in the audience.66 As Pat Palmer argues, “the community of compassionate spectatorship which pain creates is a partisan community, united in solidarity against those inflicting pain.”67 Peters inflects this further, stating that “to witness an event is to be responsible in some way to it.”68 The entanglement of witnessing is thus imagined by these critics as more than a stratified field—instead reading it as a collaborative and communal practice. How does this apply to theatre specifically? Does its communal nature automatically create the setting for witnessing? Diana Taylor suggests it does, arguing that “witnessing is transferable—the theater . . . can make witnesses of others.”69
What does this actually mean? In the theatre, we tend to sit surrounded by others, but is that truly communal? Bourdieu’s frame for economic and social exchanges suggests yes: “a two-way relation is always in fact a three-way relation, between the two agents and the social space within which they are located.”70 Becker and Murphy argue that consumer behavior is always led by others, whether fashion-setting or simply because consumption is always a social interaction.71 So do these social settings necessarily convert the audience into witnesses? Karine Shaefer asks this important question, “Does listening to testimony . . . [create] spectatorial witnesses”? The answer may not live up to our ideal wish for the moral witness—as Shaefer puts it, “any attempt to unilaterally equate spectators with witnesses collapses under the multivalency of audience reactions.”72 Likewise, Caroline Wake objects to the automatic titling of spectators as witnesses, in particular the way “the word witness is becoming a generalised, semi-sacralised term” employed “to emphasise the historical importance or emotional impact of a particular performance.”73 Wake calls attention to the emotive power and marketability of the word “witness” and its connotations of ritualized attention and catharsis: “In our eagerness to promote the ethical potential of performance [we ignore that] though primary witnessing is implicated in the ethics of vision and visibility, it is not necessarily an ethical mode of spectatorship per se.”74 Blanket use of the term witnessing distorts the multivalent realities of audiences and the performance of spectating. In order to avoid this distortion, Wake, like Peters, argues that we should more accurately think of witnessing as something that happens after the performance—it is through remediation of the testimony that the ethical level of witnessing is achieved. Whether or not that remediation occurs cannot be controlled but only guessed at.
The interaction between audience and stage, spectator and performer is thus not a definite or controlled interface. Yet it is essential that we consider how the presence of the audience functions as a key determiner of meaning. As Alan Filewood argues, we need to start to ask “whether audiences are local communities in formation, legitimising communities summoned by the performance, or metonymic agents.”75 We can extend that to challenge, as Rancière does, the automatic assumption that theatre represents a site of community at all—though the auditorium may be filled with people, they do not necessarily cohere into a single “we.”76
Asserting that being an audience member is, as Gareth White says, a “social process” has direct implications for how we witness, as White argues that during a show “audience behaviour is guided as well as audience perception.”77 It may be then that the feeling of being “allied” that Jill Dolan hopes for is what guides audiences to perform as moral witnesses.78 Solo, in the marketplace, individuals might act in one way, but in the context of a group where particular norms are developed (responding sympathetically, laughing, applauding) individuals can be influenced in particular ways (analogous to Jan Assmann’s concept of “social mediation”79). Very little work on this exists in relation to theatre, but both consumer research and social psychology suggest that group behavior is a significant determining factor in an individual’s adherence to “ethical” norms.80 Rosanne Kennedy also points to how cultural texts “educate” the public in how to respond appropriately.81 Viewed this way, theatre is perhaps the ultimate modality to create what Marianne Hirsch terms “an affiliative space of remembering” in which performers and audiences each strive to successfully perform the second and third levels of witnessing.82 However, it is debatable how voluntary this performance is, as Susan Sontag contests, “strictly speaking there is no such thing as collective memory—part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction.”83 Is the communal just a context, then, for compulsory collective instruction? This sense of top-down direction also underscores Attilio Favorini’s statement that theatre “organize[s] us into a group of rememberers.”84
Against this background of guided behavior we must acknowledge that the theatrical organization of the audience is always in dialogue with their preexisting beliefs (which may be either aligned with, or oppositional to, the show they are attending), so that audience members’ social position “including the intersectionalities of race, class, gender, and age, significantly inform how they read” and interpret what they are being presented with, or asked to witness to.85 This point brings us back to consumer agency and the power of choice—because while it is valuable to recognize how powerful the communal setting of theatre is, and the power of the call to witnessing created by being part of a group, audience choice remains. In other words, however coercive the social setting of the theatre, the possibility remains that audiences will actively choose not to be instructed, not to witness, or to witness divergently.
What Are We Witnessing?
What is it that a theatre audience is witnessing? This book takes as its subject a genre of witness theatre that can broadly be termed documentary or, following Carol Martin, “the theatre of the real.”86 As will be discussed in chapter 1, this form of theatre aims to present documentary stories, often through verbatim testimony, to an audience who will bear witness to its truths and, through their collective presence, validate those stories and experiences being performed. The sharing of testimony allows the person whose story is being performed—whether by an actor, through a veil of anonymity, or by the person themselves—to move away from being portrayed as an object of representation, toward instead portraying their experience as an agent of their own lives and memories. This firsthand contact with “the real” is what gives this form its social, cultural, and political power, generating multiple forms of capital through a complex balancing of authenticity (the witness) and mediation (the performance). Testimonial witness plays often, as discussed further below, involve witnesses and audiences in performances of painful memory. As such, testimony, as Anne Cubilié and Carl Good state, “emerges not merely as a result of the destabilization of narrative, memory, identity and history by trauma, but also as a response to trauma, a response which evokes—and ventures—the possibilities of language, literature and ethical community in a resistance to effacement from juridical, literary, psychic and cultural fields.”87 What I appreciate in this theorization of testimony is the refusal to equate painful experience with silence. As this book will show, testimonial witness plays enable fulsome articulation of varieties of memory and experience from pain to joy, devastation to resilience, loss to growth. And this, perhaps, is where the appeal lies for consumers who are not only seeking in the theatre to “find pleasure in the un-pleasurable” but who seek to invest in narratives and performances that access the breadth of another person’s experiences.88
In some senses memory plays perform the relationship between memory and identity itself—in that memory and identity are both inherently performative and discursively constructed and depend on, following Judith Butler, repetition in order to become inscribed as normative.89 Freddie Rokem argues that audiences for memory plays are witnessing the time lapse of history as they eavesdrop on testimony about past events.90 Rokem calls this a “‘ritual’ of resurrection.”91 In Memory in Play, Favorini describes theatre “as a placeholder for memory,” suggesting that theatre performs a social function in remembering on behalf of the audience—so that they may revisit, through ritual, past events they may not have the capacity to remember themselves.92
