What is Τrue in the Theatre of the Post-truth Era, Or: How did the Story About the Story Become the Main Story?
Cecilia Djurberg*
Abstract
Theatre is often said to mirror life and society, but in order to speak about art and theatre as imitating or mirroring life, of representing or disrupting our images and conceptions of reality, one must first define what reality is. This is hard in an uncertain, post-truth world, where digital platforms and surveillance capitalists pull the strings of our everyday lives. Our physical and digital lives are merging into one big confusing existence, as Big Tech uses Big Data to do Big Business in the digital battle over the power of the Big Story.The quest for truth and defining reality could easily resemble a story by Franz Kafka. In contemporary theatre, a tendency to focus on the meta-storytelling has become a frequent go-to method, perhaps as a way of trying to establish transparency or just mimicking this chaotic, “Κafkaeque” world, with its many layers of truth and contradicting stories. It could also be a sign of an artform in crisis, questioning its own identity in this paradigm shift, and being uncertain of its future.
Keywords: metatheatre, surveillance capitalism, digital tools, social media, ontology, post-truth, absurd theatre, storytelling, Zeitgeist, Theatertreffen Berlin, Festival d’Avignon, post-dramatic theatre
Theatre is frequently described as a reflection of life and society. As Shakespeare famously wrote in As You Like It, “All the world is a stage,” with the concept of Mimesis playing a significant role in theatre and drama theories. However, in today’s so-called post-truth era, the very notions of truth and reality are continuously questioned. This absurd world presents us with not only existential challenges but also interpretive ones
When discussing art and theatre as reflections or distortions of life, or as representations that challenge our perceptions of reality, we are always referencing some notion of reality itself. To engage with these distorted depictions, one must first establish what reality truly is. However, the pursuit of truth and reality in today’s post-truth era could easily be likened to a story by Franz Kafka.
If Gregor Samsa had been a modern bug, he might probably not consider his own metamorphosis to be his only problem. In our individualistic, polarized time, he might even find the surrounding world to be more absurd than his sudden new bug identity. A Gregor Samsa of today would perhaps, quite like Robert in Yael Ronens and Shlomi Shabans existential musical Bucket List at Schaubühne Berlin, start his story by waking up one morning and not recognizing his surrounding world.

Bucket List, is a good example of how the Kafkaesque, absurd experience of being alive today can be updated in a metaphorical concept that combines the effects of both the ongoing information war as well as the physical, violent wars of our time. This is a surreal story about the real challenges for individual humans as well as the human collective. In short Bucket List is described as “a musical hallucination about an overwhelming reality.” In both its form and content this is a story about the big conflicts and the big story of our time. The protagonist, Robert, is symbolically played by two actors speaking different languages (English and German), which enhances his split personality, and emphasizes the shattered reality and Zeitgeist he lives in. Robert is specifically suffering PTSD caused by the Israel-Palestine war. “One Saturday morning, I woke up under the ruins of my former reality,” he says in the beginning of the play that was created during the outbreak of the Gaza war in the fall of 2023.[1]
As the show develops this double Robert-guy is offered help by a capitalistic startup named “Zeitgeist” to wash away his trauma and clean out his bad memories. As if the reality could be fixed and reformatted, like an old computer, only you pay for it.
Well, in the post-truth era, brainwashing is definitely a business model. Our digital world is a battlefield, where more or less visible forces fight, joke and play tricks, to lure the masses to believe in their presented ideas of “reality” and to establish their preferred narrative. Like theatre makers do, although they are usually more transparent about their purposes.

