Lib Taylor

Voice, Body and the Transmission of the Real in Documentary Theatre

This article analyses how listening is used to develop performances in Alecky Blythes verbatim theatre. Listening includes Blythes use of recorded oral interviews for devising performances, and also the actors’ creation of performance by precisely imitating an interviewees voice. The article focuses on listening, speaking and embodiment in London Road, Blythes recent musical play at Londons National Theatre, which adopted and modified theatre strategies used in her other plays, especially The Girlfriend Experience and Do We look Like Refugees. The article draws on interviews with performers and with Blythe herself, in its critical analysis of how voice legitimates claims to authenticity in performance. The work on Blythe is contextualised by brief comparative analyses. One is Clio Barnards film The Arbor, a ‘quasi-documentary’ on the playwright, Andrea Dunbar which makes use of an oral script to which the actors lip-sync. The other comparator is the Wooster Groups Poor Theater, which attempts to recreate Grotowskis Akropolis via vocal impersonation. The article argues that voice in London Road both claims and defers authenticity and authority, inasmuch as voice signifies presence and embodied identity but the reworking of speech into song signals the absence of the real. The translation of voice into written surtitles works similarly in Do We Look Like Refugees. Blythes theatre, Barnards film and The Wooster Groups performances are a useful framework for addressing questions of voice and identity, and authenticity and replication in documentary theatre. The article concludes by placing Blythes oral texts amid current debates around theatres textual practices.

The experience of immediacy: Emotion and enlistment in fact-based theatre

ABSTRACT This article discusses emotion as a strategy of political agency in post-Thatcherite documentary theatre. The 1990s saw a renaissance in theatre writing based in ‘directness’ and ‘immediacy’ but based in two quite different forms of drama, ‘In-Yer-Face’ theatre and fact-based drama. There are clear distinctions between these forms: the new brutalist writing was aggressively provocative; documentary theatre engaged the audience by revealing an urgent ‘truth’. Both claimed a kind of realism that confronted actuality, be that of situation or experience, through forms of theatre that cultivated emotional engagement. ‘In-Yer-Face’ theatre used emotional shock to penetrate the numb cynicism that its creators perceived. Documentary theatre used observation and the cultivation of sympathy to enlist its audience in a shared understanding of what was hidden, not understood or not noticed. The article analyses the functioning of emotional enlistment to engage the audience politically in two examples of documentary theatre, Black Watch and Guantanamo.

The ‘Unhomely’ stage

Abstract Drawing on Freuds concept of the unheimlich, this article proposes the notion of ‘The Unhomely Stage’ as a category of postmodern theatre which responds to contemporary lived experience of fragmentation and insecurity. The idea of The Unhomely Stage emerged during the process of devising and documenting a research production at the University of Reading of Backtracks, a performance which re-evaluated what it means to feel ‘at home’ in the modern world. Focused around explorations of migration, journey, loss and memory, Backtracks looked to Homi Bhabhas postcolonial reworkings of heimlich/unheimlich to find a theoretical framework for responding to the experience of alienation and displacement that marks modern existence. But it alo connected Freuds concept of the unhomely to Brechts Defamiliarization, with its emphasis on reflexive analysis, and to Artauds Cruelty, with its focus on personal experience and the internal dynamics of the psyche.

Devising in Process

‘bad’ support is that provided (poorly and unevenly) by state institutions. Jackson seems to infer that ‘good’ support can be found not so much in large-scale institutions as in small-scale ones such as kinship structures (which she sensitively emphasises include non-normative chosen family formations), art practices such as the cross-media (or mutually supportive media) practices she examines, and critical practices such as the cross-disciplinary (or disciplinarily interdependent) ones she forges across the length of her book. There is an impressive cumulative force in this argument given the myriad examples of such art practices and the consistent deployment of such art criticism that the book offers. In that accumulation, there is a strong sense that such systemic (if not precisely institutional) everyday practices may be more effective in their support because they are more pervasive and (in Michel de Certeau’s terms) more tactical than strategic (hegemonic) institutional support. Nevertheless, certain questions remain for me, such as whether all institutional state support is ‘bad’ (not least since the ‘institutional’ can collapse all too easily into ideas of intrinsically dysfunctional bureaucracy and/or demonised nanny states); how we ensure dispersed, tactical forms of support are pervasively and fairly distributed; and how we might improve state support since it might at least offer useful infrastructures for distributing support. These questions may remain for me, but I am heartily thankful to Jackson for indicating so many answers through the art and performance examples she explores and, most importantly, for making the fundamental case for support, without which such questions would be redundant and the case for cutting support would consider itself, disastrously, given.

Representing the ‘perhaps(h)er’: Cross‐cultural approaches to the politics of identity in a production of the singular life of Albert Nobbs

A search for theatrical languages which represent the dynamics of increasingly destabilised cultural, national and gender identities through practices derived from Oriental theatre informed the production of Simone Benmussas The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs at Reading University in December 1990. While wishing to retain Benmussas interrogation of authorial identity and the structures which maintain patriarchy, the production aimed to extend the critique of cultural dislocation, by adopting Oriental theatre strategies similar to those used by Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine. Rather than reproducing Asian theatre conventions, the metaphorising strategy of replacing one signifier with another was employed to widen the field of signification, thereby exploring the imposition of cultural and gender identities. While Brook and Mnouchkine have used these forms to defamiliarise, their spectacular productions do not always expose difference. The Reading production aimed to politicise rather than exoticise the...