Lorraine Sutherland is writing an article on the rise of autobiographical performance.

1 hour ago. Like. Comment. Share

Lorraine Sutherland found a picture of her mum in a miniskirt inside of a book she is using to research this article.

45 minutes ago. Like. Comment. Share

Lorraine Sutherland has stopped writing the article and is now calling her mother to find out who the rather dashing tanned Italian man is in the photo of her in miniskirt (certainly not dad – so pale he was almost blue).

30 minutes ago. Like. Comment. Share

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; tools for self-expression and communication or narcissistic traps of self-involvement? Never before have we had the opportunity to redefine ourselves repeatedly to a global audience as we do now. Could the rise of social media accompanied by the evolution of the docudrama be held responsible for the recent increase in autobiographical performances? Or is the trend a characteristic of the timeless human condition to tell our story and have our voice heard amidst an increasingly homogenized population? This is a rather complex question that I stumble across regularly as a person who works in and teaches theatre.

Whilst it may be easy to assume that our ancestors were happy to ‘just get on with life’ without the need to make a show of themselves or air their dirty laundry in public; the practice of documenting oneself and one’s life formally dates back to pre-Augustine times. The rise of autobiography correlates with the philosophical idea of the individualist self who holds a unique view of the world and has agency and ownership over that perspective. Although diary and memoir writing as private acts had been widespread across western societies for centuries, published autobiographies, as we know them now, became prominent during the eighteen century. Since then the desire to share our story and to listen to the stories of others has gripped individuals from all walks of life; from Benjamin Franklin to Jordan.

The 1970s witnessed the potency of autobiographical material in performance, as the personal became political. Socially marginalised voices including; women, gay, lesbian and ethnic minorities used performance as a platform to express their experiences, frustrations and hopes to great effect. Simultaneously, the rise in performance art led theatre makers away from strictly character-based narratives towards the performance of the ‘self’.

Since then the use of autobiography has evolved and branched into various performance forms all of which choose to exploit notions of ‘truth’ to different degrees. Verbatim theatre may be understood as the most journalistic of forms and the one that trades on truth as a selling point the most. Writer David Hare and director Max Stafford-Clark are exponents of this type of theatre, basing their works on real-life interviews and situations, such as the privatisation of the British railways in The Permanent Way (2003). Numerous criticisms have been levied at Hare and Stafford-Clark suggesting that their ethical obligation to correctly represent their interviewees’s voices in the final performance has often given way to artistic or dramatic license. It seems that performance modes that make claims of representing a rounded ‘truthful’ account of a situation will always come unstuck when packaged into the artificial and contrived nature of performance.