It's True, It's True, It's True - Feminism, Verbatim Theatre and Truth

It’s True, It’s True, It’s True:
Feminism, Verbatim Theatre

and Truth
Jen Harvie,
Queen Mary University of London
TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Introduction
• The play
• Verbatim theatre
• Feminist contexts, agendas and effects
• Staging the truth
• Conclusion
• Further reading
• Acknowledgements
It’s True, It’s True, It’s True: Feminism, Verbatim Theatre and Truth | Digital Theatre+ 2
INTRODUCTION
Devised by multimedia performance company, Breach, It’s True, It’s True, It’s True is
an empowering work of feminist theatre. The original 2018 production was directed
by Billy Barrett and played by Ellice Stevens, Sophie Steer and Kathryn Bond.
The play is a bold example of what verbatim theatre can do using testimonial
storytelling to provoke an audience’s feelings and challenge them to reflect on who
controls the truth. The play condemns the intrinsically oppressive nature of
patriarchy, and especially its attitude towards sexual violence against women. That
said, it is less about women as victims and more about women’s power. It celebrates
women’s solidarity and expresses their justifiable rage as well as their right to be
believed and to represent their own interests. By using techniques of verbatim
theatre alongside other forms of re-enactment, It’s True presents to a 21st-century
audience a figure from the 17th century: Artemisia Gentileschi, an artist whose life,
work and words boldly challenge patriarchal control of truth, justice and power.
This essay begins by outlining the show, goes on to explore verbatim theatre as a
form, and then looks at the social and historical context of the production. It then
explores the charged politics at the time It’s True was first staged, especially in
relation to gender and truth; the play’s feminist effects; and how it achieves these
theatrically, through methods ranging from uses of verbatim techniques to structuring
of scenes, provoking audience feelings, and deployment of music. The play’s
powerful integration of historical representation and urgent present-moment reality
amplifies its political critique and emotional impact to expose the misogyny of
patriarchal cultures and to champion the too-often suppressed truths of women’s
experiences.
THE PLAY
It’s True, It’s True, It’s True is a play about a high-profile real-life rape trial that took
place over seven months in 17th-century Rome. The woman raped was the painter
Artemisia Gentileschi. A teenager in the timeframe of the play, she went on to
become “the best known female painter of the Italian Baroque” (Davies, 2018). The
accused rapist was the artist Agostino Tassi, Artemisia’s tutor. The play uses a form
called ‘verbatim theatre’ where the dialogue comes from real life, in this case, 17th-
century court transcripts in Italian and Latin, translated into English and rendered in
modern, colloquial speech.
Much of the show is composed of scenes from the trial which demonstrate that, in the
deeply patriarchal culture of Artemisia’s times (and, in many respects, ours too), the
defendant is cast as less credible than the male rapist who is on trial. She is accused
of sexual immorality and of telling lies aimed at damaging his reputation. Rhodri
Huw’s 2020 film version of It’s True makes this explicit by using the subtitle
‘Artemisia on Trial’, rather than Tassi whose trial it actually was. This victim blaming
is evidenced in numerous ways in the play. For example, the court decides that the
hands of the Pope’s favourite painter, Tassi, are too precious to subject him to lie-
detecting thumbscrews. Despite the fact that Artemisia is also an artist and – more to
the point – not the accused, the judge decrees she should be subjected to torture.
Breach’s thumbscrews are represented by a bucket of gold paint into which
Artemisia is forced to repeatedly thrust her hands, grimacing with excruciating pain.
When she takes them out, her hands drip with thick paint as though she is bleeding
gold. Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens acknowledge that their use of gold paint owes
a debt to Nic Green’s 2015 play, Cock and Bull (Harvie, Barrett and Stevens, 2019,
21:57). In It’s True, the image not only symbolises the decadent and unequal Baroque
era in which Artemisia lives, it also shows a woman shackled and constrained as
though by handcuffs (see figure 1). The paint falls on everything she touches, a
powerful metaphor for how the court’s presumption of her guilt clings to her, but also
of how she ‘leaves her mark’, visually articulating her power and reach, not least
through her own paintings.
Soon after she plunges her hands in the gold paint, Artemisia comes downstage and
directly addresses the audience in response to the doubt the court casts on her claim
that she was raped. Steadfastly, movingly, she repeats the phrase “It is true. It is true.
It is true,” as many times as it takes to speak it directly to each audience member in
the house. In the print version of the text, the font size of these reiterations grows
larger and larger and larger over several pages (Breach, 2018, pp.40–46).
Figure 1 - Sophie Steer and Ellice Stevens as in It’s True, It’s True, It’s True (Artemisia Films) © Carlton
Nixon
The show’s actors – all women – rotate into different roles: Tassi, Artemisia, her
female neighbour Tuzia, the judge, midwives, others who give testimonies, and
characters from paintings. The rotations are signalled by blasts of music, frequently
punk music sung by female artists including The Slits and Patti Smith. Sometimes
these rotations are marked by extended actions, in one of which the performers
exaggeratedly mime partnered sex acts but with the ‘partners’ metres apart. This
absurd physical distancing and parody portrays the male sexual violence of the
play’s story as “grotesque and disgusting” and critiques the court’s lascivious
interest in the sexual violence at the core of the trial (Billy Barrett, in Harvie, Barrett
and Stevens, 2019, 30:50). The court requires Artemisia to tell her story of rape twice
(Breach, 2018, pp.17–19 and p.35), a repetition that begins to reveal the court’s
vicarious pleasure in what, for Artemisia, is private and painful, and a repetition that
prompts her own need to repeat “it is true.”
Figure 2 - Sophie Steer, Ellice Stevens, and Kathryn Bond in It’s True, It’s True, It’s True (Artemisia
Films) © Carlton Nixon
