Читать книгу The Memory Marketplace - Emilie Pine - Страница 11
ОглавлениеWitnessing Docu-verbatim Memory
SOCIAL AND MNEMONIC CAPITAL ARE intimately linked. This chapter considers this statement in relation to the emergence of previously unspeakable memories into the marketplace as the social capital of marginalized groups begins to shift. These shifts are inextricably linked to cultural representation, and this chapter analyzes how theatrical gatekeepers use their influence within the cultural marketplace to raise both the memory and social capital of formerly powerless stakeholders—the victims of child abuse, sexual violence, and murder—through the form of docu-verbatim work, in order to create a more ethically balanced culture. Continuing the focus on the audience as a consumer in this dynamic, however, the chapter also highlights the risks inherent in marketing painful memory. Indeed, docu-verbatim theatre’s construction of the audience as witnesses creates a product and brand that generates memory capital for the firsthand witness, but whose ultimate dividend is the accrual of moral capital by the audience. As Roberta Sassatelli argues, “a growing variety of discourses, both within the marketplace and outside it, in politics and civil society, is calling into being the ‘consumer’ not only as an active subject but also, and above all, as a moral and political subject.”1 This chapter argues that docu-verbatim theatre is one such discourse, which not only calls into being, but depends on the idea of the moral consumer and audience-as-witness. But it also argues that the outcomes of this positioning have not yet been sufficiently analyzed in relation to how docu-verbatim theatre’s use of trauma as a catalyst for witnessing—what Ann Cvetkovich has called “an archive of feelings”—creates a consumer commodity out of painful memory.2 The chapter explores the tension between witnessing and shame, the interventionist role of biased mediation, the use of intolerable images, and the institutionalization of memory capital in order to engage with the fraught question of how theatre stages difficult histories.
DOCU-VERBATIM
Docu-verbatim theatre is not the best known form of Irish, or indeed international, theatre. But it is a genre increasing both its market share and its symbolic impact, and as such urgently requires analysis as an “alternative product,” a commodity that, as defined by Sassatelli, embodies “a critical dialogue with many aspects of commoditization as we know it.”3 In other words, this is a form of theatre that makes visible the cycle of production, distribution, and consumption through foregrounding the mechanisms of theatre-making and witnessing and highlighting the role of theatre as a joint site of production and consumption.
Docu-verbatim, my blended term designed to encompass documentary (based on documents) and verbatim (word-for-word) theatre styles, has experienced a recent market resurgence, its popularity broadly a response to the form’s attempt to represent some of the ethical crises of recent decades.4 It may be understood as a response to what Cvetkovich has defined as the need for nonmainstream social groups, without cultural capital, to have their memories and experiences represented through nonmainstream forms of performance, including “new genres of expression, such as testimony, and new forms of monuments, rituals, and performances that can call into being collective witnesses and publics.”5 Docu-verbatim is thus a “new form of . . . ritual” that responds to the consumer demand for art to react to crisis and to make the intricacies of those crises available, via a combined presentation of the relevant facts and an agreed message. Its recent popularity represents, as Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson put it, “a remarkable mobilisation and proliferation.”6 While many docu-verbatim plays are based on material (such as court transcripts) that is already publicly available, the form’s advantage is its mobilization of this information into a more accessible and performative medium. This action is attractive to a cultural and social marketplace that is constantly flooded with information, as these plays promise to distill what is important in a consumer-friendly format. In one sense, then, docu-verbatim’s contemporary market success is based not only on its seeming response to ethical crises, but to a crisis of knowing—or rather, a feeling of not-knowing. As Carol Martin argues, docu-verbatim “both acknowledges a positivist faith in empirical reality and underscores an epistemological crisis in knowing truth,” a feeling of crisis that, perhaps, an evening at the theatre can allay.7 Insecurity, as any analyst will tell you, is bad for the market—unless, that is, the market can create a brand to simultaneously address and feed off that insecurity.
