I get asked that question a lot about my performances and my writing.
I struggle with the idea of truth and fiction and how much people should be able confirm as "true". My work isn't meant to trick anyone, but it does present itself as some form of authentic experience being retold to an audience.
So what's my responsibility to the questioner? How should I respond when people ask me 'How much of that was true?'
I've been looking for people to speak at The Bad Vibes Club and someone suggested Nicholas Ridout. I read this essay of his, Performance in the Service Economy: Outsourcing and Delgation (it's on page 126 of the linked pdf), and in the final section he kind of sums up my ambivalence about answering the question, or maybe gives a good reason not to answer it.
'Theatre is, most of the time, a kind of
delegated performance, in which actors or performers
appear as representatives of or stand-ins for
others and in which they carry out their actions as
agents of higher powers, such as authors and
directors. When a theatrical performance seeks to
disrupt this familiar system of representation
— such as, for example, someone appears on stage
either as themselves or in such a way as to lay
claim to a specific identity whose story or plight is
being dramatised — a muddle often breaks out.
This might be considered as a confusion between
outsourcing and delegation, in which the right
to present the representation of a certain identity is
assumed to belong only to those actors or performers
who can claim the authentic possession of that
identity, so that they may plausibly and perhaps
legitimately make the public claim that ‘this is my
story’. This confusion arises out of a misrecognition
of the function of theatre — albeit a misrecognition
that much theatre and theatrical criticism has
sought to encourage. Even when theatre is making
no claim about the authenticity of its performers
in respect of the story or situation they are representing,
it tends to make the implicit and inclusive
claim, addressed to the audience, that ‘this is
our story’: the story enacted, such as the story of the
House of Atreus or the tragedy of Oedipus, is
the story of the polis that is supposedly gathered in
the theatre. But at one and the same time the
structure of the theatre itself makes the exact opposite
claim, that ‘this is not our story’.
This establishment of minimal distance is, I
think, one of the preconditions of theatrical representation
and so pervasive that even when
the performers enacting the representation really
are the very people they purport to represent,
they are, in the theatre, only delegates at best'