Intercut between trial scenes, Artemisia stages her most famous paintings which
draw on Biblical stories, specifically Susanna and the Elders (see figure 2) and Judith
Slaying Holofernes (see figure 3). The first shows the young and nearly naked
Susanna innocently attempting to bathe in private when she discovers she is being
spied on by two leering and fully clothed older men (Breach, 2018, pp.11–16). The
second shows Judith and her servant Abra resolutely beheading the Assyrian
general Holofernes, who had come to destroy the homeland of the young widow
Judith and carry her off as part of his spoils. In this painting, it is the male character
who is topless and low in the frame, while Judith and her female accomplice are
above him, fully clothed but with their sleeves rolled up, staunchly engrossed in their
demanding task. After this scene, the play concludes with the company singing an
adapted version of Patti Smith’s “Gloria”. The play’s ending is uncompromising. Its
effect is righteous, empowering, vivacious, thrilling. It stages Judith’s victory over the
man who would destroy her people and enslave her, Artemisia’s ultimate triumph in
the trial and her career, and a dynasty of assertive, empowered and mutually
supportive women: Judith, Abra, Artemisia, Patti Smith, and the four actresses of It’s
True, Ellice Stevens, Sophie Steer, Kathryn Bond and Harriet Webb.
VERBATIM THEATRE
Part of what makes the play so powerful is its use – and adaptation – of verbatim
theatre techniques. Verbatim is the Latin term for ‘word for word’, and verbatim
theatre uses text from real life. Texts come sometimes from interviews conducted by
the theatre company or playwright, and sometimes from found sources like court
transcripts. Performers might lip-sync to audio recordings of the source texts or, more
commonly and as they do in It’s True, memorise and perform the words like a
conventional – fictional – play. Verbatim is clearly different from a fictional play,
however, because it is at least partly nonfiction, documentary, or real. Verbatim
theatre is based on real-life events, using the actual words spoken by real people.
There are strengths and risks in this form. On one hand, verbatim poses text as
testimony, words genuinely spoken by a real person, seeming to offer transparent
access to the truth, and therefore deserving of attention and respect. On the other
hand, verbatim’s truth can nevertheless be suspect. People sometimes lie, as Tassi
and others do in It’s True. Furthermore, theatre is always artistic representation. As
Catherine Love puts it, “Although verbatim theatre-makers use the real words of
interviewees, these are manipulated – to greater and lesser extents – during the
process of editing and rehearsal” (Love, 2019, p.6). For Liz Tomlin, verbatim theatre is
paradoxical: “required to rely on the real for its political authority, whilst
simultaneously remaining suspicious of the very notion of the real” (Tomlin, 2013, p.
115; cited in Love, 2019, p.7).
At its best, verbatim theatre provokes audiences to reflect on these tensions around
truth and to question what it actually means. How is truth is affected by context?
Who controls it? And how is it that people in positions of power can benefit by
manipulating the truth and others suffer because they cannot? Breach is especially
interested in exploring these aspects of verbatim. In the audio interview with me
available here on Digital Theatre+, co-creator and director Billy Barrett describes
Breach’s ‘post-verbatim’ approach as “using verbatim theatre techniques but in a
way that acknowledges their failure to tell a full version of the truth” (Harvie, Barrett
and Stevens, 2019, 02:26). The company did not disbelieve Artemisia; in the same
interview, co-creator and actor Ellice Stevens says, “we have no problem in our
shows picking a side…. And we didn’t want really for the show to even be about
questioning her experience” (Harvie, Barrett and Stevens, 2019, 04:00). What the
company does explore is how Artemisia’s opportunity to tell her truth is so violently
obstructed by the male privilege of her era and the legal system she testifies in.
They also explore how Artemisia’s four-centuries-old story chimes so strongly with
our own times.
FEMINIST CONTEXTS, AGENDAS AND EFFECTS
Breach started creating It’s True, It’s True, It’s True in 2017, a few months before the
#MeToo movement – originally launched by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 –
explosively resurfaced with numerous women publicly accusing Hollywood producer
Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault over many years. #MeToo opened the
floodgates on issues such as toxic masculinity, sexual violence against women, and
the way that patriarchal society tends to privilege men and disbelieve women.
Although work on the play had already started before Weinstein’s public accusation,
the themes it dealt with resonated with many high-profile cases of women’s sexual
abuse. Think of Bill Clinton’s 1998 lie that he “did not have sexual relations with that
woman”, White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and the grossly asymmetrical power
relations between the 50-something male President and the female intern in her
early 20s whose professional position was precarious by definition. That scenario is
echoed both in the age and power gap between the 15-year-old Artemisia and her
tutor Tassi who also stated categorically: “Never have I had carnal intercourse, nor
tried to, with Artemisia” (Breach, 2018, p.20). Think too of Donald Trump’s 2005
boast that surfaced during his 2016 US Presidential campaign: “When you’re a star,
women let you do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything” (New York
Times, 2016). In It’s True, Tassi’s male privilege and elite status as painter for the
Pope appear to make him believe that he, too, ‘can do anything’ with impunity.
It’s True’s resonance grew over the course of its initial productions in 2018–19, as
more high-profile cases emerged of women being disbelieved in cases of male
sexual violence. When Senator Brett Kavanaugh was nominated by Trump for the
Supreme Court in 2018, Christine Blasey Ford revealed that Kavanaugh sexually
assaulted her when they were high school students; however, Ford’s credibility and
imputed immorality appeared to be more on trial than Kavanaugh’s appropriateness
for office. Feminists rallied, urging people to ‘Believe Women’. But as journalist
Sophie Hayssen observed, “Ever since the #MeToo movement gained cultural
