117. Berlant, “Compassion (and Withholding),” 9.
118. Givoni, Care of the Witness, 4.
119. Upton, “Northern Ireland,” 192.
120. See the discussion of market segmentation (the creation of new niche markets targeting particular consumer groups) in Art Weinstein, Market Segmentation (London: McGraw Hill, 1994).
121. Arvidsson, “Brand Management,” 78.
122. Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 10. See also Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, for belief that cultural memory has the ability to shape subjectivity and politics (p. 2); and that memory can consolidate important group identities (p. 4).
123. Throughout this book when I refer to “utopian” possibilities, I am following the example of Jill Dolan in Utopia in Performance.
124. Clarisse Loughrey, “Read Hamilton Cast’s Surprise Statement to Vice President-Elect Mike Pence,” Independent, November 21, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/hamilton-mike-pence-booed-statement-in-full-watch-new-york-vice-president-elect-a7429251.html.
125. Winter, “Thinking about Silence,” 11.
126. Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and Performance (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 3; see also pp. 20–25 for an overview of feminist and queer consciousness-raising performances.
Witnessing Docu-verbatim Memory
SOCIAL AND MNEMONIC CAPITAL ARE intimately linked. This chapter considers this statement in relation to the emergence of previously unspeakable memories into the marketplace as the social capital of marginalized groups begins to shift. These shifts are inextricably linked to cultural representation, and this chapter analyzes how theatrical gatekeepers use their influence within the cultural marketplace to raise both the memory and social capital of formerly powerless stakeholders—the victims of child abuse, sexual violence, and murder—through the form of docu-verbatim work, in order to create a more ethically balanced culture. Continuing the focus on the audience as a consumer in this dynamic, however, the chapter also highlights the risks inherent in marketing painful memory. Indeed, docu-verbatim theatre’s construction of the audience as witnesses creates a product and brand that generates memory capital for the firsthand witness, but whose ultimate dividend is the accrual of moral capital by the audience. As Roberta Sassatelli argues, “a growing variety of discourses, both within the marketplace and outside it, in politics and civil society, is calling into being the ‘consumer’ not only as an active subject but also, and above all, as a moral and political subject.”1 This chapter argues that docu-verbatim theatre is one such discourse, which not only calls into being, but depends on the idea of the moral consumer and audience-as-witness. But it also argues that the outcomes of this positioning have not yet been sufficiently analyzed in relation to how docu-verbatim theatre’s use of trauma as a catalyst for witnessing—what Ann Cvetkovich has called “an archive of feelings”—creates a consumer commodity out of painful memory.2 The chapter explores the tension between witnessing and shame, the interventionist role of biased mediation, the use of intolerable images, and the institutionalization of memory capital in order to engage with the fraught question of how theatre stages difficult histories.
DOCU-VERBATIM
Docu-verbatim theatre is not the best known form of Irish, or indeed international, theatre. But it is a genre increasing both its market share and its symbolic impact, and as such urgently requires analysis as an “alternative product,” a commodity that, as defined by Sassatelli, embodies “a critical dialogue with many aspects of commoditization as we know it.”3 In other words, this is a form of theatre that makes visible the cycle of production, distribution, and consumption through foregrounding the mechanisms of theatre-making and witnessing and highlighting the role of theatre as a joint site of production and consumption.
Docu-verbatim, my blended term designed to encompass documentary (based on documents) and verbatim (word-for-word) theatre styles, has experienced a recent market resurgence, its popularity broadly a response to the form’s attempt to represent some of the ethical crises of recent decades.4 It may be understood as a response to what Cvetkovich has defined as the need for nonmainstream social groups, without cultural capital, to have their memories and experiences represented through nonmainstream forms of performance, including “new genres of expression, such as testimony, and new forms of monuments, rituals, and performances that can call into being collective witnesses and publics.”5 Docu-verbatim is thus a “new form of . . . ritual” that responds to the consumer demand for art to react to crisis and to make the intricacies of those crises available, via a combined presentation of the relevant facts and an agreed message. Its recent popularity represents, as Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson put it, “a remarkable mobilisation and proliferation.”6 While many docu-verbatim plays are based on material (such as court transcripts) that is already publicly available, the form’s advantage is its mobilization of this information into a more accessible and performative medium. This action is attractive to a cultural and social marketplace that is constantly flooded with information, as these plays promise to distill what is important in a consumer-friendly format. In one sense, then, docu-verbatim’s contemporary market success is based not only on its seeming response to ethical crises, but to a crisis of knowing—or rather, a feeling of not-knowing. As Carol Martin argues, docu-verbatim “both acknowledges a positivist faith in empirical reality and underscores an epistemological crisis in knowing truth,” a feeling of crisis that, perhaps, an evening at the theatre can allay.7 Insecurity, as any analyst will tell you, is bad for the market—unless, that is, the market can create a brand to simultaneously address and feed off that insecurity.
The “art” of docu-verbatim is to transform complex ethical and social debates into a theatrically powerful moment, harnessing the emotive power of crisis and controversy in order to do so. In championing the disenfranchised, and highlighting abuses of power, these plays derive their edge from challenging the status quo and saying the unsayable. In this sense docu-verbatim theatre goes beyond “holding the mirror up to nature,” instead actively attempting to intervene in the world outside the theatre—the social, cultural, and memory marketplaces. What is particular to this form is its rooting in “the real”; docu-verbatim theatre gives direct access to untold stories of the unheard. I say “gives” and “direct,” with the obvious caveat being that docu-verbatim gives the impression of granting access to authenticity, through what is a highly stylized and highly selective form. We need to consider the dialectic between witnessing the authentic voice and the exigencies of shaping the message; through examining this tension we will see how docu-verbatim theatre negotiates the marketplace, positions the witness within the marketplace, and mediates the witness’s voice in order to create a powerful connection between the witness and the audience, a connection that creates significant cultural, social, and memory capital.8 Ultimately, theatre makers who privilege the voice of the unheard work as gatekeepers, who transform not only the cultural but hopefully also the social capital of the person or group whose testimony is being witnessed.
Is consuming docu-verbatim theatre a different experience to consuming fiction theatre? The short answer is yes. While the performers of mainstream fiction theatre relate their narratives to an implied audience, docu-verbatim is generally characterized by a direct address style, which creates an uninterrupted relationship,