Performing the testimonial

Rethinking verbatim dramaturgies

Amanda Stuart Fisher

• Editorial: Manchester University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526145734
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Categoría: Theaterregie und& Theaterproduktion

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.

Part I
Verbatim theatre and its histories

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

Forms don't die, they change and reappear. (Weiss in Munk, Weiss and Gray, 1966: 110)

When asked in an interview about the dramaturgical approaches he adopted when writing his Auschwitz play The Investigation Peter Weiss responded by arguing that certain historical situations and events required particular forms of dramatic response. In order to write a play about Auschwitz, Weiss suggests, he had to move away from ‘individualistic characters’, turning instead to the structure of ‘ancient tragedy’ and the use of a chorus of voices and blocks of testimonial text (Weiss in Munk, Weiss and Gray, 1966: 108–10). Rather than framing his approach around processes of replication and reiteration, as is common within the dramaturgy adopted in contemporary verbatim and tribunal theatre, Weiss describes shaping ‘blocks’ of testimony in a way that is reminiscent of an artist transforming raw material into a work of art. This reflects Weiss's interdisciplinary arts background, for, along with being a playwright, he was also an experimental film maker and surrealist painter. As a consequence, the dramaturgical approach he adopts in The Investigation is framed by formal experimentation, which Weiss compares to sculpture: ‘The enormous amount of material I gathered from the Frankfurt trial was concentrated into eleven big blocks of testimony, presented one after another. Each block was a closed complex. Some modern sculpture is neither abstract nor figurative, it's only a thing which stands there – a sense of this imbues the play’ (Weiss, in Munk, Weiss and Gray 1966: 108).

When Weiss speaks of forms that ‘change and reappear’, then, as quoted in the epigraph at the outset of this chapter, he refers to the way that The Investigation draws on documentary theatre techniques but, in so doing, both changes and transforms them. By constructing this play around blocks of testimonial text and eschewing the use of individualised characterisation, Weiss reimagines documentary theatre, rethinking its use of character and what character means in this play. For the characters in The Investigation do not depict a recognisable social reality nor are they constructed with a psychological coherence or with individual motivation. Like some other key documentary playwrights emerging in post-war Germany at this time, such as Rolf Hochhuth and Heinar Kipphardt, Weiss reframed his approach to documentary theatre around forms of truth telling. This new generation of German playwrights moved beyond representations of collective realities and instead foregrounded the figure of the witness through dramaturgical approaches in which truth telling becomes authorised by testimonial accounts of the past and key historical protagonists are interrogated and called to account.

In this chapter, I explore some of the formal innovations developed in Weiss's play and in Hochhuth's The Deputy, which makes use of a very different dramaturgical approach from the one adopted by Weiss. What these dramaturgical innovations reveal, I suggest, is a move away from collective, social reality and a focus on individual action, moral decision making and culpability. These dramaturgical approaches were arguably symptomatic of the time, for the plays were created by a generation of post-Holocaust artists and playwrights who were struggling to come to terms with Germany's history, seeking to identify and call to account those who were responsible for the atrocities of the past. This turn towards a dramaturgical theatre engaged in acts of bearing witness and truth telling is particularly significant to the arguments developed within this book, because this shift towards an excavation of the truth of the event became a key approach adopted by the new forms of verbatim theatre emerging in the 1990s and early 2000s. Of course, the plays emerging at the end of the twentieth century were addressing a very different age, yet the 1990s was arguably also to some degree characterised by a sense of loss and what Andreas Huyssen describes as ‘a deepening sense of crisis’ (Huyssen, 1995: 1). While the impending arrival of the new millennium might have represented a moment of celebration and optimism, it was instead culturally framed by a sense of nostalgia for what had been lost from the past, along with a growing, pervasive anxiety about what the 2000s would bring. This was encapsulated by the public anxiety surrounding the ‘Millennium bug’ and the fear that, as the year 2000 dawned, the data on computers everywhere would be wiped out, leaving populations vulnerable to cyber-attacks and unable to function in their day-to-day lives. The rapid expansion and growth of information technology, Huyssen argues, led to a ‘chaotic, fragmentary, and free-floating’ engagement with cultural memory and a ‘virus of amnesia that at times [threatened] to consume memory itself’ (1995: 7). It is perhaps this amnesiastic quality of the era that Shoshana Felman also addresses, when, in Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, she describes the contemporary moment as being marked out by a ‘crisis of truth’, precipitated by the legacy of the contemporary trauma of the Holocaust and the failure of history to adequately recall and transmit these events (Felman, 1992: 6). It is the failure of facts to adequately historicise the past, she suggests, that has led to the turn towards testimonial practices as a form of cultural and individual remembering. The crisis of truth telling arguably deepened in the UK as a result of the Iraq war in 2003 and was precipitated further by the death of David Kelly, a UK government scientist who was sent to Iraq to unearth the presence of the kinds of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had used to justify Britain's involvement in the war. Kelly's inability to find any such WMD and his subsequent untimely death ultimately brought about not only the collapse of Tony Blair's government, but also a radical decline of faith in the trustworthiness of UK politicians. Many of the different forms of documentary and verbatim drama produced at this time addressed this loss of faith through dramaturgical narratives that aimed to investigate and expose the undisclosed truths of specific historical events or issues. As I shall go on to argue in Chapter 2, rather than being centred around the representation of the real, these contemporary plays are best understood as engaging in new forms of truth telling. To do so, verbatim and tribunal playwrights turned to testimonial and documentary text, seeking to identify and represent key witnesses who could authenticate certain political narratives by revealing untold truths about these events. This approach, I suggest, was largely rooted in the influence of the post-war German documentary plays of the 1960s, many of which were directed by Erwin Piscator (1893–1966), a founding figure in the field of documentary drama.