prominence, multiple powerful men have received less backlash over allegations of
misconduct and assault than their accusers have,” a condition painfully reflected in
It’s True (Hayssen, 2020).
These battles for a woman’s right to be heard and believed are part of a broader
conflict over truth in the culture of our times. In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary selected
‘post-truth’ as its word of the year, noting, “not a belief that facts and the truth no
longer have relevance, but rather,” as Amanda Stuart Fisher writes, “that truth is
being deployed and re-authored to manipulate the opinion of others.” Fisher
concludes that the term “reflects a growing unease at the way truth has been eroded
and has lost value in certain sectors of social, political and civic life” (Fisher, 2020,
p.179).
It’s True tapped into all these contemporary stories and feelings, indicating not just
the play’s timeliness in relation to gender and truth, but also the apparent
timelessness of women’s sexual abuse. Director Barrett notes, “we were reluctant to
call it a MeToo show because that feels like a very specific cultural moment of
something that is a centuries-, millennia-old story, unfortunately” (Harvie, Barrett and
Stevens, 2019, 13:00).
It’s True exposed how patriarchal culture condones sexual violence against women
and normalises understandings of women as disreputable, untrustworthy and
subordinate. At the same time as revealing these reprehensible truths about
patriarchal culture, however, the production fiercely advocated women’s right to
represent themselves and to be believed; it upheld the legitimacy of women’s rage
at the oppressions and exploitations of patriarchal culture; and it celebrated
women’s power and solidarity.
STAGING THE TRUTH
As Kim Solga argues, feminism thinks about “gendered experience from a human
rights perspective” (Solga, 2016, p.1). It thinks about how social inequalities are linked
to gender and it focuses on how societies work to disempower women in particular
as well as how uneven power can be redistributed more fairly. It’s True enacts
feminism through a wide range of overlapping theatrical techniques and effects. One
of the most important of these is its form – of verbatim, or post-verbatim, theatre –
including its selection of source materials. Along with this, the structuring and
juxtaposition of scenes not only stage the systematic abuse of one particular woman
but amount to a powerful argument about the social justice of believing women per
se.
The verbatim use of real court transcripts from the 17th century makes the point that
male violence against women has remained unchanged throughout history. It also
demonstrates how patriarchal dominance shapes social systems such as courts of
law. Despite those oppressive conditions, the verbatim form also reveals Artemisia’s
power, allowing her to describe the violence against her in her own words and, as
Erin McMahon observes, “to seek justice in a formal and public way” (McMahon,
2020, p.13). Admittedly, this is through a legal system that constrains, disbelieves
and actively punishes Artemisia, but one which – perhaps despite itself – preserves
her words for posterity, and for this play and its audiences. The transcripts reveal a
clear difference between Artemisia’s moral authority and her accusers’ moral
bankruptcy. As Stevens notes, Artemisia addresses the courtroom with “honesty”
and “generosity” in stark contrast with “the many, many lies that [other] people tell
so flippantly,” especially Tassi (Harvie, Barrett, and Stevens, 2019, 32:03).
Furthermore, by restaging the real trial, members of the audience are positioned not
only as theatre-goers but as jurors themselves. Isabel Stuart points out that Artemisia
“is not just pleading for herself, but for us to believe her and restore justice,” a
position amplified in the filmed version which was performed “in front of twelve
people: the size of a jury” (Stuart, 2010). The audience is encouraged to challenge
the gendered injustice the play reveals and to witness Artemisia’s claim to power.
Working with real testimony also helped Breach summon contemporary echoes of
events cited in the play. I have already noted echoes of Clinton in Tassi’s words.
Elsewhere, Artemisia recounts how Tassi’s friend Cosimo verbally threatened her.
When she challenged him, he told her “to calm down, that he was joking” (Breach,
2018, p. 9). In 2011, the Conservative British prime minister David Cameron told
Labour MP Angela Eagle, to “calm down, dear!”, a comment many saw as sexist but
which a government spokesman excused as “just ‘a humorous remark’” (BBC News,
2011). As Mark Fisher writes in his review of It’s True, “it is chilling to see how closely
the accused man’s strategies – questioning the victim’s morality, rubbishing the
evidence and nobbling the witnesses – mirror the smokescreen tactics of sexual
abusers in our own time. Were it not for the thumbscrews, it could be happening
today” (Fisher, 2018).
Using real testimony also enabled Breach to ‘hear’ Artemisia’s inspiringly bold voice.
Early in their process of devising the show, the company assumed that the male-
dominated, highly formal, sometimes Latin-speaking court would make the teenaged
Artemisia feel “nervous, and she would be shy, and it would be a really scary
experience for her” (Stevens in Harvie, Barrett and Stevens, 2019, 06:39). But, though
Stevens “tried so hard to perform her lines like that… it didn’t work, it didn’t make
sense. She’s so bold and forthright and strong” (Harvie, Barrett and Stevens, 2019,
06:46). The verbatim form reveals the patriarchal oppressions of Artemisia’s times
but also her strength as she faces them.
As noted above, Breach is aware that verbatim fails “to tell a full version of the truth”
(Barrett in Harvie, Barrett and Stevens, 2019, 02:26). They also know verbatim
theatre can implicitly make claims to truth that are actually dubious, as can so many
other powerful voices and forms, including courts of law. In It’s True, Breach did not
want to impugn Artemisia, but they do show how other forms of testimony besides
verbatim words can hold a different, and sometimes more powerful, credibility. They
also emphasise other forms of present reality, whereas the antique and formal
language of the historical sources makes it initially appear more reliable in
comparison.
As well as the court transcripts, Artemisia’s paintings provide an alternative and

