Amanda Stuart Fisher

Providing one of the first critically sustained engagements with the new forms of verbatim and testimonial theatre that emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, this book examines what distinguishes verbatim theatre from the more established documentary theatre traditions developed initially by Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. Examining a wide range of verbatim and testimonial plays from around the world, this book looks beyond the discourses of the real that have tended to dominate scholarship in this area and instead argues that this kind of theatre engages in acts of truth telling. Through its analysis of a range of international plays from UK, Germany, America, Australia and South Africa, the book explores theatre’s dramaturgical interrogation of testimony and how the act of witnessing itself is reconfigured when relocated outside of the psychoanalytic frame and positioned as contributing to a decolonisation of testimony.

Providing one of the first critically sustained engagements with the new forms of verbatim and testimonial theatre that emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, this book examines what distinguishes verbatim theatre from the more established documentary theatre traditions developed initially by Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. Examining a wide range of verbatim and testimonial plays from around the world, this book looks beyond the discourses of the real that have tended to dominate scholarship in this area and instead argues that this kind of theatre engages in acts of truth telling. Through its analysis of a range of international plays from UK, Germany, America, Australia and South Africa, the book explores theatre’s dramaturgical interrogation of testimony and how the act of witnessing itself is reconfigured when relocated outside of the psychoanalytic frame and positioned as contributing to a decolonisation of testimony.

• A wide-ranging collection of plays by women dealing with contemporary subjects such as child abuse, recession, war, poverty and the complexity of modern women's lives. • Many roles for women and girls; suitable for study for performance or as part of courses in Women's Studies or Feminist Theatre Studies. • All the plays have been produced and performed in the UK to acclaim.

A powerful, short verbatim play assembled from mothers' experiences of their children being abused. A verbatim play, created from the testimonies of seven mothers who have had to come to terms with the devastating reality of their children being sexually abused. In a society in denial of the widespread occurrence of the sexual abuse of children, and with a system ill-equipped to deal with the families, the women tell the often harrowing stories of how they have struggled to access medical and social services for their families as well as justice from the courts.