Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term “show trials” suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era’s great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages?

In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.

"A thoughtful and intelligent book on the ways in which political theater, or more precisely courtroom dramas, create a space in which aesthetic, ethical, and political judgments bleed into one another." - Choice

"Staged marks an exciting moment for scholarship at the intersection of law and theater... emerge[ing] from the long-established insight that law and performance are mutually constitutive." - The English Association

"For its ambitious articulation of fundamental questions of aesthetics and politics, and for the study’s under-appreciated subjects, Staged should be read not just by those interested in post-war Germany but by anyone interested in how theatre can benefit judgement and justice." - Modern Drama

"An exciting moment for scholarship at the intersection of law and theater...Arjomand’s analysis offers a powerful defense of theater as a public institution." - The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

"An important contribution to scholarship on political theater...[and] a strong argument for the continued political relevance of theater." - The Germanic Review

"This book is full of small anecdotes...that add humanizing touches to its subject of study, giving readers a glimpse of the real personal and political stakes that these theatre artists encountered...highly accessible." - Theatre History Studies

"A highly original book that confidently speaks to different audiences." - Contemporary Political Theory