Tattered Theatres: Fleeting Performances in Concentrationary Theatre

Abstract

This paper explores the presence of dramatic fiction in plays dealing with imprisonment within the Nazi and Communist concentrationary systems. Whether we talk about performances belonging to the pre-concentrationary past, which ghost the prison or camp world, about plays that the prisoners tell in secret to their fellow inmates, or about embedded performances, all these spectacular forms are structured by the idea of absence (of the text, of the actor), and are to be seen as instrumental in getting away from the concentrationary experience and at the same time bearing witness to it. We will consider these embedded theatrical forms (which are based on repertoire plays or attempt to dramatize (pre)concentrationary realities) as devices meant to articulate trauma. We will analyse the dramatic strategies enabling dramatists to foreground an oblique approach to the concentrationary experience.