Throughout history, mankind has tried to understand and navigate the world and reality by connecting images and fragments. We try to connect the dots and find patterns, to be able to see the bigger picture and to understand things and occurrences that happen outside of our own frames of knowledge, limited by our own vision and comprehension. Along the road, we have learned that things appear to be different when seen from different angles, in different lighting and in different contexts. But today the world, more than ever, is shaped by distorted and contradicting images. Polarizing forces make sure the gaps between the pieces remain wide, or even grow wider. The contracts of solidarity and former standards of unbiased knowledge and information exchange are broken in our daily lives and in our meetings with others. Even if we would agree that there is no pure reality, that everything we see is simulacra, merely patterns of symbols, the understanding of symbols and representation is challenged if we no longer share the same symbols or agree on the meaning of the images and symbols that shapes the representation.
We live in a truly mediated world. Media, and mass communication, shape our reality; or, our realities. Everyone has their own small window to a world of information and communication in their pocket. But, in the mobile phone, everyone sees a different picture of the world, from their hyper individual angle. This shapes their reality, and what they believe is real. But these windows towards the world are by no means neutral. On the contrary: they are heavily biased and shaped by the tech companies, with the main purpose of gaining revenues by collecting data. Or, as the tech companies like to name it: “personalizing” our user profiles in order to “give us a better user experience.”
The digital tools that could, and would, have helped us navigate our lives better are actually doing the opposite. Tools that could have helped us distinguish between truth and falsehood have, instead, made us more uncertain, teaching us to be skeptical of nearly everything except the fabricated, staged, and manipulated portrayals of reality. We keep our digital devices close to our hearts, and we put our most intimate thoughts and secrets in them, albeit knowing the risks. Our physical and digital lives are merging into one big confusing existence, as Big Tech uses Big Data to do Big Business in the digital battle over the power of the Big Story.
Professor Shoshana Zuboff has in her groundbreaking book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power described this development thoroughly, and the risks these unregulated digital experiments on humankind come with. We can already see the effects, in the eroding democracy and decreasing psychological health among young people, for example.
Given the current crisis affecting both the arts and humanity, theatre naturally seeks to reflect this peculiar era we are living through, either as a response or consequence. Theatre, in a broad sense, is currently undergoing a search for ways to depict this rapidly changing, truly kafkaesque world, while humanity is also striving to understand how to live and make sense of the distorted reality we are experiencing today.
It is an inevitable paradox that we first must agree on what is real, to be able to point out the unreal. This presents a logical dilemma, even for artists. The theatre stage, however, is the ideal space for honing the essential skill of holding multiple thoughts in one’s mind simultaneously. In theatre, everything has always been both true and false at once. A lot of people go to the theatre to let themselves be convinced and enchanted by made up stories. We voluntarily walk into theatres in order to be deceived, knowing that the real world is still out there when the curtain falls. Or, that is what we used to do. Because the concept of reality is under investigation and is being questioned everywhere.
The conflict between intellectual and theoretical discussions of reality and the general public’s, or the internet’s, uncertainty about what is true or false in an ontologically recognizable “real” world often challenges art and theatre. While this has always been the case to some extent, we might also argue that during Kafka’s time, contemporary readers of The Metamorphosis had fewer ways to interpret what Gregor Samsa’s main issue was.
When August Strindberg wrote his Dreamplay, the audience might have had less challenge in separating the dreamlike from the “real.” When modernists first challenged, deconstructed, and reimagined traditional depictions of reality, the audience at the time largely shared a similar understanding of “the real” compared to today’s theatergoers, and could (perhaps) more easily recognize the distortions and absurdities. Post-modernists then identified the changeable, debatable and chaotic world, as it developed along with the media development. They reacted to this and said: it is what it is, let’s just abandon old standards, conventions and genres, and play along. And now we are here, in yet another shift, heading towards even more uncertainty, with our smartphones glued to our hands, with constant split vision and shortening attention spans.