crucial historical source for the show, allowing the audience not only to hear her,
word for word, but also to see her through her images. Luke W. Robson’s set
instantly converts the courtroom into an artist’s studio and back again. This allows
Artemesia to communicate her ideas visually through her preferred form of
expression – painting – and allows her to reveal things outside the patriarchal
constraints of the courtroom, where male speakers and lawmakers tend or even
conspire to disbelieve her. Barrett notes that the play is not only about the
courtroom, “It’s also about her artistic response to the trauma, and how she used her
art as a form of justice that was denied to her in the court” (Davies, 2018). Early in the
show, the company presents her version of Susanna and the Elders, painted when
she was a teenager. This tableau highlights men’s routine abuse of women and
illustrates, as Artemisia says, “how it feels to be a woman who is watched, rather
than a man who gets off on it!” (Breach, 2018, pp.14–15). Near the play’s end, the
company stage Artemisia’s first version of Judith Slaying Holofernes (see figure 3),
which insists on women’s power and solidarity as well as their right to challenge and
punish their abusers. Critic Hannah Greenstreet calls it “a furious feminist fantasy of
revenge” (Greenstreet, 2018).
Figure 3 - Sophie Steer and Harriet Webb in It’s True, It’s True, It’s True (Artemisia Films) © Carlton
Nixon
Furthermore, Breach’s stagings of these paintings deliberately combine the historical

