News from the stage
The Canadian curtain opens on reality theatre, as “verbatim” crosses the pond
BY Carrie-May Siggins
Photography by Michel Mersereau / Dianne Fukunaga
All revolutions in art, a philosopher once said, are made in the name of greater realism. If this is the case, an uprising in Canadian theatre is at hand. Verbatim theatre, a form of play where the scripts are compiled word-for-word from transcripts, is travelling across the pond after a decade of popularity in the U.K. The genre seems to have peaked in the U.K., but verbatim is being presented by an increasing number of theatres across Canada.
Vancouver writer and actor Alex Ferguson, for example, is currently co-creating a piece with Vancouver’s Urban Crawl Performance Society and the Kalayaan Centre that explores the experiences of Filipinos involved in the federal government’s Live-in Caregiver Program. The majority of the program’s participants are from the Philippines, and many are forced to work for little money in unsupervised conditions, for an average of nine years, before they can earn enough points to fully immigrate, and bring their families to Canada. Like a newspaper exposé, the intended effect of the piece is to bring awareness and change policy.
The content of verbatim pieces is usually political, and productions create predictable controversy—but the verbatim form itself is also contested. Borrowing as much from journalism as from theatre, verbatim opens itself to criticisms over the truthclaims implicit in using actual text. In relying exclusively on non-fictional record, verbatim productions have been known to not-so-subtly claim to represent the “real” version of events.
Critics argue that any form of art that purports to reflect what “really happened” is inherently misguided. A script is always filtered through the writer/compiler, making objectivity impossible.
Despite disagreement over the authenticity of verbatim—or maybe because of it—the radical form of grassroots theatre carries with it the potential to not only invigorate political theatre, but also to bring audiences and understanding to stories we don’t hear from conventional news sources.
Verbatim theatre has been popular in England for about 10 years now, and the productions tend to explore perspectives on social conflicts, including questions of class and race that run deep in British life. The birth of the movement there goes back to the 1960s, but the genre has its roots in 1930s North America. One of verbatim theatre’s first incarnations was as a federally funded program for American Depression-era audiences, called the Living Newspaper Project. Unemployed reporters and theatre practitioners got together and sifted through the daily news to create theatre pieces to inform and politically motivate their mostly working-class audiences.
It wasn’t until 30 years later that verbatim sprang back to life, this time in Germany. In 1965, Peter Weiss wrote and produced The Investigation, an account of the Frankfurt War Crimes trials. Weiss wove together witness accounts of Auschwitz to create a piece of theatre no one had experienced before—the real words of those who had survived one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. Weiss’s tradition of transcript-as-script is what is still distinguishing verbatim from documentary theatre, plays simply based on real events.
In the 1990s, the idea of transcript-as-theatre found a broad audience in the U.K. Best known for successfully introducing verbatim to the mainstream, London’s Tricycle Theatre’s “tribunal plays” brought public inquiries to the stage. In 1999, Tricycle staged The Colour of Justice, a reconstruction of the inquiry into the death of black high-school student Stephen Lawrence. A report, released a month after the play’s premiere, exposed the deep-seated systemic racism that led to the mismanagement of the case by London police. The killers (young white supremacists) never came to justice, and police were never held accountable.
The Colour of Justice became a huge hit in England. Audiences packed the Victoria Palace Theatre to watch details of the report play out on the dimly lit stage. For many audience members, the theatrical affirmation of the injustice of the case created a much-needed sense of closure. As Professor Janelle Reinelt writes in The Drama Review, “The initial performances repeated and rehearsed the facts, reclaimed their undeniability at a time when the public was wanting ‘closure,’—to be comforted even, by this reassertion of the ‘truth.’” As it toured, the play went a long way in creating dialogue about race in British society.
In many respects, this sense of dialog had been quashed in the U.K. for years. During the Thatcher era in England, official policy dictated that terrorists were not to be negotiated with. Thatcher refused to supply the “oxygen of publicity,” or any attention negotiation would bring to terrorists’ causes.
This is in part what led director Max Stafford-Clark, one of the leading directors of new works in the U.K. and a forefather of verbatim theatre, and writer Robin Soans to create Talking to Terrorists. Stafford-Clark’s Out of Joint theatre company spent a year interviewing those who had taken part in acts of violence against the state, including an IRA member who killed five people in a hotel explosion; a couple who were victims of that explosion; a Ugandan child soldier; a fighter for Kurdish independence; and an ex-British diplomat who had rallied against the use of information obtained through torture in Uzbekistan.
Stafford-Clark and Soans undertook the project believing that we need to understand what motivates the players to solve conflicts involving terrorism. As Soans told The Daily Telegraph, “We live in an age where people are constantly pigeonholed. Terrorists are, in many cases, demonized. They are seen as bearded devils who squat on Afghanistan hillsides who want to mangle our way of life. That doesn’t seem very helpful in telling us who a terrorist is. They’re not one-dimensional characters. We needed to humanize them.”
The methods for bringing those characters to life are as varied as the productions. Stafford-Clark uses performers to conduct original research for most of his non-fiction productions. These actor/researchers usually carry out hundreds of hours of interviews with the real-life players in a story. In Stafford-Clark productions, these actors then “feed back,” or perform the interview transcripts in character for the writer, who then retreats to the keyboard.
Another technique of verbatim, practised by the U.K. writer and director Aleck Blythe, again mixes acting and imitation. Blythe creates plays by directly editing the sound files from interviews rather than transcribing them. There is no paper script for the actors to work with. Instead, during rehearsal and performance, the actors wear earphones, through which they hear the edited interview. “They copy exactly what they hear,” writes Blythe in an essay on verbatim theatre, “including every cough, stutter and hesitation. By keeping the earphones on during the performance the chance of the actors slipping into their own speech pattern or parody is limited as they have to keep up with what they are listening to.”
The popularity of dramatizing events in real words may be a relatively fresh approach in Canada, but a form of theatre which straddled the line between documentary theatre and verbatim had an early start here, too. One of the first Canadian productions of verbatim theatre was The Farm Show, created and staged by Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille in 1972. The Farm Show featured stories from Ontario farm labourers about the hardships and satisfactions of living and working on the land.
Thirty-five years later, another high-profile piece of Canadian verbatim was the hit of this past summer’s Toronto Fringe Festival: Talk Thirty to Me, written and produced by Oonagh Duncan, creative director of Oyster Productions. Duncan, who created a verbatim piece for her graduating thesis from London’s East 15 Acting School, interviewed more than 50 29- year olds about what it was like being on the cusp of turning 30. Talk Thirty to Me garnered feature articles in such publications as The Globe and Mail and The Calgary Sun, which, for a fringe show, is great press.
For Talk Thirty to Me, Duncan recorded over 100 hours of interviews with her subjects. With the help of a team of volunteers, she transcribed every “um,” interruption and grammatical error in order to capture the raw thought and speech patterns of her subjects.
