Carol Martin introduces Theatre of the Real as a broad category of performance that emphasizes the relationship between theatrical representation and the actual people, events and experiences it cites (or hopes to incite). ‘Theatre of the real’ transcends defined categories like documentary and verbatim theatre by questioning authentic representation and performing subjectivity. Martin roots this theatre in popular entertainments that blurred distinctions between the actual and the staged, engines of social change like Piscator's and Brecht's epic theatre(s), and expanded performance practices and concepts since the 1970s.
The study is bookended by vignettes of ‘theatre of the real’ at incipient and contemporary moments. Following an introductory overview, Martin's second chapter, ‘The Theatricalization of Public and Private Life’, chronicles two streams of theatre of the real emerging in 1970s New York. One involved the rise of collective groups and a focus on process and performer training. The other, more familiar, approach employed documentary sources to structure realist scripts. Martin argues that it is often the work concerned with its own construction that can facilitate actual change.
The final chapter, ‘Seems Like I Can See Him Sometimes’, looks to three recent productions that tackle social and political realities using technology, citation and participation. These performances do not necessarily rely on documents but instead stage the construction of factual certainty, shifting focus from theatre as a means to access the real to theatre as an investigation of reality itself.
In the three intervening chapters, Martin focuses on a cluster of issues – Jewish identity, the Holocaust, and the Israel–Palestine conflict – that become a second focus of the book. The third chapter, ‘After the Fact: Memory, Experience, Technology’, argues that imagination and mediation can offer undocumented or undocumentable perspectives on public traumas, from the Holocaust to 9/11, unavailable to an individual viewpoint. Her fourth chapter, ‘Apart from the Document: Representation of Jews and Jewishness’, surveys Jewish identity in five solo shows spanning more than three decades. Martin finds that most of these performances explore the Holocaust and Israel–Palestine from within the limitations of personal narrative, while she advocates performance that understands the Israel–Palestine conflict as a convergence of multiple historically constructed rationales.
Martin's fifth chapter, ‘Occupying Public Space’, effectively critiques the 2005 documentary theatre piece My Name Is Rachel Corrie, based on writings of the American activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip. While Martin argues that the play's co-editors, Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner, conceal their authorial project behind their source material, her own questions often seem intended to challenge arguments made against the Israeli government's perspective. The transparency of motivation that Martin finds missing in the script might have been applied reflexively here, as it is in other sections. This affirms Martin's case for attending to the rhetorical construction of truth before seeking evidence in the real.
