Abstract
Gibson examines the connection between words, stories, identity, and the materialisation of reality in ‘theatre of the real’, with a particular interest in verbatim theatre. She argues that any reality being framed on stage will inevitably cite the already mediated frames of reference underpinning and bolstering this reality, making it almost impossible to avoid replaying the ‘right kind’ of dementia story and summoning ‘normative age-and-dementia-effects’ (assumptions underpinning naturalised representations of old adults with dementia). Gibson importantly considers what dementia can offer ‘theatre of the real’, as dementia draws attention to the nature of the ‘truth’ of any story, whether from someone with dementia or not. No one can tell an unchanging and true life story which can then be represented on stage in a direct and unmediated fashion.
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Notes
- 1.
Garde and Mumford see Martin’s choice not to capitalise her phrase “theatre of the real” (2013) as one which underlines the fluidity of the diverse practices she investigates; they choose the opposite move and capitalise their “Theatre of Real People” to convey a “more containable or discrete (if by no means fixed) type of theatre-making” (2016, 7).
- 2.
Despite occasional recourse to the work of memory theorists, the domain of memory is too large and unwieldy for me to do it justice within this book’s scope.
- 3.
This is an idea proposed by both Derek Paget (2009) and verbatim scholar Caroline Wake (2010a). Wake argues that, in certain ways, particular theatre practices “do … different kinds of cultural work” (ibid., 21) and therefore still need to be distinguished, otherwise any muscularity in describing differences in the various practices under their mantles will be lost. Writing about asylum seeker plays in Australia from 2000 to 2005, Wake argues that verbatim plays “were often writing a subaltern history of the period (by interviewing those who had been absented from the public record) while documentary plays were writing a subversive history … (by re-reading publically [sic] available documents ‘against the grain’)” (2010a, 21).
- 4.
In practice, this is happening frequently: the German company Rimini Protocol has people, not professional actors, perform their own stories on stage. Their Radio Muezzin (which I saw at the Sydney Festival in early 2012) had four muezzins from mosques in Cairo recount their ceremonial practices through telling their distinct stories. These are “‘the experts of the everyday’ (people who are specialists in a particular field of life)” (Garde and Mumford 2013, 149). Writing mainly in reference to performance art, art historian Claire Bishop (2012, 219) uses the term “‘delegated performance’” to account for this practice of professionals hiring non-professionals to do work on their behalf (e.g. performance artist Marina Abramović).
- 5.
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz were among these playwrights.
- 6.
Lenz (1835) is a study of schizophrenia based on a Minister’s journal notes. Woyzeck (1837) is a working-class tragedy based on documentation about three nineteenth-century murders and medical reports on the mental health of Johann Woyzeck, an actual person (Garde et al. 2010, 10).
- 7.
An example is In Spite of Everything! (Trotz alledem!) (1925), co-produced with Felix Gasbarra. A political revue of a ten-year history of the German Communist Party, this production marked the emergence of “a new form of theatre composed entirely of visual and verbal documents” (Favorini, xviii cited in Garde et al. 2010, 11), including montages of projected newsreel footage, recorded speeches, news extracts, photographs, and film sequences from the First World War.
- 8.
As Garde et al. (2010) report, in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR), the Blue Blouse troupe presented Living Newspapers commissioned by the Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) to present ‘facts’ and information about the Russian Revolution to a vast number of mostly illiterate people. Starting from actors just reading the newspapers, these shows became livelier over the years with the use of slides, songs, and snippets of film. In the Depression era, from 1929, the form spread to the UK and the USA. In the USA, it manifested in the Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers, which were socially engaged plays based on newspaper reports; in the UK, the Unity Theatre took up the form. Both presented challenges to totalitarian regimes and told stories about the capitalist victims of the Depression.
- 9.
Two of these were Rolf Hochhuth’s The Representative (1963) and Peter Weiss’ The Investigation (1965), both written nearly twenty years after the end of the Second World War. Of interest here is that Piscator directed both these productions, as well as Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1964) (Cantrell 2015).
- 10.
