A Dramaturgy of Imagination

A Dramaturgy of Imagination

Huge social issues have demanded global attention in the last several years. Enduring problems of racism and colonialism have been highlighted by Black Lives Matters protests and campaigns to decolonise media, curricula, and city statues. The MeToo movement has pulled back the curtain on widespread misogyny and sexism, especially within entertainment industries. Protests by Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, and many others, alongside regular United Nations’ conferences, have emphasised the existential risks posed to our planet by accelerating climate catastrophe. The Occupy protests which started in 2011 called attention to gross income inequalities that have only become more extreme and widespread in the years since.

What is the role of theatre in the face of these – and other – enormous social challenges? Should it use documentary forms to address them literally, deploying real people, real data, and real impacts to pre-emptively undermine any potential doubt? Or does such a strategy’s reliance on representing the truth – or showing the problems – risk reproducing the problems, reinforcing rather than challenging the status quo? Do we instead need a theatre which deliberately escapes the real to imagine alternative, better realities? And how do we – or even can we – distinguish categorically between a theatre of the real and a theatre of the imagination?

A Theatre of the Real
To explore these questions, let’s start by reviewing one of the most prominent trends in recent theatre: its turn towards the real. Theatre’s recent infatuation with the real is illustrated by the efflorescence of documentary theatre forms, especially verbatim theatre, which stages the words of real people drawn from transcripts of interviews and trials and consistently addresses urgent social issues. Anna Deavere Smith’s verbatim plays explore contemporary race relations in the USA. London’s Tricycle (now Kiln) Theatre is famous for ‘tribunal plays’ which stage re-enactments of real legal trials. It’s True, It’s True, It’s True, produced by devised theatre company Breach in 2018, used court transcripts from seventeenth century Italy to restage the trial of Agostino Tassi for the rape of painter Artemisia Gentileschi.

Other theatre based in the real does important work providing real data. A lecture-based play such as 2014’s 2071 by climate scientist Chris Rapley and playwright Duncan Macmillan details the impact of climate change on Antarctic ice shelves and global sea levels. Rimini Protokoll’s peripatetic 100% City, first staged in Berlin in 2008, assembles a different 100-person cast in each city to explore specificities of its demographics, including the geographical- and age-spread of its people, and what their beliefs and values are.

The great offer of this theatre that prioritises the real is that it confronts its audiences with real and urgent social issues – of systemic racism in Smith’s plays, structural misogyny in It’s True, climate catastrophe in 2071, and urban change in 100% City. This theatre shows real people, facing real-life problems, in real time. The speakers’ truths are undeniable and made urgent compelling by the documentary and data-driven forms they are presented in.

The Real of Theatre
Even theatre which aims to be purely fictional and ostensibly makes no effort to engage with the real cannot escape presenting it: almost all theatre is performed by real actors in real time with real energy resources and materials in front of real audiences. It always, therefore, potentially invites audiences to reflect on real and urgent social and material issues. Casting, for example, evokes issues of labour and employment equity in terms of gender, race, and age. Scenographic and lighting choices pose questions about the use of energy and other resources. Admittedly, most theatre doesn’t draw attention to these real theatre-making conditions, conditions which are often highly problematic in an industry infamous for the precarity and frequent elitism of its employment and for its exorbitant energy use.

However, some theatre deliberately foregrounds these real conditions in order to problematise them. An infamous example which intentionally drew audiences’ attention to its own energy cost is director Katie Mitchell’s 2013 production at Berlin’s Schaubühne of Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs (as, in German, Atmen). In Lungs, two fictional characters debate the ethics of having a child in the context of ongoing global population expansion, the resource ‘cost’ of each child, and climate catastrophe. Mitchell’s production put its two performers on stationary bicycles for the duration of the show and required them to cycle to generate the electricity that ran the lights illuminating them; four technicians cycled just off stage to fuel the sound system and projections. Above the stage, a real-time digital counter tracked the globe’s human population expansion of 2.6 people per second, showing growth approaching 12,000 over the show’s seventy-five minute duration. Mitchell’s staging coupled the fictional characters’ debate about human impact on climate crisis through energy use with the real-life demonstration of real-time energy demand. Where most realist theatre usually aims to sublimate the real conditions of theatre production, Mitchell’s Atmen foregrounded them, using them to amplify Macmillan’s fiction about individual choice while also emphasising how we all make choices about energy use and climate crisis in dozens of everyday ways beyond deciding whether to have children, from deciding how to commute to what entertainment to consume. Mitchell’s Atmen demonstrates the potential of any theatre – ‘real’ or fictional – to actively foreground its own real conditions of production in ways that harness that reality for social commentary and critique.

