Theatrical Performance and the Forensic Turn

This book is the first substantial account of contemporary theatre’s fixation with the processing and detection of evidence. Since the mid-1990s, across diverse branches of theatrical performance, truth has increasingly been figured in terms of means rather than ends, with procedures for the gathering of information becoming the focus of attention. This overarching turn to the forensic has been obscured by the critical tendency to treat genres discretely. Frieze reconsiders landmark works that have been used to constitute dominant genres, such as Blast Theory’s Desert Rain (virtual theatre), Sarah Kane’sBlasted (in-yer-face/new writing), and Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror (verbatim drama), reading a range of works (by companies such as Troika Ranch, Les Deux Mondes, and Inspector Sands) that defy generic categorization—a factor that has denied these works the scholarly attention they deserve. The book’s contextualization of the forensic turn begins in the late nineteenth-century, when Zola’s manifesto and the playwriting of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov (all of whom had medical training) introduced a naturalistic theatre against which twentieth-century alternative theatre movements would repeatedly rail and react. The forensic turn is in part a revival of naturalism’s diagnostic method and tone. However, while naturalistic playwrights receded from view to the point of invisibility, their characters appearing to act of their own volition, the technical expertise of those seeking after truth is scrutinized in the era of the forensic. This volume frames contemporary theatre’s interrogation of expertise and evidence-gathering by closely articulating performance examples with television’s ceaseless supply of crime-scene investigation and reality shows, and with political and social debates about journalistic procedures and the management of identity data (identity recognition/theft/fraud/leaking).