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Responding to the resurgence of verbatim theatre that emerged in Britain, Australia, the United States and other parts of the world in the early 1990s, this book offers one of the first sustained, critical engagements with contemporary verbatim, documentary and testimonial dramaturgies. Offering a new reading of the history of the documentary and verbatim theatre form, the book re-locates verbatim and testimonial theatre away from discourses of the real and representations of reality and instead argues that these dramaturgical approaches are better understood as engagements with forms of truth-telling and witnessing. Examining a range of verbatim and testimonial plays from different parts of the world, the book develops new ways of understanding the performance of testimony and considers how dramaturgical theatre can bear witness to real events and individual and communal injustice through the re-enactment of personal testimony. Through its interrogation of different dramaturgical engagements with acts of witnessing, the book identifies certain forms of testimonial theatre move beyond psychoanalytical accounts of trauma and re-imagine testimony and witnessing as part of a decolonised project that looks beyond event based trauma, addressing instead of the experience of suffering wrought by racism and other forms of social injustice.

This edited collection brings together essays presenting an interdisciplinary dialogue between theatre and performance and the fields of care ethics, care studies, health and social care. The book advances our understanding of performance as a mode of care, challenging existing debates in this area by re-thinking the caring encounter as a performed, embodied experience and interrogating the boundaries between care practice and performance. Through an examination of a wide range of different care performances drawn from interdisciplinary and international settings, the book interrogates how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring, careless or careful, and correlatively how care can be conceptualised as artful, aesthetic, authentic or even ‘fake’ and ‘staged’. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates and discussion, the book considers how the field of performance and the aesthetic and ethico-political structures that determine its relationship with the social might be challenged by an examination of inter-human care. By placing socially-engaged performance in dialogue with theories and practices of care, the contributors consider how performance operates as a mode of caring for others and how debates between the theory and practice of care and performance making might foster a greater understanding of how the caring encounter is embodied and experienced.

Succinate-based plasticizer mixtures have potential use as nontoxic and sustainable plasticizers and as replacements for commonly used phthalate plasticizers. Synergistic effects occur when the interaction between two materials is enhanced by the addition of a third component. This concept was applied to plasticizers within a polymer matrix. Three newly synthesized succinate-based plasticizers (di-ethylhexyl succinate, di-decyl succinate, and di-dodecyl succinate) were tested for their plasticizing ability. Then, di-decyl succinate and didodecyl succinate were blended with the previously reported succinate di-esters (di-ethyl succinate, di-hexyl succinate, and di-octyl succinate) to study their plasticizing efficiency. Mixtures of these higher molecular weight (MW) succinate di-esters and previously reported lower MW ones were found to be more effective at plasticizing poly(vinyl chloride) compared to the individual succinate plasticizers alone.

Evoking Freud’s essay ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’, first published in 1914, the title of this special issue of Performing Ethos invites us to think about the ethics of enactment and performance in relation to remembrance and the event of trauma.

In this article I consider a charge often levelled against verbatim theatre: that it is essentially appropriative and that it uses the life experiences of vulnerable and marginalized individuals and communities within our society in order to authenticate or invigorate theatre making. By using as a case study, a verbatim theatre project I led involving the charity Mosac and seven mothers of sexually abused children, I examine the process and the relationships that emerged between the verbatim subjects who offered up their stories as part of the project and the actors who played them at a public rehearsed reading of the play. Drawing on psychoanalytic readings of ‘identification’, I challenge the assumption that appropriation always only equates to an eradication of the other by the self. Instead I propose that the enactment of the verbatim subject's story by a professional actor can facilitate a moment of recognition and a positive process of empathetic identification which, if handled carefully, c...

In his short essay to accompany the publication of Robin Soans's verbatim play Talking to Terrorists, David Hare describes the resurgence of verbatim – or to use Hare's terminology – ‘factual’ thea...

Phthalates pose adverse health effects due to their propensity to leach and the most common, di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) and di-n-octyl phthalate (DOP), are petroleum-based. Conversely, di-esters, succinates are biobased (produced from fermentation of biomass), biodegradable, and therefore potential sustainable replacements for phthalates. A series of succinates, di-octyl succinate (DOS), di-hexyl succinate (DHS), di-butyl succinate (DBS), and di-ethyl succinate (DES), were mixed with poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC). The interaction of the plasticizer ester carbonyl with PVC shows an average −5 cm−1 shift of the carbonyl absorbance peak energy. The glass transition temperatures (T g), were monitored by differential scanning calorimetry and dynamic mechanical analyses. The T gs of DOS and DHS plasticized PVC were significantly lower than DOP plasticized PVC at a lower percent mass. On the other hand, PVC plasticized with either DBS or DES exhibited a similar trend in lowering the T g as that of DOP plasticized PVC.

In his book Applied theatre: bewilderment and beyond, James Thompson examines the importance of ethics to applied theatre practice. His concluding chapter, ‘Becoming ethical’, explores the ‘ethical...

What are the ways that collective storytelling becomes a community-forming activity, where individual and communal identity is negotiated and explored? What are the interactive exchanges between the storyteller and community?