Truth, Trust, and 21st Century Theatre Audiences

The volatile post-pandemic cultural industry has left many theatre institutions in Canada and the UK with diminished audiences and resultant financial precarity. This has forced companies to reduce programming, limit experimentation, or seek alternative audience models. Simultaneously, Rachel Botsman, the first Trust fellow at Oxford University, Said Business School, describes a wider "trust crisis" (2025) in which corruption, elitism, and economic disparity have deeply eroded trust in institutions generally throughout Global North societies and produced a deeply divisive society (2017). Given this financial and political climate, building trust through meaningful and sustained relationships between audiences and theatre institutions is a pressing concern that impacts the ability of artists and companies to sustainably utilize performance to enact social change. Using empirical audience data taken from spectators in post-show talkbacks and online social media platforms of two productions of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, this presentation suggests the impacts of a murky dramaturgy in such examples of ‘politi-real’ theatre that blur the distinctions between real and fictional worlds, resulting in a complex reading of truth and trust on and offstage. Ibsen’s text, as performed in 2014 and 2023, thus demonstrates how performance shapes audience reception not only of political messages but of truth itself, offering insight into how the co-present, live space of performance reflects larger crises of trust.