Publication details
Terrorists on stage : Documenting criminal voices in verbatim theatre
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Verbatim theatre, the staging technique combining elements of stagecraft and literal transcriptions of actual discourse, is an instance of documentary theatre, which aims at presenting words spoken by real-life persons to theatre audiences as they were spoken, without an artistic license or stylistic improvements. The effect of this technique is a heightened sense of authenticity and an educative element, which arrive at the cost of dramaticality of a performance. Verbatim theatre has a tradition in the context of plays dealing with crime and the judgment, such as tribunal plays (Arjomand 2018), and in the genre of the history play (Forsyth and Megson 2009). After discussing various aspects of the verbatim theatre relevant to the notion of the “criminal voice”, the presentation will discuss the play Talking to Terrorists by Robin Soans (2005) within the framework of post-dramatic theatre (Lehmann 1999) focusing on how the ultimate criminal of today – the terrorist – is construed in totality as a personage with complex history and agency. Hearing the terrorist speak authentically in the embodied presentation by a living actor on stage has a profound effect on the audience, which is complex in a specific way, which is pertinent to the theatre. |
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