People get more and more dependent of the same digital tools that violate their integrity and twist their images of reality. Let’s never forget that the motto of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook for a long time used to be “Move fast and break things.” Under this slogan they created the platforms many of us have adopted as important parts of our daily lives. Psychological concepts such as confirmation bias and our brain’s craving for dopamine are exploited to manipulate and control us, keeping us glued to our screens and fostering chaos. Even if we have learned that the world is not painted in black and white, with clear distinctions of good and evil, right and wrong, even if we know that some things are complex and contradictory, our brains keep searching for comprehensible patterns and easy solutions. We are designed to try to connect the fragments into understandable images. Complexity and contradicting information is exhausting, so we often chose what seems to be the simplest or shortest way, to decisions and to conclusions.
As our online and offline lives melt together, it is hard to separate the feelings and thoughts we experience in digital life from those in our physical, daily life. Younger generations, who have lived their whole life on the internet, make no difference at all between the online and offline world. Many people suffer from real problems, caused by fake or distorted information. To put it briefly: it is a mess out there. And it was already complicated before artificial intelligence entered the stage. Now our views of what is true, and what is fake, are even more challenged. As trust is destroyed, there is even more confusion about who the good guys are, and who the bad ones are.
As humankind’s ability to navigate in this chaos shrinks, as we let algorithms make our decisions, it will be the best and most convincing storyteller who knows how to best ride the algorithms, and how to get the most attention, that wins the largest audiences. People want heroes, celebrities and clear enemies, and they want promises of a happy end. Just like in old school dramas. And one might wonder: are we in the beginning, the middle or in the end of this? What kind of mad dramaturg rules the world? Is it Kafka?
The tools and methods of mass communication have always shaped our reality, but as I have tried to describe, the rapid digital development has not only given us new possibilities, but also a lot of new challenges and problems. The medium is the message, as Marshal McLuhan famously put it. This can somehow be applied to theatre as well.
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said in his famous work Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik) that: “True works of art are only those in which content and form prove to be completely identical.” This is of course not an objective truth, and I would rather not go down that rabbit hole trying to define what “true art” would be. But I find this an interesting theory nonetheless, and quite useful in theatre criticism. When considering truth and its representation in art and literature, it is always insightful to revisit Erich Auerbach’s discussion in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur) particularly his comparison of truth in Homer’s Odyssey with the Bible’s conception of truth. A notable example he uses is the story of Odysseus’ scar. The conclusion drawn from this comparison is that what is considered “true” within the fictional framework of The Odyssey does not easily align with the Bible’s broader definition of truth. One has to pay attention to not only what is told, but also how the stories are being told. How truth is depicted.
But let’s return to our own confusing time. Audiences around the world can still experience “true” emotions when watching a completely made up story—like a fairy tale—on a theatre stage. These feelings are also shared collectively in the same room, albeit the emotion itself is an individual experience. In the auditorium, the physical experience influences the psychological one, and vice versa. This creates a significant contrast to digital platforms and the varying stories we encounter there.
In one aspect, theatre is always somewhat “true,” as it happens “for real” before our eyes. At the same time, theatre is always made up; an artificial construct, a staged reality, so to speak, created to stimulate our senses and imagination, in different ways. In theatre as well as in the world beyond the stage, we always make agreements—in our communication, in social situations, and in our interpersonal exchange. These agreements are built on trust and they are based on conventions, traditions and/or some other kind of rules. In order to understand the situation, one has to understand the framework of the agreement, the “rules.” To understand when rules are broken, limits are pushed, conventions are being questioned, you have to know what these rules and conventions are in the first place. One very big problem of the time we live in now, in the digital society, is that the rules in the digital world are constantly changed without people ever knowing when, how and why. The social contract on social media is breached, as fake content and algorithm-driven posts are presented as “reality.”
The power of make-believe is the very charm of theatre. Through artificality, and with the power of imagination, we can experience something absolutely real and even life-changing. Our minds can associate complete nonsense to “real” things (just as in the digital world) and our reactions and feelings can absolutely be “true,” even if the source of the impulse is fictive, even if the aesthetic is completely non-realistic.
