DOCUMENTARY THEATRE – A LITTLE GUIDE TO A GREAT 21ST CENTURY PHENOMENON

The author of this book is Karel Král (1953), a renowned Czech theatre scholar, dramaturge, director and long-standing editor-in-chief of the magazine Svět a divadlo (1990–2021). On the one hand, his “handbook” questions the adequacy of the term documentary theatre, since the truth of documentary record always overlaps with artistic fiction in productions of this type. On the other hand, the ambivalent, yet obviously existent documentary theatre is described as a very lively, increasingly powerful tendency in contemporary performing art. Individual chapters attempt to identify its currents, which manifest in both traditional as well as quite unusual forms, types or genres. The chapters are fifteen in number, mapping the subject from various forms of reconstructions and documentary dramas, through Living Newspaper, theatre created by the verbatim method, or work with so-called everyday experts, to audio-walks, installations, theatre of the spectator, of children, and other forms of non-theatre. The book ends with a chapter dedicated to documentary theatre of alternative histories. Each chapter, excepting that on wiretap theatre, is accompanied by appendices (articles and interviews) that present either the author’s testimony from specific productions or interviews with creators. The book is understood as a kind of stop time in the year 2025, though the author assumes that documentary theatre will continue to develop.

Translated by Jakob Keller

Documentary theatre is enjoying a period of great popularity and development in the 21st century. It is branching out and intertwining with other theatrical forms, both traditional and innovative. Its popularity has grown considerably, probably mainly because people are bombarded on a massive scale and from all sides (in the arts, the media, politics…) with fabrications, fake news and lies passed off as the truth. They therefore yearn for something they can trust, something that is not a deception, nor even fiction, but the absolutely true. There are now so many productions of this kind that I must admit from the outset that I cannot cover more than a small fraction of them in this book, in this ‘handbook in progress’. I hope that this fraction will be representative, albeit subjective. I have deliberately chosen to focus primarily on productions that I have seen, and about which I can therefore speak from personal experience. I am aware that documentary theatre is not a fixed type, form or genre. It is an ever-widening current that should be monitored on an ongoing basis. This book is a summary of the period up to 2025.

Please regard my mapping of documentary theatre as an expedition which, starting from the source (the first chapters devoted to several ‘varieties’ of reconstruction), sets out towards traditional, powerful currents (such as biographical or historical works), through inlets (newspaper theatre), meanders (autobiographies), vanishing, perhaps river branches (theatre based on wiretaps), and artificial channels created using new techniques and technologies (the verbatim method, experts of the everyday, audio walks…), all the way to the riverbed that serves particularly emancipated swimmers (audience-driven documentary theatre). Why am I writing this so poetically? Because even the documentary nature of documentary theatre is not entirely sober. It is a form of objectivity that simultaneously indulges in the illusionism of art.

Epilogue © Michal Čunderle & Libor Vodička, 2025

ISBN 978-80-7331-700-3