imPEACHable @ the South by Southeast Festival, Gulbenkian Theatre 13 February 2020

 

On Thursday 13 February 2020, at the Gulbenkian Theatre in Canterbury, imPEACHable, my latest tribunal play based on the private and public transcripts of the ongoing impeachment trial of the President of the United States, will be performed as part of the South by Southeast Festival.

The play examines the central tenet of the trials, that is, whether there was a 'Quid Pro Quo' offer in a telephone conversation with the US President and the Ukrainian President in July 2019.  Donald Trump insists he did nothing wrong and that his conversations with the Ukrainian President were ‘perfect.’  But the play hears from the others in his administration about how perfect the phone call might have been.

In an age of fake news, witch hunts, spin and short news cycles, tribunal theatre is a tremendous platform on which to examine and illuminate the context and causes of trust and leadership and the potential of both to breakdown.The play is edited from congressional testimony from October & November 2019. imPEACHable is ripped from the headlines theatre.

The play opens with a recording of the 'perfect' phone call between the United States President Donald Trump & the Ukrainian President Zelensky followed by the edited  testimony of several witnesses: Ambassador Sondland, Marie Yovanovitch and others from October & November 2019.  The transcripts were released in early November of over 900 pages which have been edited to 30 pages.  As the play progresses, upstage the hearings are being broadcast in real time to add to the metatheatrical nature of the trial itself [Donald Trump live tweeting during the trial and the Chairman of the committee commenting on said tweets to the witness].  

Now that Donald Trump has become the third president to be impeached and the trial in the Senate begins, the script can be regularly updated to give audiences access to a trial with international ramifications.