Theatrical Performance and the Forensic Turn

Contemporary theatre, like so much of contemporary life, is obsessed with the ways in which information is detected, packaged and circulated. Running through forms as diverse as neo-naturalistic playwriting, intimately immersive theatre, verbatim drama, intermedial performance, and musical theatre, a common thread can be observed: theatre-makers have moved away from assertions of what is true and focussed on questions about how truth is framed. Commentators in various disciplines, including education, fine art, journalism, medicine, cultural studies, and law, have identified a ‘forensic turn’ in culture. The crucial role played by theatrical and performative techniques in fuelling this forensic turn has frequently been mentioned but never examined in detail. Political and poetic, Theatrical Performance and the Forensic Turn is the first account of the relationship between theatrical and forensic aesthetics. Exploring a rich variety of works that interrogate and resist the forensic turn, this is a must-read not only for scholars of theatre and performance but also of culture across the arts, sciences and social sciences.

Introduction: Theatrical Performance in the Forensic Turn The forum: object evidence and the agency of things Popular culture and the embedding of forensic aesthetics Language and aesthetics The economy of legibility From existential actualization to interpellated coherence: ideas of self in the forensic turn Illusions and Imperatives The forensic and the theatrical: forum and theatron Generative doubt Does the human have to die for the forensic to begin? Theatre and the Black Mirror Data Chaos and the Verification Void Flusser and Beck: technical images and risk society Darkness and the bigger picture Life in the verification void Enron and the transparency illusion Landscape with Weapon New Enlightenment Bubblethink I’m Seen Therefore I Am: Romance in the Forensic Turn Parallels and possibilities: the epistemological romcom Voyeurism, screens and forensic culture The heterotopic capsule Ghosting the techno-present machine The Hypothetical Real vs. the Interiority Illusion The interiority illusion The hypothetical real Entitled The Events: Greig’s Rough Theatre vs. Baudrillard’s informational event Dis-integrating the techno-present ‘real’ Life Throes: The Strange Case of the Diehard Corpse Death as metaphor in forensic aesthetics Breathing Corpses How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found Theatrical ghosts and leaky containers Undead Domesticity: Naturalism and Home in the Forensic Turn The half-life of the living-room play Away from home Framing the taming of chaos London Road: choric pathos From Taine to Raine: Tribes and translation anxiety The game family and the AFK family: Neighborhood 3 The Open House The tabloid forensic and the one-room drama Open Dialogue as Prefigurative Performance: Re-assembling the Forum (Part I) Stringing along: participation in crisis? It felt like a designated participatory opportunity Building a forum on open dialogue The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland What happens to the hope at the end of the evening: the prefigurative power of the dematerialised stage I Wish I Was Lonely A poetics to dislodge habit Effects of Infinity: Re-assembling the Forum (Part II) Direct address Necessities of thought Monologic energy-exchange and the split subject: Eno’s ragged warriors Sustaining fictions and the failure to undercut Effects of infinity Epilogue Index

James Frieze teaches contemporary performance practice and theory at Liverpool John Moores University. His devised theatre-making centres on the adaptation of non-theatre texts for site-responsive and other performance contexts. He is also the author of Naming Theatre: Demonstrative Diagnosis in Performance (2009) and the editor of Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance (2016).