“False Confessions:” Representing Crisis in Contemporary Theatre and Activism

Image shows a stage scene, with a man in a suit without a jacket sitting on the stoop of a house scene to the left and a woman in a long dress sitting in a chair to the right of screen.
Still from Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists

4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne.

Map

Share via

“False Confessions:” Representing Crisis in Contemporary Theatre and Activism

Lindsay Goss (University of Melbourne)

  • Wednesday 14 October, 4:00-5:30pm
  • 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne

Abstract

The play Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists (2020) concludes after a fascist is not killed but everyone else is. Following this, the fascist begins a tirade against women, immigrants, ethnic minorities, and religious minorities. The speech goes on for quite some time; in many cases audiences have become animated in response: heckling, leaving, throwing objects or rushing the stage.

How does it happen that a theatre audience can be so provoked by this concluding speech that they respond as if an actual fascist, and not an actor playing one, was standing on stage before them? This paper puts Catarina in conversation with other “false confession”—the term I am using for performances, onstage and off, that seek to produce the experience of truth through a deliberate or doubled act of deception, misdirection, or misidentification. I consider how such acts of representation might help us think the problem of “truth” in relation to activist efforts to represent states of crisis.

Lindsay Goss

Image shows a wmoman with brown hair above the shoulders, smiling close mouthed, wearing an orange top under a blazer and small hoop earrings, in front of a garden background.

Lindsay Goss holds the position of Senior Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at Melbourne Uni. Her research explores how popular discourses of authenticity and identity animate historical anxieties about the actor in proximity to politics. In 2025, her first book, F*ck The Army! How Soldiers and Civilians Staged the GI Movement to End the Vietnam War (NYU Press 2024), won the Lawrence W. Levine award from the Organization of American Historians. Her current project on "crisis actors" looks at the intersection of activist discourse and contemporary theatre practice and considers the necessity of "staging" crisis under conditions that obscure or deny its existence.