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INTRODUCTION

The Market for Pain

THIS BOOK IS INSPIRED BY my observation that public performances of painful stories are not simply formed, and told, and watched, and listened to, but are imagined, produced, and consumed in a cultural, social, and economic sphere that I call the memory marketplace. More than that, this book argues that in order to fully understand not just when and why we publicly tell stories about our pasts but how we perform as witnesses to painful pasts in general we have to consider the market dynamics of trade, which underpin how these stories are told, mediated, received, and re-mediated. In other words, we need to consider that stories of painful pasts are not just told but sold, not just received but bought, not just mediated and re-mediated but commodified.

The memory marketplace operates like any other form of market: in order to reach an audience and therefore to accrue value, public performances of pain require material and immaterial investment, labor, and a consumer willing to buy and promote them. And, just like items a consumer buys in the supermarket, the economic foundations and ramifications of memory performances are often invisible because they happen out of sight, or because we simply take them for granted. Though invisible, however, these economic factors determine not just how a performance happens, but whether it happens at all. Mirroring the economic dimensions of the memory marketplace, moreover, the symbolic functions of the marketplace are also key. In fact, I am most interested in the ways that reading performances of painful pasts through this framework can help us to interpret the performances themselves as transactions. For example, in reading how the producer’s and performer’s awareness of the audience as consumers influences the kinds of emotional engagement offered by a performance.

Why is it so rare that analyses of painful stories raise questions of commodity, value, and trade? Is it that we imagine the meaning of cultural performances exists in opposition to commercial evaluations, such as box office earnings? Are we afraid of confusing, or conflating, different forms of value? Memory and performance critics are sophisticated analysts of the material, historical, and political contexts and effects of memory, yet often critics stop short of interpreting memory performances themselves as commodity transactions. But in not pursuing the value of mnemonic capital to a reading of cultural memory, critics are missing an important part of the picture. My investigation of the memory marketplace is driven therefore by two major impulses. First, it is only by placing cultural memory in the context of the marketplace that the hierarchical and competitive structures guiding the production and consumption of cultural memory can be made visible. Second, in ignoring the engines of the marketplace we also ignore the material and immaterial labor (and the laborers) that actually produce mnemonic, symbolic, and social capital. My ambition in this book is to begin to make these necessary shifts in perception.

To ignore the marketplace for memory is to also disregard what the witnesses of painful pasts are telling us—these witnesses know there is a market for their memories, and they also know that they have to enter that market if they want to be heard. In Land Full of Heroes (UK/France/Spain, 2019), Carmen-Francesca Banciu, a Romanian writer based in Berlin, narrates for an audience the history of her life, in particular her involvement in the 1989 Romanian revolution and her escape to Berlin. In describing her migratory journey, Banciu considers the commodification of her emotions by others—and, given that she has no financial resources of her own, she knows that the expression of her feelings is her only form of currency:

In March 1990 the world is no longer okay. Or it’s just now on its way to being okay. I’m allowed to leave Romania. . . . From Romania to Hungary we drive across the Pusta. Across never-ending expanses that make the transition between one country and the next barely discernible. Dieter is also a writer and wants to write about me. About my experiences on this journey. He wants to capture the moment at the border with all of my emotions. But I don’t feel anything. Or don’t want to reveal my emotions to him. I feel mute and numb.

They will pay the bills during the trip. This is a part of our deal. I should talk. Disclose. I’m not even aware that I’m selling my impressions. That I’m practicing for the first time for life in the market economy. In Capitalism.¹

In this theatrical moment, there is a striking contrast between Banciu’s historical reluctance to tell, and lack of awareness of the transaction, with the present moment in which she shares her feelings not with Dieter, but with a much larger audience. In both timeframes, Banciu’s feelings are a commodity she trades. In the past, this trade secured her freedom from Bucharest and the socialist past; in the present, her articulation of her memories secures another valuable commodity—the audience’s interest. Both Banciu and La Conquesta del Pol Sud (the company producing the show) acknowledge the voyeuristic, potentially exploitative nature of the audience’s interest. They appear to give us what we want (the emotional content of Banciu’s memories) while illustrating the knowingness of this performance by deliberately linking the selling of memory to capitalism. Despite this knowingness, however, Banciu’s status as a controlling agent in the memory marketplace is debatable as, though she intentionally trades her mnemonic capital, in doing so she no longer owns it exclusively. This is the paradox that recurs throughout this book: that witnesses know what they trade—their memories for the value of being heard—but that the process of performing their testimony of painful pasts delivers them only temporary power in the marketplace. The fluctuations of witnessing can thus only be understood if we consider the “deal” that is being made between performer and audience; in other words if we recognise that cultural memory is a performance happening within a marketplace.

This book takes its cue from theatrical moments such as these, moments when the literal and symbolic memory marketplace becomes visible, moments when the commodity trading of performance becomes undeniable, moments that allow us to consider the power plays underlying different forms, and mobilizations, of mnemonic capital. The memory marketplace is particularly visible in testimonial “witness theatre,” in which an onstage witness (either the original witness or an actor) performs painful memories for an audience. In return those memories are valued, and validated, by an audience who, in Paul Celan’s terms, “bear witness for the witness.”² This bearing witness, on both sides, is a transaction of different forms of capital. While Banciu’s experience is unique to her, at the same time her life story is representative of a generation of artists and activists in Romania and across socialist countries more generally. In this way, Banciu’s memories have significant social and cultural capital; this capital is added to by her status as an award-winning writer and her willingness to autoperform these memories herself on stage. Land Full of Heroes thus enables audiences to learn about the socialist past of Eastern Europe (at the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Ceaușescu regime), to gain insight into one woman’s life, and to play the role of affective witnesses to Banciu’s expression of her feelings.

Banciu’s memory may be highly mediated, but nevertheless the emotional charge of “I was there, this was real” remains. This charge of the real or, in Jean Baudrillard’s term, the “hyperreal,” gives her witness testimony value in the memory marketplace.³ The production of Land Full of Heroes, funded by a grant by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of an academic project at the University of Birmingham, thus mobilizes both personal and institutional capital in order to create an authentic product that audiences will want to consume. Indeed, the premiere at Birmingham BE Festival (Birmingham Repertory Theatre, July 2019) was sold-out, and the show received a five-star review; it is currently scheduled for additional performances in Berlin, France, and London, illustrating the market impact of, and demand for, this kind of work.⁴

To read single performances like Banciu’s and, more generally, to position witness theatre within a marketplace framework allows us as critics not only to understand the ways that witnesses create new narrations of the past, but also to spotlight how the immaterial labor of performing past experience creates and re-creates mnemonic capital. Focusing on the theatrical production of witnesses (both on and off stage), this book argues that painful memory is a commodity in a transactional exchange. This transaction has economic dimensions to it (e.g., institutional and commercial funding of theatre), making the value of pain traceable in the real economy. But witnessing is about producing more than economic value, and there are other forms of capital that require analysis—my argument in the chapters that follow thus engages with the idea of painful memory as a symbolic commodity. By expressing painful experience in witness plays, onstage witnesses gain status in the overlapping cultural, social, and political marketplaces. By producing testimonial work, companies and theatres not only create platforms to enable these witnesses, but also add to their own cultural status (as well as, potentially, their own commercial success given the expanding market for pain). In turn, in attending witness theatre, audiences can confirm themselves as good spectators (and perhaps good citizens) for their own exercise of labor in witnessing the performance of painful memory. These are the infrastructures, commodity chains, and transactional exchanges that lie, so often invisibly, behind every performance of painful memory.

Witnessing: Tell Them That You Saw Us

We get bored easily these days it would seem. Our phones are never off, and rarely out of sight. Our to-do lists are long and varied. The demands on our time and attention are never ending. But in the theatre we leave that behind. It’s not just that theatre provides a break from modern life, it’s that going to the theatre involves a contract in which audiences pledge their attention. This attentiveness flows both from and onto the stage. The person on the stage pays attention to the audience, performing for that audience, and in return the audience pays attention to the performer(s). This may seem too obvious to be worth spelling out here—but, here’s the thing, if we notice that attention is the silver thread binding performer and audience to each other, then the next step is to think about what that attention produces. The performer onstage is always keen to tell their story (despite the challenges this may involve for them). In narrating their memories, the onstage person asserts the importance of their voice, of their identity as a witness. But it is the audience who grants the witness the space and time to perform, who frame their testimony as worthwhile, and who establish their authenticity and authority through their acts of attentive listening. Without the audience, nothing would be produced because there would be no transaction of labor or capital.

In theatre, there are, broadly, two types of witness—those onstage and those in the auditorium. We can better understand the relationship between types of witness, and between memory and witnessing if we look at another play, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. In Act 1, Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot to arrive and impart some information, or meaning, which they are lacking. They wait to be witnesses and to be witnessed. But this desire is constantly frustrated as Godot does not arrive, and those who do—Pozzo and Lucky—do not bring them any closer to either enlightenment or salvation. At the end of the first act, a Boy appears to tell them that Godot will come tomorrow. The Boy then asks if Vladimir has a message for Godot:

Boy: What am I to say to Mr Godot, sir?

Vladimir: Tell him . . . [He hesitates] . . . tell him you saw us. [Pause.] You did see us, didn’t you?

Boy: Yes sir.⁵

But the following day—Act 2—Godot is again a no-show, and again a Boy comes to tell the pair to wait again tomorrow. The second Boy (played by the same actor) claims not to know Vladimir and Estragon, and says he is the other Boy’s brother. Again the Boy asks for a message for Godot:

Boy: What am I to tell Mr Godot, sir?

Vladimir: Tell him . . . [He hesitates] . . . tell him you saw me and that . . . [He hesitates] . . . that you saw me. [Pause. Vladimir advances, the Boy recoils. Vladimir halts, the Boy halts. With sudden violence.] You’re sure you saw me, you won’t come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!⁶

Throughout Waiting for Godot the characters strive to be witnessed, in an enactment of Bishop Berkeley’s maxim that “to be is to be perceived.”⁷ Self-perception does not count here, not least because Vladimir and Estragon have no confidence in their own powers of witnessing (they doubt what day it is, what place it is, what has happened). Instead, they require an external witness to validate them. In the second act, Beckett pushes this further—it is not enough for the Boy to see them and to relay that message to Godot, he must remember having seen them. The link between witnessing and memory thus illustrates that witnessing is an ongoing and active task, where repetition and remediation are as important as the first encounter in the creation of meaning. The Boy’s actions are analogous to the audience’s—where the audience is asked not only to spectate (to see), but to transform that act of spectating into witnessing, which is understood as an active role that continues after the act of seeing (remembering). The real meaning of a play, then, is the agglomeration of acts of witnessing: that which happens on the stage, projected outward to the audience; and that which happens internally as the audience sees, listens to, and processes the performance; and finally that which happens as the audience relates their experience and their insights in the future, whether that is for themselves, or to others who have not seen the show. The compulsion to tell becomes the compulsion to retell. In simple terms, this is how the past is witnessed; in a more complicated sense it is also how future memory banks are formed. As Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney assert, cultural memory “is as much a matter of acting out a relationship to the past from a particular point in the present as it is a matter of preserving and retrieving.”⁸ Through performance a relationship is built that links past and present—and that, through repetition, projects into the future.

