Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present

Abstract

Forsyth, Alison; Megson, Chris (eds), Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) pp.272 Contents: Acknowledgements - Notes on Contributors - Introduction; A.Forsyth & C.Megson - The Promise of Documentary; J.Reinelt - Mediating the 1930s: Documentary and Politics in Theatre Union’s Last Edition (1940); B.Harker - History in the Driving Seat: Unity Theatre and the Embrace of the ‘Real’; C.Chambers - The Documentary Body: Theatre Workshop to Banner Theatre; A.Filewod - Living Simulations: The Use of Media in Documentary in the UK, Lebanon, and Israel; C.Martin - Looking for Esrafil: witnessing ‘refugitive’ bodies in I’ve got something to show you; A.Jeffers - Remembering the Past, ‘Growing Ourselves a Future’: Community-Based Documentary Theatre in the East Palo Alto Project; L.Smith - Ngapartji Ngapartji: Telling Aboriginal Australian Stories; M.Casey - Performing Trauma: Race Riots and Beyond in the Work of Anna Deavere Smith; A.Forsyth - History, Memory and Trauma in the Documentary Plays of Emily Mann; A.Favorini - When Heroes Fall: Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife and the Challenge to Truth; N.P.Highberg - The Performance of Truth and Justice in Northern Ireland: the Case of Bloody Sunday; C-A.Upton - Half the Picture: ‘a certain frisson’ at the Tricycle Theatre; C.Megson - Verbatim Theatre in South Africa: ‘living history in a person’s performance’; Y.Hutchison - The ‘Broken Tradition’ of Documentary Theatre and its Continued Powers of Endurance; D.Paget - Index ALISON FORSYTH is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK, and researches into adaptations and staging the real. Her publications include Gadamer, History and the Classics: Fugard, Marowitz, Berkoff and Harrison Rewrite the Theatre (2002). Her current research projects are an anthology of adaptations and The Trauma of Articulation: Arthur Miller's Holocaust Plays. CHRIS MEGSON is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway College, University of London, UK. He is currently writing a book on the playwright Sarah Kane and has published a range of essays on post-war British playwriting and performance.