Through an examination of the changing dramaturgical shape and function of the documentary character, I consider some key innovations that emerged in documentary theatre, as it developed through two critical moments within the twentieth century. The first part of the chapter concerns the early forms documentary theatre developed in Germany in the 1920s that were directed and produced by Piscator, and the second examines two influential plays that were written by Peter Weiss (1916–66) and Rolf Hochhuth (b. 1931) in the 1960s, which were also directed by Piscator. This period of documentary theatre history between the 1920s and the 1960s should be viewed as forming a pre-history for the contemporary verbatim theatre that appeared in the 1990s onwards. While the use of character in contemporary verbatim theatre tends to be somewhat fluid and at times inconsistent, what these verbatim plays have in common is a desire to use the figure of the witness to draw out new and previously untold narratives, in order to expose new truths about a key political event or issue.

Reconfiguring documentary character: Moving beyond dramatic character

Character is a central element in classical forms of dramatic structure and tends to be understood as being intrinsic to the play's action. However, this configuration has to be rethought when creating documentary and verbatim theatre, because the action of the plot in these types of plays is determined not by a fictive world but by real events and real people. Of course, this is a challenge confronted by many dramatists dealing with historical material. However, in documentary and verbatim plays, the representation of real people arguably becomes more politically and ethically acute, not least because often it is the actual, personal narratives drawn from living people that are used as a basis of the dramaturgical text itself. As such, deciding what motivates a character to act and determining how an audience will engage with the ideas a character represents determines the means by which character is constructed and what function character serves within a play.

The relationship between character and action in classical dramatic structure is discussed by Aristotle in The Poetics. Framed by a unity of plot, character and action, Aristotle presents an account of the structure of drama that appears to subordinate the importance of character to plot, while maintaining that within classical tragedy these two elements remain ‘closely linked’ (Janko, 1987: 109). Describing ‘plot’ as being the ‘soul of tragedy’, Aristotle positions character as a ‘secondary’ element (Aristotle, 1987: 8). Yet, it is this apparent conjoining of character and action that has probably been most influential in the development of dramatic structure in Western theatre, leading to the widely held view that ‘character is action’ and the playwright's job is to ‘show not tell’. On the subject of the relationship between character and action, Aristotle suggests that actors ‘do not act in order to represent the characters, but they include characters for the sake of their actions’ (Aristotle, 1987: 9). This leads him to argue that ‘[c]onsequently the incidents, i.e. the plot, are the end of tragedy, and the end is the most important of all […] without action a tragedy cannot exist, but without characters it may’ (Aristotle, 1987: 9). However, when character and plot are determined not by the playwright but by history itself, then the form of character and character's relationship to action must be rethought. Of course, the structure of any character within the dramaturgy of a play is itself always somewhat fluid and contingent because the structure and function of character shift and change from one genre of theatre to the next, and, as such, the claims of truth associated with each dramaturgical structure also shift and change. Trying to determine how to make a real person into a documentary character becomes a complex dramaturgical task and, as I will argue in this chapter, often has an ethico-political dimension to it.

Aristotle's account of character in relation to action and plot in The Poetics has also been a source of much debate, not least because the vision of character being grounded in action has been very influential to the way the structure of character has evolved in many forms of classical drama from Shakespeare onwards. To make matters more complex, while connecting character with plot, Aristotle also suggests that it is character ‘which reveals decision’ (Aristotle, 1987: 9), and this belief in an intrinsic relationship between character, motivation and decision has tended to imprint itself onto classical dramaturgical structures of characterisation. However, this is not to suggest that Aristotle's vision of character as being connected to action, plot or decision automatically produces psycho-social forms of characterisation, determined by individual desires or wants. Elinor Fuchs points out that ‘character’ in classical Greek theatre was not determined by any concept of an ‘individual psychology’ and certainly ‘the tragic actions’ of Greek tragic heroes were not ‘anchored in recognizable contexts of psychological and material life’ (Fuchs, 1996: 24). This contrasts to the construction of Shakespearean characters, such as Hamlet, who emerges not only through his outward actions, but through his expression of an ‘interior’ life comprised of personal desires and motivations. As such, when we encounter Hamlet, he seems to be a completed ‘whole’, and, as such, we envisage him existing as a whole person, exceeding beyond ‘the only partially visible Hamlet’ we encounter within Shakespeare's play (Fuchs, 1996: 25).

In her carefully traced historical account of the development of dramatic character in The Contemporary Political Play (2017), Sarah Grochala examines how changing social and cultural understanding of the human subject contributed to key shifts in the way dramatic character was viewed and constructed. The ‘Renaissance commentators on the Poetics’, Grochala argues, ‘recast playwrights as teachers of moral conduct’ (Grochala, 2017: 194), and this led to characters being ‘split into predominantly good or bad types’ with their fates being ‘determined by their moral condition’ (Grochala, 2017: 194–5). However, by the late eighteenth century, characters became unleashed from their moral status and were expected to have a ‘life of their own’ (Hazlitt quoted in Grochala, 2017: 198). By the late nineteenth century, there followed ‘a shift in characterisation towards an understanding of human behaviour in...