Before I expand on the processes of witnessing, it is important to understand the context in which these performances happen. Witnessing—being a witness and being witnessed—is both a necessity and a luxury. The violence of Vladimir’s insistence that he and Estragon be seen and remembered emerges from vulnerability; their precarity means that they struggle to be witnessed and increases the stakes to the extent that a young Boy can become the arbiter of their identity. That a child is elevated above two grown men indicates how witnessing is always performed within social and cultural power structures, in which some witnesses have power and some witnesses have little to none. This exemplifies Anna Reading’s contention that in the capitalist marketplace different agents have “uneven memory capital.”⁹

How can we read these different agents in this context? How can we interpret performances of witnessing in relation to both the top-down organization of memory culture, and the bottom-up drive for expression and understanding? What relationship is there between the scarce resource of witnessing-attention, and the current “memory boom”? What role do memory gatekeepers play, and what agency do spectators really have? The marketplace is a powerful framework for considering these questions.

THE MEMORY MARKETPLACE

The memory marketplace as both a real market and a metaphoric space of exchange helps us to consider how power and memory intersect: who owns memory, how it is traded, and how it is consumed. The marketplace framework enables us to think in broader terms of memory not just as a performance on both individual and collective levels, but as a product or commodity. Moreover, to follow Pierre Bourdieu, this book suggests that we think of the memory marketplace beyond financial and monetary terms, instead considering the marketplace as a symbolic space where values are produced and consumed. This book thus argues that the market is both “an institution of power” and a “site of contest” within which actors seek to have their memories witnessed in order to generate and maximize both cultural and social capital.¹⁰

We already have a language in memory studies that borrows from economics—memory entrepreneur, Holocaust industry—and much of the scholarship in this field emerges from recognition of the ways that processes of memorializing often overlap with processes of commodification. Yet the analysis of the economic dimensions of culture has largely been restricted to the heritage sector; as a result, the broader applicability of market concepts has not yet made significant impact. As Reading argues, “the mnemonic economy has largely been overlooked within memory studies and feminist memory studies.”¹¹ Indeed, as Jonathan Bach argues, there is a tendency in memory studies to discuss cultural memory in terms of the production of “narrations of the past”; Bach’s approach instead analyzes—alongside narrative—the ways that mnemonic capital circulates in “overlapping economies.”¹² Tanya Notley and Reading argue that as critics we should pay attention to the labor as well as the objects of memory, as it is this labor that “becomes accumulated in [the] materialised states of memory capital.”¹³ Memory is thus both energetic and material. Through a focus on mnemonic capital and the labor of memory work, Reading highlights the otherwise invisible role of precarious workers and activists, often women. Hence one of the compelling reasons for considering the dynamics of the marketplace at play in the cultural sphere is the increased visibility of the investment of effort, emotion, and time by producers, performers, and audiences in the cocreation of “mnemonic capital.” The cocreation aspect of mnemonic capital is also important to note because, as Matthew Allen argues, there has been a problematic identification of memory as “private property” without sufficient attention to the public ownership, differentials in valuation, and the exchangeability of memory.¹⁴

Building on this conceptual groundwork, this book argues that we exploit the marketplace as a framework in order to gain insights into how witnessing painful memory operates as a transaction of both real and symbolic capital. This examination considers how the memory marketplace subjects witnesses to different forms of gatekeeping, how audiences (read as consumers) exert agency, whether consumption is active or passive, and whether witness theatre can lead not only to empathic catharsis, but social change.

The memory marketplace frames the kinds of cultural exchange we already analyze—the interactions of what “Adorno scornfully called ‘the culture industry,’” or, in Jen Harvie’s terms, the “entertainment market.”¹⁵ Highlighting the role of market dynamics in these spaces foregrounds how memory functions as a commodity, both as an economic asset and, more broadly, as Reading terms it, “mnemonic capital.”¹⁶ Reading’s use of mnemonic capital is an important addition to Bourdieu’s framework for cultural capital, which notes three different forms: embodied, objectified, and institutionalized.¹⁷ Reading draws on Bourdieu’s recognition of how each of these forms contributes to what he terms “symbolic capital,” the value accrued by generating or owning particular products (e.g., the social status conferred upon house owners).¹⁸ Reading’s development of this framework, to include mnemonic capital and mnemonic labor, thus recognizes that cultural memory involves a significant degree of work by a range of mnemonic actors (who is making it, who is transmitting it, who is receiving it). Moreover, building on Bourdieu’s framework helps us to understand the overlapping of the literal capital benefits to memory work (e.g., many of the plays discussed here are commercially successful) with the symbolic capital generated by particular kinds of cultural prestige often associated with memory plays that shed light on painful or troubled pasts.¹⁹ Drawing on Bourdieu’s framework also illustrates the roles of time and accumulation—these plays may take years to come to fruition, as their subjects gain public traction or support; the performances may be either the apex of the struggle to speak out, or (in the case of activist work) may be hoped to contribute toward the struggle. Capital is not easily generated, the marketplace is not an “imaginary university of . . . perfect equality” but rather, as Vladimir and Estragon find to their cost, a stratified sphere of different power relations.²⁰ The frequent hope, then, underpinning the process of witnessing is that symbolic capital can work to reverse some of the marketplace inequalities.

As will become clear over the course of this book, in recent decades the performed memory of troubled pasts has taken on a certain market cachet and thus symbolic capital of its own, so that plays that share in this trend may enjoy an enhanced status in the marketplace (a result of trend scouting). By highlighting the role of capital we can perceive how memory functions not only as a signifier of a relationship to the past, but as a commodity in a marketplace that can be sold and bought, produced and consumed. Theatre is an unparalleled space on which to center these questions and discussions, not only because of how the past is put into form and performance, but because theatre represents a joint site of immaterial—“energetic”—production and consumption. Highlighting the role of immaterial labor is a political act, making visible the mnemonic, emotional, intellectual, and physical labor that are necessary to the witnessing event.

Memory products, from heritage sites to commemorative parades to memory plays, circulate in local and global markets. As Alison Landsberg argues, the commodification of memory enables “images of the past to circulate on a grand scale,” making them “available to all who are able to pay.”²¹ Memory is thus both the marketing device and the product being marketed, both of which contribute to the creation of what Harvie identifies as “consumer allegiance,” which generates “a more profitable bottom line.”²² While both Harvie and Landsberg point to the social good generated by memory culture—solidarity, connection, empathy—they each also emphasize the role of economic considerations in mediating how culture is transmitted—for example, the need to appeal to an audience “on a grand scale” will determine what kinds of memories are given space within the market (e.g., through corporate sponsorship, state/civic cultural programming, subsidies and grants, or heavy marketing).²³ As Jean Baudrillard argues, “distress, misery and suffering have become the raw goods” that attract the largest audiences.²⁴ Further, as Terri Tomsky outlines, trauma circulates as a commodity, “analogous to social and economic capital”; and, crucially, Tomsky illustrates how the scale of modern suffering (and knowledge of that suffering via the media) has resulted in the creation of a hierarchy of suffering as trauma is valued and revalued.²⁵ As this book will argue, the market is thus a key determinant of what memories are deemed to generate consumer allegiance and thereby drive profit, and what memories are devalued by the market hierarchy.

The memory marketplace is hence a vital framework, shedding light on the circulation and exchange of different forms of capital and how memory performances are produced and consumed. The theatre audience is not, after all, spontaneously turning up and listening. They peruse a season brochure, schedule plans, buy a ticket. They invest in hearing the memory. They leave a review, recommend the show, buy tickets for others to attend the show or for subsequent performances. Or not—perhaps instead they leave a bad review, share no positive word of mouth, never buy a ticket for the theatre again. The successful transmission of memory in culture has to be understood as a transaction in order to fully understand how an audience chooses to support or invest in a particular memory narrative product. This transaction may be directly financial (buying a ticket) or it may be suprafinancial (recommending it to a friend), either way it represents the outlay and generation of different forms of capital by an audience, who choose how they will invest in the value of that memory in performance. The audience thus represents one more layer of gatekeeping in a complex commodity chain of funders, producers, and marketers.

Using the term “gatekeeper” raises the issue of power—who has the power to gain entry to the marketplace, who controls others’ entry, who regulates it, and who owns the “invisible hand”?²⁶ This can be answered in a literal sense—memory is produced by, and circulates within, cultural and economic infrastructures. Memory commodities that are popular in the market will receive infrastructural support. For example, public and private funding enable theatres to run, to program shows, and to offer discounted tickets for particular shows; programmers decide what will fill the theatre’s stage; writers and directors decide on the final shape of the show; marketing campaigns seek to brand shows in ways that will appeal to consumers; successful shows will have extended runs and be booked in subsequent venues and festivals; tours will create transnational consumers; successful producers (writers, directors, performers, and companies) will gain support for their next venture, and their work will be highly promoted. This is how the industry works, driven by profit—as Carol Martin argues, “who decides who speaks . . . although ideally driven by ethics, is mostly a commercial and ideological decision.”²⁷ Developing this idea, this book argues that the decision to represent particular stories in the theatre is not random, but a direct result of gatekeepers seeking to accrue cultural, social, and economic capital through selected “valuable” stories.

Though many of these decisions are based on “the bottom line” and respond to commercial trends, within each layer of the production process other kinds of marketplace decisions are made about what characters, subjects, and voices will be granted a platform. Gatekeepers are therefore empowered by both economic and social capital and use this power in multivalent ways—they can choose how to respond to wider market demands (e.g., to write/direct/program shows that aim for escapism, or that seek to confront), they can choose which social groups are prioritized (dominant top-down, or bottom-up), and they can choose how to market them (a three-day run in a studio theatre for a niche audience, a month-long main stage run for a national audience). Not all gatekeepers are created equal though: just as there are power differentials for witnesses, major public institutions—such as the national theatre—often have greater market access and impact than local or fringe theatres and, due to longer runs and funding for archiving, greater longitudinal impact. This book thus considers the differences between institutional—and institutionalized—witness theatre and smaller-scale productions that, while not totally ephemeral, are more likely to remain at the level of embodied capital

Gatekeeping is often determined by economic trends. In Ireland, the turn toward a more inclusive public memory culture coincided with the greater affluence of the “Celtic Tiger” period (1993–2007). From this, we can see how economic context informs remembrance policy. One result, for example, is the 1994 official opening of the Irish War Memorial in Dublin commemorating the Irish soldiers who died fighting for the British Army in World War I. The memorial, initially completed in the 1930s, had its official opening delayed due to the outbreak of World War II; it was further delayed by both economic and postcolonial anxieties in the wake of the declaration of the Irish republic in 1949. In the 1990s the new national economic confidence created a context in which remembrance could become more inclusive, and the state became willing to expend national resources to recognize marginal memories and, through this investment, increase the marginal memory community’s mnemonic and social capital.

