It didn’t happen like this: Suicide, voice and witnessing in Dead Centre’s Lippy

Abstract

This article addresses the use of voice in the theatrical representation of suicide in Dead Centre’s Lippy, a play that engages with the real-life group suicide of a family of four Irish women in 2001. Following a discussion of how to negotiate the political and ethical components of the suicide and the play, the article suggests witnessing as a fruitful conceptual framework. However, it establishes the need to develop the conceptualization of witnessing from existing scholarship in two core modes. First, it denotes that rather than simply a particular mode of language or sight, witnessing can take place through voice; it explores how Lippy uses voice to delineate and question structures of power in the representation of the Mulrooneys’ suicide. Second, instead of conceiving witnessing as simply a radicalization of the audience’s spectatorship, or situating the audience as either as testifier, witness or meta-witness, witnessing is a process in performance that concomitantly involves all three of these positions.