Imagining Alternatives
That point gestures towards one of theatre’s most valuable attributes – its potential to help us imagine alternatives. Yes, we are facing endemic racism, misogyny, and climate crisis. A reality-based theatre helps us recognise this – in detail, and with feeling. But how do we imagine alternatives? We need not only a theatre of the real to help us do so but also a theatre of speculation.

In 2016, writer, performer, and theatre maker Travis Alabanza was crossing London’s Waterloo Bridge when an assailant yelled a transphobic slur and threw a burger at them. Though Alabanza reckons over 100 people witnessed the incident, no one came to their aid. Alabanza’s 2018 show Burgerz recounts and, in some respects, reproduces this story but in ways that aim to imagine and enact different outcomes, especially ones where allyship is cultivated and practised. Alabanza grounds the production in the real. They make and cook a burger on stage. They request that a cis white man from the audience helps them prepare it (Alabanza is Black, trans, and gender non-conforming). At the end of the show, they ask a cis white woman to throw the burger at them. In a podcast interview with Bechdel Theatre, Alabanza recounts how different audiences react to this moment, from vocally reproaching women who choose to throw the burger, to physically intervening to prevent the throw from happening. The show benefits from its engagement with the real. The burger made on stage is smelly and sloppy; the offence of throwing it is palpable. Most importantly, the human relations and dynamics are real. Alabanza forges a kind, caring relationship with the cis white man who helps them make the burger, easily demonstrating the viability of such intersectional understanding. The woman from the audience who might throw the burger is a real person and also a metonym, a part standing for a whole, one representative of all of us in the audience. Her choice is our choice; her real-ness makes manifest our ethical responsibility in making and/or influencing her choice of whether to throw the burger. This is where imagination comes most powerfully into play in Burgerz: Alabanza invites us to imagine alternative endings to their story, endings where the burger is not thrown, where Alabanza is instead shown solidarity, support, and allyship. Burgerz deploys the real to ground the stakes of its story in present-day lived experience, but it invites its audience to imagine different outcomes and different futures.

Selina Thompson’s salt., first produced in 2017, recounts the real voyage she took on the triangle of the Black Atlantic, partly by cargo ship, to investigate histories of slavery, anti-Black racism, and her own relationship to them, as a Black British woman. Part way through the show, she dons safety glasses, hauls a massive block of rock salt centre stage, and proceeds to bludgeon it with a sledgehammer. As she does so, she recounts the hierarchies of power on the cargo ship, from the global company that owns it, down through its captain and crew, to Thompson herself and another Black woman artist passenger. Pieces of salt represent each entity, with the company being the largest piece, and Thompson and her fellow artist the two smallest and most bludgeoned. The hierarchy clearly echoes hierarchies in former slave ships. At the end of the show, Thompson greets each member of the audience as they exit the performance space and offers them a fragment of the salt. This is a memento of Thompson’s grief and pain. It is also a material and metaphorical invitation to audience members to share the burden of grief and remembrance, ‘so that’, Thompson says, ‘the task of carrying it might be communal/ Because this is our burden/ […] There is work to be done’. The salt is real but the invitation is to imagine what it signifies beyond its modest material reality as well as what it might mean to work communally to carry and potentially transform this burden of racist history. It is an invitation to imagine a better future, where the burden of redressing and dismantling racism is shared.

Hyperobjects Imagined
A hyperobject is a phenomena that is so massively distributed across time and space that is it difficult to comprehend let alone combat. Climate crisis, racism, and sexism can all be understood as hyperobjects. Realist, documentary, and data-driven theatre can do helpful work helping us to approach these concepts, their forms, and their impacts. But it might be that we need a theatre of speculation and imagination to help us come to grips with what these vast and enduring things really are, in all their complexity, and to help us come up with ways of imagining alternatives to them. The climate crisis play 2071 ends, ‘The whole point about climate change is that, despite having been revealed by science, it is not really an issue about science, it is an issue about what sort of world we want to live in. What kind of future do we want to create?’ A theatre of imagination can help us both speculate in response to that question and imagine the alternatives we want to realise.

Jen Harvie
Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at Queen Mary University of London. On her podcast Stage Left she interviews performance-makers - including Selina Thompson and two directors from Breach – about their practices of performance-making.

Note: In the writing of this article, I am grateful to all the artists mentioned, and to Leslie Hill, Catherine Love, and Emma Welton for their scholarship.