its Continued Powers of Endurance; D.Paget
Index