Performing Historiographical Precarity: The Problem of Truth and Justice in Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides

Holocaust theatre underlies a sense of ‘goneness’, in terms of both the disappearing nature of history and performance, and the magnitude of victimhood of this particular genocide. The representation on stage is thus fuelled by ‘a need to repeat, to recover, to say, and to iterate’. In this regard, Butler’s concept of precarity is integral to her thesis on performativity. For the act of reiteration, they argue, is ‘not contrasted with the real but constitutes a reality that is in some sense new’. In the context of Holocaust history, the ‘new’ engenders its own instability. Saul Friedlander locates the instability in the contradictory constraints between ‘a need for “truth” and the problems raised by the opaqueness of the events and the opaqueness of language as such’. In an era where historiography is perceived as the ‘emplotment’ of narratives, yet the pursuit of truth in commemorating the suffering persists, how does theatre inform us about the ethical issues of truth, justice, and responsibility?

This paper will take Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides (1995) as a case study to explore the precarity in the historiography of the Holocaust and its implications on concepts such as truth and justice. The play centres on the controversies of Wilhelm Furtwängler, the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in Hitler’s regime. By presenting an ethical dilemma of ‘an artist caught in the vice of totalitarianism’, the historiographical precarity emerges in the play as an allusion to historical relativism. The play thus complicates and even problematises the notions of historical truth and justice. My analysis will focus on Harwood’s dramaturgy, particularly the ‘trope of trial’ of the dramaturgical structure and the plotting of tribunal predisposition. This paper will further address the moral anxiety that pervades both the practice of Holocaust theatre and my scholarly inquiry.