The “art” of docu-verbatim is to transform complex ethical and social debates into a theatrically powerful moment, harnessing the emotive power of crisis and controversy in order to do so. In championing the disenfranchised, and highlighting abuses of power, these plays derive their edge from challenging the status quo and saying the unsayable. In this sense docu-verbatim theatre goes beyond “holding the mirror up to nature,” instead actively attempting to intervene in the world outside the theatre—the social, cultural, and memory marketplaces. What is particular to this form is its rooting in “the real”; docu-verbatim theatre gives direct access to untold stories of the unheard. I say “gives” and “direct,” with the obvious caveat being that docu-verbatim gives the impression of granting access to authenticity, through what is a highly stylized and highly selective form. We need to consider the dialectic between witnessing the authentic voice and the exigencies of shaping the message; through examining this tension we will see how docu-verbatim theatre negotiates the marketplace, positions the witness within the marketplace, and mediates the witness’s voice in order to create a powerful connection between the witness and the audience, a connection that creates significant cultural, social, and memory capital.8 Ultimately, theatre makers who privilege the voice of the unheard work as gatekeepers, who transform not only the cultural but hopefully also the social capital of the person or group whose testimony is being witnessed.
Is consuming docu-verbatim theatre a different experience to consuming fiction theatre? The short answer is yes. While the performers of mainstream fiction theatre relate their narratives to an implied audience, docu-verbatim is generally characterized by a direct address style, which creates an uninterrupted relationship, removing the security of the fourth wall entirely. Though there are obviously theatrical personas being performed in docu-verbatim, many of the “roles” portray real people or, in the case of autoperformance (considered in the next chapter), the “actor” and the “real” person are one and the same. Moreover, the sense that these productions address urgent and moral crises also serves to increase the feeling of consuming something real and important, shifting the audience member toward the role of citizen consumer and audience-witness. Since this genre of performance projects itself differently, it makes sense to consider how the audience may react differently. For example, in watching an actor perform a true story of abuse, is the audience more engaged, more impacted, more affected? If the story of abuse is due at least in part to inequality in social, political, and economic capital, is the audience inspired to leave the theatre and to join a campaign for greater equality? Does the communal nature of hearing this testimony inspire theatre audiences for docu-verbatim shows to situate themselves in a social dynamic whereby each individual sees their responsibility to the collective? Conversely, does the setting of the theatre and the use of theatrical strategies of scripting and mediation work to separate this “reality” from the outside world, thereby preventing the translation of the ethical feelings produced by the play within the theatre into ethical action outside the theatre? Docu-verbatim theatre may create the potential for both collective and individual ethical witnessing, but it does not automatically lead to ethical action outside the theatre, in the larger market.
The Market for Docu-verbatim: The Starving Man
Playwright David Hare said of the appeal of documentary theatre “What is a painting, a painting of a starving man? What is a painting of a corpse? It’s the facts we want. Give us the facts.”9 The popularity of docu-verbatim theatre rests on the idea that this form of theatre will “give us the facts.” The veracity of the form is integral to its appeal, yet since one show could never, and we would not want it to, give us all the facts, it must necessarily be selective. Just as a painting is, docu-verbatim theatre is composed, crafted, and framed, an artistic mediation. The facts, however, grant the docu-verbatim play an atmosphere of legitimacy, which in wearing its mediation lightly, seems to offer a refreshingly unswerving contact with its subject: suffering. This may not be the most obviously appealing or popular form; when presented with crises, audiences often crave escapism. Yet the success of London’s Tricycle Theatre, which pioneered tribunal theatre in the UK,10 and the success of individual artists such as Anna Deveare Smith, who has made a career in the US out of her one-woman shows based on verbatim testimony (discussed in chap. 4), illustrates that Hare is right—there is substantial consumer demand for the starving man.