More recently the Irish “Decade of Centenaries” (2012–22), covering the revolutionary period from insurrection to civil war and independence, has been avowedly inclusive of previously overlooked narratives of the national past, including women’s suffrage and the 1913 workers’ lockout, alongside Irish participation in World War I. Indeed, the “unheard” status of many of these personal and national stories has been one of the features selling them to an audience who might be assumed to be fatigued by the monolithic anticolonial narrative. The inclusion of other marginal narratives is not, however, to suggest that the mainstream narrative has been displaced—indeed, the Decade of Centenaries budget tells another story. With €48.6 million of the approximately €60m budget for the entire decade spent on 2016—the centenary of the 1916 Rising against the British—its scale is a clear demonstration that this event is the most important in terms of the top-down state-led commemoration program. Even the expansion of that narrative to include female combatants and civilian casualties did not undermine the importance of this central event, rather it seemed a canny marketing tool to make new the old story of the rebellion. The success of the 2016 program, which resulted in huge crowds attending the commemorative parades and other family-related events (making hotel bookings skyrocket in cost²⁸), demonstrates that the combination of state expenditure and the festivalization of history results in significant public buy-in. The combination of public spending with national remembrance (what Bourdieu terms the coincidence of economic and social investment²⁹) thus carries significant dividends for both the state (the confirmation of a national narrative of progress and of Irish identity) and the market (new consumers for new stories³⁰) incentivizing gatekeepers to make “transmissible heritage” a high profile and prestigious product in the marketplace.³¹

When it comes to the work this book discusses, I focus on how gatekeepers decide which witnesses are allowed to have a voice in the market. As Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Chana Teeger put it, “the narration of certain memories and the silencing of others can oftentimes be conceptualized as the attempts of those with power to set the limits on what is speakable or unspeakable about the past.”³² As suggested by the example of the First World War in Ireland, cultural gatekeepers with this kind of power thus shape the memory marketplace. What I explore in this book is how gatekeepers can use their power to transform what has been previously held to be “unspeakable”—child abuse, sexual violence, torture—by deliberately creating platforms for the voices of previously silenced cohorts. In fact, the witness plays discussed here highlight how two dimensions of the marketplace converge—the commercial desire for audiences, with a balancing desire for authenticity (itself a market-friendly concept).

The “social turn” in the culture industry, of which witness plays are a major aspect, promotes performances that enhance the social good, which seek to combat “fake news,” and which promise contact with the “real.” Witness plays, which focus on voices of victims and survivors, meet both needs as they market themselves as socially conscious plays where audiences can both enjoy a theatrical catharsis and fulfil their responsibilities as citizens to bear witness. The popularity of this medium (a new cultural hegemony?) has been marked in recent years, so that at times it seems it’s not just a memory boom, it’s a witnessing boom—with a seemingly endless supply of producers and consumers.

Gatekeepers and competition are fundamental features of the marketplace—without some element of selectivity, the memory marketplace becomes an overwhelming space of excess. After all, as Bourdieu warns, “it is taken for granted that maximum growth and therefore productivity . . . are the ultimate and sole goal of human actions,” and it is the same for the memory industry.³³ This excess, however, is not a sign of complete remembering, but rather a kind of forgetting. While growth in the memory field may mean the expansion of platforms for unheard and untold stories, particularly by those with marginal memories, at the same time, expansion leads to the risk of saturation. As Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir argues, the logic of total recall is a kind of forgetting—if we remember everything without any selectivity, nothing is nominated as being particularly memorable or meaningful.³⁴ We can find an echo of this sentiment in Brian Friel’s play Translations (1980) as Hugh advises his anxious son Owen that “to remember everything is a form of madness.”³⁵ We may, then, need competition as a mechanism for cultures to reflect what is most important to remember and, yes, to forget what is less important. It’s also worth noting that the opposite—a lack of competition—is a feature of totalitarianism, a kind of “organised forgetting” and remembering.³⁶

Competition is thus not a sign of the scarcity of memory, but a result of its abundance. What is in shorter supply is audience attention. The results of competition in the attention economy are therefore often unfair, mirroring the stratification of the social marketplace. The term “free market” thus misappropriates the term “free,” given that the market is determined by preexisting social and political factors, from state regulation to private investment. As Rosanne Kennedy and Gillian Whitlock argue, we need paradigms that can account for how “social and institutional structures, and political and economic power, shape and produce individual and collective experiences [and narratives] of suffering.”³⁷ At a cultural level, we know well that powerful producers determine the narrative; in Walter Benjamin’s words, that powerful historical discourses “silence the memory of the defeated and powerless for whom the past is an uneven succession of fragmented and interrupted moments.”³⁸ Moreover, we also know that consumption, “is a class institution.”³⁹ Consumption in a stratified marketplace means that, as Baudrillard puts it, “the purchase, choice and use of objects are governed by purchasing power . . . in short not everyone has the same objects, just as not everyone has the same . . . chances.”⁴⁰ As a counterpoint to competition, Michael Rothberg advances the principle of multidirectional memory—suggesting that through solidarity and connectivity, memory culture can create enhanced platforms for multidirectional articulations of remembrance. This is a powerful way of understanding the solidarity that can be produced between different kinds of witnesses and, in the theatre, between the performer and the audience (and, indeed, between audience members). Rothberg’s multidirectional model of memory culture, however, does not fully acknowledge the role of market forces in both production and consumption. Financial investment—whether it’s the money to buy the land that a museum stands on, the backing to create a play, or the disposable income to purchase a theatre ticket—propels, shapes, and limits the articulation of remembrance. Likewise, audiences have to be selective—they cannot attend everything—and marketing departments are well aware of the need to capture their attention, investing financial and cultural resources in building audience share. If a play about twenty-first-century refugee memories, which also evokes the post–World War II migration crisis, cannot find a company to produce it, or a theatre to back it, or a grant to support it, or a catchy advertising campaign, or audiences to attend it, then its articulation and enactment of multidirectional remembrance is shut down because of its failure to accrue either economic or social capital. Competition is thus inherent within the market, whether it is competition for limited economic resources or for equally limited audience attention. Inequality in capital and the disproportionate power of certain social groups are thus major barriers in the cultural memory marketplace, undermining, just as in the social and political marketplaces, ethical principles of equality of representation and access. Indeed, as we will see, plays embody this competitive dynamic, often staging the competition between victims and perpetrators for both cultural and symbolic capital. Gatekeepers—whether funders, theatre makers, or witnessing audiences—are thus key in adjudicating how those competitions play out.

The Audience Consumer vs the Audience Witness

Given the role of social and political capital in shaping and mediating the marketplace, how can it avoid becoming a reflection of the desires and outlook of only an elite band of gatekeepers and consumers? The role of the consumer is key here—if the marketplace is not simply a space of top-down practices, but is driven by consumer demand and bottom-up practices, then there remains the possibility for consumers—who are not a homogenous group, and who are marked by power differentials themselves—to direct or counteract top-down investment and practices.

Lizabeth Cohen outlines distinctions between types of consumers, identifying two general types: the “customer consumer” and the “citizen consumer.” Cohen argues that the customer consumer is motivated by the desire to consume, and their activity and output are summed up as “shopping” (pure economic capital). In contrast, the citizen consumer is motivated by the desire that their consumption can generate a social good, so that their activity may be consuming (or shopping), but their output is consuming plus social impact (the transferral of social capital).⁴¹ Cohen’s model is an important development in understanding how consumers operate, and a necessary move away from the view of consumers as “passive human resources.”⁴² In terms of the specifics of how memory performances are consumed, I deploy Cohen’s binary and add two more terms relevant for discussing theatre: the “audience-consumer” and the “audience-witness.” The audience-consumer is there to watch and enjoy the show, to have a good time, to expend their economic power investing in cultural performances that make them feel good. The audience-witness is driven by many of the same motivations, but with the added dimension of a sense of performing a public duty—this is less joyless than it sounds; as I explore in the following chapters, there is a feel-good dividend for audiences who invest in performances that make the world a better place.

The recent explosion in authenticity in culture (marking not only theatre but, notably, the whole heritage sector), may be read as a way for consumption and ethical witnessing to intersect, through the creation of more spaces for bottom-up initiatives and unheard stories. Though arguably this has the potential to make the marketplace a fairer place, it is doubtful that consumption in itself can change the structural imbalances of power within either the memory marketplace or the larger society. The philanthropic consumption model, embodied by initiatives such as Fair Trade, may set up the consumer, and the act of consumption, as a force for social good, but it can be ameliorative at best. It’s also not the case that all audience consumers will invest in an ethical model of consumption, and it is thus far from automatic that all audience members attending a show that brands itself as ethical will become witnesses. We must assume, then, that plays will always have an audience made up of both consumers and witnesses (and all those in between).

Even in a marketplace full of citizen consumers/audience-witnesses, the marketplace is not necessarily a fair or stable place. Indeed, fluctuation and instability are inherent features of the market. After all, the market is driven by constant renewal, through a process of “creative destruction” (innovation),⁴³ whereby old narratives are discarded and new narratives introduced. The downside, then, of assuming a model in which the consumer has power, is that consumer trends will always change—and since novelty and competition are defining features of all consumption, access to the marketplace for minority voices is therefore always dependent on changing demands. Though creative destruction can lead to the overturning of oppressive narratives, for example in the case of the emergence of a new collective memory of institutional child abuse by the Catholic Church in Ireland in the 1990s and 2000s, just as quickly, the market can move on to yet another story, again limiting the space available to particular memory groups and disempowering those who are not currently in demand.

Often the individual consumer and the mass market are driven not by the principle of social good but by the allure of authenticity. As Gilmore and Pine put it, authenticity is what consumers really want.⁴⁴ Authenticity is a tricky object—on the one hand it suggests a veracity that cannot be bought or sold, yet on the other hand the “authenticity brand” is a driver of major commercial trends. This brand has multiple meanings that consumers attach to it, including the ability to secure identity through the careful curation of their consumption of authenticity, and the attraction of making consumers feel safe while simultaneously in contact with “the real.”⁴⁵ Yet authenticity is not a stable concept, indeed both authenticity and the demands that shape it shift with market trends (creative destruction, again). As Christopher Howard states, “both the age of authenticity and consumerism centre on a restless individualism and the value of choice in an ever-changing market of consumable objects and experiences.”⁴⁶ Indeed, as this book argues, even when a theatrical show is highly “authentic” this does not guarantee attracting an audience to make it commercially viable (which is vital even when a show is subsidized). Market awareness thus always mediates the kinds of aesthetic and performance strategies used to engage and satisfy an audience—and authenticity, while a major branding device in itself, is just one element of marketing theatre. Other strategies include the promise of novelty, the performance of trauma, creating a space for catharsis, marketing the show as culturally prestigious and/or as satisfying a social or political need (e.g., for knowledge or public accountability), and downplaying the potentially negative impacts on audiences by limiting the narrative or creating an uplifting ending.

