Life and Death, Presence and Absence: The Alchemy of the Archive in Posthumous Documentary Theatre

Abstract

At its core, dramatic performance can be considered a series of signs and signifiers. The things that create a reality onstage frequently represent or stand in the place of other things from other times. The stage lighting might evoke sunlight or moonlight, the set may represent a certain location at a specific time and place, and the actors’ bodies become the bodies of others. Be it Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s history plays or Oscar Wilde in Moises Kaufman’s documentary play Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997), when real people are represented on stage, their presence tends to be dependent on the corporeality of others. As both a literal body, tangible in space and time, and a symbol of those absent, the actor enables us to imagine, remember, and (re)construct elements of reality, people, places, and things beyond our reach. Theatre-makers, actors, and audiences have become adept at working together to conjure presence in the face of absence, and through presence, acknowledge absence. This article explores the intersection of presence and absence in documentary theatre, specifically, how the deceased, and the archives in which remnants of them remain, might be evoked and figuratively resurrected on stage.

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