What is it that the fact of the “starving man” gives the audience? In basing itself on archival history or personal, often oral, testimony, the docu-verbatim show derives a value from its proximity to “the thing itself.” The actor portraying the firsthand witness, using their words, can declare “I was there” and the audience can declare “I was there to witness the person who experienced this,” seeming to put the primary and secondary witnesses into a new relationship.11 There is a certain frisson attached to this proximity and also a potential visceral thrill for the audience in coming close to suffering, a thrill that is made safe by the environs of the theatre. Though the subject matter may be violence and its consequences, the staging of docu-verbatim is nonviolent and it may be perceived indeed as an alternative for audiences who want a dose of reality but do not desire the confrontation of in-yer-face theatre. There is also a clarity offered by docu-verbatim theatre, based on its proximity to, but difference from, the archive or event. The process of docu-verbatim sifts the “important” facts from the irrelevant or messy, creating a more straightforward narrative and message with which audiences can engage. As Martin has described it, “theatre of the real participates in how we come to know and understand what has happened.”12 It may be that docu-verbatim shows play to the converted, but there is also the possibility that the docu-verbatim show can change minds too. In being presented with different sides of the debate, or being granted access to the verbatim words of the original witness, the audience member may be newly convinced (or reconvinced) of the case that is under presentation. And this highlights a feature of docu-verbatim: that it so often has a case to present, which I would summarize as the case to champion the disenfranchised or otherwise voiceless.
In championing the disenfranchised, docu-verbatim theatre promises to create a platform for the many voices that otherwise have no social capital and thus no access to the theatre, or to the cultural marketplace in general. This promise is appealing to an audience, in the same way that “untold stories” have a novelty and discovery value. The promise is also, of course, appealing to those whose stories are to be dramatized as it offers the potential to amplify their voice in an otherwise loud and crowded marketplace. Unlike the television documentary, there is no screen or commercial break to come between the spectator and the subject (though the screen may, in fact, be a welcome diversion for audiences averse to such a close identification). And, finally, in selecting one story to tell—or personalizing through drawing out, however basically, “characters” from the messiness of all the facts—the docu-verbatim show offers the promise not only of making the archive or experience intelligible, but knowable. In this way, docu-verbatim shows promise audiences that in the process of witnessing the production, they will gain an authority over the subject matter and attain a sense of ownership over an archive or experience that did not, initially, belong to them. This promise is a potentially valuable commodity.
If these are some of the reasons why audiences buy a ticket to hear the facts or to see “the thing itself,” then what happens once they are in the theatre? As I discuss in detail below in relation to specific productions, there are various answers to this question. As mentioned, there is the possibility that audiences can be inspired (or not) by the production to act as witnesses themselves in the marketplace outside the theatre. But there are multiple other dimensions to the relationship between the docu-verbatim stage and the auditorium. The agency of the audience is never an easy question to consider, but it is possible to see how productions themselves hope to construct and affect that agency. Ownership of, or authority on, an experience or event is one way that docu-verbatim can create a sense of agency for an audience. Crucially, however, not all perspectives on that experience or event are valued equally within the docu-verbatim play. Frequently, the docu-verbatim show prioritizes the voice and experience of the victim over the perpetrator. The docu-verbatim play, as a result, configures some onstage witnesses and witnessing texts as more valuable or more factual than others. The symbolic capital of the victim is created through the same strategies of editing, scripting, and performance style that are used in fiction plays. The agency of an audience in deciding whose testimony to value is thus circumscribed by the way that docu-verbatim playwrights and companies act as gatekeepers of memory capital. Overall then, the docu-verbatim show grants the audience a feeling of independent agency and being “in the know” while actually strongly guiding their judgement and limiting their knowledge.
Gatekeepers of Memory
Docu-verbatim theatre is always a mediated form. The material being presented comes from archival or testimonial sources but, in its presentation on stage, it is always a limited version of that material. Though this act of limiting may be framed as a socially useful intervention, it nevertheless mediates the material via an ideological agenda with major implications, for example, for what a particular archive is then taken to mean, and how its memory capital is used to support particular subject positions within the political and cultural memory marketplaces. Various strategies of mediation—from where and how statements are positioned within thematic segments, or by telling the audience some pieces of information before others—have direct impact on the reception of the onstage witnesses. How questions are framed and whether the questions are visible or audible to an audience is also a major factor affecting how the testimony being performed—testimony which is often given in response to a question—is itself mediated by the witness and then received by an audience. These strategies are partly driven by necessity—with docu-verbatim theatre there is usually a very large amount of information that needs to be selected from and structured in order to be relayed in any meaningful way.