and factual with what Barrett refers to as “a more imaginative space that was about
the paintings”, a space that is visual, poetic, and allows audiences to hear
Artemisia’s ‘voice’ (Harvie, Barrett and Stevens, 2019, 18:05). The staging of Judith
Slaying Holofernes is followed immediately by the play’s climax, where the
company sing Patti Smith’s “Gloria”, a fitting anthem to Artemisia’s bold spirit (Barrett
in Harvie, Barrett and Stevens, 2019, 23:35). Breach seeks to tell a true story of
sexual abuse and feminist resistance by using historical transcripts, but the
transcripts are not the only vehicle they use. Period details such as baroque music
and large dresses are juxtaposed with deliberate anachronisms such as using
modern punk music to give voice to Artemisia’s rage or actors wearing exaggerated
men’s suits to convey the pompous bravado of patriarchal culture.
It’s True’s investigation of truth also plays out in how it engages with other aspects of
performance that juxtapose the real and the fictional. Breach deliberately
incorporates some semi-nakedness in the show, for example when the actor playing
Artemisia – Stevens in the filmed version – re-enacts Susanna and the Elders (see
figure 1). Stevens undresses and gets dressed again deliberately and specifically as
part of her storytelling. Semi-nakedness is functional to the storytelling; it is not the
kind of voyeuristic nudity so often imposed in the history of Western art on a passive
female object by a dominant male gaze, as Artemisia eloquently explains (Breach,
2018, pp.14–15).
The show also invites its audiences to reflect on the reality of tears and feelings.
Stevens frequently cries when she performs the “It is true” speech, a scene which
demonstrates the horrible necessity for women repeatedly to protest their credibility.
She reports that she feels “very moved on the stage, because I feel as if I can see
the audience reacting to it, and I feel like I’m reacting to it – what happened to her,
and what’s happening now, and everything” (Harvie, Barrett and Stevens, 2019,
07:39). For me, one of the things this scene did was to make me reflect on how the
story of sexual abuse was true not only for Artemisia, but also possibly for the actor
playing her, and likely for many other women in the theatre. It is true that an actor
can counterfeit emotion (in some respects that’s an actor’s job), and it may be true
that Stevens’ tears in this scene are not always ‘really’ elicited by her own feelings
about sexual abuse and women’s disputed credibility. But it is true that Stevens’
powerfully credible enactment helps me believe not only Artemisia but also Stevens,
drawing the story of sexual abuse and feminist resistance like a lightning bolt from
the 17th to the 21st century.
It’s True offers a powerful feminist narrative through a bold, passionate verbatim text,
and consonant with that text is the production’s powerful feminist theatricality. All its
performers are women. The putatively neutral but decidedly patriarchal formality of
the courtroom and its language is set against a proudly subjective punk aesthetic
which screams out Artemisia’s boldness and self-assertion, and by her tears which
insist that the court’s ‘neutrality’ is violent. Visual anachronisms such as
contemporary underwear (see figure 1) likewise insist that the story is not only
historical. Stevens’ eye contact with every audience member in the scene where she
repeats “It is true” humanises the story, invites solidarity with her, and refuses to
allow her to be cast as art history’s object of the male gaze, presenting her instead
as feminist art history’s active subject. Perhaps most importantly, in response to the
patriarchal court’s privileging of putatively objective legal language, It’s True insists
on the feminist power and credibility of subjective feelings and of the visual, whether
through the richness of the imagery of the gold paint, the controlled use of
Artemisia’s partial nakedness, or the restaging of her paintings as articulate, self-
aware, passionate and empowered tableaux vivants.
CONCLUSION
It’s True, It’s True, It’s True deploys verbatim techniques for emphatically feminist
ends. It tells a true story of sexual abuse, gendered power, victim blaming,
gaslighting and rape that resonates across centuries. It also questions truth,
especially how it is conventionally attributed in patriarchal cultures to privilege men
and disbelieve women. The play is committed to truth but insists that we look for it
beyond its usual sites of patriarchal, male-dominated privilege, It insists we look to
women, and not only to words but also to images, sounds, feelings and actions. It
shows the double-edged nature of women’s relationship to power in patriarchal
culture, where so many people, contexts, and systems conspire to dishonour, exploit,
consume, rape and condemn Artemisia, but where she speaks and paints back to
those oppressions with rage, power, clarity, credibility and, ultimately, in triumph.
FURTHER READING
BBC News. (2011). David Cameron Criticised for “Calm Down Dear” Jibe. British
Broadcasting Corporation. [online] 27 April. Available at:
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13211577> [Accessed 28 November 2020].
BBC News. (2020). Harvey Weinstein Timeline: How the Scandal Unfolded. British
Broadcasting Corporation. [online] 29 May. Available at:
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-41594672> [Accessed 26
November 2020].
Breach. (2018). It’s True, It’s True, It’s True. London: Oberon.
Davies, A. (2018). Focus on: Breach Theatre, Fest, 26 July, Available at:
<https://www.fest-mag.com/edinburgh/theatre/focus-on-breach-theatre> [Accessed
30 November 2020].
Fisher, A. (2020). Performing the Testimonial: Rethinking Verbatim Strategies.

Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Fisher, M. (2018). It’s True, It’s True, It’s True Review – A Compelling Rape Drama
Driven by Feminist Rage. Guardian. [online] 8 August. Available at:
<https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/aug/08/its-true-its-true-its-true-review-
rape-drama-feminist-rage-edinburgh-fringe-underbelly-cowgate> [Accessed 29
November 2020].
Greenstreet, H. (2018). Edinburgh Review: It’s True, It’s True, It’s True at Underbelly.
Exeunt. [online] 15 August. Available at:
<http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/edinburgh-review-true-true-true-underbelly/>
[Accessed 29 November 2020].
Gush, H., Barrett, B., and Stevens, E., (2020). Breach Theatre. Theatre Voice,
[podcast] 8 August. Available at: <http://www.theatrevoice.com/audio/breach-
theatre/> [Accessed 29 November 2020].
Harvie, J., Barrett, B., and Stevens, E., (2019). Episode 9: Breach Theatre: It’s True, It’s
True, It’s True, Stage Left with Jen Harvie, [podcast]. Available at:
<https://soundcloud.com/stage_left/episode-9-breachtheatre-its-true-its-true-its-true>
[accessed 9 December 2020]. Reposted on Digital Theatre. [online] Available at: <
https://edu.digitaltheatreplus.com/content/interviews/the-making-of-its-true-its-true-
its-true> [Accessed 16 April 2021]
Harvie, J., Green, N., and Cade, R., (2017). Episode 3: Nic Green and Rosana Cade:
Cock and Bull, Stage Left with Jen Harvie, [podcast]. Available at:
<https://soundcloud.com/stage_left/episode-3-nic-green-and-rosana-cade-cock-and-
bull> [Accessed 27 November 2020].
Hayssen, S. (2020). What #BelieveWomen Really Means. Women’s Media Centre.

