Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment by Minou Arjomand (review)

Staged: Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment. By Minou Arjomand. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018; 248 pp.; illustrations. $65.00 cloth, e-book available.

In Staged, Minou Arjomand sources German and German-American postwar theatre to motion toward the theatre as a public site of judgment. From show trials to trial shows, she appraises the objectivity of the law and the subjectivity of the theatrical. Where does the courtroom end and the stage begin? What are the implications of justice to the present moment? By cross-examining philosophy, law, and politics, Arjomand poignantly argues that theatre's value as a public institution lies not only in the meaning conveyed onstage, but also in its unique potential to foster the audience's critical ability to judge. Arjomand primes the reader's attention toward theatrical space when she notes that the Eichmann trial was held in the Beth Ha'am building (the People's House) in Jerusalem, resignified as Beth Hamishpath (the House of Justice) throughout the show trial. What was an auditorium became a courtroom, but the spectators remained. Rooted in this anecdote, Staged crosses the often segregated modes of legal and aesthetic judgment to question where justice is publicly seen: the stage, the courtroom, or elsewhere.

In a deliberately nonlinear account, Arjomand selects Hannah Arendt, Bertolt Brecht, and Erwin Piscator as protagonists of the book's three main chapters, whose narratives are levied by cross-references to Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Peter Weiss, and others. Throughout, Arjomand's ambitious project benefits from her accessible prose. She admits multiple forms of evidence including: historical records, dramaturgical notes, infamous performances, and forgotten rehearsals, all as intertwined through personal (oscillating between public and private) debates between the aforementioned individuals. Therefore, the book intentionally begets a citational, categorical, but not chronological, format.

Staged consistently investigates secondary stagings of trials, rather than trials themselves. This upstaging of the primary archive blends history and historiography. Chapter 1, "Hannah Arendt: Judging in Dark Times," investigates the theatrical techniques best suited to politics, with Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) serving as the primary testimony in place of the Eichmann trial itself. Arjomand emphasizes Arendt's depiction as epic theatre rather than tragedy, in order to exchange pity and catharsis for judgment and action, and advance the political agency of theatre. Chapter 2, "Bertolt Brecht: Poetic Justice," shifts from theatrical philosophy to philosophical theatre, responding to Brecht's learning play The Measures Taken (1930) and his famed work of epic theatre The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948) alongside historical records of the Nuremberg and Moscow trials. Through these courtroom dramas and trial scenes, Arjomand attends to art form, formal law, and formalism, further intersecting narratives of theatre, history, and philosophy through a practice of justice. For example, through Brecht she interprets the simultaneity of the formalism debates and the Moscow trials, noting the Stalinist purge of formalist artists such as Vsevolod Meyerhold during an age of socialist realism (63). Consequently, Staged appeals beyond the jurisdiction of performance studies, extending its readership to scholars of social sciences, critical theory, and artistic practice.

Brecht's character of Azdak in The Caucasian Chalk Circle and his "carnivalesque practice of judgment" (73) leads Arjomand to discuss parallels to the kadi court system, supported through uncritical reference to Max Weber. (Conventionally, kadi refers to judges who settle disputes in accordance with Islamic law.) She goes so far as to cite King Solomon as the prototypical kadi judge. In doing so, she inconspicuously—and seemingly unintentionally—brings Islamic law into this predominately Jewish conversation. The crossing of Semitic religions and cultures warrants further discussion. It is a rich tangent, but one not fully attended to, leaving the reader anxious to apply Arjomand's findings in German postwar theatre to a global context.

Chapter 3, "Erwin Piscator: Theater After Auschwitz," transports us across the Atlantic with the introduction of Piscator's play...