Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 81

the end of the performance, we applaud the performers, and the lights come
back on us, as if restored to ourselves.
The convention of the “fourth wall” has been so widely deployed and
accepted, and so fundamental to the apparatus of Western forms of
naturalism and realism, that it can be seen as an all-encompassing gesture
that allows audiences the voyeuristic gratification of peering into a world
without any particular participatory accountability. In this model, we sense
that the performance would transpire in much the same way whether we
were there to witness it or not. We may, in fact, listen intently, or even
be emotionally stirred, but we also may hide, daydream, fidget, doze, and
generally forego any accountability. At its essence, this form of performance
is still designed to be witnessed, but we as audience play an anonymous and
relatively expendable and interchangeable role.
In the summer of ����, South African theater-maker Yael Farber’s powerful
and harrowing documentary theater work Nirbhaya premiered to much
fanfare at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Based on the December ��, ����
gang-rape incident in urban Delhi that had shocked the world just months
before, Farber’s play both revisited the particular incidents of that evening
and explored the wider epidemic of gender-based violence through the
personal testimonies of the performers.
Nirbhaya operates within a large and tremendously varied category of
“documentary theatre” works described my Carol Martin as “Theatre of the
Real” (����), including, for example, an expanding body of work around the
world that engages the stories and experiences of refugees. In an increasing
number of these works, the power of the performance is inextricably bound
up with the audience’s understanding that these performers recount stories
and moments that have actually happened to them; in Nirbhaya, for example,
scars and disfiguring injuries visibly marked on some of the performers’
bodies provide a heartrending resonance beyond the text of the narrative they
are recounting. When Lyn Gardner, reviewing Nirbhaya for The Guardian,
writes that “we are not just watching, we are bearing witness,” (����) her
observation seems characteristic of the response from press and audience
alike, as if some kind of degree of critical distance that it is presumed will be
in operation in most theatrical performances has here been collapsed.
The significance of a work like Nirbhaya was not only in how it exposed
long-silenced societal taboos, or in the exceptional craft with which it was
executed, but in the fact that the performers drew their power, authenticity,
and expertise less from their artistic training and more from the lived truth
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