[online] 9 March. Available at: <https://womensmediacenter.com/fbomb/what-
believewomen-really-means> [Accessed 27 November 2020].
Huw, R., (2020). It’s True, It’s True, It’s True: Artemisia on Trial. British Broadcasting
Corporation.
Love, C., (2019). A Concise Introduction to Verbatim. Digital Theatre. [online]

Available at: < https://edu.digitaltheatreplus.com/content/guides/verbatim-theatre?
[Accessed 12 April 2021]
McMahon, E., (2020). Survivor Agency and Empowerment: Defining an Ethical

Representation of Domestic Violence in Performance. MA Dissertation, MA Theatre
and Performance, Queen Mary University of London. Unpublished.
New York Times, The. (2016). ‘Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About
Women’ [2005]. The New York Times, [online] 8 October, Available at:
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html>
[Accessed 13 August 2020].
Solga, K., (2016). Theatre & Feminism. London: Palgrave.
Stuart, I., (2020). It’s True, It’s True, It’s True: Moving Towards Revolutionary Feelings
and the Affective Functions of Tears. PhD Dissertation chapter draftf. Unpublished.
Tomlin, L., (2013). Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance
Practice and Theory, 1990–2010. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Tripney, N., (2018). Breach Theatre: “A Really Exciting Company That Will Only Get
Better, The Stage, [online] 14 August. Available at:
<https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/2018/breach-theatre-a-really-exciting-
company-that-will-only-get-better/> [Accessed 30 November 2020].
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to It’s True’s co-creator and actor Ellice Stevens, and co-creator and
director Billy Barrett, as well as Isabel Stuart, Erin McMahon and Debbie Kilbride, for
conversations about this play and its production. My thanks also to Breach Theatre’s
producer, Ellie Claughton.

It's True, It's True, It's True - Feminism, Verbatim Theatre and Truth

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

It's True, It's True, It's True - Feminism, Verbatim Theatre and Truth

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

It’s True, It’s True, It’s True:

Feminism, Verbatim Theatre

As well as the court transcripts, Artemisia’s paintings provide an alternative and

Furthermore, Breach’s stagings of these paintings deliberately combine the historical

Fisher, A. (2020). Performing the Testimonial: Rethinking Verbatim Strategies.

Hayssen, S. (2020). What #BelieveWomen Really Means. Women’s Media Centre.

Love, C., (2019). A Concise Introduction to Verbatim. Digital Theatre. [online]

McMahon, E., (2020). Survivor Agency and Empowerment: Defining an Ethical

Solga, K., (2016). Theatre & Feminism. London: Palgrave.

You might also like