Get Real

Documentary Theatre Past and Present

A. Forsyth, C. Megson, A. Forsyth, C. Megson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780230221154
• eBook ISBN:
  9780230236943
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Social History

Over the past two decades, theatre practitioners across the West have turned to documentary modes of performance-making to confront new socio-political realities. The essays in this book place this work in context, exploring historical and contemporary examples of documentary and 'verbatim' theatre, and applying a range of critical perspectives.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Promise of Documentary
• 2 Mediating the 1930s: Documentary and Politics in Theatre Union’s Last Edition (1940)
• 3 History in the Driving Seat: Unity Theatre and the Embrace of the ‘Real’
• 4 The Documentary Body: Theatre Workshop to Banner Theatre
• 5 Living Simulations: The Use of Media in Documentary in the UK, Lebanon and Israel
• 6 Looking for Esrafil: Witnessing ‘Refugitive’ Bodies in I’ve got something to show you
• 7 Remembering the Past, ‘Growing Ourselves a Future’: Community-Based Documentary Theatre in the East Palo Alto Project
• 8 Ngapartji Ngapartji: Telling Aboriginal Australian Stories
• 9 Performing Trauma: Race Riots and Beyond in the Work of Anna Deavere Smith
• 10 History, Memory and Trauma in the Documentary Plays of Emily Mann
• 11 When Heroes Fall: Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife and the Challenge to Truth
• 12 The Performance of Truth and Justice in Northern Ireland: The Case of Bloody Sunday
• 13 Half the Picture: ‘A Certain Frisson’ at the Tricycle Theatre
• 14 Verbatim Theatre in South Africa: ‘Living History in a Person’s Performance’
• 15 The ‘Broken Tradition’ of Documentary Theatre and Its Continued Powers of Endurance
• Bibliography
• Index