Search results
the political potential of the theatre simulation reveals itself in its most poignant artistic form. The point of this ‘documentary’ theatre is not to render reality transparent, but to show – through the exposure of reality to the real – that the prevalent ways in which reality is understood, comprehended, or depicted involve failures of comprehension, and that the terms in
Brecht’s political didacticism nor in Piscator’s documentary theatre of exposure and accusation’ (204–5). Seeing in the theatre’s reverence for the idea of the hero something of the problem which had permitted Hitler’s rise to power, he embraced a notion of the heroic which had more to do with the maimed, rebellious and morally outraged survivors of the war. Kortner despised the absolution of theatrical
collaboration came in the form of a BBC documentary, produced by Philip Donnellan for the Midland Region, on the production of The Staffordshire Rebels (BBC2, 8 January 1966), a play about the English Civil War which the Victoria Theatre Company staged in 1965. Not only does the documentary provide a unique insight into Peter Cheeseman’s method of constructing documentary theatre, it also reveals how the company dramatised historical subjects from a distinctly ‘local’ perspective. Not long after this, while the company was staging a production COOKE PRINT.indd 37 05
real Allen Bullock actually said or actually believed. In testimonial, verbatim and documentary theatre Testimony as speaking out 171 practices, then, there is always also some expectation of a correlation between actual lived experience and those experiences represented in the play – and so it matters how the play represents these lived experiences through its content and dramaturgical structure. It is this dramaturgical and methodological formation, I suggest, that forms the relationship between the theatre maker and the testimonial subject as one that is
(2005), about atom scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The libretto was by Peter Sellars, or rather it was compiled from a variety of sources somewhat in the manner of Documentary Theatre. Sellars also directed the first performance.33 There are more British than American examples of documusical, but, as might be expected, HBO co-produced one (with Cinemax) for their ‘America Undercover’ series. Showgirls: Glitz and Angst (2003, director: Kirby Dick) explored the onstage and backstage lives of Las Vegas showgirls and featured music and song, both in rehearsal and
been on the performances in ‘An Unearthly Child’, it is necessary to explain the term and briefly trace its development. Social realism is a form that was variously associated with the visual arts, documentary, theatre and film before being applied to television. It was John Bratby’s painting of a kitchen sink that originally gave rise to the term often associated with or substituted for social realism after being appropriated for David Sylvester’s 1954 article of that name; the ‘kitchen sink drama’ most commonly associated with the birth of social realism in the
to know how to create cinema we must return to Méliès, and for this a good number of Lumière years still lie ahead of us.) With its combination of documentary, theatre and fantasy, Le Sang d’un poète established the formal parameters of Cocteau’s film work. The films that followed developed these three formal strands in a multitude of ways and to varying