Documentary Theatre and Performance

What distinguishes documentary theatre from other forms of drama? How has it integrated different media across the years, and to what effect? What is its relationship to truth and reality, and defining moments of civic unrest and political change?

In this short authoritative book, Andy Lavender surveys a century of documentary theatre and analyzes key productions. Arranged in three sections that take a broadly chronological approach, the volume considers the nature of documenting, forms of intervention through theatre, lived experience and group and individual identities, and issues of truth, reality and representation.

Lavender begins by considering In Spite of Everything (1925), directed by Erwin Piscator and presented at the Grosses Schauspielhaus, Berlin. Commonly held to be an inaugural instance of documentary theatre, this case study introduces the innovative work of artists and theatre-makers in Europe in the 1920s and '30s as well as many of the defining characteristics of documentary drama. The chapter traces work that followed in Europe and America, including the tribunal and testimony plays of the 1990s and 2000s.

The book moves on to examine the relationship of three key productions to moments of civic and political crisis: Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights Brooklyn and Other Identities, written and first performed by Anna Deveare Smith in New York in 1992; Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, written and first performed by Smith in Los Angeles in 1993, and The Colour of Justice: The Stephen Lawrence Enquiry, written by Richard Norton-Taylor and first presented at the Tricycle Theatre, London in 1999. It also looks at the impact of digital technologies and social media in the 21st century, to explore the engagement of documentary performance with mediations and experiences of Islam, immigration, cultural change and western identity across five varied case studies.