ABSTRACT

This chapter considers three, ostensibly very different works, all of which interrogate their own ‘theatre-ness’—the presence of audience as audience, and of facilitators as facilitators, in a constructed space. In much contemporary theatre, agency is figured as a negative space—that which is noticeable because of its absence, its insufficiency. The idea that agency needs to be restored is the uber-premise of much immersive theatre, which claims to empower the spectator to do more than just spectate. For all the calls by Felix Barrett and others to abandon the artifice of theatre, shows such of these require more of a suspension of disbelief than ‘traditional’ theatre does. The chapter considers to re-direct the forensic turn by making slow violence visible. In the forensic turn, media, in conjunction with myriad forms of survey/questionnaire, provide platforms that function as new, mechanistic kinds of forum.