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Naked Truth: Theatrical Performance and the Diagnostic Turn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2011

JAMES FRIEZE
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Abstract

In a fashion that harks back to the birth of naturalistic drama, but also reflects contemporary anxieties about the etiolation of the real, the forensic capabilities of theatre have become, in the last two decades, the primary focus of theatrical attention. Reconsidering landmark works and rhetorical frames that helped to establish verbatim, virtual and in-yer-face theatre, this article explores the ways in which these key works and genres deploy, and attempt to jam, theatre's diagnostic machinery. The article contextualizes that machinery in relation to the medical underpinnings of naturalism, the growth of theatrical reflexivity from Pirandello to Beckett to Blast Theory, and the televisual phenomena of crime-scene investigation and fly-on-the-wall ‘reality shows’. In the final section I move to address two works which are explicitly about diagnosis, but which, in signal and purposeful ways, evade diagnosis: Must, by American performance artist Peggy Shaw and British company Clod Ensemble; and If That's All There Is, by UK-based company Inspector Sands.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , July 2011 , pp. 148 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2011

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References

NOTES

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6 Zola quoted by Garner, ‘Introduction’, p. 318.

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11 I am quoting Giannachi's introduction to Desert Rain on the website for the Presence Project, an exploration of presence in performances that mix the live and the simulated: http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/348 (accessed 8 February 2011). For her expanded assessment see Giannachi, Gabriella, Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 115–22Google Scholar.

12 An American protesting against the destruction of Palestinian homes, Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in 2003. My Name Is Rachel Corrie was first produced at the Royal Court in London in 2005. A scheduled transfer to the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) was aborted amidst controversy: NYTW claimed that Rickman and Viner pulled the play after a postponement the theatre described as logistical; Rickman and Viner claimed that the theatre got cold feet after protests by Jewish groups. The play did open in downtown Manhattan in 2006, but at Minetta Lane in Greenwich Village. My Name Is Rachel Corrie (London: Nick Hern, 2008).

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15 Columbinus was written by P. J. Paparelli and produced by Raven Theatre in 2008 at their home space in Chicago. The quotation is from a review on the site Theatre in Chicago, www.theatreinchicago.com/playdetail.php (accessed 21 January 2011).

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25 Vikram Dodd, ‘A Critique of Journalism Framed by the Stockwell Shooting’, Guardian, 23 June 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/jun/23/stockwell-shooting-de-menezes-play (accessed 18 January 2011).

26 Dodd cites Davies, Nick, Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media (London: Chatto and Windus, 2008)Google Scholar.

27 For further discussion of the term ‘distillation’ as used by Kent and other makers of verbatim theatre see Frieze, James, Naming Theatre: Demonstrative Diagnosis in Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 203–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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31 I am quoting an extract from Hysteria uploaded by the company to YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Yl-28FYqols (accessed 10 January 2011).

32 The British Household Panel Survey has been tracking what it deems a representative range of ten thousand households across the UK since 1991 to measure ‘subjective wellbeing’ in different parts of the country. The international survey to which I refer, polling 12,500 consumers in sixteen countries, is known as the Coca Cola Happiness Survey as it is designed by the beverage corporation and conducted by them in conjunction with Complutense University of Madrid.

33 Garner, ‘Introduction’, p. 319.

34 All Must quotations are from Peggy Shaw and The Clod Ensemble, Must (2008), a privately published, illustrated, unpaginated script sold at some performances. A collection of scripts including Must is soon to be published by University of Michigan Press, edited and introduced by Jill Dolan. The collection will be titled A Menopausal Gentleman: The Solo Performances of Peggy Shaw.

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