Chris Megson

Get Real : Documentary Theatre Past and Present

Forsyth, Alison; Megson, Chris (eds), Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) pp.272 Contents: 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 ALISON FORSYTH is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK, and researches into adaptations and staging the real. Her publications include Gadamer, History and the Classics: Fugard, Marowitz, Berkoff and Harrison Rewrite the Theatre (2002). Her current research projects are an anthology of adaptations and The Trauma of Articulation: Arthur Millers Holocaust Plays. CHRIS MEGSON is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway College, University of London, UK. He is currently writing a book on the playwright Sarah Kane and has published a range of essays on post-war British playwriting and performance.

‘The spectacle is everywhere’: tracing the situationist legacy in British playwriting since 1968

In 2002, there was a landmark opportunity for the British public to revaluate the artwork produced in Paris during the late 1960s and to meditate on its legacy across visual cultures. The ‘Paris: Capital of the Arts (1900–1968)’ Exhibition at London’s Royal Academy presented the found objects, torn posters and ‘readymade’ compositions that characterised politically-engaged interventions before and during les événements of May 1968. 1 In this motley collection, the ephemera and detritus of the everyday are recontextualised for the viewer in order to dislocate conventional ways of seeing. Although the exhibition made scant reference to them, it is the ideas of the Situationists that help explain how such art generates its effect. Stimulated in part by this exhibition and in part by the repeated references in British theatre historiography to 1968 as a ‘watershed’ year, the first section of this article considers the legacy of the Situationist Guy Debord in relation to the British playwriting that emerged after 1968; it also identifies the fundamental tenets of Debord’s critique. The latter section demonstrates that the specific frames of reference set out in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle can help illuminate aspects of so-called ‘In-Yer-Face’ theatricality that came to prominence in the 1990s.

Performance, Experience, Transformation: What do Spectators Value in Theatre?

This article explores the findings of “Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution” (TSVA), a research project conducted by the British Theatre Consortium (BTC, a small think-tank of playwrights and theatre academics) in 2013–14. The project team developed partnerships with three theatres – the Young Vic, RSC, and Theatre Royal (Drum) in Plymouth – to investigate how spectators attribute value to the performances they see. Based on empirical research gathered through surveys but enhanced by additional data from interviews and creative workshops, TSVA revealed both the necessity and limitations of empirically based research methodologies. Quantitative research methods are helpful in the collation and mapping of demographic data on theatre audiences (age, gender, educational background, etc.); however, when research seeks to address processual activities rooted in phenomenological experience, qualitative methodologies are especially useful. TSVA found strong evidence that spectators assign value to theatre as a result of the complex associations that emerge between the performance, their personal networks, and the larger public context; moreover, these values are liable to change over time. This article explores the methods, findings and implications of the TVSA project with reference to two production case studies at the Young Vic – Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (staged in 2014) and David Greig’s The Events (2013).

Half the Picture : ‘A Certain Frisson’ at the Tricycle Theatre

Over the past 15 years, the so-called tribunal plays staged at the Tricycle Theatre in North London have been at the epicentre of the revival in documentary performance in the UK. Tribunal theatre consists of the meticulous re-enactment of edited transcripts of state-sanctioned inquiries that address perceived miscarriages of justice and flaws in the operations and accountability of public institutions. Typically, tribunal productions take the form of a forensic simulation of the inquiry’s disputations and setting, with actors playing the roles of the actual witnesses and judicial personnel, and performances invariably accrue an intense topical frisson since they are often staged more or less synchronously with the ‘real’ inquiry itself. The partnership of Richard Norton-Taylor, the Guardian journalist who edits the transcripts into a play, and Nicolas Kent, the Tricycle’s artistic director, has proven to be one of the most enduring in the postwar history of British documentary theatre. In this chapter, I wish to focus on the first of Norton-Taylor’s plays, Half the Picture, a dramatic re-enactment of the Scott Arms-to-Iraq Inquiry that premiered in June 1994.1 The Scott Inquiry was established to investigate the alleged complicity of government ministers and Whitehall officials in the illegal export of machine tools destined for weapons manufacture in Iraq, and consisted of 87 public hearings (with additional hearings in private).

