Crisis Theatre and The Living Newspaper
Author: Sarah Bartley (Homerton 2007) and Sarah Mullan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (Elements)
Crisis Theatre and The Living Newspaper traces a history of the living newspaper as a theatre of crisis from Soviet Russia (1910s), through the Federal Theatre Project of the Great Depression in America (1930s), to Augusto Boal's Teatro Jornal in Brazil (1970s), and its resonance with documentary forms deployed in the final years of apartheid in South Africa (1990s), up until the present day in the UK (2020s). Across this Cambridge Element, the authors are interested in what a transnational and transhistorical examination of the living newspaper through the lens of crisis reveals about the ways in which theatre can intervene in our collective social, economic and political life. By holding these diverse examples together, Mullan and Bartley assert the Living Newspaper as a form of Crisis Theatre.