Documentary Theatre as Dissidence: Textuality of World Politics in David Hare‟s History Play Stuff Happens

Abstract

In an age of manipulation through text and image, when television and the internet have seized representation and forwarded it as truth, political fiction struggles to remain a significant conveyor and commenter of information. Post-9/11 literature attempts to reestablish the supremacy of representation, and hints at the prevalence of a web of discourses hardly contingent with an actual, non-imposed truth. It is the case of David Hare‟s docudrama Stuff Happens, a mixture of actual statements made by Bush, Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell – transposed as characters in the play – and a collection of imagined dialogues allegedly exchanged behind closed doors. Hare‟s play blurs the relation between factuality and representation. The aim of the present paper is to disclose this strategy by analysing the discursive practice at work within the literary text.