Theatre of Real People: Diverse Encounters at Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer and Beyond by Ulrike Garde and Meg Mumford (London: Bloomsbury, 2016)

Abstract

The ontological categories of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ have never been especially stable, but through reality television, social media, and the ‘performance’ of world politics they are becoming even less so. Who and what is ‘real’? Documentary, verbatim, tribunal and testimonial plays seek to depict—in a variety of ways—the legitimate, unmediated and authentic ‘real’ on stage, and scholars such as Carol Martin, Derek Paget and many others investigate this borderland. Now Ulrike Garde and Meg Mumford join them, with their relevant and readable book Theatre of Real People: Diverse Encounters at Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer and Beyond, which analyses the theatrical, theoretical and socio-political ramifications of placing real people as performers in professional theatre contexts.