Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment Arjomand Minou
Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment Arjomand Minou Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights…
Specifikacia Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment Arjomand Minou
Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment Arjomand Minou
Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era's great trials as shows. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term "show trials" suggests?
Does justice require both courtrooms and stages?In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and