As behavioral economics has demonstrated, consumers make decisions led by their emotions rather than purely based on rational calculations⁴⁷—in the case of plays that witness painful memories, the promise of emotional expression/catharsis/fulfilment is combined with the expectation of social engagement, thereby suggesting that this form of theatre can deliver on both grounds, in theory being doubly attractive to consumers as a powerful mode of identity-signaling.⁴⁸ I make this point knowing at the same time that the reactions of many friends when I suggest going to see one of these plays—“sounds a bit depressing”—means that the double hit of emotion plus politics is not necessarily attractive to all consumers. When consumers do buy into the cultural trend for witnessing memory, then we see the full impact of consumption as an active influencer of market trends. Audiences are the target for the performers’ acts of witnessing, and audiences are the ones who will remediate the memories being performed (creating what’s known as market “surplus value”).⁴⁹

The Active Consumer and the Question of Power

The question of audience power is a knotty one. Does, for example, the idea of the citizen consumer/audience-witness mean the consumer is a powerful actor in the marketplace? Arjun Appadurai argues not: “merchandising is so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser.”⁵⁰ Appadurai locates the “real seat of agency” and power with the producer and other actors within the market who decide what to produce, how to market it, and so on, all of which are behind-the-scenes actions that contribute to the illusion of consumer agency.⁵¹ I have a mixed reaction to the view of consumers as “choosers.” On the one hand, consumers do not have input into what cultural work is promoted to them, and how—indeed the rise of authenticity as a marketing tool alone should make us suspicious of how the outcome consumers desire (contact with “the real”) is actually not the outcome, but the medium of the real message (the world is a consumer playground). As I discuss throughout the book, consumer agency in choosing which theatres to visit, and which shows to patronize, should not be mistaken for real social or political action or activism. As Baudrillard scathingly puts it, when audiences consume suffering all too often what happens is that “they swap their distress with the misery of the poor, both of them sustaining each other.”⁵² This is not a relationship productive of social good, but of social exploitation. On the other hand, at the very least, audiences do exercise choice. I am biased here, I realize—as a critic and teacher, I am a major consumer of theatre and so, for the sake of retaining passion in what I do, I have to believe that audiences are not powerless: I believe we can be active witnesses.

Exercising consumer power is not restricted to choosing which show to buy a ticket for and thus influencing the real economy of the cultural memory marketplace. Consuming, or even witnessing, a show does not mean being uncritical about it. On the contrary, critical witnesses add surplus value and further capital to a production by interpreting and responding to what they see and hear. Jacques Rancière argues against the view that the spectator is passive because they are “immobile” in their seat—instead recognizing the “activity peculiar to the spectator. Every spectator is already an actor in her story.”⁵³ The audience as not just witness, but also actor, takes the idea of the active spectator further. This formulation understands that the audience-witness always interprets what they are seeing and hearing via their own story, their own subjectivity, their own position in the marketplace. John Durham Peters interprets the spectators’ subjectivity as being vital to their act of witnessing, because for Peters it is only in retelling or reproducing the original act of witness that the spectator themselves witnesses: “an active witness must first have been a passive one.”⁵⁴ This view chimes with Stuart Hall’s reception theory of media, in which audiences not only receive but actively construct identities in relation to media; Jukka Törrönen terms this the “mutual modelling” of media and audiences.⁵⁵ This audience-forward reading of reception does not equate to the power to set the agenda, it is a reactive, “soft” power; yet in the moment of the performance, and in its aftermath, it is nevertheless a performance of consumer agency. It is thus not as simple as labeling some consumers active and others passive—with power or without power—but instead identifying the multiple ways in which audiences perform different roles, consecutively and concurrently, in the marketplace.

Reflecting on consumers as agentic, and the performance of witnessing as an active role, leads us to acknowledging that audiences also carry out labor: the work of watching, listening, processing, and reacting to what is being performed. The labor entailed in spectating a show, often most obvious in experimental or avant-garde theatre, means that the audience are (to different degrees) cocreators of the mnemonic capital that the show produces. The labor of the audience—what Harvie calls “prosumerism”⁵⁶—demonstrates how vital the consumer is, not just to the marketplace, but to the production of meaning and thus capital; without the audience, the performance is not only unseen, but unproductive.

Audience agency also means that spectators may choose not to witness. One reason for this choice is that they may not invest their belief or trust in the testimony being performed. Paul Ricoeur points to the role of the audience in determining which testimony is seen as trustworthy,⁵⁷ while Elizabeth Jelin points out that audiences only accord authority to certain witnesses.⁵⁸ While gatekeepers can influence how an audience encounters a firsthand witness, it is ultimately up to the audience how well the show does in the marketplace.

When Jay Winter asks “Who has the right to speak of the violent past?”⁵⁹ he seems to address the ethical issue of rights (who grants this right, who guarantees it?). But he is also raising, of course, a series of questions about the marketplace: is there a market for stories of “the violent past,” which firsthand witnesses and gatekeepers have the capital to command consumer investment in those stories, and how does consumer investment create the necessary memory capital to institutionalize those stories in remembrance culture? The agency of both the audience-consumer and the audience-witness is therefore not only necessary to the operation of the market, but to who gets remembered and who forgotten.

From Consumers to Witnesses?

The debate around the relative activity and passivity of audiences emerges from the question of what kinds of witnessing audiences perform. As Lisa Fitzpatrick argues, the “increasing emphasis on trauma and traumatic experience in arts practice” has led to an equal rise in the “use of the term ‘witness’ in place of spectator.”⁶⁰ No longer do we ask audiences to simply watch or listen, now the expectation is that audiences will provide a much larger service—that of witnessing, a term and identity that, as Fitzpatrick points out, emerges from the relatively new dominance of trauma in the arts. We are in an era of witnessing others’ pain.

Dori Laub defines witnessing as having three levels: from the firsthand witness of subjective experience, to secondhand witnesses to others’ subjective experience, to thirdhand witnesses who observe the testifying process.⁶¹ Laub argues for the importance of testifying and witnessing in the wake of painful experience, and the importance of being an “authentic witness” by recognizing the truth of the experience being testified to. Without all three levels of witnessing functioning authentically, Laub argues, there is a “collapse of witnessing” whereby neither the experience nor its subjective pain are recognized.⁶² Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski, likewise, view witnessing as a complex field in which there are three zones: (1) the eyewitness, (2) the mediator, and (3) the audience.⁶³ This tripartite schema demonstrates that successful witnessing involves the event being seen by one person, who then testifies about their experience to a second person (who did not experience the event), and that second person then choosing how to mediate the testimony for the third form of witness, the audience. This is a complex performance chain, akin to the making of theatre in fact, as the information about the event must go through two stages in order to be communicated to the audience. It is also a perpetuating performance, in which the audience further mediates the testimony to another person, creating new audiences in turn (surplus value). Laub adds an additional requirement to the definition of witnessing: positing the witness as someone who can step outside the totalizing and dehumanizing frame of reference in which the event takes place.⁶⁴ The witness must therefore not only be able to identify what is happening within the frame, but also, in stepping outside it, be able to achieve a greater understanding and perspective on the suffering caused by the event. Acknowledging these different levels to, and articulations of, witnessing is important to understanding how these performances function—and also to identifying how they may become blocked if one or more of the levels does not flow smoothly or clearly. As Peters argues, “witnessing is an intricately tangled practice.”⁶⁵ Naming the audience as “witnesses” then demands not only that they be active, but that they pursue a particular agenda in how they spectate and what their response will be.

Aleida Assman’s definition of the “moral witness” explicitly emphasizes this ethical dimension, defining witnessing as an act that goes beyond the body of the victim testifying to include the secondary witnesses in the audience.⁶⁶ As Pat Palmer argues, “the community of compassionate spectatorship which pain creates is a partisan community, united in solidarity against those inflicting pain.”⁶⁷ Peters inflects this further, stating that “to witness an event is to be responsible in some way to it.”⁶⁸ The entanglement of witnessing is thus imagined by these critics as more than a stratified field—instead reading it as a collaborative and communal practice. How does this apply to theatre specifically? Does its communal nature automatically create the setting for witnessing? Diana Taylor suggests it does, arguing that “witnessing is transferable—the theater . . . can make witnesses of others.”⁶⁹

What does this actually mean? In the theatre, we tend to sit surrounded by others, but is that truly communal? Bourdieu’s frame for economic and social exchanges suggests yes: “a two-way relation is always in fact a three-way relation, between the two agents and the social space within which they are located.”⁷⁰ Becker and Murphy argue that consumer behavior is always led by others, whether fashion-setting or simply because consumption is always a social interaction.⁷¹ So do these social settings necessarily convert the audience into witnesses? Karine Shaefer asks this important question, “Does listening to testimony . . . [create] spectatorial witnesses”? The answer may not live up to our ideal wish for the moral witness—as Shaefer puts it, “any attempt to unilaterally equate spectators with witnesses collapses under the multivalency of audience reactions.”⁷² Likewise, Caroline Wake objects to the automatic titling of spectators as witnesses, in particular the way “the word witness is becoming a generalised, semi-sacralised term” employed “to emphasise the historical importance or emotional impact of a particular performance.”⁷³ Wake calls attention to the emotive power and marketability of the word “witness” and its connotations of ritualized attention and catharsis: “In our eagerness to promote the ethical potential of performance [we ignore that] though primary witnessing is implicated in the ethics of vision and visibility, it is not necessarily an ethical mode of spectatorship per se.”⁷⁴ Blanket use of the term witnessing distorts the multivalent realities of audiences and the performance of spectating. In order to avoid this distortion, Wake, like Peters, argues that we should more accurately think of witnessing as something that happens after the performance—it is through remediation of the testimony that the ethical level of witnessing is achieved. Whether or not that remediation occurs cannot be controlled but only guessed at.

The interaction between audience and stage, spectator and performer is thus not a definite or controlled interface. Yet it is essential that we consider how the presence of the audience functions as a key determiner of meaning. As Alan Filewood argues, we need to start to ask “whether audiences are local communities in formation, legitimising communities summoned by the performance, or metonymic agents.”⁷⁵ We can extend that to challenge, as Rancière does, the automatic assumption that theatre represents a site of community at all—though the auditorium may be filled with people, they do not necessarily cohere into a single “we.”⁷⁶

Asserting that being an audience member is, as Gareth White says, a “social process” has direct implications for how we witness, as White argues that during a show “audience behaviour is guided as well as audience perception.”⁷⁷ It may be then that the feeling of being “allied” that Jill Dolan hopes for is what guides audiences to perform as moral witnesses.⁷⁸ Solo, in the marketplace, individuals might act in one way, but in the context of a group where particular norms are developed (responding sympathetically, laughing, applauding) individuals can be influenced in particular ways (analogous to Jan Assmann’s concept of “social mediation”⁷⁹). Very little work on this exists in relation to theatre, but both consumer research and social psychology suggest that group behavior is a significant determining factor in an individual’s adherence to “ethical” norms.⁸⁰ Rosanne Kennedy also points to how cultural texts “educate” the public in how to respond appropriately.⁸¹ Viewed this way, theatre is perhaps the ultimate modality to create what Marianne Hirsch terms “an affiliative space of remembering” in which performers and audiences each strive to successfully perform the second and third levels of witnessing.⁸² However, it is debatable how voluntary this performance is, as Susan Sontag contests, “strictly speaking there is no such thing as collective memory—part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction.”⁸³ Is the communal just a context, then, for compulsory collective instruction? This sense of top-down direction also underscores Attilio Favorini’s statement that theatre “organize[s] us into a group of rememberers.”⁸⁴

Against this background of guided behavior we must acknowledge that the theatrical organization of the audience is always in dialogue with their preexisting beliefs (which may be either aligned with, or oppositional to, the show they are attending), so that audience members’ social position “including the intersectionalities of race, class, gender, and age, significantly inform how they read” and interpret what they are being presented with, or asked to witness to.⁸⁵ This point brings us back to consumer agency and the power of choice—because while it is valuable to recognize how powerful the communal setting of theatre is, and the power of the call to witnessing created by being part of a group, audience choice remains. In other words, however coercive the social setting of the theatre, the possibility remains that audiences will actively choose not to be instructed, not to witness, or to witness divergently.