It seems though that fiction has lost some of its appeal in large parts of Western culture today. Instead, the concept of “authenticity”—or various interpretations of what is considered “authentic”—has gained increasing popularity. In literature, the rise of autofiction reflects this trend, while film and television have long delved into and capitalized on documentary-style and “authentic” elements across different genres.
“Authenticity” and “real stories” sell (and this is a fact) but the authenticity people love to buy is often creatively arranged, it is fixed and made-up, just like “reality” on the internet. Now and then authors and artists take the liberty to use too much imagination in genres that used to be reserved for “the authentic, like in documentaries and biographies, which fuels yet another debate about “truth” vs artistic freedom. And sometimes one wonders : have people forgotten that artists always arrange their stuff creatively, in order to achieve effects and to tell their stories?
In contemporary theatre one way to respond to this urge for “authenticity” has been to imitate the documentary style and/or letting actors perform “as themselves,” or having non-actors performing on stage, and thus mixing theatre with performance art, or putting fiction and fantasy within clear, meta-narrative frameworks. By creating an illusion of reality, or a “circle of trust,” around the more obvious fantasies, fictions and fairy tales, theatre can induce some kind of truthiness and establish a reality checking moment of transparency, by telling the story about storytelling.
This is by no means a new phenomenon, but the tendency has nevertheless intensified along with the development of the biggest story of our time: The battle of the big narrative, the culture war about how the story of our lifetime is to be told; and, maybe, how this world will end.
In the past years, I have watched the “story about the story” take place on several stages and theatre festivals. From simpler meta-theatrical formats that, so to speak, mostly remind the audience that they are in the theatre to more thoroughly and creative compositions with a higher degree of urgency than the more internal and self-reflective ones. Since the fourth wall was long abandoned, and post-dramatic theatre is now considered the new norm (at least on many European stages), these thoughtful meta-theatrical approaches can no longer be seen simply as violations of convention. They carry deeper significance. These approaches shift the focus to the storytelling process itself, raising questions about truth and reality by highlighting the art of narration.
Classics with clear fairy tale elements are often presented with a metatheatrical layer, where the play is framed within an additional narrative. For instance, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream might be staged within a meta-framework that tells the audience the story is about a theatre group preparing to perform Shakespeare. This was precisely the approach taken in Antú Romero’s and Theater Basel’s 2023 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Theatertreffen in Berlin.
Knowing that Shakespeare already put a play-within-the-play, you can probably imagine how the meta-layers sort of create the structure of an infinity mirror with different, distorted reflections of reality. What made this concept so brilliant, was that the play-within-the-play, which often is interpreted as a totally absurd comedy, here was performed in a hyper realistic style with strong compassion, showing the true strength of the art of theatre after you have all the extra layers, costumes, trends and stunts removed. Yet, it is, of course, still only a representation of reality.
When German director Falk Richter takes on Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Sweden in the fall of 2024, he fails to breathe new life into the play with a similar added meta-framework. The story centers on a daughter of a renowned theatre director, who is elderly and ill, inheriting his project of staging King Lear. The scenes in which the actors perform Shakespeare’s play are far more compelling than the meta-narrative, leaving it unclear why the added storyline was necessary at all. Perhaps the answer is that Dramaten is as fond of the story about the story, as many other theatres, or as preoccupied with mirroring the reality of theatre.

It is probably no coincidence that another of Dramaten’s big, recent productions is a staging of Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance, a play that is a good example of a story-of-a-story-play. To start with, it is inspired by E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and is often referred to as having a Netflix dramaturgy. The playwright here solves the vast jumps in time and space already in his script, by adding a frame story about an author—Tobey—who is writing the play of his life within the plot of the play.
The production at Dramaten in Stockholm is unfortunately a quite pale experience if you, like I did, first have seen German director Philipp Stölzl’s staging of the same play (Das Vermächtnis, Residenztheater, München). The seven-hour production I saw at Theatertreffen 2023 featured a unique scenographic concept, where the stage image was reversed. It displayed a (fake) proscenium from the actors’ usual perspective, framed by black brick walls and a fluorescent border that led towards “the scenography.”This set design complemented the performance perfectly, as the sceneries and text were constantly referenced throughout the play’s epic retelling.