And so at every stage of the process, there are decisions made about what is meaningful and what should be conveyed, from the self-scripting of the witness or testifier, to the selection, editing, and scripting of the playwright, to the direction of actors or the witnesses themselves, to the production decisions on lighting, sound, and so on. These decisions affect how witnesses are given performance time, and how they are positioned (sympathetically or unsympathetically), and what testimony is included versus what testimony is left out. Technically, as mentioned above, it may be possible with a purely documentary play, based on an accessible archive, to determine what has been excised, but this is not an easy nor, I would imagine, a frequently performed exercise. And where the play is based on oral testimony, often gathered specifically for this purpose, it is impossible to access and know what has been removed from that archive in order to make the performed version. Recognizing inclusion and exclusion as not merely aspects of process, but highly political issues for the docu-verbatim play, is also to recognize that docu-verbatim playwrights, directors, and companies are not so much mediums of memory but gatekeepers. The effect of this gatekeeping is more than telling an audience that some memories or perspectives are important, it results in giving the audience a potentially partial (or slanted) version of the experience—the opposite of “the facts” that are the audience’s initial motivation to see the show. This is particularly important in the cases where the play stands in for the archive; though Brian Friel could declare that “We don’t go to Macbeth for history” this is not the case for plays that actually market themselves as factual approaches to the past.13
Witnesses to Painful Experience
We might not go to Macbeth for history, but we do go for heightened drama, conflict, and catharsis. So what can the docu-verbatim play offer its consumer? The answer is: access to the voice of the disenfranchised, victimized, traumatized individual. In isolating the voices of the disenfranchised, this platform nominates them as particularly important and gives the audience time to consider their memories apart from the usual social context. While this can increase attention, it’s also possible that this apartness can make it difficult for audiences to then connect what they are prepared to listen to appreciatively in the theatre, with the social world outside, with other issues competing for their attention and sympathies.
These plays are not easy to witness. The memories and histories of vulnerability discussed in this chapter make for uncomfortable watching and listening. Many of the experiences described—child abuse, rape, and murder—are still taboo social facts that are hard to hear and, as a result, are all too often underlistened to. However, as these productions, and their reception, show, audiences can be attentive and responsive. We can therefore identify these shows as potential utopian moments of ethical and collective witnessing, moments that are not usually available in the marketplace. Yet in buying a ticket for these kinds of productions, the audience may be self-selecting consumers with an interest in the area, who are particularly amenable to listening to vulnerability. Are these then taboo issues for the audience, or is it—more likely—that the docu-verbatim play is pushing at an already open door? We will also see, in relation to plays that deal with suffering, that audiences respond empathetically, and so a follow-up question is whether the way that audiences respond to painful memories of suffering is temporary catharsis or whether the utopian moment can continue outside the theatre, after the show? These docu-verbatim productions thus offer important opportunities for us to consider how to stage and respond to vulnerability.
This chapter considers three productions. In part one, I focus on the Irish play No Escape (2010) by Mary Raftery, first produced by the Abbey Theatre, which dramatizes the story of institutional child abuse in Ireland. This is a traditional documentary play based on a public archive that stages the testimony in a combination of direct address and tribunal-style interviews. In part two, I consider two plays by New York–based Tectonic Theater Company, The Laramie Project (2000) and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later (2010). These two shows, created by the ensemble, respond to the homophobic hate-crime murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. Both plays are based on interview material created by the company, with small elements of other documentary material, such as court records. Like No Escape, these two plays are staged as a blend of direct address and onstage interview scenarios, though Tectonic takes a different approach in constructing its own testimony archive. In linking these three plays, I aim to show the international appeal and applicability of docu-verbatim theatre, as well as divergences in subsidized versus commercial theatre. Though they emerge from different national contexts, what unifies these three plays is the consistent use of docu-verbatim theatre as a style to respond self-consciously and ethically to violence against vulnerable individuals in order to deliberately build social and memory capital for the victims.
