lines. As the examples of By Heart and Hamilton demonstrate, these calls to action do not have to be based on trauma. However, as this book will explore, these are exceptional moments—as pain and suffering are the current default modes for memory work in the theatre (and arguably culture more generally). The ethics of how painful memory is deployed as a tool for generating ethical remembering, and as a marketing tool, will be debated in the chapters that follow. There is a fine line between witnessing and appropriation, between ethical memory and entertainment consumption, and much depends on the aesthetic and performative decisions and strategies used by the theatre companies as to where on the line their depictions of pain fall. As Winter argues, not only silence, but also speech, can be used in “morally deplorable ways.”125
It is valuable to note here that responsibility works in two directions—memories of brutality and injustice deserve to be heard and witnessed, but we must not forget that scenes that depict brutality are a burden to the audience. The performance of painful memory creates an ethical imperative to remember and an equal need to forget. In a crowded marketplace, novelty and increasingly intense physical and emotional experiences drive consumption. Yet these experiences, which are the very ones that need witnessing, may become so normalized that they blend into a generalized trauma culture that reduces the capacity for witnessing as traumatic cultural memory reaches a saturation point. In some senses, then, it is not simply that these plays act out past trauma, but that they actually enact a traumatized relationship to the past. This relationship also requires witnessing.
THIS BOOK
This book focuses on the production and consumption of painful memory in contemporary Irish and international theatre. The chapters that follow examine how memories of pain are staged by playwrights and theatre companies, how they are communicated to audiences, and how that audience, in turn, both consumes and witnesses. Each chapter considers the message being sold to the audience, the possibilities for reception and remediation, the effects of different levels of social and cultural capital on the status of the witness, and how theatrical strategies can highlight competition, or create solidarity, through recognizing different forms of capital, and involving the audience in mnemonic labor. In deciding what plays to discuss, I have chosen to focus on testimonial and memory plays—witness plays—that stage the personal experiences of subjects who traditionally do not enjoy social and economic capital, as a way of understanding whether theatre can function as an intervention in the marketplace. As such, this book takes its cue from a long history of feminist performance (both in theatre and performance art), which has used the autobiographical as a mode to “reveal otherwise invisible lives, to resist marginalisation and objectification and to become, instead, speaking subjects with self-agency.”126
Over the course of the two opening chapters, I establish many of the practices of “theatre of the real” and the performances—and risks—of witnessing. Beginning with documentary and verbatim theatre, chapter 1 discusses two examples of that genre—No Escape (Ireland, 2010), compiled by Mary Raftery and created by the Abbey, Ireland’s national theatre, an example of subsidized theatre with a limited audience; and The Laramie Project (US, 2000) and The Laramie Project Ten Years Later (US, 2010) by Tectonic Theater Company, both of which were massive commercial successes with national US tours. These plays open the book’s discussion of how theatre can provide a powerful ensemble platform for experiences of the marginalized—victims of sexual abuse and violence—to be testified to. Though the productions are on very different scales, they each illustrate how mnemonic capital can be witnessed—and institutionalized—through the actions of key gatekeepers in the marketplace.
In chapter 2, the discussion turns to autoperformance plays, a form of documentary verbatim work in which the performer is the firsthand witness. The chapter highlights how I Once Knew a Girl (2010), by Theatre of Witness in Northern Ireland (2010), and Nirbhaya (India and UK, 2013), by Yael Farber and the ensemble at once show how victims can be empowered to perform their own stories, and also illustrate the risk of empathy as a dramaturgical strategy that commodifies the victim and enables the too-easy consumption of their suffering. These plays further illustrate the value of considering funding streams—public subsidy via grants, online marketing campaigns—demonstrating the tension for producers between creating platforms for marginalized voices and creating prestigious and instrumentalized cultural products.
Chapter 3 develops the analysis of the staging of witnessing, both within and outside institutionalized memory contexts, focusing on three plays based on and around the concept of truth and reconciliation commissions: Ubu and the Truth Commission by Jane Taylor and Handspring Puppet Company (South Africa/UK, 1997), Claudia by La Conquesta del Pol Sud (Spain/Argentina, 2016), and Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman (Chile/UK, 1990). Through these plays, I consider how testimony, as a particular form of cultural capital, becomes a tradeable commodity and the dimension that transnational witnessing adds to the market. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to modes of witnessing, to consider active listening as a way that audiences can engage in witnessing as a performance of immaterial labor. Discussions of Twilight—Los Angeles, 1992 (US, 1994) by Anna Deavere Smith, Come Out Eli (UK, 2003) by Alecky Blythe, Annulla (An Autobiography) (US, 1985) by Emily Mann, and Krapp’s Last Tape (Ireland/France, 1958), Footfalls (Ireland/France, 1976), and Come and Go (Ireland/France, 1965) all by Samuel Beckett, ultimately suggest how dramaturgical strategies around listening may resist the commodification of the firsthand witness.
Taking theatre out of the auditorium in chapter 5’s consideration of site-specific theatre allows us to look at other forms of resistance—and the full role of the audience as “prosumer” and collaborator in the construction of meaning. This chapter focuses on Proximity Mouth (Ireland, 2015) by Dominic Thorpe, the work of Dublin-based company ANU Productions (in particular their Monto cycle, Ireland, 2010–14), and audio performance walks Quartered: A Love Story (N. Ireland, 2016) by Kabosh Theatre Company; Echoing Yafa (Palestine/Israel, 2014) by Miriam Schickler; and And While London Burns (UK, 2007) by Platform. Each of these productions requires the audience to step out of the comfortable role of passive consumer and suggests the role of space and movement in the creation of mnemonic capital.
Finally, the conclusion considers the #MeToo movement as a new form of collective memory performance, and analyzes how in Ireland, feminist theatre movements such as “Waking the Feminists” and “Speak Up and Call It Out” show the activist power of mobilizing mnemonic capital in progressive ways, staging painful pasts for political ends rather than consumer empathy. This chapter responds to many of the ethical questions raised in the book about the consumption of others’ pain, asking us to notice how collective movements often require enormous labor from individuals, and finally considering how to balance the need to address inequalities in power and capital with the need to withdraw at times from the marketplace in order to preserve a sense of self.
Throughout the book, my analysis focuses on how producers exploit scripted and production strategies in the hope of directing audience attention to painful memory in particular ways, thereby shaping their behavior as both consumers and witnesses. I consider how audiences may have multivalent reactions and what the possibilities are for the citizen consumer to act in transgressive ways to become audience-witnesses and perhaps even activists. Witnessing memory of painful pasts is, in this iteration, not just a performance, but a performance of responsibility that occurs within, and draws attention to, the power strata of the marketplace.
NOTES
1. Carmen-Francesca Banciu and La Conquesta del Pol Sud, Land Full of Heroes (2019), unpublished script courtesy of La Conquesta del Pol Sud.
2.