What Are We Witnessing?

What is it that a theatre audience is witnessing? This book takes as its subject a genre of witness theatre that can broadly be termed documentary or, following Carol Martin, “the theatre of the real.”⁸⁶ As will be discussed in chapter 1, this form of theatre aims to present documentary stories, often through verbatim testimony, to an audience who will bear witness to its truths and, through their collective presence, validate those stories and experiences being performed. The sharing of testimony allows the person whose story is being performed—whether by an actor, through a veil of anonymity, or by the person themselves—to move away from being portrayed as an object of representation, toward instead portraying their experience as an agent of their own lives and memories. This firsthand contact with “the real” is what gives this form its social, cultural, and political power, generating multiple forms of capital through a complex balancing of authenticity (the witness) and mediation (the performance). Testimonial witness plays often, as discussed further below, involve witnesses and audiences in performances of painful memory. As such, testimony, as Anne Cubilié and Carl Good state, “emerges not merely as a result of the destabilization of narrative, memory, identity and history by trauma, but also as a response to trauma, a response which evokes—and ventures—the possibilities of language, literature and ethical community in a resistance to effacement from juridical, literary, psychic and cultural fields.”⁸⁷ What I appreciate in this theorization of testimony is the refusal to equate painful experience with silence. As this book will show, testimonial witness plays enable fulsome articulation of varieties of memory and experience from pain to joy, devastation to resilience, loss to growth. And this, perhaps, is where the appeal lies for consumers who are not only seeking in the theatre to “find pleasure in the un-pleasurable” but who seek to invest in narratives and performances that access the breadth of another person’s experiences.⁸⁸

In some senses memory plays perform the relationship between memory and identity itself—in that memory and identity are both inherently performative and discursively constructed and depend on, following Judith Butler, repetition in order to become inscribed as normative.⁸⁹ Freddie Rokem argues that audiences for memory plays are witnessing the time lapse of history as they eavesdrop on testimony about past events.⁹⁰ Rokem calls this a “‘ritual’ of resurrection.”⁹¹ In Memory in Play, Favorini describes theatre “as a placeholder for memory,” suggesting that theatre performs a social function in remembering on behalf of the audience—so that they may revisit, through ritual, past events they may not have the capacity to remember themselves.⁹² These rituals however are only validated by the presence of the audience—and so in some ways what is being performed and witnessed is the presence of the audience. Without an audience, as theatre-maker Teya Sepinuck argues, there is no testimony.⁹³ So we attend the theatre to be reminded of our own existence.

Is this always the case? Is the same call upon the audience being made by Beckett as it is by a documentary play in which women testify about having been raped? In fact, can we even say that a memory play necessarily calls an audience to action? (Are there plays that ask for our passivity? Plays that do not, perhaps, even require an audience?)

In writing this book, it has been difficult to resist the word “should” (audiences should do particular things). In discussions about how we might witness injustice it is easy to slip into moralizing. Indeed, it’s hard to resist using the term “we” (even when that imagined communal identity stretches across national and temporal boundaries) simply because of the rhetorical imperative invoked by the moral imperative of witnessing.

Allen Feldman is suspicious of many memory performances that depend on the inevitable “moralizing periodization” of postevent depictions of violence, pain or injustice.⁹⁴ These moral positions may call for simplified reactions and affects. One particular pitfall of this trend is that the emotive nature of so many witness plays means that audiences may feel they are being called on to react emotionally rather than intellectually. There is thus a tight line for theatre makers to walk, so that, in Hirsch’s terms, the work of art can “touch us without paralyzing us . . . galvaniz[ing] memory in the interest of activist engagement for justice and social change.”⁹⁵ The sustained focus of this book is thus on the aesthetic strategies chosen by theatre makers: how they create witnesses, how and why they call on audiences to behave in particular ways. Paramount here is whether, as Peters puts it, performances of witnessing “call for our aid [or] our appreciation; our duty [or] our pleasure.”⁹⁶ If the audience is allotted subjectivity, then does that also hold true for the onstage witness? Because, as Feldman argues, “no matter how empathic the gaze” of the audience member, the process of witnessing is inevitably often an objectifying one. This brings us to the risk of witnessing—that the witnessing dividend accrues not to the person being witnessed, but to the person consuming.⁹⁷

The Real Inequality

Perhaps these questions of consumer power actually divert attention away from the real subjects of disempowerment—those being represented. We cannot assume that just because someone, or their story, is represented on stage that they have power as witnesses. As many critics of discourses around victimhood argue, power is distributed unequally between those who are represented and those doing the representing. The important question about power and exploitation does not center on the consumer, but pivots on how often, in fact, the subject of the performance is exploited. In the desire for authenticity, “the real,” and stories of personal hardship, the experiences of survivors of abuse, victims of sexual violence, and protestors against injustice, become market commodities. As Jasbir Puar argues, performances of empathetic or charitable selfhood are used by gatekeepers to accrue symbolic cultural and social capital without any proper recompense or benefit to the survivors themselves.⁹⁸ This is not to be undersold, as Allen states, “the cultural production of memory depends increasingly” on the “intensification of immaterial, precarious and forced labour.”⁹⁹ A witness’s labor may be rewarded by consumer interest in their stories and the validation and potential support this generates, but the real benefit is to the gatekeepers’ profit margins and the already-privileged consumers’ performance of being a good citizen. Precarity in the marketplace is thus not solved, but actually worsened, by some performances of witnessing.

In an ideal world, we can hope to set against the inequalities and disempowerments engendered by the competitive, top-down, and profit-driven nature of the marketplace, the citizen consumer’s desire to exercise their critical faculties, and to see change enacted—and the possibility that they may further enact those changes themselves outside the boundaries of both theatrical and remembrance cultures, thus shifting the balance of power in the marketplace. As Jill Dolan encouragingly argues, we must believe in “the potential of different kinds of performance to inspire moments in which audiences feel allied with each other, and with a broader, more capacious sense of a public, in which social discourse articulates the possible rather than the insurmountable obstacles to human potential.”¹⁰⁰

It is also important to note the possibility for work that does not speak on behalf of the survivor, but that is made by the survivor. This book includes discussion of performances in which different stakeholders get to speak—from victims of physical, sexual, and state violence who script and perform their own narratives, to activists who campaign for social justice. Overall, however, it is important to acknowledge that most of the culture we consume is made by one group, about another group. The stakes of aestheticizing another’s pain, and the risk of appropriating suffering, are thus very real concerns, and I set out to examine them in the context of power and capital. Appropriation does not have to be a destructive process; there is potential for audience witnesses to make the problem their own without, in the process, appropriating the moral capital of the victim/survivor.

It is vital that we acknowledge the inequalities—social, political, and economic—of the marketplace and the ways that market practices entail the silencing of the memories of particular social groups in order to amplify and bolster others, or that exploit the suffering of some in order to generate economic and social capital for those who already hold power. However, so that we do not despair, we also need at the same time to remind ourselves that these inequalities do not preclude the potential for positive change. Indeed the starkness of the market inequalities around not just social issues, but also memory issues, may call on the audience to do the opposite—to become activists. In this reading, we can salvage precarity as a potential ground for new political subjectivities and solidarity, though, as Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt acknowledge, that is itself “a precarious project,”¹⁰¹ one that risks not only instrumentalizing the disenfranchised, but further burdening this cohort with insatiable expectations of their immaterial labor.

The Witness to Pain

Identifying that the audience is being called on does not quite answer the question of what it is that a theatre audience is being asked to witness, or indeed why audiences are being cast in the role of witnesses at all. As suggested by Fitzpatrick above, the rise of the term witness is linked to the rise of trauma: albeit witness theatre offers audiences a range of experiences, more and more audiences are being asked to witness pain. Indeed, Sepinuck argues that this has reached such a level that many potential theatrical witnesses fear they have not “suffered enough” and that they should therefore not testify as their stories do not “count.”¹⁰² Indeed, in some instances it may be that consumers are simply attracted by, and marketers exploit, what has become a “trauma brand.” This brand is linked to positive social values, such as empathy and the production of social relations, but it is also at risk of flattening and commodifying personal experiences, leading us to ask more questions of how trauma operates in performance. Is our concept of witnessing linked exclusively to painful memory? Do we expect, or even demand, performances of suffering? Is this the real impact of the consumer?

And what is the effect on the audience of being asked to witness pain—either firsthand (in the case of autoperformance) or secondhand (via actors)? It is troubling to consider these effects because, as Michal Givoni asserts, witnessing so often entails being “overtaken by a performance of trauma and loss.”¹⁰³ Givoni is referring here to firsthand witnessing where an individual testifies to their own experience of trauma—but if we expect an audience to enter into a collaborative witnessing relationship, and to remediate the testimony they have heard, does this description of witnessing not also apply to the audience?

