What real? Which truth? Whose story? In an age of post-truth and postreality, how do we identify what is real? Does the real remain outside representation, even as acting, language, and symbolism try to represent it? Is the desire for truth and authenticity a product of natural law and binding ethics independent of politics and society? Or is it something else? A real that is not so distinguishable from a simulation? Should we just give up and live in a mise en abyme of media, news cycles, citations, and selves? As Hamlet attests, our perceptual consent enables theatre to turn the real into a fiction and perhaps a fiction into something real.

Hong Kong’s burgeoning theatre of the real movement, led by Wu Hoi Fai of Pants Theatre Production, is a case in point. Wu’s most recent work, The First and Second Half of 2047 (2019), refers to the date that ends the 50-year transition from what Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping termed “one country, two systems” to Hong Kong’s complete integration with mainland China. Performing the work during the protests that have rocked Hong Kong since summer 2019 made some actors question why they should perform in a theatre at all, when they could more effectively protest on the streets outside the theatre (Fan Reference Fan2019). Both actions require costumes, blocking, dramaturgy, casting, and a sense of urgency and conviction.

The dramaturgy of the Hong Kong streets was elaborate. Protest gear included garbage can lids and luggage used as armor, plastic wrap to protect the skin, and traffic cones and water bottles to help snuff out the tear gas and prevent it from spreading. Human supply chains, some over a mile long, used hand signals to ask for helmets and other gear. Information was anonymously shared through Apple AirDrop and Telegram chat. Laser pointers and spray paint obscured security cameras, and supporters taped single-use tickets to metro station entrances so protesters couldn’t be tracked by transit cards registered to their names. The slogan “Be water” advised constant movement so that when demonstrations were reported, protesters quickly dispersed; this fluidity also allowed ambulances to safely pass through the crowds (Willis, Khavin, Horn, and Lai Reference Willis, Khavin, Horn and Lai2019). The ubiquitous umbrellas, which first emerged during the 2014 protests as a form of passive resistance to pepper spray, symbolized both the longevity of the demands of the masses for more transparent elections and continued passive resistance to the police. The actors’ question about the usefulness of performing in theatres deftly notes theatre’s limitations: in this context, the street demonstrations are more than rhetorical because they have risk of injury, arrest, and loss of employment.

In his densely written Real Theatre: Essays in Experience, Paul Rae cautions against “a rhetorical separation of theatre from reality” (4). Rae’s book is about theatre as a material practice, arguing that the practice of theatre includes other phenomena, such as the objects and activities of the backstage, rehearsals, preparations, past performances, media, and fleeting theatre talk, in ways that merit our attention (25). Mistakenly imagining that those who study theatre in terms of the meanings created by productions onstage are unaware of theatre’s material complexity, Rae deems the focus on the production of meaning in specific works as too limited. His view is that theatre is real “in the same way everything else is” (4). He reminds us of what second-wave feminist scholars long argued: that even when theatre is distinguished from reality, it is partly constitutive of reality both onstage and off.

Rae’s key ideas are very worthy. Thinking about the continuities and discontinuities of the material practices of theatre can open new paths of inquiry. We know little of the experience of those who “participate in the practice and perpetuation of the form, in a variety of administrative, technical, creative, spectatorial” capacities (2). Rae reflects on his own practice in a “primal postmodern scene,” when he forgot his lines while performing in a 2008 production of Lear Enters (1). Having written his lines on his hand, Rae feels that he breached “theatrical protocol by carrying into performance a feature of the production process” (10). It is a curious statement given the existence of prompters’ boxes, the ubiquitous use of cue cards (Saturday Night Live uses complete cue cards for all its sketches), the reading of the nightly news, and the live-feed performances of theatre companies such as Alecky Blythe’s Recorded Delivery. This is not to mention the staging of rehearsal processes in the works of Milo Rau. Production, performance, and reception are not necessarily separate in 2020.

Contrary to Rae’s rejection of close readings of specific productions, they do, in fact, produce a wealth of information. But Rae prefers to look elsewhere: the blurred boundaries between the human and nonhuman, the nonsignifying features of theatrical performance, the potential of scientific theory for theatre theory, the work of J.L. Austin, new realisms, theatre conversations, and “the field of critical analysis coalescing around new materialism, vitalism, affect, assemblages and actor networks” (124). Rae also engages Karen Barad’s scientific critique of Michael Frayn’s 1998 Copenhagen, especially her assertion that intentionality cannot be established independent of material circumstances (39). Rae explains his book as having multiple streams of thought:

For Rae, the acute citationality of theatre — the persistence of its restagings; its embodiment of narrative, gesture, and persona; the ready-made and often bite-sized quality of its utterances — means that a key characteristic of the social life of the medium lies in how it endures and where it materializes in the private experiences and public practices of its participants (95). He is concerned with the great many entities of theatre: “talk and tech; bodies and objects; representations and affects” and the “trajectories of those various components through space and time” (209). The breadth of Rae’s interests makes one search for a through line.

In Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real, Jenn Stephenson argues that representations have the power to create reality, both rhetorically separating theatre and reality and linking them at the same time (25). Citing my work on dance marathons, she makes the following cogent observation about the aesthetic outcome of theatre of the real:

In relation to the overarching subject of the cusp between the real and the fictional, Stephenson discusses immersive theatre, disability theatre, site-specific audio walks, solo performance, verbatim theatre, and autobiographical performance. Studying actual autobiographies, she writes, allows us to experience representation both as unmoored from reality without obligation to an authoritative origin and as a construction that we take to be real even in the face of doubt. Autobiographical performance enables us to apprehend the cusp between the actor-self and the character-self, providing glimpses of an actual person who is present in the guise of a stage persona in the same body (25–26). The same duality is found in site-specific performance, where the set and site are both the same and distinct. Ditto for the staged words in verbatim. The distinctions between verbatim and documentary or even the rationale for the phrase “theatre of the real” are not followed by Stephenson.

Examining Winners and Losers, a Canadian work written and performed in 2016 by the real-life friends and collaborators James Long and Marcus Youssef, Stephenson sees the work as an autobiographical agon that includes the opening of old wounds in pursuit of brutal honesty (25). Performing a score “that generates an affect of realness,” the professional actors often provoked a response that questioned how they could still be friends — a response indicative of the simultaneously authentic and constructed (invented) nature of the performance. Yes, fictional things are made from real-world things, but theatre is the only art form where the art thing is the same as the real thing it references: a human is a human, a chair is a chair, a light is a light. But onstage they are narratively, even perceptually, different (6). The objects do not change, but our perception of them does.

Writing about the experience of watching actors with Down syndrome perform, Stephenson likens the experience to encounters with strangers: “The stranger is both fixed and known and is also essentially unknowable” (71). Bodies marked by what Stephenson calls “strangeness” prioritize presence over mimesis (75). The collapse of the distinction between the real and the fictional in relation to actors’ bodies and theatrical space produces a liminal state, according to Erika Fischer-Lichte in her essay “Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre.” Shifts between the real phenomenal body of the actor and the fictional semiotic body of the character produce perceptual multi-stability, perception that shifts from one moment to the next disrupting a fixed notion of presence and representation. The result is a unique aesthetic experience that is betwixt and between, or liminal. Theatre is performed in real spaces, consumes real time, and uses real bodies. At the same time, the real space signifies fictional spaces; real time is not identical to the time represented; and the body of the actor usually signifies the body of another, a character (Fischer-Lichte Reference Fischer-Lichte2008). Fischer-Lichte gives the example of Romeo Castellucci’s use of “deviant” bodies in Giulio Cesare (1998), in which the actor’s body and that of the dramatic character diverged, preventing mimesis (2008:86). Stephenson mentions Fischer-Lichte, but her work deserves further discussion here, especially since many of Stephenson’s ideas proceed from Fischer-Lichte’s.

Extending Walter Benjamin’s distinction between the original and its reproduction, Stephenson considers mediation as being in conversation with both realness and authenticity (100). The auratic chain reconfigures the original in that both “the representation and what is recorded is the ‘original’ document” (100–01; emphasis added). Embedding mediatization in live experiences is inevitable when technology generates the text and physical attributes of a performance. Unlike Rae’s view that theatre is real in the same way everything else is, Stephenson’s theoretical perspective is deeply concerned with the ways in which “the perceptual workings of the frame encourages critical engagement with how the frame constructs relations within and across that boundary” (174). Audiences are present as real bodies and minds in the real world in ways that anchor them to “their phenomenological experience of that world even as they are imaginatively fused to the surrounding fiction” (175). It is precisely this dual consciousness that is the catalyst for an aesthetic distance that accounts for both the real and fiction.

In her discussion of immersive theatre, Stephenson takes issue with Janet Murray’s notion that all good storytelling technologies eventually become transparent, and thereby touches upon a future pertinent to the one that has emerged with Covid-19. Already in motion are shifts in the variety, size, availability, and forms of both theatre and spectatorship. Real bodies refer to not only the performers but also the spectators in both live and virtual viewing:

The First and Second Half of 2047 has two timeframes. The first half is about how young people see Hong Kong now and in 2047. The second half is about the older people’s feeling and projection of Hong Kong in the future. Each half proceeds by a series of short scenes developed from student letters and verbatim interviews. The epilogue is a mixture of young and old in what amounts to a collective wish for Hong Kong in 2047. As 2047 approaches there are those who are concerned that “One Country Two Systems” will become an idea of the past. The First and Second Half of 2047 is a mediation between generations that challenges ethics, compassion, and a political moral compass in the context of the theatre taking place outside the theatre. Wu and his theatre colleagues, like audiences everywhere, are physically and mentally in the real world desiring authenticity. A by-product of Romanticism, the contemporary desire for authenticity is synonymous with pursuing one’s own inner truths, capitalist consumerism, and a cleansing of the body politic. But as Stephenson points out, authenticity is not necessarily morally good. It can also be “a pillar of fascism, expressed in fascism’s nostalgia for a lost purity or unity that is to be restored through violent social upheaval as so-called polluting elements are cast out” (210–11). Provenance, outer appearance, and inner ontology all offer security in the knowledge that a thing is what it seems to be — a poststructural impossibility (211). Refusing poststructural impossibility is important to theatre of the real. This does not mean it is without its own ontological insecurity. Agreeing to believe that what is onstage is real can be a dangerous endeavor even when it is documentary, verbatim, theatre of witness, etc. Has truth been dispelled or enacted? Just as authenticity is not necessarily morally good, neither is the suspension of disbelief. Can the magical belief system of theatre and performance sweep us up in a wave that leads to the shore of a land without democracy?