Recent socially engaged Western theatre has shown an intense fascination with putting contemporary people on stage. Garde and Mumford's book provides the first in-depth analysis of how innovative forms of this theatre present and invite encounters between participants from diverse backgrounds through a study of the work arising from Germany's Hebbel-am-Ufer theatre in Berlin. In so doing it opens up the work of an important European theatre and illuminates a distinct and prevalent mode of performance and aesthetic trend. The Theatre of Real People focuses on productions by leading practitioners from Germany - including Mobile Academy, Shermin Langhoff, and Rimini Protokoll - that were curated by the award-winning Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) production house in Berlin during the period of Matthias Lilienthal's leadership (2003-11). Through its investigation of the HAU productions, this book encourages readers to consider how performance can invite fresh ways of perceiving culturally diverse and unfamiliar people through the creation and destabilization of a sense of the real and authentic.