Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
Verbatim theatre is a form of documentary-style theatre in which the plays are constructed from real-life interviews or testimonies. This can take different forms: the technique of ‘recorded delivery’ is sometimes used, where the audience is treated to actual recordings of real interviews taken place, with the actors then mimicking the voices of those interviewed, taking on those ‘characters’; another technique is to use the language and idiom of real people, usually picked up in interview, to generate the dialogue of the play.
Theatre companies or directors who produce verbatim plays are never short of material: productions in the last few years have included such topics as the financial crisis (David Hare’s The Power of Yes), the story of an American woman killed by an Israeli bulldozer during the Second Intifada in Gaza (My Name is Rachel Corrie, by Katherine Viner and Alan Rickman), and the British General Election 2010 (LookLeftLookRight’s current Roundhouse production of Counted, on until May 22nd).
For some, verbatim theatre treads a careful line between what counts as theatre and what counts as an invasion of privacy. Jenna Omeltschenko, associate producer of Jonathan Holmes’ site-specific piece The Mill – City of Dreams, set in a disused mill in Bradford, encountered the difficulty of gathering research. She had to spend a lot of time in various migrant communities before the people who lived there felt comfortable enough to share their stories with her. It is seen by some critics as a misuse of the dramatic form, a way of diluting people’s personal tragedies and rendering them as entertainment for a middle-class audience. Robin Soans was the playwright of two verbatim plays (Talking to Terrorists and The Arab-Israeli Cookbook) that both opened, in a twist of irony, just before the terrorist attacks in London on 7th July 2005. He said in an interview, "You must never forget that it's someone's life".
Verbatim theatre has scathingly been likened to reality TV, the playwright David Eldridge remarking that the companies who perform it emphasise its hard-hitting realism, “when actually such work is as subjectively edited and put together as any work of fiction”. However, verbatim theatre is seen as a way of accessing certain inconvenient truths in our societies, an effective way of raising awareness of social injustices or political scandals. Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, co-writers of The Exonerated, an award-winning verbatim play about exonerated death row inmates across America, suggest that the ordinary style of narrative theatre is about implicating and involving the audience by making them sympathize with the characters or situation. As verbatim theatre has its basis in real-life stories, the audience is automatically implicated even further. Verbatim theatre has impressed audiences globally, raising vital questions about the world we live in by giving a voice to those who may otherwise not be heard.
Interest piqued? Go and see the TFTV department’s second-year verbatim productions, based on real stories from homeless people. They start at 7.30pm on both Thursday 19th and Friday 20th, in the TFTV building on Hes East. Each performance is only half an hour and is free!
To reserve tickets for Thursday’s performance of ‘Don’t Step Over Me,’ please email tftv-verbatim-2011@hotmail.co.uk
To reserve tickets for Friday’s performance of ‘Just Three Paycheques,’ please email ‘TICKETS’ to verbatimproduction@gmail.com
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