On the occasion of my lecture on ‘Truth in Theatre’ at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, here is an addendum to my attempts at truth based on two current examples.

If theatre cannot be the herald of truth, what can it achieve in times of ubiquitous deception?

One possibility is journalistic theatre, as practised by the actor Calle Fuhr with the director Kay Voges and the journalist collective ‘Correctiv’. The best-known example of their collaboration was the project ‘Geheimplan gegen Deutschland’about the Potsdam Meeting 2024. Another example is Calle Fuhr’s solo evening ‘The Rise and Fall of René Benko’ at the Vienna Volkstheater and now also at the Schauspiel Köln.

Here, too, theatre is not the mouthpiece of truth, but it participates in a social process that revolves around the concept of truth. What we consider to be truth comes about by trusting certain scenes of truth and certain figures of truth. Donald Trump accordingly calls his social network, through which he spreads his resentments, outbursts and distortions of reality, ‘Truth social’. Sociologically speaking, truth is a social operator. ¹

The research project ‘Praxeology of Truth’ at the University of Erfurt has a painting by Lucas Cranach as its logo on its website. It is entitled ‘Bocca della Verità’ ² This mouth of truth is actually a Roman manhole cover in the shape of a lion’s head, and legend has it that anyone who puts their hand in the lion’s mouth and lies will lose their hand. Lucas Cranach depicts such a scene of truth: a stone lion statue stands in a courthouse. A young woman accused of adultery puts her hand in the lion’s mouth while being watched by a judge and her husband. Behind her stands another figure in a jester’s costume, embracing the woman at the hips. The medieval story told by the picture is that the lover has disguised himself as a fool, and the woman can now truthfully say, “No one has embraced me except my husband and this strange fool”. Thus she tells the truth, which is nevertheless a lie. Theatre is being performed here to give the appearance of truth. This is what truth practices look like.

Theatre has the disadvantage of slower reaction times compared to other competing truth assemblages (as heterogeneous structures of social and technical practices are called in sociological jargon). It is slower than electronic media, but still faster than the justice system, and has the advantages of concentrating the audience over a longer period of time and providing a communal experience.

Theatre projects such as those by Calle Fuhr and Kay Voges can also be understood as a reduced form of theatre. It dispenses with many other possibilities that theatre has, but gains a new one. Theatre as part of the truth practice of our society.

A second example and another possibility: Milo Rau’s project ‘Die Seherin’ (The Seer) with actress Ursina Ladi (at the Vienna Festival and the Schaubühne in Berlin).

Here, the relationship between truth and deception is brought to the centre of attention on four different levels. Ursina Lardi plays a photographer who specialises in war images and violence. But what she says about her origins in a village in southern Switzerland fits so well with the actress’s real biography. Where is the boundary between actress and fictional character? It becomes blurred.

While talking about her fascination with depictions of violence, Ursina Lardi cuts a wound in her left calf with a scalpel. This detail is greatly enlarged and projected onto a screen above the stage. Is she really doing this, or is it just a work of art by the make-up artist? The line is blurred.

Then Azad Hassan, an Iraqi man whose right hand was chopped off by IS in Mosul for alleged theft, appears on the video screen. The actress talks to him. Is it a real-time dialogue or a pre-produced video? The line is blurred.

Then a video is shown of the public mutilation of the Iraqi in Mosul during the reign of IS. The video was also available on the internet at the time. The Iraqi reports that worse than the pain was the enthusiasm of the spectators. Spectators, that includes us, the theatregoers. The truth of visible violence is a fascination that binds the non-acting spectators to the acting perpetrators of violence. The truth of a documentary image can also function as a visual stimulus³. Guilty actor or innocent observer? The boundary is blurred.

The effect of documentary images is less about providing information about reality than about responding to our desire for intensity. The doubt as to whether the video images we see are real or staged – whether Azad Hassan is really standing in Mosul when he speaks, whether Ursina Lardi is really hurting herself, and the theatre demonstrates this doubt to us here – this doubt does not devalue the images, but makes them more powerful. Whether the images are true, whether they show us reality, is secondary; it is precisely the doubt about their truth that demonstrates the power of the images.⁴

Here, theatre shows how what we consider to be truth comes about. Theatre is particularly well suited to this as a hybrid medium in which contemporary presence, fiction, media representation and digital production can be mixed.

Participation in our society’s discourse on truth is one possibility for theatre; analysis of this discourse, through the telling of stories that make our society’s truth-seeking processes tangible and transparent, is another. Precisely because theatre cannot be the mouthpiece of a higher truth of art, it can show the construction of truth and become a ‘school of complexity’⁵ .

The relationship between theatre and truth today is therefore very different from what Ivan Nagel assumed at the time and what I thought as a juror at the time.

See also the previous parts of ‘The Truth in Theatre’ Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.