Acting a Part: Performing Docudrama

Abstract

This essay considers approaches to acted performance in film and television docudrama, using as examples of recent practice a number of ‘high concept’ international coproductions such as Nuremberg and Conspiracy (both 2001). The focus of the essay is specifically upon the actor as a ‘visible marker of [documentary] inauthenticity’. It discusses the means by which an actor attempts to compensate for the manifest gap between the performed and the historical ‘real’ in preparation for docudrama performance. It also considers the nature of the transaction that takes place between actor and audience in docudrama, noting that the founding concept of this transaction is likely to be intertextual (grounded in an appreciation of the knowledge(s) brought to performance by actor and audience alike). Both parties bring to docudrama performance an awareness of the information, misinformation and disinformation that tend to cluster around significant historical events and personalities. This, it is argued, will in all probability affect both actors ‘preparation and audience reception in strikingly similar ways. The actor's trained ‘as if’ reflex is matched by a sophisticated audience's ‘what if’ reflex, in a mutual seeking of understanding beyond the rational and factual. Brian Cox's performance as Hermann Goering in Nuremberg is discussed in detail in relation to these claims. The intensification of documentary's basic absent/present paradox that takes place in docudrama is finally considered in relation to reality TV and its participants (who should be thought of, it is argued, as ‘authentic performers of self’).