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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.