Theatre as Collective Casework: Clean Break Theatre Company's Charged (2010)

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McPhee, Molly. 2020. Theatre as Collective Casework: Clean Break Theatre Company's Charged (2010). In: Caoimhe McAvinchey, ed. Applied Theatre: Women and the Criminal Justice System. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 143-161. ISBN 9781474262552 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

Theatre, as a cultural product predicated on physical proximity and collectivity, proposes a form with unique capacity to agitate audience awareness of how the constructs of casework motivate carceral society through a shared carceral imaginary. In this chapter, I investigate Clean Break Theatre Company’s Charged at Soho Theatre (2010) as operating within, and critiquing, the syntax of a criminal case by engaging audiences in collective casework at the theatre. When it suddenly becomes a live encounter, in what ways might casework at the theatre reveal carceral sites – and site-making processes – as immediate, material, and specific to the context of the audience? Tracing the casework of Charged advances a broader development in this chapter around theatre’s capacity to destabilize linear causality in criminal justice narratives, and to critique the carceral function of audiences.

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Book Section

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474262583.ch-006