PART ONE
Capital in the Marketplace: No Escape
No Escape (2010) is the first-ever documentary play commissioned by the Abbey, Ireland’s National Theatre. Compiled by Mary Raftery, the play is traditionally documentary in its approach, based on the archival material and published text of the 2009 Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse under Judge Ryan (henceforth the Ryan Report), which investigated the abuse of children in residential institutions administered by the Catholic Church in Ireland over a seventy-year period. Raftery’s play combines the tribunal approach in staging some of the interviews between the commission’s legal team and the religious congregations, presided over by Judge Ryan, with the direct address more common to verbatim theatre, as individual abuse-survivor testimony is delivered face on to the audience. The play’s dependence on the official report suggests what Caroline Wake has described as a version of “history as it has been recorded in the archive.”14 What the docu-verbatim play brings to the archive, though, is the further potential for representation and explanation.
No Escape is a highly interventionist version of the archive and, as such, reflects a particular political agenda, and equally political representation and explanation of this history. Raftery’s work on this archive refutes any idea of these documents as a static or fixed narrative of the past; indeed Raftery’s editing technique profoundly illustrates the ability to make the archive seem a contested and lively space from which multiple and conflicting histories can emerge. Though the weight of written material in the archive, including records and log books and so on, belongs to the religious congregations, the play’s script moves this quantitative material to the background, bringing the voices of the survivors and their oral histories to the foreground, consistently prioritizing their voices, embodied experience, and formerly suppressed memories.
The set for the first production (Abbey Theatre 2010), directed by Róisín McBrinn, bisected the stage with two glass screens onto which Judge Ryan (played by Lorcan Cranitch) wrote place names, dates, and figures. This schoolroom aesthetic affirms the didactic approach of the play, with Ryan playing the role of teacher as much as judge. Behind the screens, stacked boxes of files represented the original interviews and research conducted by the commission, and the historical records of the religious congregations and the state, so that the audience saw onstage part of the material history of the abuse. This didacticism and the “weight of history” connoted by the stacked file boxes both support the truth claims of the docu-verbatim play and reinforce its message and investment in the voice and memory capital of the victims.
The commissioning of No Escape illustrates a significant shift in the marketplace status of the play’s constituent witnesses—religious congregations and abuse survivors—and further indicates the relative and constantly shifting value of social capital in the marketplace; as public confidence in the Catholic Church decreases, so the investment in survivors’ stories increases. This is not a story that is limited to Ireland, as internationally we have seen a widespread shift of cultural capital and status—both of which equal credibility—from religious figures to survivors with the direct effect that allegations of abuse are now believable in ways that they weren’t two decades ago.15 This effect is, of course, in part due to the accumulation of proven cases of clerical abuse, which render new allegations increasingly believable, and in part due to the connected shift in attitudes to abuse that mean these memories are no longer unspeakable. In the case of No Escape, the legitimacy of the play is guaranteed by the generic authority of the official state report while the Ryan Report’s social and juridical capital also creates an audience amenable to hearing these stories in the forum provided by the National Theatre.
In Ireland, the momentum behind the revolution in market status of the survivor-witness had a long development from the 1980s and 1990s, when perceptions of narratives of institutional child abuse began to change due to the growing body of memories and stories of abuse available in the public sphere. In 1999, the government issued an apology to institutionalized children for the state’s “collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue,”16 signifying an official authorization that led to memories of institutional abuse becoming increasingly normalized and accepted.17 As a result of this shift, the pattern of social memories related to these institutions, and the groups of people incarcerated within them, has changed significantly. We might argue then that this docu-verbatim play is simply confirming a linked change in both memory culture and social capital that has already happened. Yet docu-verbatim theatre and the witnessing it produces is still a necessary step in the process of changing social attitudes and the power dynamics in the memory marketplace, and this is where the enactment of representation and explanation is most productive.
Docu-verbatim Responds to the “Big Lie”
After the publication of the Ryan Report, the Abbey directors met to discuss how best the National Theatre could respond to its significance; their decision was to commission a documentary play. The Abbey had previously hosted the Tricycle’s touring production of Richard Norton-Taylor’s The Saville Inquiry (2005), but had never before commissioned documentary work. Aideen Howard, then literary director of the Abbey, suggested that the documentary form would do justice to this history in a more direct way than a fictionalization could.18 Though the media coverage was widespread and thorough, the Ryan Report itself was twenty-six hundred pages long, so this theatre piece was a chance for audiences to access in more depth some of the detail and individual testimony of the report.
