History or journalism: Two narrative paradigms in "Bloody Sunday. Scenes from the Saville Inquiry" by Richard Norton-Taylor

Abstract

The article focuses on one of the most controversial plays in contemporary Irish theatre, Richard Norton-Taylor’s Bloody Sunday. Scenes from the Saville Inquiry. The play belongs to the popular form of drama called verbatim or documentary and attempts to render factual material and recorded evidence about the Bloody Sunday tragedy in a possibly most objective and reliable way. The aim of the article is to present Norton-Taylor’s work against the long and interesting tradition of the genre of documentary theatre. What is more, the central subject of the analysis is the complex interconnection between journalistic methods of rendering facts and strictly fictional strategies – such as for instance metaphor, metonymy or synecdoche – which according to Hayden White belong to modern historical discourse. The seamless blurring of journalism and elements of historical writing makes it possible for Norton-Taylor to maintain realistic objectivity of the medium, while still holding the reader’s interpretations and understanding under politicised and ideologically biased control.