Another way of staging ”the story about the story” is the way Russian Kirill Serebrennikov’s approached Chekhov’s short story The Black Monk, which I saw at the Festival d’Avignon 2022. The concept of the staging included three major takes on the story, which was performed in three different languages (German, Russian and English). This underlined the shifts in perspective one can tell this story from—as well as different geographical perspectives on storytelling—and the big narrative of our time—in general. And it also provided an image of the history keep repeating itself, like underlining that we haven’t learned anything from our old conflicts and mistakes.

Elfriede Jelinek’s so called “corona play,” Lärm. Blindes Sehen. Blinde sehen! might be described as a peak or landmark in this contemporary, new theatre tradition. In this play Jelinek begins her—typical—stream of writing with a kind of manifesto of the text’s intention, which is completely permeated by stories about stories. Specifically, about how these stories could behave during the conflicting information noise of the pandemic.
The play had its Scandinavian premiere at Östgötateatern in Norrköping, Sweden, in February 2023. Then, the audience was welcomed in the auditorium with a kind of interpretation tip for the performance. Before the curtain went up, there was a projected written message, saying: “The language is the action. Language plays the main role. The language speaks.” An instruction that can generally help in interpreting Jelinek’s plays, which are typical of the post-dramatic theatre. But here the challenge of language and communication was the prime message. The audience was advised to be on their guard, as the entire text addresses our confused, mediated, post-truth, and virus infected time.
In all these examples of productions, and I have a whole bunch of more, the narrative itself, the story about the story, tends to emerge as an overall message. It is obvious that this message does not really fit the traditional drama formats with typical beginnings, easily followed dramatical arches, or clear, concluding endings.
In his Essay on the Tragic (Versuch über das Tragische, 1961), Peter Szondi delved into tragedy and the philosophy of the tragic, with a review of a number of philosophers’ reasoning on the tragic, including a substantial expansion of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as a genre. If one jumps from there to our time, and to the performing arts of our era, it is perhaps precisely in relation to the tragic that one can find a key to the ongoing development and the massive tendency to discuss the story about the story. As the general, dominant narrative of our time appears right now—via culture and media—we’re all living, in many ways, in a tragic context, framed by a shattered uncertain story that doesn’t seem to have a happy ending or even a clear way out. War, climate threats, human suffering and an eroding democracy are ever-present and ongoing tragedies in our lives, and it is perhaps out of respect for our time of crisis that the performing arts neither want nor dare to blow up strong bubbles of fiction, or stories, before our eyes, with happy endings or clear paths provided for a safe exit.
When people feel like kafkaesque bugs, helpless lying on their backs unable to act or move, the question always seems to be whether we are in the beginning, middle or end of the misery. Escaping reality, as purely fictional illusion, might thus be deemed too unfashionable in the theatre, so to speak?
But paradoxically, at the same time, an intensive fictionalization is taking place, through a diligent imitation and representation of “the authentic,” with reality-based stories and documentary aesthetics, which in turn are often reinforced with distancing tools—such as alternative live camera angles. Plus: all the endless reminders that you’re dealing with stories about stories. That we are in the theatre, as if the audience wasn’t completely aware of this already.
In show after show we are exposed to a constructed illusion of truth. A meta framing of the storytelling, implying that the top meta layer is not an illusion. A kind of extreme self-contradiction which, by all accounts, points to some kind of identity crisis, or a search for the relevance and place of theatre in our time.
Thus, Søren Kierkegaard’s definition of the tragic could be applied to contemporary performing arts, and not least to the state of contemporary drama, as he is quoted by Szondi: “The tragic is the suffering contradiction. The tragic view sees the contradiction and loses hope for a way out.”