Beyond Belief: British Theatre and the ‘re-enchantment of the world’

One of the notable features of twenty-first-century British drama is its preoccupation with the manifestations, existential implications and ethical possibilities of belief across varied religious and secular contexts. Drawing on the philosopher and sociologist Max Weber’s landmark lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1918), which identifies ‘disenchantment’ as the presiding condition of modernity, and Simon During’s writings on ‘secular magic’, Megson shows how the encounter with belief in contemporary theatre raises vital questions about its capacity to enchant, delude or transform social reality at the present juncture. The chapter includes detailed analysis of Rob Drummond’s Bullet Catch (Arches, 2009), Lucy Prebble’s Enron (Royal Court, 2009) and Mike Bartlett’s 13 (National Theatre, 2011).

‘And I was struck still by time’: Contemporary British Theatre and the Metaphysical Imagination

David Greig’s Pyrenees (Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 2005) tells the story of a man found unconscious in the snow on the mountainous pilgrims’ route to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. The Man (as he is designated in the text) suffers from severe memory loss and the play revolves around the mystery of his identity. The quotation above is taken from a conversation with Anna — the Man’s contact from the British Consulate — as he recalls his feelings at the very moment of regaining consciousness.

The Theatres Act (1968), documentary theatre and the actor's ‘overwhelming reality’

ABSTRACT This article examines the turbulent debates in Cabinet and Parliament that took place in 1967–8 during the passing of the Theatres Act—the piece of legislation that abolished the Lord Chamberlains jurisdiction over British theatre. These debates were characterized by a concern about how the abolition of theatre censorship might impact on the representation of living and recently deceased persons by actors onstage. Leading politicians at the time were especially fretful about the possible effects of satire and documentary drama on the reputations of iconic historical and political figures. The article explores these arguments, noting how they give expression to underlying anxieties about the function and affect of acting in fact-based theatre. Over the past fifteen or so years, coinciding with the revival and proliferation of forms of documentary theatre across western theatre cultures, these anxieties about acting have resurfaced in the discourse of theatre practitioners. Indeed, I argue that contemporary fact-based theatre often protects the primacy of testimony by attempting to delimit the phenomenal power and ‘overwhelming reality’ of the actor in performance.

This worldly Wonderment: Contemporary British Theatre and Postsecularism

The discourse of postsecularism has emerged in the West as a response, variously, to contemporary critiques of secularism, the rise of ‘new atheism’ and religious fundamentalisms , and the perceived philosophical impasse of postmodern scepticism. Focusing on Howard Brenton’s Paul (Cottesloe Theatre 2005), Nick Payne’s Constellations (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs 2012) and Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (Cottesloe Theatre 2012), this chapter explores the relationship between recent British theatre and secular/postsecular critical itineraries. In so doing, it argues for the capacity of theatrical performance to both unsettle and vivify secular imaginaries through its intensive evocation of worldly experience.

Conversations with David Edgar

Conversations with David Edgar Chris Megson and Janelle Reinelt....................... 372 The National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch Rebecca Robinson ............................................ 392 Dramaturgy of Desire, Ethics of Illusion in Kristian Smeds’s Mr Vertigo Hana Worthen................................................ 400 Radical intimacy: Ontroerend Goed Meets The Emancipated Spectator Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink.................................. 412

In memoriam : David Bradby (1942-2011) : liberte, egalite, fraternite

This special edition of Backpages is dedicated to commemorate the passing of Contemporary Theatre Reviews co-editor David Bradby, whose long-standing, exemplary, open-hearted leadership in theatre education, scholarship, translation, theory and practice was profound, and beyond measure. Backpages has gathered personal tributes from practitioners and fellow colleagues in the field in his memory.This special edition of Backpages is dedicated to commemorate the passing of Contemporary Theatre Reviews co-editor David Bradby, whose long-standing, exemplary, open-hearted leadership in theatre education, scholarship, translation, theory and practice was profound, and beyond measure. Backpages has gathered personal tributes from practitioners and fellow colleagues in the field in his memory.