The work of these practitioners was in the lineage of the UK radio ballads of the 1950s, which culminated in Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War (1963); as well, they were clearly indebted to the UK documentary films of the 1930s and 1940s and the European plays of Berthold Brecht and Erwin Piscator (Paget 1987, 318–319).
- 11.
Parramatta Girls is an example of what Valentine calls “‘massaged verbatim’” (Smith 2014, 16) with the eight characters in the play composites of the many women interviewed (more than 35 ex-Parramatta Girls home inmates).
- 12.
The Laramie Project is about Kaufman and company’s venture to Laramie, Wyoming, to write a verbatim play about the effects of the 1998 torture and murder of a young gay university student, Matthew Shepard, on its townspeople. Stuff Happens is about the events which led up to the 2003 Iraq war with excerpts taken from members of the Bush and Blair administrations and other well-known political figures.
- 13.
Theatrical realism first developed in the 1870s with a set of dramatic conventions targeting a greater fidelity to ‘real’ life in both text and performance. It centred on the ordinary speech, behaviour, and settings of the middle classes. It was a theatre interested in the actual problems of people’s lives and was established in reaction to the artificial comedies and melodramas which were the mainstay of most of the nineteenth-century stages of Europe (Kernodle and Kernodle 1978, 126–130).
- 14.
In using the phrase, the ‘British school’, I do not mean to infer that all British theatre of the real follows in this line. I use it to refer primarily to those playwrights who talk about their practices in the book Verbatim, verbatim (2008) edited by Will Hammond and Dan Steward: specifically, Richard Norton-Taylor, Robin Soans, David Hare, Nicholas Kent, and Alecky Blythe. Their ideas about the value of verbatim as a technology of truth share many similarities.
- 15.
First defined by Plato, diegesis as redefined by Martin Puchner (2002, 24) refers to “‘indirect descriptive or narrative representation of objects, persons, spaces or events through language…spoken by a rhapsode, narrator, chorus, or author or represented in the dramatic text for the reader’” (quoted in Wake 2018b, 117).
- 16.
Headphone verbatim faithfully reproduces the speech patterns of its sources. Using headphones, actors listen to and deliver as closely as possible the words and vocal inflections of a pre-written and carefully edited script recorded from interviews (including pauses and stutters). The form was first introduced in the UK by Mark Wing-Davey at a workshop at the London Actors Centre, at which both UK theatre maker Alecky Blythe and Australian Roslyn Oades were participants (Brown 2010, 84). Blythe went on to establish the company Recorded Delivery and Oades to work with Sydney-based Urban Theatre Projects. Blythe has expressed the strains of the commitment to “remaining faithful to the interview and creating a dramatic narrative” (2008, 95), concerns which most of the British verbatim practitioners in the book Verbatim, verbatim also repeatedly express.
- 17.
English actor and director Henry Siddons, along with Johann Jacob Engel, documented many of these nineteenth-century gestures in Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gestures and Action (1822).
- 18.
Both also deploy what The New Yorker theatre reviewer Hilton Als terms “the round tones of a classically trained act-or” (2010; original emphasis).
- 19.
There are correspondences between dementia testimonies and trauma testimonies. Cathy Caruth, following Freud, defines trauma as “that which resists simple comprehension” (1996, 6) and argues that it is best apprehended as an unqualified break in consciousness of being in the world; “a wound inflicted not on the body but on the mind … a breach in the process of cognition” (1996, 3–4 cited in Stuart Fisher 2011, 114). Research into the experience of living with dementia describes how individuals experience frequent traumatic ruptures in the fabric of their lives, usually to do with memory loss. It is quite common for people with dementia to endure bewildering absences in everyday life “threatening the continuity and familiarity of assumptions that enable us all to live day-by-day” (Mitchell et al. 2011, 23). One moment the person could be having breakfast and the next he or she could be down at the shops with four to five hours having passed and no idea of how they got there. The reality of dementia, in itself and as a lived trauma, is that it may not be able to be ‘told’ by those who have it, depending on the stage of the disease, of course, or at least it may not be able to be told in a linear, logical, and continuous narrative mode.
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Gibson, J. (2020). Staging the ‘Reality’ of Dementia. In: Dementia, Narrative and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46547-6_4
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