French choreographer and director Gisèle Vienne is a good example of someone who manages to brilliantly capture this confusing reality and at the same time avoid the meta-theatre clichés. In her Extra Life, which also was shown at Theatertreffen in Berlin 2024, two siblings with a dark childhood trauma seem to be stuck in some kind of glitch or time warp between life and death, dream and reality, night and day, beginning and end, sitting in a car that has broken down somewhere out in the woods after a party. The form is dissolving even more, when this brother and sister slide into role-playing within the play, shifting characters and voices while processing their situation and their traumatic story. The aesthetic captures the profound uncertainty of our time, portraying the concept of reality as a simulacrum. The set design is both hyper-realistic and hyper-artificial: it features a “real” car on stage and natural materials like twigs and bark on the floor, while also incorporating intense laser light effects and eerie, hallucinatory electronic music. These elements create the sense that the characters’ lives—or their demise—have become something like a computer game. There is no obvious answer to what happens, the interpretation is up to the audience to solve.
The tragic contradiction can thus be seen as a message in itself—the big question posed of our time is too big, the trauma too severe or painful, and cannot be resolved. Instead of suggesting a way out, a way forward, making up a happy end or a resolution to all the conflicts and crisis of our time, a huge part of today’s theatre makers chose to merely comment on the tragic by playing the stories of the stories, leaving open endings for people living in an uncertain reality with an unclear future. Mimicking a chaotic world for audiences that live in chaos and who can’t even agree on if there is a crisis, and what the problem in that case really is.
By creating a persuasive agreement on a “true” framework, even if only temporary, where people can at least believe in some form of sincerity, theatre can explore the tragic contradiction of unresolved issues and complex questions within this framework, offering a clear reflection of uncertainty. It is a way of saying: the world is absurd, but unfortunately this is our reality. If we can’t reach a consensus on what is real outside of the theatre, or on what is true in a post-truth society, then the framework of an illusionary reality could serve as a temporary, functional agreement—a theatrical negotiation—allowing us to explore the tragic and absurd sides of life. It offers the essential “neutral” foundation for the narrative we require, allowing the storytelling itself to distinguish truth from fiction. So perhaps this method of storytelling also could be seen as an attempt to re-establish some trust? After all, if there’s one thing the meta-story emphasizes, it’s that there are always multiple stories, never just one.
This approach of multi-layered meta-narrative theatre can sometimes lead to brilliant performances. However, more often than not, it gives the impression that theatre is trapped in a self-reflective, solipsistic, and narcissistic loop. It’s as if theatre has developed a reluctance to embrace make-believe at a time when the world is filled with deceit, crises, cultural battles, and kafkaesque uncertainties. Alternatively, it seems that theatre is so engulfed in its own crisis that it has become preoccupied with mere survival, focusing more on defining what theatre is than on demonstrating what it can truly be.
One can’t help wondering: are we in the beginning, in the middle or in the end of this story about the story-trend, in theatre? Is there a way out of the meta-storytelling? Will theatre find faith in fiction again? Provide us with new stories, and a new future? Or do we have to wait for the world to change, before theatre can change?
Endnote
[1] Bucket List premiered in December 2023; I saw it at Theatertreffen Berlin 2024, and it is available for streaming here.
Bibliography
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton UP, 1953.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Science of Logic. Cambridge UP, 2010.
Szondi, Peter. An Essay on the Tragic, translated by Paul Fleming, Standford UP, 2002.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 2019.

*Cecilia Djurberg is a Swedish journalist and theatre and dance critic, based in Stockholm. She has a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Theatre History and Theory from Stockholm University. She is currently theatre editor and critic at Sweden’s largest daily newspaper Aftonbladet. As of 2024 she is a Board member of the ExCom of IATC-AITC. She also produces a critical podcast called ”Kritcirkeln” with discussions and conversations about performing arts.
Copyright © 2024 Cecilia Djurberg
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #30, Dec. 2024
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
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Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.