Theatre Of The Real

At an unparalleled time of the construction of reality across the fields of the science and humanities on a variety of platforms, theatre and performance participates in the current obsession with the problems and possibilities of the epistemologies of the real by using and revising the conventions of dramatic writing and performance to create and recreate personal, national, historical, and virtual realities.

Theatre of the Real examines a wide range of international theatre and performance that claims a special relationship to contemporary reality in order to theorize how theatre and performance participates in how we come to know, experience, and understand the important events of our personal, social and political lives.

The wide range of works discussed include Kamp and History of the World - Part Eleven by Hotel Modern, Is.Man by Adelheid Roosen, I am My Own Wife by Doug Wright, Southern Exposure by JoAnne Akalaitis, My Name is Rachel Corrie by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner and Via Dolorosa by David Hare. Review: 'In Theatre of the Real, Carol Martin addresses a perennial problem in the medium of theatre: its access to, reliance on, and use, representation, and betrayal of the real.

Eschewing a merely generic argument, Martin moves beyond the terminology of documentary or verbatim theatre to analyze the complex ways performance invokes contemporary politics, biography and autobiography, historical events and personal memory. Richly positioned in the history of modern theatre, ranging across four decades of performance, The Theatre of the Real suggestively explores an essential dimension of the contemporary stage.' - W.

B. Worthen, Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, Barnard College, Columbia University, USA 'The book provides an ideal conceptual framework within which to view and understand a variety of performances that have erupted in Egypt since the dawn of the so-called Arab Spring. Martin's profound, insightful and lucid investigation of the elusiveness of truth in relation to the staging of 'reality' makes it a must read for artists/activists in the Arab world and similarly beleaguered countries and for anyone, anywhere, who still believes in the political potency of theatre.' - Nehad Selaih, Professor of Drama and Criticism, Cairo Academy of Arts, Egypt 'In Theatre of the Real, Carol Martin reopens a question as old as theatre itself - she calls it ontoglogical theatre doubt - and puts the multifarious styles of reality performance since the 1960s, from opening of veins in protest to closing of doors in housing-bubble foreclosure, to the cogent test of critical truth-telling.' - Joesph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater and English, Yale University, USA