Emily Mann is the author of plays which engage history through offering testimonies to the nature and crushing power of that history. Largely through the words of those who observed and suffered, she seeks to stage the reality of our century, alive to the ambiguity of the exercise and yet necessarily submitting to it. Hers is an uneasy art. She stares into the heart of darkness, aware that the light she seeks to shine there may falsify the profundity of that darkness and that the mere act of presentation may diminish the enormity of what she seeks to encompass. The result is an art whose own methodology is as fraught with moral complexities as the world which that methodology is designed to capture.

In Granada Television's documentary account of the Second World War, The World at War, a woman recounts the death of her family in a concentration camp. She sits on a chair and speaks directly into the camera. Her words are uninflected, her face expressionless. The film's director has done nothing but asked her to sit and testify. She could be a bystander recounting events she has happened upon. The effect is devastating. Much the same could be said of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, designed to record the details of the Holocaust. In an earlier television series, Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, Bronowski goes to the camp in which his family died. He wears the suit of a television presenter. There comes a moment when he walks into the mud and stands in the water at the edge of the camp, apparently careless of the fact that the water covers his shoes and the lower part of his trousers.