Documentary theatre

Documentary theatre, or theatre of fact, is theatre that wholly or in part uses pre-existing documentary material (such as newspapers, government reports, interviews, etc.) as source material for the script, ideally without altering its wording.

Attilio Favorini, professor of Theater Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, dates the first dramatic documentary impulse back to 492 BC when the ancient Greek playwright Phrynicus produced his play "The Capture of Miletus" about the Persian War. He traces the genre through to European medieval mystery plays, Elizabethan England and Shakespeare's historical tragedies, French revolutionary patriotic dramas, British and American 1930s Living Newspapers and German plays about the Holocaust.

In its modern form, documentary theatre was pioneered in the 1920s by two famous German authors and directors, Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, who focused on issues of social conflict, class tensions and power structures. Essentially derived from Brecht and Piscator's Epic Theatre, Piscator developed his own "Living Newspaper" in the 1930s.

In his anthology, Voicings: Ten Plays from the Documentary Theater, Favorini collects the most important 20th century examples of the genre, and argues that documentary theatre is highly relevant and resonant in societies that create and consume contemporary news as aggressively as we do.

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