Theatre History and Historiography Ethics, Evidence and Truth

This collection of essays is the first time a group of theatre historians have come together to consider the challenge of applying ethical thinking to attempts to truthfully represent the past. Topics include the life of the celebrated Restoration actor Thomas Betterton, the little-known records of hitherto forgotten women involved in Victorian theatre, amateur theatricals enjoyed by the British army in colonial India, the loss of a pioneering arts centre for African and Caribbean culture, performance art in Wales and present-day community arts in Northern Ireland. While confronting such difficult issues as the instability of evidence and the unreliability of memory, the contributors offer fresh perspectives and innovative strategies for fulfilling their ethical responsibility to the lived experience of the past.

Facing the Face of the Other: The Case of the Nia Centre

Until comparatively recently there has been little systematic effort to record the contribution to British theatre history of the diversity represented by Black British and British South and East Asian theatre makers. That failure to ‘see’ and acknowledge this lacuna within the academy reflected what in 2001 was condemned as widespread institutional racism within the theatre industry itself. The other ‘faces’ had been rendered effectively invisible. This chapter considers the ethical and evidential challenges associated with the task of recovering the history of a project created to enhance an important concept of cultural identity: the little-documented failure in the 1990s of the Nia Centre, the UK’s first black arts centre which opened in Hulme, Manchester in 1991. My exploration raises a number of key ethical challenges: How in the aftermath of the Nia’s collapse and in the almost complete absence of archival records, is the historian to mediate what inevitably are multiple truths coming from different perspectives? Whose, and what values were, and remain, at stake both at the time of the project itself, and in the telling of the history? How does the historian deal with failure especially if the circumstances were obscure and little regarded? The dream of the Nia died more than a decade ago, but the participants in that history are very much alive and their sensitivities have to be respected as part of the ethical challenge.