This book proposes a new way to consider theatre and performance that claims a special relationship to reality, truth and authenticity. It documents innovations in devising and staging theatre and performance that takes reality as its subject, cultural shifts that have generated theatre of the real, some of its problems and some possibilities.

The Dramaturgy of the Real brings together an incredible range of international theatre thinking, plays and performance texts, many published here for the first time, that ask questions about how we have come to understand reality and truth in the twenty-first century and analyze the presentation of non-fiction on the international stage.

At an unparalleled time of the construction of reality across the fields of the sciences and humanities on a variety of platforms, theatre and performance participates in the current obsession with the problems and possibilities of the epistemologies of the real by using and revising testimony and the archive to create and recreate personal, national, historical, and virtual realities. Carol Martin examines the special relationship of theatre and performance to the real in order to theorize how we come to know, experience, and conceptualize our personal, social and political lives. Theatre of...