and be booked in subsequent venues and festivals; tours will create transnational consumers; successful producers (writers, directors, performers, and companies) will gain support for their next venture, and their work will be highly promoted. This is how the industry works, driven by profit—as Carol Martin argues, “who decides who speaks . . . although ideally driven by ethics, is mostly a commercial and ideological decision.”27 Developing this idea, this book argues that the decision to represent particular stories in the theatre is not random, but a direct result of gatekeepers seeking to accrue cultural, social, and economic capital through selected “valuable” stories.
Though many of these decisions are based on “the bottom line” and respond to commercial trends, within each layer of the production process other kinds of marketplace decisions are made about what characters, subjects, and voices will be granted a platform. Gatekeepers are therefore empowered by both economic and social capital and use this power in multivalent ways—they can choose how to respond to wider market demands (e.g., to write/direct/program shows that aim for escapism, or that seek to confront), they can choose which social groups are prioritized (dominant top-down, or bottom-up), and they can choose how to market them (a three-day run in a studio theatre for a niche audience, a month-long main stage run for a national audience). Not all gatekeepers are created equal though: just as there are power differentials for witnesses, major public institutions—such as the national theatre—often have greater market access and impact than local or fringe theatres and, due to longer runs and funding for archiving, greater longitudinal impact. This book thus considers the differences between institutional—and institutionalized—witness theatre and smaller-scale productions that, while not totally ephemeral, are more likely to remain at the level of embodied capital
Gatekeeping is often determined by economic trends. In Ireland, the turn toward a more inclusive public memory culture coincided with the greater affluence of the “Celtic Tiger” period (1993–2007). From this, we can see how economic context informs remembrance policy. One result, for example, is the 1994 official opening of the Irish War Memorial in Dublin commemorating the Irish soldiers who died fighting for the British Army in World War I. The memorial, initially completed in the 1930s, had its official opening delayed due to the outbreak of World War II; it was further delayed by both economic and postcolonial anxieties in the wake of the declaration of the Irish republic in 1949. In the 1990s the new national economic confidence created a context in which remembrance could become more inclusive, and the state became willing to expend national resources to recognize marginal memories and, through this investment, increase the marginal memory community’s mnemonic and social capital.
More recently the Irish “Decade of Centenaries” (2012–22), covering the revolutionary period from insurrection to civil war and independence, has been avowedly inclusive of previously overlooked narratives of the national past, including women’s suffrage and the 1913 workers’ lockout, alongside Irish participation in World War I. Indeed, the “unheard” status of many of these personal and national stories has been one of the features selling them to an audience who might be assumed to be fatigued by the monolithic anticolonial narrative. The inclusion of other marginal narratives is not, however, to suggest that the mainstream narrative has been displaced—indeed, the Decade of Centenaries budget tells another story. With €48.6 million of the approximately €60m budget for the entire decade spent on 2016—the centenary of the 1916 Rising against the British—its scale is a clear demonstration that this event is the most important in terms of the top-down state-led commemoration program. Even the expansion of that narrative to include female combatants and civilian casualties did not undermine the importance of this central event, rather it seemed a canny marketing tool to make new the old story of the rebellion. The success of the 2016 program, which resulted in huge crowds attending the commemorative parades and other family-related events (making hotel bookings skyrocket in cost28), demonstrates that the combination of state expenditure and the festivalization of history results in significant public buy-in. The combination of public spending with national remembrance (what Bourdieu terms the coincidence of economic and social investment29) thus carries significant dividends for both the state (the confirmation of a national narrative of progress and of Irish identity) and the market (new consumers for new stories30) incentivizing gatekeepers to make “transmissible heritage” a high profile and prestigious product in the marketplace.31
When it comes to the work this book discusses, I focus on how gatekeepers decide which witnesses are allowed to have a voice in the market. As Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Chana Teeger put it, “the narration of certain memories and the silencing of others can oftentimes be conceptualized as the attempts of those with power to set the limits on what is speakable or unspeakable about the past.”32 As suggested by the example of the First World War in Ireland, cultural gatekeepers with this kind of power thus shape the memory marketplace. What I explore in this book is how gatekeepers can use their power to transform what has been previously held to be “unspeakable”—child abuse, sexual violence, torture—by deliberately creating platforms for the voices of previously silenced cohorts. In fact, the witness plays discussed here highlight how two dimensions of the marketplace converge—the commercial desire for audiences, with a balancing desire for authenticity (itself a market-friendly concept).
The “social turn” in the culture industry, of which witness plays are a major aspect, promotes performances that enhance the social good, which seek to combat “fake news,” and which promise contact with the “real.” Witness plays, which focus on voices of victims and survivors, meet both needs as they market themselves as socially conscious plays where audiences can both enjoy a theatrical catharsis and fulfil their responsibilities as citizens to bear witness. The popularity of this medium (a new cultural hegemony?) has been marked in recent years, so that at times it seems it’s not just a memory boom, it’s a witnessing boom—with a seemingly endless supply of producers and consumers.
Gatekeepers and competition are fundamental features of the marketplace—without some element of selectivity, the memory marketplace becomes an overwhelming space of excess. After all, as Bourdieu warns, “it is taken for granted that maximum growth and therefore productivity . . . are the ultimate and sole goal of human actions,” and it is the same for the memory industry.33 This excess, however, is not a sign of complete remembering, but rather a kind of forgetting. While growth in the memory field may mean the expansion of platforms for unheard and untold stories, particularly by those with marginal memories, at the same time, expansion leads to the risk of saturation. As Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir argues, the logic of total recall is a kind of forgetting—if we remember everything without any selectivity, nothing is nominated as being particularly memorable or meaningful.34 We can find an echo of this sentiment in Brian Friel’s play Translations (1980) as Hugh advises his anxious son Owen that “to remember everything is a form of madness.”35 We may, then, need competition as a mechanism for cultures to reflect what is most important to remember and, yes, to forget what is less important. It’s also worth noting that the opposite—a lack of competition—is a feature of totalitarianism, a kind of “organised forgetting” and remembering.36
Competition is thus not a sign of the scarcity of memory, but a result of its abundance. What is in shorter supply is audience attention. The results of competition in the attention economy are therefore often unfair, mirroring the stratification of the social marketplace. The term “free market” thus misappropriates the term “free,” given that the market is determined by preexisting social and political factors, from state regulation to private investment. As Rosanne Kennedy and Gillian Whitlock argue, we need paradigms that can account for how “social and institutional structures, and political and economic power, shape and produce individual and collective experiences [and narratives] of suffering.”37 At a cultural level, we know well that powerful producers determine the narrative; in Walter Benjamin’s words, that powerful historical discourses “silence the memory of the defeated and powerless for whom the past is an uneven succession of fragmented and interrupted moments.”38 Moreover, we also know that consumption, “is a class institution.”39 Consumption in a stratified
