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.