The Abbey was astute in asking Mary Raftery to create the play, as Raftery, an investigative journalist whose work over the previous two decades had pioneered and championed the case of survivors of abuse, had an exhaustive knowledge of the institutional system and an authoritative public identity and cultural capital as a campaigner. Raftery’s 1999 television documentary series, States of Fear, was a major factor in the government’s official recognition of the abuse and then Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern’s historic apology for the state’s “failure,” which led to the establishment of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.19 Though the resulting play is a tiny slice of the vast data in the Ryan Report—the report includes evidence from 1,712 complainants and 1,090 witness statements, yet the play is just under ninety minutes long—Raftery worked with the National Theatre team, including Howard and McBrinn, to make this tiny slice feel representative of the whole history.
Raftery used a dramatic editing technique, imported from her experience in television production, combining information from different sections of the Ryan Report into unified scenes, and alternating testimony between survivors, the religious congregations, and civil servants. Raftery also themed the sections of the play so that, roughly speaking, the first scenes are concerned with physical abuse of boys and girls, the next section is concerned with sexual abuse, and the final sections are concerned with the institutional system and its legacy for survivors. Raftery also concentrates the play on a small number of institutions that exemplify the problems of the general system. Though Raftery was a trusted pair of hands, it is still worth emphasising that her role in compiling the play was a highly interventionist one, manipulating the particular archive of the Ryan Report, as discussed below. The purpose of this manipulation was to create an accessible format, or digest, of the report itself, which Catriona Crowe, in a review of the play, argued was achieved, as No Escape is “a very successful way of dealing with a huge public issue that convulsed . . . and is still convulsing the country.”20
Creating a Timeline: “Hindsight Is Grand, Of Course”
The docu-verbatim play must situate itself clearly in time and space in relation to the subject that it seeks to represent. No Escape locates itself firmly within a combined discourse of social history and personal memory. The contrast between these two versions of the past is shocking and worth quoting in some detail:
Dept of Education: 1933 Department of Education Rules and regulations for Certified Industrial Schools—
Rule 13
. . .
(c) Chastisement with the cane, strap or birch.
Referring to (c) personal chastisement may be inflicted by the Manager, or, in his presence, by an Officer specially authorised by him. . . . No punishment not mentioned above shall be inflicted.
Sean Ryan: [Children were] hosed down with cold water before being beaten, beaten while hanging from hooks on the wall, being set upon by dogs, being restrained in order to be beaten, physical assaults by more than one person, and having objects thrown at them.
. . .
There were accounts of boys being hit or beaten with a variety of sticks, including canes, ash plants, blackthorn sticks, hurleys, broom handles, hand brushes, wooden spoons, points, batons, chair rungs, yard brushes, hoes, hay forks, picked and piece of wood with leather thongs attached . . . bunches of keys, belt buckles, drain rods, rubber pram tyres, golf clubs, tyre rims, electric flexes, fan belts, horse tackled, hammers, metal rulers, butts of rifles, t-squares, gun pellets and hay ropes.
Dept of Education: Circular No11/1946—“Discipline and Punishment in Certified Schools”:
Corporal punishment should only be used as a last resort, where other forms of punishment had been unsuccessful as a means of correction.21
The duration and extent of these lists being read onstage is an early shock to the audience. The inclusion of the regulations is also significant for the years from which they date. In Act 4 Brother Reynolds states that “I would say the understanding of the abuse and its effect on the young people wasn’t known.”22 And in Act 5, Mr. Black, a former principal officer of the Department of Education says “it was a crime, but it wasn’t regarded in that light at the time.”23 Mr. Black is actually referring to an incident that occurred in 1980, yet there is a clear attempt at “archaicization” where the distance between the present and the past is exaggerated in order to explain the aberration of past events or views. Indeed, Mr. Black also comments in relation to 1980 that women working within the department were not shown files on abuse as “there was a rule at one time that girls were not to see any things like that, they were very sensitive creatures.”24 Mr. Black counters the suggestion that he, or the department, were remiss by asserting “hindsight is grand, of course.”25 Raftery is careful to resist this reimagining of recent Irish history as a premodern era. The regulations, in their careful elucidation of what represents acceptable punishment, and what does not, demonstrate that punishment by being beaten while “hanging from hooks,” for example, would have been equally unacceptable in 1946 as it is seventy years later.
