Nothing But the Truth
By Terry Stoller
Verbatim Verbatim: Contemporary
Documentary Theatre
Edited by Will Hammond and Dan Steward
Oberon Books
£14.99 Paperback
True to the meaning of verbatim, editors
Will Hammond and Dan Steward have put together a volume of firsthand
accounts about making theater from found or recorded words. Here
are the foremost practitioners of verbatim theater in Britain--in
their own words: Robin Soans, David Hare, Max Stafford-Clark,
Alecky Blythe, Richard Norton-Taylor, and Nicolas Kent. The editors
introduce Verbatim Verbatim: Contemporary Documentary Theatre
by defining "verbatim" as a technique, rather than a form, in
which the words of "real people," either spoken or drawn from
existing records, are used to create the "dramatic presentation."
This makes for an unwieldy category, one that could include a
meaninglessly wide array of plays containing actual people and
what they've said. Hammond and Steward say that verbatim theater's
distinguishing feature is its veracity claim, its promise of accuracy
and truthfulness and its demanding code of ethics for dramatists.
In essays and interviews rich with detail,
the artists give their reasons for engaging in verbatim theater
and talk about their methods of gathering, selecting and presenting
the material--all the while balancing good storytelling with fidelity
to the documentary evidence and the voices of the individuals.
Their plays encompass a wide spectrum of subject matter: government
accountability, war crimes, terrorism, housing projects, and senior
citizens dating.
Actor Robin Soans's first verbatim work
as a dramatist explored the political climate of Britain leading
up to the 1997 election, through interviews with Londoners in
a northwest district. His focus was the personal concerns that
affect voting. Later, he was approached by director Max Stafford-Clark
to create a verbatim play about conditions at the council housing
estate (the British equivalent of an American low-income housing
project) in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where writer Andrea Dunbar,
who died at age 29, had lived and where she set her frank and
gritty play Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982). Soans and a
team of actors interviewed policemen, drug addicts, prostitutes,
priests and others in the Bradford area. The result, A State
Affair (2000), was produced in conjunction with a revival
of Dunbar's play. For Soans, the importance of verbatim theater
is that people can speak for themselves--and in some cases, that
means the "amplification of an otherwise lost voice." The audience
as a kind of stand-in for the interviewer becomes a participant,
an attentive ear for all those voices.
Although he doesn't mention it in his
essay, the topicality of Soans's verbatim plays was underscored
in July 2005. His Talking to Terrorists, about the experiences
of former terrorists and terrorism's victims, directed by Stafford-Clark,
was playing at London's Royal Court Theatre at the time of the
bombings on the London transit system--while his Arab-Israeli
Cookbook, consisting of stories of daily life in the aftermath
and continuing threat of violence, was being performed at the
Tricycle Theatre in northwest London. Soans does note that the
antiterrorist branch of Scotland Yard went to see Talking
to Terrorists and "said they found it very informative."
Stafford-Clark and playwright David Hare
discuss their work in a joint interview that reaches back to the
Joint Stock Theatre Company in the mid 1970s. In Stafford-Clark's
creative process, actors participate in firsthand research, which
is explored in workshops--as was done in A State Affair.
He uses research for all his work, not just his verbatim plays.
Stafford-Clark says the difference with verbatim plays is that
the research is presented in its "raw" state. In 2003, he directed
Hare's The Permanent Way, a verbatim play that looks
at the failures of the privatized British rail system, including
fatal train accidents. Hare says the attitudes of the survivors
and the bereaved in these accidents--the former wanting to move
on, the latter wanting to take the accident investigations further,
to assign blame--led to tension between them and to the metaphor
of the play: "Deciding what is necessary suffering and what is
unnecessary suffering." For Hare, a documentary play must have
a metaphor, though it's often misunderstood to be just "a load
of facts on the stage."
Playwright/actor Alecky Blythe named her
theater company Recorded Delivery for her onstage technique: in
performance, actors listen through earphones to recorded interviewees,
replicating the speech patterns of the individuals they're portraying.
Blythe thinks this method, in which actors don't memorize their
lines, provides spontaneity and helps the actors remain true to
the original expression of those lines. For her first play, Come
Out Eli (2003), she examined a community's reactions to a
critical event through interviews in an east London neighborhood.
The event was a protracted standoff between the police and a gunman
holed up in an apartment with a hostage. In subsequent work, she
has looked at diverse lifestyles. For The Girlfriend Experience,
which opened at the Royal Court in September 2008, she recorded
conversations in the living room of a brothel. Blythe says that
in her plays she is more interested in the drama than the journalism,
adding, however, that verbatim drama can "provide insight where
journalism fails."
The failures of journalism are addressed
in the interview with David Hare, whose Stuff Happens
(2004) about going to war in Iraq combines both verbatim and imagined
material. His prime example is the misreporting by the British
and American press that bought into the "Blair/Bush propaganda"
prior to the war. Richard Norton-Taylor, Guardian journalist
and author of six of the Tricycle Theatre's staged tribunals,
acknowledges the limitations of journalism. In an essay that gives
political context to his work along with excerpts from the plays,
he writes that the tribunals dramatize "the methodical process
of cutting through ... layers of duplicity" in the various testimony.
In his first play, Half the Picture, he feels he got
closer to the truth than he could have with his journalism.
The Tricycle's director Nicolas Kent produced
Half the Picture, based on the British government inquiry
into the sale of arms to Iraq, in 1994. Norton-Taylor writes that
shortly into his playwriting career, he appreciated the advantages
of a coherent two-hour-plus theater piece over the typically briefer
coverage of news events in the media. With Norton-Taylor at times
editing tens of thousands of words for one play, Kent has staged
tribunals about the Nuremberg trials, the lead-up to the Iraq
war, and the shooting of civil-rights marchers in Northern Ireland.
The plays expose the "attitude of mind, the intellectual subculture,
of individuals in positions of power and authority," writes Norton-Taylor.
In 1999, the Tricycle presented The
Colour of Justice, an inquiry into the police investigation
of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a young black man killed by
a white gang in southeast London--a murder for which no one was
convicted. Kent, who was interviewed for the book, says he measures
the success of the tribunals by whether they foster understanding
of the issues. For example, when the audience listened to the
police testimony in The Colour of Justice and heard the
way in which the police spoke about black people, they began to
comprehend the nature of institutional racism--a process that
he believes can lead to change.
Although Kent admits he doesn't feel strongly
about verbatim theater, he finds the form useful for staging issues-oriented
plays: for the speed in which a play can be mounted and for its
ability to portray two sides of an argument believably by using
people's actual words. In 2004, Kent commissioned and co-directed
(with Sacha Wares) a verbatim play about the British detainees
at Guantánamo Bay: Guantanamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom'
by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo. And in 2007, along with
lawyer Philippe Sands and Norton-Taylor, Kent devised an unofficial
hearing to examine whether Prime Minister Tony Blair could be
charged with the crime of aggression against Iraq. The resulting
piece was Called to Account.
Kent uses microphones for his tribunal
actors to ensure a low-key "hyper-naturalism." Like Soans, he
considers the role of the audience crucial and keeps the house
lights on to include them in the event. He describes the depth
of their involvement at performances of The Colour of Justice.
When at the end of the play, the judge called for the people at
the inquiry to stand for a minute's silence in honor of Stephen
Lawrence and his family, everyone in the audience would stand:
"Having listened to the evidence they were involved in what that
family had gone through and the way they had been treated, and
they wanted to show respect to the family, and they stood."
That story serves as a fitting coda to
Hammond and Steward's thoughtful collection.
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