I am wary of the idea of secondary trauma because it is important to recognize the distance between the event and the secondhand witness and hence the relative safety of that second witness—nevertheless, in transferring the responsibility of witnessing from performer/testifier to audience, something of the performance of pain must also be transferred. In the auditorium, audience members may react with fear, or tears, or anger—a range of emotions linked to trauma—and when it comes to remediating the testimony their reactions may equally be to be afraid again, or to cry again, or rail again at the injustice they have witnessed. These may only be surface-level emotions, exhausted by the performance, but, still, they affect the kind of witnessing that is happening. This leads to what Carol Martin argues is the key problem with memory plays that “instead of offering [audiences] analysis or responsibility, [leave them] to sentimentally weep.”¹⁰⁴ As Carole-Anne Upton also argues, staging trauma can lead theatre makers to opt for “a sympathetic portrayal of victims of injustice rather than an interrogation of [social] responsibilities.”¹⁰⁵ Given the tendency for sympathy over criticism, the expected activity of the audience thus becomes about emotional expiation rather than political action—meaning that trauma theatre’s potential, as Fitzpatrick puts it, “is often limited [as] the desired transformation is actually interpersonal” not political.¹⁰⁶ This form of personal transformation is a worthwhile dividend of the labor that spectators perform at the theatre, but it is a benefit that primarily profits the individual, not the collective, and the witnessing that occurs will primarily drive further consumption, rather than social change. Moreover, the assumption that affect always entails “pleasant” emotions of solidarity and other “affirmative feelings” stubbornly ignores the fact that affect in fact often involves less pleasant emotions—anxiety, frustration, competitiveness—and that while it can be used to mobilize positive forces for change, it can also be used to “collude and reproduce” negative social attitudes such as racism.¹⁰⁷

The empathic response by an audience is often assumed to be a necessary context or prerequisite for witnessing, but the recent dominance of empathy not as a tool, but as a mode, of witnessing actually limits the range of audience engagement. Many of the case studies in this book are based on documentary sources, or performed using autoperformance—where the performer onstage is actually a firsthand witness. This allows me to discuss the connections between the performance and the world outside, and to argue that witnessing by both performer and audience member is capable of making a link between the aesthetic representation of injustice and actual injustice. But empathy can be a stumbling block. Though Rokem argues that the awareness of an actor mediating the character’s victimization enables both identificatory and critical responses, I would argue that the turn toward “the real,” combined with the “complete absorption” that characterizes empathy, make it difficult for audiences to avail of any critical distance in making judgements about the performances they see.¹⁰⁸ This is why Kabosh Theatre Company in Belfast, though they base their work on documentary and verbatim research, always translate this into a fictional framework, in order to create critical space for both the original memory and the audience to interrogate that memory as a kind of public history (which is more available for critical discussion than someone’s personal memory).¹⁰⁹ This is a tricky maneuver as fictional plots and characters, in losing the impact of “the real,” have to work differently in order to establish the authority of the witness text—so that audiences don’t simply dismiss what is being performed as fictional and therefore not applicable to life outside the theatre, or requiring witness. Of course, theatre productions—no matter how real—always go through multiple stages of mediation, so that audiences are always only seeing the outcome of firsthand witnessing, a witnessing text, and never the “real thing.” Nevertheless, the “live” dimension of theatre, in which audiences watch a real person on stage and not via a screen, can occlude the function of mediation, particularly in the case of testimonial theatre, as its reliance on verbatim material and autoperformance produces a kind of invisibly mediated firsthand witnessing. The pain being performed onstage hence has an unavoidable affective power—this really happened, and now it’s happening again, right in front of me. The emphasis on trauma and the real thus makes it easier for the producer to create impact, but harder for the audience to think about how they are being impacted, and to translate their spectatorship into acts of critical witnessing.

The Victim as the Perfect Witness and Affective Witnessing in the Marketplace

In this cultural moment, it is easy to see how victimhood and suffering have become the currency of so much popular culture, and a route to establishing the authority of the witnessing work of art in the memory marketplace. Indeed, Rothberg argues that trauma as a universal condition has become “a form of cultural capital that bestows moral privilege.”¹¹⁰ The victim thus becomes the perfect moral witness. This is a turn from the previous treatment of trauma, which silenced victims in a marketplace that privileged nostalgia on the one hand and progress on the other. Now we live in an “empire of trauma.”¹¹¹ The shift in the status of the victim has led to the rise of the victim as a valuable commodity—as Peters puts it, “Not surprisingly, there has been something of a scramble to capture the prestige of the victim-witness.”¹¹² Victim prestige is produced by a combination of their testimony as a novelty product in the market and the symbolic capital conferred by their firsthand presence and suffering.

The market dominance of sympathy and empathy can thus be read as both enabling and disabling witnessing. Lauren Berlant’s work on compassion is illuminating here, as she argues that calls to action that utilize these emotions depend on privilege: “In operation, compassion is a term denoting privilege: the sufferer is over there. You, the compassionate one, have a resource that would alleviate someone else’s suffering.”¹¹³ It is a generous impulse to want to alleviate another’s suffering, but the question then becomes—how? Berlant goes on, “When we want to rescue X, are we thinking of rescuing everyone like X, or is it a singular case that we see?”¹¹⁴ Further, as Rosanne Kennedy argues, the risk of compassion is that it may “displace efforts that could be more productively put into working for social justice.”¹¹⁵ These empathic dynamics thus make the outcomes of even citizen-consumer witnessing ambivalent.

Let me give an example: in Sanctuary, a verbatim production by Theatre of Witness (2013, Northern Ireland), several asylum seekers testified to an audience about their reasons for seeking asylum—including familial breakdown, death threats, and gang rape. At the end of the show, which was obviously highly emotive, postcards were distributed to the audience to write to the UK home secretary so that each of us could remediate the testimony we’d received, and call on the officials with hard power to grant asylum to these particular individuals. These postcards were a way for audiences to act in a meaningful way in response to what they had witnessed—to become witnesses themselves. It held the promise of political action, a way to balance the emotional reaction during the moment of the play. Direct political actions like these can be highly effective—yet the worry remained for me that as witnesses we were not making a decision based on the political facts, nor were we protesting the structural inequalities of the system, but merely making a plea for one person (X) based on our sympathetic response to her plight (but not all people like X). And in answering the call to sympathize, and then signing the postcard, were we also appropriating her story to enrich our own—in Puar’s terms, was cultural capital accruing to us, rather than to the “other”?¹¹⁶ And if we turn to Landsberg’s model of prosthetic memory, which gives us the feeling of memory as an extra “limb,” we need to ask—are we, as consumers, simply shopping for feel-good limbs?

At one point in Sanctuary, during the female asylum seeker’s testimony, she became unable to deliver her lines and another performer had to take over. The woman’s onstage silence provoked many people in the audience to cry—and I couldn’t help but think that this was not either fair to her (clearly she was still traumatized) or fair to the audience (in the wake of such an emotional performance, it is very difficult to say “I want to think about it before signing the postcard”). And this brings us back to agency—was the postcard signing an indication of being an active or a passive audience, was it an act of witnessing or not? And once the card had been signed and given to a volunteer, were we done? Was that, as Berlant puts it, “the apex of affective agency among strangers”?¹¹⁷

Like Berlant, Givoni questions the capability of witnessing to solve political problems, suspicious of how witnessing is currently marketed as “the most available solution for an increasingly pressing need to cope with political evil.”¹¹⁸ Both these critics instead see affective witnessing not as the solution but a form of amelioration. This is doubly the case when we consider the relatively small scale of the theatre audience—as Upton argues, theatre “does not constitute the public sphere in the way that mass media and particularly television can.”¹¹⁹ Indeed, the theatre of painful memory represents a potentially even smaller-scale market segment. Even a popular show, which tours and enjoys high market impact, cannot change the market structures—or the political and social inequalities beyond the memory marketplace. In fact, if we return to the idea that each “untold story” derives much of its popularity from consumers who constantly crave novelty in content and form, we can then understand why the rise in, for example, theatre shows that perform stories of injustice based on gender or racial inequality do not change the dominance of white patriarchal culture. Instead of actually changing the marketplace, these narratives create new niche market segments for audiences that want to consume those narratives—thereby expanding, but not fundamentally changing, the market.¹²⁰ Segmentation has been a feature of markets for many decades, as a response to overcapacity that, in turn, creates a need for “market differentiation and for the discovery of new niche” market segments.¹²¹ In this model, then, consumer demand leads to the creation of market segments, rather than the decentralization of power.

Hope, Witnessing, and the Marketplace

Do all these limits make theatrical witnessing redundant? I point to all the potentialities of witnessing with a sense of optimism, and I note all the contradictions with a heavy heart. But overall, I believe that even in a crowded and consumption-driven marketplace, witnessing memory can make a difference. I love theatre, and I believe in its transformative power; I believe that we do have the opportunity for community at the theatre; and I believe that theatre can make us better citizens, as well as witnesses. Like Dolan, I see in the choice of audiences to watch live performances as a group “potential for intersubjectivity not only between the performer and spectators, but among the audience as well.”¹²² Out of that intersubjectivity may grow the grounds of real change. I offer two examples of effective memory plays as a way of gesturing toward the utopian possibilities of theatrical witnessing in practice.¹²³

In By Heart (2015), the Portuguese theatre maker Tiago Rodriguez enlists the audience in a memory collaboration. Rodriguez invites ten audience volunteers to sit onstage with him, and to learn “by heart” one of Shakespeare’s sonnets: “Sonnet 30,” which begins “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past.” Though only ten individuals move onto the stage (each entrusted to memorize a single line) the entire audience is involved in this project, as we recite each line with Rodriguez and the volunteers, until at the end of the show, the full poem is memorized and recited. Interspersed with the repetition of each line, Rodriguez tells other stories of the importance of memory and witness: the story of the Russian writer Boris Pasternak, who was threatened with arrest, and who risked disaster by standing up at a public congress in Russia. Yet instead of giving a speech, or reciting his own work, all Pasternak said was a number, the number of the Shakespearean sonnet he had translated from English to Russian. And when Pasternak said “30,” the audience at the Stalin congress stood and recited the poem in Russian. This action, as Rodriguez puts it, “said everything. It said—you can’t touch us.” Instead, touch is mobilized in positive ways—through the solidarity of the audiences, then and now.

In By Heart, Rodriguez does not tell his stories of memory as abstract or historical parables. Instead, he involves the audience as active witnesses and cocreators of meaning. The collaborative witnessing achieved, through listening to stories and reciting the poem, has the effect of expanding the meaning of collective memory to acknowledge the trauma of fascism and also hope: the ability of people to unify in a common purpose and achieve something larger than the sum of their parts through the joint act of memory and witnessing. The memorization and recitation of “Sonnet 30” by the end of the show felt like an achievement, and every time I have recited it since, it invokes my memory of that act of witnessing, as well as summoning to mind the potential for audiences who want to remember to make a difference.

By Heart embodies and enacts so many of the principles of witnessing that underpin my optimism about theatre, and memory plays in particular. Yet it is in many ways a very different play from those discussed in this book: though there are stories in By Heart about oppression and sadness, it is a comic show. Rodriguez enlists the audience’s support through humor and the shared experiences of laughter, rather than tears. This is deliberate—indeed, one of the funniest jokes of the show is when a volunteer’s memory falters and his line is forgotten; Rodriguez turns to the volunteer and says “if you forget something, don’t worry—it’s very good for the performance; the audience always loves to watch failure.” The laugh of recognition (and culpability) resounds in the theatre. So it is perhaps salutary to note that this witness play relies for its impact on the joyful practice of creativity and collective remembering. Does this mean we were not witnesses, though, in the sense I have discussed up until now? Does witnessing only count if it is to suffering? I think not—the principle of By Heart is the recognition of the joint importance of attention and memory, and so while it may not ask us to witness current injustice, it does answer Vladimir’s painful demand in Waiting for Godot that the powerless be witnessed with compassion and care. And it also provides the audience with evidence of their own ability and power as witnesses, rather than simply as consumers.

By Heart revolves around making the audience visible—as a core part of what is being performed, and how that performance is witnessed. Another theatrical moment that made the audience visible came on November 19, 2016, during a curtain call to the US Broadway hit musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Actor Brandon Victor Dixon stepped forward on the stage and quieted the audience’s applause. Speaking directly to the auditorium, and deliberately going “off script,” Dixon spoke on behalf of the cast of Hamilton to address one of the show’s spectators: US vice president-elect Mike Pence. Dixon called on Pence, saying: “We, sir—we—are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights. . . . We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”¹²⁴ Dixon’s statement was greeted with a further standing ovation and went viral via traditional and social media. Clearly this was another moment when the audience realized their role as witnesses and the concomitant necessity for them to cocreate and remediate the theatrical message.