In teaching this play (as a read script, not in performance), I find that students are always shocked and often overwhelmed by these lists. In each class there is also at least one student who, as a result, cannot read any further or who finds the material so disturbing that they choose not to come to class; this is always the risk in teaching emotionally difficult plays. The students who choose to write on this play show great insight into it as a constructed work, calling attention to the ways that this scene functions to contrast the regulations on the one hand and the experience of punishment on the other, and to identify the “rules” as one version of history and the survivors’ embodied remembrance of physical abuse as an alternate version. The students’ reactions thus demonstrate both the risk of alienating or abjecting an audience by confronting them with emotionally overwhelming material, and the possible intellectual reward of the same confrontation. This is not a criticism of those students who do not, or cannot, engage with the text but an observation of the different impacts of docu-verbatim representations of painful memory. Though there are other highly emotive plays in this course, this is the only play that stimulates this adverse reaction, and it is the only docu-verbatim play, which suggests that fictional plays (about suicide, infant death, and so on) are more easily processed.
The Purpose of Competing Witnesses: The Individual and the “Record”
In “selling” a message to an audience, sympathy is a valuable commodity and tool for theatre makers. The catalog of horrific punishments is certainly one visceral way of eliciting audience sympathy for the children who suffered under such a regime. In order to move sympathy to something stronger, Raftery alternates testimony between competing witnesses: survivor-witnesses who allege abuse, and religious witnesses who claim the abuse allegations are unfounded. By reinforcing the truth claim of the survivor-witness, Raftery generates more than sympathy—audiences are encouraged to side with, or at least acknowledge the truth claims of, the abuse survivor.
An idea of how this works can be gauged from this scene:
Sean Ryan: One witness spoke of arriving at Goldenbridge as a six-year-old child . . . after her mother had died. . . . She said she used to lie in her bed at night and wished that she didn’t wake up in the morning. She said that she would sob her heart out crying for her mother.
Witness 2 (female): I used to scurry around. I used to try to dodge and weave to get away from the beatings, the abuse. You didn’t. You were helpless. Wherever you were you were a helpless victim. You couldn’t get away from them. They used to clatter you, they used to batter you. The names you were called. The stuff you had to go through. The thing was you were always so alone. There was never anybody there for you. Nobody was there this is what I find so hard to tell you. You were lumped together and you were one of a many, many.
[Public hearing (from Phase 3 hearing, 15 May 2006)—scenario as above]
Sr O’Donoghue: Well . . . from all of the material that we have examined and all of the people that we have talked to over the past ten years we are of the conviction that Goldenbridge was . . . a reasonably efficient and caring school, that the managers and Sisters there were committed and worked long and hard in the interest of children, and that it was both committed and dedicated and progressive in very many ways. We believe that having examined some of the, certainly, serious allegations we have not been able to find grounds that would convince us that they were part of the reality.26
Here we see how the two types of witness statements alternate competitively. Ryan functions as an intermediary in this competition, to highlight significant points, leaving little room for an audience to sympathize or identify with Sister O’Donoghue, as Raftery’s editing strategy works to validate the survivor testimony and to set up an emotional connection between the survivor witnesses and the audience.
It need not be the case, however, that emotion positively attaches to direct statements over interview testimony; it is easy to imagine a reverse of this scenario, where the stark direct-address statements would have a less sympathetic effect in contrast with a fuller and more complex representation of the witness via interview. The inclusion of onstage interaction might have given the interviewed witnesses a more humane quality or given more opportunity for the demonstration of emotion. The intercutting of the survivor testimony with an evasive religious spokesperson, however, creates affective impact and, combined with Sister O’Donoghue’s lack of remorse, gives that affective capital to the survivor-witness. In a way, then, the purpose of Judge Ryan’s onstage role is in educating and guiding the audience to understand that compassion is the correct witnessing response.27
