From Front Page to Front Stage: War Correspondents and Media Ethics in British Theatre

Abstract

War correspondents have captured the public and cultural imagination since the beginning of war reporting in the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on Barbara Korte’s Represented Reporters: Images of War Correspondents in Memoirs and Fiction (2009), this chapter examines the representation of war correspondents and war photographers in three British plays, Stella Feehily’s O Go My Man (2006), David Hare’s The Vertical Hour (2008) and Vivienne Franzmann’s The Witness (2012). Differentiating between biographical, testimonial and metajournalistic war correspondent plays, the chapter explores how British playwrights have responded to the nexus between the performativity of war reporting and drama and how they address the motivations, practices and moral values of war correspondents and war photographers within the context of global media ethics.