The next day US president-elect Donald Trump responded on Twitter: “The Theater must always be a safe and special place. The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!” The cast did not apologize. It is significant that the cast of Hamilton, as makers of a hit Broadway show, have a platform in the loud and crowded cultural marketplace that allows their voices to be heard, and that they choose to use this platform, and their symbolic capital, to speak up for the diverse others who are not enfranchised in the same way. It is also significant that they understand the potential of a history play to “inspire” future action, implicitly identifying the power of cultural memory to act as an ethical catalyst. Most of all, they recognize the importance of making theatre an “unsafe” space where radical things can happen. My point here is not just that theatre matters but that witnessing matters as an act in itself. Certainly, neither Pence nor Trump have showed any signs that this theatrical intervention was meaningful to them—but for the audience Dixon’s act of witness from the stage, and their witnessing of this moment, was meaningful. So while this moment does not demonstrate that theatre can change the political sphere, it does show how theatre can positively shape the witnessing sphere. And since this moment has now taken on iconic status, it has not only shaped cultural memory (both of Hamilton and of the weeks following the US presidential election) but continues to act as an exemplar of how artistic intervention, voice, and witnessing are vital in the cultural and memory marketplaces.

Witness plays call on their audiences to act as moral witnesses, and to assume the responsibility for collective memory and thereby to shape and define the memory marketplace along ethical lines. As the examples of By Heart and Hamilton demonstrate, these calls to action do not have to be based on trauma. However, as this book will explore, these are exceptional moments—as pain and suffering are the current default modes for memory work in the theatre (and arguably culture more generally). The ethics of how painful memory is deployed as a tool for generating ethical remembering, and as a marketing tool, will be debated in the chapters that follow. There is a fine line between witnessing and appropriation, between ethical memory and entertainment consumption, and much depends on the aesthetic and performative decisions and strategies used by the theatre companies as to where on the line their depictions of pain fall. As Winter argues, not only silence, but also speech, can be used in “morally deplorable ways.”¹²⁵

It is valuable to note here that responsibility works in two directions—memories of brutality and injustice deserve to be heard and witnessed, but we must not forget that scenes that depict brutality are a burden to the audience. The performance of painful memory creates an ethical imperative to remember and an equal need to forget. In a crowded marketplace, novelty and increasingly intense physical and emotional experiences drive consumption. Yet these experiences, which are the very ones that need witnessing, may become so normalized that they blend into a generalized trauma culture that reduces the capacity for witnessing as traumatic cultural memory reaches a saturation point. In some senses, then, it is not simply that these plays act out past trauma, but that they actually enact a traumatized relationship to the past. This relationship also requires witnessing.

THIS BOOK

This book focuses on the production and consumption of painful memory in contemporary Irish and international theatre. The chapters that follow examine how memories of pain are staged by playwrights and theatre companies, how they are communicated to audiences, and how that audience, in turn, both consumes and witnesses. Each chapter considers the message being sold to the audience, the possibilities for reception and remediation, the effects of different levels of social and cultural capital on the status of the witness, and how theatrical strategies can highlight competition, or create solidarity, through recognizing different forms of capital, and involving the audience in mnemonic labor. In deciding what plays to discuss, I have chosen to focus on testimonial and memory plays—witness plays—that stage the personal experiences of subjects who traditionally do not enjoy social and economic capital, as a way of understanding whether theatre can function as an intervention in the marketplace. As such, this book takes its cue from a long history of feminist performance (both in theatre and performance art), which has used the autobiographical as a mode to “reveal otherwise invisible lives, to resist marginalisation and objectification and to become, instead, speaking subjects with self-agency.”¹²⁶

Over the course of the two opening chapters, I establish many of the practices of “theatre of the real” and the performances—and risks—of witnessing. Beginning with documentary and verbatim theatre, chapter 1 discusses two examples of that genre—No Escape (Ireland, 2010), compiled by Mary Raftery and created by the Abbey, Ireland’s national theatre, an example of subsidized theatre with a limited audience; and The Laramie Project (US, 2000) and The Laramie Project Ten Years Later (US, 2010) by Tectonic Theater Company, both of which were massive commercial successes with national US tours. These plays open the book’s discussion of how theatre can provide a powerful ensemble platform for experiences of the marginalized—victims of sexual abuse and violence—to be testified to. Though the productions are on very different scales, they each illustrate how mnemonic capital can be witnessed—and institutionalized—through the actions of key gatekeepers in the marketplace.

In chapter 2, the discussion turns to autoperformance plays, a form of documentary verbatim work in which the performer is the firsthand witness. The chapter highlights how I Once Knew a Girl (2010), by Theatre of Witness in Northern Ireland (2010), and Nirbhaya (India and UK, 2013), by Yael Farber and the ensemble at once show how victims can be empowered to perform their own stories, and also illustrate the risk of empathy as a dramaturgical strategy that commodifies the victim and enables the too-easy consumption of their suffering. These plays further illustrate the value of considering funding streams—public subsidy via grants, online marketing campaigns—demonstrating the tension for producers between creating platforms for marginalized voices and creating prestigious and instrumentalized cultural products.

Chapter 3 develops the analysis of the staging of witnessing, both within and outside institutionalized memory contexts, focusing on three plays based on and around the concept of truth and reconciliation commissions: Ubu and the Truth Commission by Jane Taylor and Handspring Puppet Company (South Africa/UK, 1997), Claudia by La Conquesta del Pol Sud (Spain/Argentina, 2016), and Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman (Chile/UK, 1990). Through these plays, I consider how testimony, as a particular form of cultural capital, becomes a tradeable commodity and the dimension that transnational witnessing adds to the market. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to modes of witnessing, to consider active listening as a way that audiences can engage in witnessing as a performance of immaterial labor. Discussions of Twilight—Los Angeles, 1992 (US, 1994) by Anna Deavere Smith, Come Out Eli (UK, 2003) by Alecky Blythe, Annulla (An Autobiography) (US, 1985) by Emily Mann, and Krapp’s Last Tape (Ireland/France, 1958), Footfalls (Ireland/France, 1976), and Come and Go (Ireland/France, 1965) all by Samuel Beckett, ultimately suggest how dramaturgical strategies around listening may resist the commodification of the firsthand witness.

Taking theatre out of the auditorium in chapter 5’s consideration of site-specific theatre allows us to look at other forms of resistance—and the full role of the audience as “prosumer” and collaborator in the construction of meaning. This chapter focuses on Proximity Mouth (Ireland, 2015) by Dominic Thorpe, the work of Dublin-based company ANU Productions (in particular their Monto cycle, Ireland, 2010–14), and audio performance walks Quartered: A Love Story (N. Ireland, 2016) by Kabosh Theatre Company; Echoing Yafa (Palestine/Israel, 2014) by Miriam Schickler; and And While London Burns (UK, 2007) by Platform. Each of these productions requires the audience to step out of the comfortable role of passive consumer and suggests the role of space and movement in the creation of mnemonic capital.

Finally, the conclusion considers the #MeToo movement as a new form of collective memory performance, and analyzes how in Ireland, feminist theatre movements such as “Waking the Feminists” and “Speak Up and Call It Out” show the activist power of mobilizing mnemonic capital in progressive ways, staging painful pasts for political ends rather than consumer empathy. This chapter responds to many of the ethical questions raised in the book about the consumption of others’ pain, asking us to notice how collective movements often require enormous labor from individuals, and finally considering how to balance the need to address inequalities in power and capital with the need to withdraw at times from the marketplace in order to preserve a sense of self.

Throughout the book, my analysis focuses on how producers exploit scripted and production strategies in the hope of directing audience attention to painful memory in particular ways, thereby shaping their behavior as both consumers and witnesses. I consider how audiences may have multivalent reactions and what the possibilities are for the citizen consumer to act in transgressive ways to become audience-witnesses and perhaps even activists. Witnessing memory of painful pasts is, in this iteration, not just a performance, but a performance of responsibility that occurs within, and draws attention to, the power strata of the marketplace.

NOTES

1. Carmen-Francesca Banciu and La Conquesta del Pol Sud, Land Full of Heroes (2019), unpublished script courtesy of La Conquesta del Pol Sud.

2. Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1992); Paul Celan quoted in Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 89.

3. See Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993), 85 and passim, for definition of hyperreality.

4. “Our BE Festival Review Round-up,” What’s On Birmingham, accessed October 12, 2019, https://www.whatsonlive.co.uk/birmingham/news/our-be-festival-review-round-up/44721.

5. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986), 50.

6. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 86.

7. George Berkeley, A New Theory of Vision and Other Writings (London: J M Dent, 1938), 114–15.

8. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, quoted in introduction to Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, ed. Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik (London, New York: Routledge, 2013), 4.

9. Anna Reading, “Seeing Red: A Political Economy of Digital Memory,” Media, Culture & Society 36, no. 6 (2014): 748–60, see esp. 753.

10. John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, eds., introduction to Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 4.

11. Anna Reading, “The Female Memory Factory: How the Gendered Labour of Memory Creates Mnemonic Capital,” European Journal of Women’s Studies (2019): 1–20, see esp. 4.

12. Jonathan Bach, What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Social Past in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 3.

13. Anna Reading and Tanya Notley, “Globital Memory Capital: Theorizing Digital Memory Economies,” in Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, ed. Andrew Hoskins (London: Routledge, 2018).

14. Matthew Allen, “The Poverty of Memory: For Political Economy in Memory Studies,” Memory Studies 9, no. 4 (2016): 371–75, see esp. 371.

15. Jen Harvie, Fair Play (London: Palgrave, 2013), 8.

16. I am grateful to Anna Reading for her use of this term, discussed during the “Activist Memory” workshop at Columbia University, November 2–3, 2018.

17. Pierre Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986). For a discussion of the influence of these forms of capital on tourist consumer decisions, see Erdinç Çakmak, Rico Lie, and Tom Selwyn, “Informal Tourism Entrepreneurs’ Capital Usage and Conversion,” Current Issues in Tourism (2018): 2250–65.

18. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy (London: Polity, 2000).

19. Anna Reading defines mnemonic capital in her article “The Female Memory Factory: How the Gendered Labour of Memory Creates Mnemonic Capital,” European Journal of Women’s Studies (2019): 1–20.

20. Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” 241.

21. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 18.

22. Harvie, Fair Play, 8. Harvie draws on Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s work on the “experience economy.” See Pine and Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review, 1999).

23. For a discussion of how community versus public/private funding creates a particular market-driven narrative, see Robyn Autry, “The Political Economy of Memory: The Challenges of Representing National Conflict at Identity-Driven Museums,” Theory and Society 42, no. 1 (2013): 57–80.

24. Jean Baudrillard, “No Reprieve for Sarajevo,” Liberation, January 8, 1994, republished on CTheory.net, http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/no-reprieve-for-sarajevo/, September 28, 1994.

25. Terri Tomsky, “From Sarajevo to 9/11: Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 49–60, see esp. 49.

26. The idea of the “invisible hand” of the market is discussed in Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann, “Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas, Practices and Governances,” in Markets in Historical Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

27. Carol Martin, “Living Simulations: The Use of Media in Documentary in the UK, Lebanon and Israel,” in Get Real, ed. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 74–90, see esp. 82.

