list.co.uk/festival History on Stage | F E S T I VA L T H E AT R E
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Presenting historical events on stage is not a simple cut and paste job from the history books. Katharine Gemmell asks some of the creatives bringing shows to the Fringe based on real- life stories where the balance lies between factual retelling and having artistic licence to interpret the past
T he stage has long been the chosen medium for relaying acts of the past, but if the line between fact and fiction is unclear, it raises the question of whether theatre can ever truly represent history. And if it can’t, then why do we keep going back to past events for on-stage content?
‘I don’t think that’s the job of theatre. I think theatre is about ideas and feelings,’ says Roberta Zuric, director of Incognito’s The Burning, a new physical piece that follows women and witch hunters across time. ‘We’ve been working with a historian and he’s wonderful but, as historians are, he’s a stickler for detail. That made it clear to us that our job is to give an interpretation that then opens discussion’. Caitlin McEwan, writer and star of Poor Michelle’s Bible John, based her show on the unsolved 1960s Glasgow Barrowland murders but uses the production to consider the contemporary obsession with true crime. She agrees with Zuric that history in theatre doesn’t need to be accurate. ‘You can’t present things exactly as they are: there’s always the danger
that things get heightened or fictionalised. I think it’s a really interesting medium to play with artifice and reality.’ So, is it about perspective rather than fact? ‘It gives you perspective, gives you more of the heart of the thing and why we shouldn’t forget it.’
The prolific playwright David Edgar, however, believes that theatre can be good at representing history. ‘It goes in waves,’ he muses. ‘If you were to look back over theatre during the last 60 years you would find a pretty good record of cultural, political and social changes that have occurred and how people have responded to them.’ Edgar’s first ever solo show, Trying It On, consists of his 20-year-old self in the 1960s arguing with his 70-year-old self in 2018 about how the world, and himself, has changed. He points out that theatre exploring history wasn’t fashionable when he was 20. ‘I’m of a generation that believed that you should write plays set in the present. If that meant they had a sell-by-date then so be it. One way around that was plays in which the present and the past is confronted, plays in which the present investigates the past in some way.’ >>
31 Jul–7 Aug 2019 THE LIST FESTIVAL 109