REALITY CHECK
by Adrian Turpin
Originally published in FT Magazine, July 21st 2006
The Edinburgh festival is looming. Here, then, are some highlights to look out for. The novelist A.L. Kennedy is doing an hour of stand-up comedy. Hamlet is being performed on a bouncy castle and A Midsummer Night’s Dream up a tree.
To borrow Richard Littlejohn’s catchphrase: “You couldn’t make it up.”
But then who needs to make stuff up these days? It’s certainly not a prerequisite if you want to sell tickets at the festival this year. True-life stories are everywhere. From Girl Blog From Iraq: Baghdad Burning, the re-creation of a young Iraqi woman’s internet journal, to Peccadillo Circus, in which the comedian Lizzie Roper reveals real people’s fetishes and “dirty secrets” in their own words, real life has been plonked on stage and made into “art”.
None of this is exactly new. Verbatim theatre, in which the words of real people are reproduced unmediated on stage, has been around in one form or another for years. This has been championed at the Tricycle in Kilburn, London, which staged Srebrenica, Richard Norton-Taylor’s word-for-word recreation of the United Nations’ war crimes trials at The Hague. David Hare has made a second career in documentary theatre at the National Theatre in London.
One of the most successful shows of the 2005 Edinburgh Fringe was The Exonerated. It featured a revolving celebrity cast speaking the words of American death-row inmates, and subsequently transferred to London. Coming the other way this year is the Royal Court’s acclaimed production of My Name is Rachel Corrie, assembled by the actor Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner from the writing of a 23-year-old US peace activist who was killed by an Israeli Defence Forces’ bulldozer in Gaza.
What is interesting about this year’s crop of true-life drama is not so much its novelty but what it says about how accepted the documentary/verbatim formats have become. Increasingly, authenticity appears to be valued equally with invention.
That is not necessarily a criticism; the two don’t have to be in opposition. One of the most eagerly awaited plays at this year’s festival is Gregory Burke’s Blackwatch, produced by the new National Theatre of Scotland. Burke - one of the best young British playwrights - spent months interviewing the crew of a Warrior armoured carrier who served with the Black Watch regiment (now battalion) in Iraq. “A lot of it’s about the banality of the job,” Burke says. “It’s about sitting around in the desert being bored - followed by experiencing moments of extreme terror. What struck me is that it’s just like any other job except you can be killed.”
Burke’s script sticks closely, if not exactly, to the words of the soldiers. It cuts between their experiences on duty and the Fife pub where they later tell their story. But it also alternates the words with military songs and dances, the whole ritualised pageantry of war, a reminder that fact-based drama does not have to be constrained by naturalism.
Blackwatch, like many other verbatim plays, tells the stories of the dispossessed, the marginalised, those who do not usually have a voice. In Burke’s play that means the common soldier. In Unprotected, which arrives at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh from the Liverpool Everyman, the unheard voices are of sex workers and clients.
“I wonder whether what we’re seeing with all these type of plays is a hunger for the kind of engaged, agit-prop theatre of the 1970s,” says the play’s director Nina Raine. “Except that playwrights today are often much less willing to be on the nose about politics. Verbatim is a way of getting around that. It fills the void.”
Unprotected includes two mothers of murdered prostitutes. The many interviews were recorded by four writers and then woven together to make a story. “When we did it at the Everyman, there were some electrifying moments when the real working girls came to see the show. They were whooping and crying. I have never heard audiences like it.” One actor plays a woman who lost a child to cot-death; in the middle of the dress rehearsal, she looked out into the empty auditorium to find her real-life counterpart sobbing in the stalls.
For both dramatist and performer, this kind of intense connection with the person portrayed can be a mixed blessing. “One thing that can hamstring you is you start to develop a moral viewpoint and feel responsible for them,” says Raine. “It’s easy to forget that, particularly in the areas we’re dealing with, people often whitewash stuff. They don’t always tell the truth.”
All of which makes a nonsense of the idea that verbatim is the most transparent theatrical medium. What looks like a window on reality, unadorned, turns out to be as riddled with blind spots and as ideologically skewed as any conventional, unashamedly fictional work. It is just less honest about it.
Of course, these days you don’t even need a tape recorder to get in on the verbatim theatre act. The internet provides an infinity of material waiting to be honed into some kind of dramatic shape. In Bloggers - Real Internet Diaries, to be performed at Edinburgh’s Underbelly, writer and director Oliver Mann has trawled through hundreds of blogs to find what he calls “a broad spectrum of British society”. Each of the 10 people portrayed on stage has given permission for excerpts from their blogs to be spoken by an actor. Among them are an agoraphobic sex-line operator, a mother of three who thinks she’s a nymphomaniac, and a heartbroken twenty-something who has broken up with his girlfriend.
Isn’t all of this a little bit lazy? “I think that’s a legitimate point,” says Mann, “although obviously I don’t agree. What I’m doing isn’t that different to someone who edits, say, The Faber Book Of Diaries. It may be copying and pasting but you can still do it with artistry.”
For Mann, the proliferation of work such as Bloggers - Real Internet Diaries has as much to do with reality television as it does with politics. “Reality shows have completely superseded all appetite for televised drama and now I think some of the same process has started to happen in theatre. However naturalistic the acting is, people are going to start to think, ‘why aren’t we watching a real story?’
“And theatre provides a very intimate venue for those small-scale human soap operas to be told, in a way that is more powerful than reality TV. There’s just something about being close-up... I don’t think that’s going to change. It’s a form that’s here to stay.”
He may be right. But anyone feeling depressed about Big Brother culture contaminating the stage may take solace from Long Life, a remarkable show from the New Theatre of Riga which is playing at the Edinburgh International Festival this year.
Alvis Hermanis’s production portrays a day in the lives of the elderly residents of a communal block, employing as props objects that once belonged to real people and were left in their flats after the owners died.
Long Life has drawn praise for its detail and verisimilitude wherever it has toured, often inspiring debate about the way that society treats the old. On the surface it sounds like a model of docudrama. So it comes as a surprise to discover that all the characterisations in the play have been invented by the actors during weeks of intensive improvisation. Does that make it any less “authentic”? I don’t think so. Sometimes apparently you can just make it up.
“Blackwatch”, Traverse Theatre, August 1 to 27; “Bloggers - Real Internet Diaries”, Underbelly August 3 to 27; “Unprotected”, Traverse Theatre, August 3 to 20.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
