Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis explores how French and Algerian dramatists have engaged with two traumatic events that continue to haunt France: the German occupation and Vichy government from 1940 to 1944 and the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962. John Ireland’s investigation is guided by one central question: can theater take on issues of violence, war trauma, and conflicted memory in a fundamentally different way from archival forms of culture such as memoirs, narrative fiction, and film? Throughout the twentieth century, French cultural anthropologists, classicists, and social scientists repeatedly revisited links between archaic religious ritual, the practice of sacrifice, and Greek tragedy as attempts to understand, regulate, and mitigate the violence of human conflict and war. Ireland argues that contemporary French playwrights dealing with war trauma and contested memory were influenced by aspects of this research that foregrounded the core virtues of oral culture: presence