28. See Fiona Gartland, “Dublin Hotels Fully Booked for Easter 1916 Commemorations,” Irish Times, March 9, 2016, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/dublin-hotels-fully-booked-for-easter-1916-commemorations-1.2566748.

29. Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy (Oxford: Polity, 2005), 21.

30. For a discussion of the relative appeal of popular history books in 2016, see John Spain, “Coogan Blows Ferriter Away,” Independent.ie, January 10, 2016, https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/book-reviews/coogan-blows-ferriter-away-in-explosion-of-1916-books-34344713.html.

31. Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy, 19.

32. Vered Vinitzky Seroussi, “Unpacking the Unspeakable: Silence in Collective Memory and Forgetting,” Social Forces 88, no. 3 (2010): 1103–22, see esp. 1107.

33. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance (New York: The New Press, 1999), 30–31.

34. Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir, Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction (London: Palgrave, 2017), 9–10.

35. Brian Friel, Translations in Plays One (London: Faber, 1996), 445.

36. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 14.

37. Rosanne Kennedy and Gillian Whitlock, “Witnessing, Trauma and Social Suffering: Feminist Perspectives,” Australian Feminist Studies 26, no. 69 (2011): 251–55, see esp. 252. Michael Rothberg echoes this, acknowledging that, “all articulations of memory are not equal; powerful social, political and psychic forces articulate themselves in every act of remembrance.” See Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 16.

38. Walter Benjamin, as quoted in Jeanette Malkin, Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 26.

39. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage, 1998), 59.

40. Baudrillard, The Consumer Society, 59.

41. Lizabeth Cohen, “Citizens and Consumers in the United States in the Century of Mass Consumption,” in The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, ed. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 203–22.

42. Bevir and Trentmann, “Markets in Historical Contexts,” 3.

43. See George M. Zinkhan and Richard T. Watson, “Advertising Trends: Innovation and the Process of Creative Destruction,” Journal of Business Research 37, no. 3 (1996): 163–71.

44. James Gilmore and Joseph Pine, Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2009).

45. See S. Banet-Weiser, “Branding Consumer Citizens,” Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

46. Christopher Howard, “Touring the Consumption of the Other: Imaginaries of Authenticity in the Himalayas and Beyond,” Journal of Consumer Culture 16, no. 2 (2016): 354–73, see esp. 362.

47. For an overview of emotion and consumer behavior research, see Fleur J. M. Laros and Jan Benedict E. M. Steenkamp, “Emotions in Consumer Behavior: A Hierarchical Approach,” Journal of Business Research 58, no. 10 (2005): 1437–45.

48. Identity-signaling is a key part of decisions about consumption, meaning that the social-good dimension of attending social-justice plays may play a large role in people’s ticket-buying patterns. See Jonah A. Berger, Benjamin Ho, and Yogesh V. Joshi, “Identity Signaling with Social Capital: A Model of Symbolic Consumption” (working paper, SSRN, April 15, 2011) https://ssrn.com/abstract=1828848.

49. Adam Arvidsson, “Brand Management,” Consuming Cultures, 71–94, see esp. 87.

50. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 42.

51. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 42.

52. Baudrillard, “No Reprieve for Sarajevo,” http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/no-reprieve-for-sarajevo/.

53. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 2, 16.

54. John Durham Peters, “Witnessing,” in Media Witnessing, ed. Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2008), 26.

55. Jukka Törrönen, “Between Public Good and the Freedom of the Consumer,” Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 2 (2001): 171–93.

56. Harvie, Fair Play, 29–61.

57. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 162.

58. Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Struggles for Memory (2003), 23, quoted in Berthold Molden, “Power Relations of Collective Memory,” Memory Studies 9, no. 2 (2016): 134.

59. Jay Winter, “Thinking about Silence,” in Shadows of War, ed. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6.

60. Lisa Fitzpatrick, “Gender and Affect in Testimonial Performance: The Example of I Once Knew a Girl,” Irish University Review 45, no. 1 (2015): 126–40.

61. Dori Laub, “An Event without a Witness,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (London: Routledge, 1992), 75.

62. Laub, “An Event without a Witness,” 80.

63. Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski, “Witnessing as a Field,” in Media Witnessing, ed. Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2008), 133–55, see esp. 137.

64. Laub, “An Event without a Witness,” 81.

65. Peters, “Witnessing,” 23.

66. Aleida Assmann, “Truth and Memory” (lecture, UCD Humanities Institute, February 6, 2018), https://soundcloud.com/ucd-humanities/aleida-assmann-truth-and-memory.

67. Pat Palmer, The Body in Pain in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Fionnuala Dillane, Naomi McAreavey, and Emilie Pine (London: Palgrave, 2017), 21–38, see esp. 23.

68. Peters, “Witnessing,” 23.

69. Diana Taylor, “Staging Social Memory,” in Psychoanalysis and Performance, ed. Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear (London: Routledge, 2001), 16.

70. Bourdieu, The Social Structures of the Economy, 148.

71. Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy, Social Economics: Market Behaviour in a Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

72. Karine Shaefer, “The Spectator as Witness?” Theatre & Performance 23, no. 1 (2003): 5–20, see esp. 7, 17.

73. Caroline Wake, “Towards a Taxonomy of Spectatorial Witness in Theatre and Performance Studies,” in Visions and Revisions, ed. Caroline Wake and Bryoni Tresize (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculaneum Press, 2013), 34.

74. Wake, “Towards a Taxonomy of Spectatorial Witness,” 42.

75. Alan Filewood, “The Documentary Body,” in Get Real, ed. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 55–73, see esp. 69.

76. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 16.

77. Gareth White, Audience Participation in the Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (London: Palgrave, 2013), 57.

78. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 2.

79. Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (Summer, 1995): 125–33, see esp. 127.

80. See, for example, E. Kromidha, “Social Identity and Signalling Success Factors in Online Crowdfunding,” Entrepreneurship & Regional Development 28, no. 9–10 (2016): 605–29; Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole, “Incentives and Prosocial Behavior,” The American Economic Review 96, no. 5 (2006): 1652–78; Rachel Croson, Femida Handy, and Jen Shang, “Keeping Up with the Joneses: The Relationship of Perceived Descriptive Social Norms, Social Information, and Charitable Giving,” Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 19, no. 4 (2009): 467–89; Deborah J. Terry, Michael A. Hog, and Katherine M. White, “The Theory of Planned Behaviour: Self-Identity, Social Identity and Group Norms,” The British Journal of Social Psychology 38 (1999): 225–44.

81. Rosanne Kennedy makes this argument in relation to apologies to the Australian Stolen Generation. See Rosanne Kennedy, “An Australian Archive of Feelings,” Australian Feminist Studies 26, no. 69 (2011): 257–79.

82. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 93. Favorini argues that theatre is “a connectionist rather than a storage model for memory,” Atillio Favorini, Memory in Play: From Aeschylus to Sam Shepard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 180.

83. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2004), 66.

84. Favorini, Memory in Play, 135.

85. Louise Woodstock, “It’s Kind of Like an Assault You Know,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 33, no. 5, 399–408, see esp. 406.

86. Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2013).

87. Anne Cubilié and Carl Good, “The Future of Testimony,” Discourse 25, no. 1/2 (2003): 4–18, see esp. 7.

88. Patrick Duggan, Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012), 1.

89. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge Classics, 2006), 2–4.

90. Freddi Rokem, Performing History (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), 19, 204.

91. Rokem, Performing History, 205.

92. Favorini, Memory in Play, 7.

93. Interview with Teya Sepinuck by Playhouse as part of the Playhouse Theatre of Witness program, Derry. July 10, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJNWzN5mdTE.

94. Allen Feldman, “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing and the Trauma Aesthetic,” Biography 27, no. 1 (2004): 163–202, see esp. 164.

95. Marianne Hirsch, “Connective Histories in Vulnerable Times,” PMLA 129, no. 3 (2014): 330–48, see esp. 334.

96. Peters, “Witnessing,” 39.

97. Feldman, “Memory Theaters,” 166.

98. Jasbir Puar interprets Foucault’s idea of “speaker’s benefit” to discuss this kind of cultural capital. See Jasbir Puar, “Celebrating Refusal: The Complexities of Saying No,” Bully Bloggers, June 23, 2010, https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/celebrating-refusal-the-complexities-of-saying-no/. I am grateful to Anne Mulhall for this reference.

99. Allen, “The Poverty of Memory,” 373.

100. Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 2.

101. Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, “In the Social Factory: Immaterial Labor, Precariousness and Cultural Work,” Theory, Culture & Society 25 no. 7–8 (2008): 1–30.

102. Teya Sepinuck, Theatre of Witness (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2013), 157.

103. Michal Givoni, Care of the Witness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 44.

104. Carol Martin, “Living Simulations,” 78.

105. Carole-Anne Upton, “Northern Ireland: The Case of Bloody Sunday,” in Get Real, ed. Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 179–94.

106. Fitzpatrick, “Gender and Affect in Testimonial Performance,” 132.

107. Gill and Pratt, “In the Social Factory,” 15–16.

108. See Rokem, Performing History, 204, 192. “Complete absorption” is why advertisers in particular engage empathy in their “drama-based” ads. See Jennifer Edson Escalas and Barbara B. Stern, “Sympathy and Empathy: Emotional Responses,” Journal of Consumer Research 29 (2003): 566–78, see esp. 573.

109. Conversation between author and Paula McFettridge, artistic director of Kabosh Theatre Company, Dublin, April 2018.

110. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 87.

111. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

112. Peters, “Witnessing,” 31.

113. Lauren Berlant, ed., “Compassion (and Withholding),” in Compassion (London: Routledge, 2004), 4.

114. Berlant, “Compassion (and Withholding),” 6.

115. Rosanne Kennedy, “An Australian Archive of Feelings,” 259.

116. See Jasbir Puar, “Celebrating Refusal,” https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/celebrating-refusal-the-complexities-of-saying-no/. On the risks of trauma and appropriation, see also Dominic LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

117. Berlant, “Compassion (and Withholding),” 9.

118. Givoni, Care of the Witness, 4.

119. Upton, “Northern Ireland,” 192.

120. See the discussion of market segmentation (the creation of new niche markets targeting particular consumer groups) in Art Weinstein, Market Segmentation (London: McGraw Hill, 1994).

121. Arvidsson, “Brand Management,” 78.

122. Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 10. See also Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, for belief that cultural memory has the ability to shape subjectivity and politics (p. 2); and that memory can consolidate important group identities (p. 4).

123. Throughout this book when I refer to “utopian” possibilities, I am following the example of Jill Dolan in Utopia in Performance.

124. Clarisse Loughrey, “Read Hamilton Cast’s Surprise Statement to Vice President-Elect Mike Pence,” Independent, November 21, 2016, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/hamilton-mike-pence-booed-statement-in-full-watch-new-york-vice-president-elect-a7429251.html.

125. Winter, “Thinking about Silence,” 11.

126. Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and Performance (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 3; see also pp. 20–25 for an overview of feminist and queer consciousness-raising performances.