ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on vividly challenge the interiority, solvability, and transparency illusions that underpin the forensic’s economy of legibility. It introduces Renaissance anatomy demonstrations reinforced associations of interiority with the idea that truth is lying in wait, a singular answer buried beneath confusing layers of disguise. While hypothetical modes of performance always play with the duplicity of theatre, intrusive-hypothetical is fundamentally suspicious of theatre, almost to the point of being anti-theatrical. Pro-theatrically, hypothetical real asserts and even celebrates the co-dependence of reality and illusion, and theatre’s culturally foundational role in modelling this co-dependence. The hypothetical present is an antidote to the demands of the techno-present, where, as Virilio theorises, ‘news’ is always streaming in a ‘theatre of real time’ which inculcates a sense that this ‘real-time information’ is what connects to reality. In the hypothetical real, events are portrayed ecstatically, with those involved standing outside both the events and themselves to gain greater perspective.
