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Topic: Verbatim theatre

In the News (Sun 15 Nov 09)

Northern Trust

Marvin Harrison

Peter Chernin

Gary Locke

Match Play

Penelope Cruz

Mickey Rourke

AR Rahman

Danny Boyle

Hugh Jackman

	Australian Financial Review - (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		The idea that there is something phoney about using theatre as a form of current affairs critique is not new, and surely Marowitz is still right: any treatment of politics on the stage, if it does not first and foremost present itself as a work of theatre, should be approached with scepticism.
		The idea of political theatre, as it has shifted and developed over the last generation, is littered with such ironies, not least of which is that, as the 1970s wore on, Ayckbourn came increasingly to be seen as a comically analytical political writer.
		Together, they generated the idea of fringe theatre, and it was their way of working against the theatrical institutions of the time - rather than ideological principles per se - that still really underpins what we mean by political theatre today.
	afr.com /articles/2004/09/23/1095651460090.html (3298 words)

	Print Article: Belvoir's bid to prise open closed doors
		"[Theatre] is not an escape from the world, but there's an element of retreat in that you go there to contemplate and...
		His aim is for the theatre to serve as a forum for ideas and to reflect the currents in contemporary Australian society, refracting them in "challenging or beautiful or funny ways".
		is a piece of verbatim theatre in the tradition of two previous Belvoir successes: Aftershocks, which dealt with the Newcastle earthquake, and The Laramie Project, which focused on a gay-hate murder.
	www.smh.com.au /cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2002/10/03/1033538725523.html (693 words)

	Bulletin - Theatre of the displaced (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		The result is “verbatim theatre”: the words we will hear on stage are taken from transcripts of those interviews.
		Verbatim theatre is a form of “docu-theatre”, a genre of political theatre that has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years.
		He acknowledges that the popularity of “theatre of fact” may suggest “a deeper problem for writers, namely that modern life in its unimaginable complexity seems to defy invention itself”.
	bulletin.ninemsn.com.au /bulletin/EdDesk.nsf/0/637962f5e461bc14ca256de90081df6b?OpenDocument (1470 words)

	Author Bio & Notes (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		It went on two nationals tours, had two runs at Soho Theatre and was invited to be performed in the House of Lords.
		I remember the atmosphere on the first night being very tense, each cast member finding a quiet corner to sit in, or a corridor to pace, where they could run on re-rerun the complex speeches through their minds.
		Impressed by the power of this form of theatre, I suggested to Stephen Daldry, who was running the Royal Court at the time, that I might try to write an English equivalent.
	www.thearab-israelicookbook-la.com /authornotes1.htm (1797 words)

	Observer \| Theatre of war
		Edgar sees political theatre as going in 'whooshes' like a sequence of comets - 'We were due for a whoosh.' The Bush administration has provided a 'whoosh' for satirists - the Edinburgh fringe is swarming with Bush impersonators.
		But it is not satire, it is verbatim theatre that has recently made political theatre high profile.
		Edgar's eloquent theory is: 'Verbatim theatre fills the hole left by the current inadequacy of TV documentary, perished under the tanktracks of reality TV.' And while political theatre comes closer to documentary, journalism increasingly engages in a kind of verbatim theatre itself.
	observer.guardian.co.uk /print/0,3858,5003951-102280,00.html (1618 words)

	Telegraph \| Arts \| Should terrorists be given a voice?
		One of the most riveting pieces of theatre last year was created by an actor who has been around for decades and appeared in more than 80 stage productions, many at the RSC and the National, but whose name may ring only the faintest of bells.
		With the aid of real-time cooking on stage, audiences were transported into the lives of those who would normally feature as background to news reports: a frightened elderly Christian couple, a poor Palestinian hummus-maker, an Israeli woman caught at a supermarket checkout at the time of a suicide bomb attack.
		The play was a sell-out at the Gate theatre in London's Notting Hill and is set to be revived in July at the Tricycle in Kilburn, the epicentre of the current theatrical vogue for telling it like it is: verbatim or documentary theatre.
	www.telegraph.co.uk /arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/04/23/btterrorists23.xml (982 words)

	Telegraph \| Arts \| Review 2004: theatre
		After years in which cultural commentators have mourned the death of political theatre, it was back with a vengeance in the bloody and tendentious aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.
		Using a mixture of verbatim theatre and imaginative speculation, it showed that Bush is a far more complex figure than the brain-dead warmonger of popular imagination, and allowed the audience to draw its own conclusions about the invasion of Iraq and its messy aftermath.
		And after its dramatisation of the Hutton inquiry last year, the Tricycle came up with another revealing piece of verbatim theatre, Guantanamo, about the treatment of prisoners rounded up in the war against terror and held, outside the remit of the Geneva Convention, at the US naval base in Cuba.
	www.telegraph.co.uk /arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/12/18/bt04thea18.xml (1501 words)

	The New Yorker: Goings On About Town: The Theatre (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		In a new play by John Patrick Shanley, set in the nineteen-sixties at a Catholic school in the Bronx, a nun (Cherry Jones) worries that a priest (Brían F. O’Byrne) is too close to a male student.
		The Pearl Theatre Company presents Gogol’s rarely performed 1833 play about a woman who is wooed by four suitors.
		Theatre for the New City, 155 First Ave., at 9th St. 212-254-1109.
	www.newyorker.com /goingson/theatre?041122goth_GOAT_theatre (1525 words)

	Untitled Document (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Given the current vogue for verbatim theatre, it is refreshing to see a playwright willing to run with his own imagination to explore an idea.
		Political theatre is often obvious, dull and preaches to the choir.
		Ackland is interested in ideas but he does not use his characters as mouthpieces, this preserves the dramatic integrity of the characters but the level of the debate tends to reflect their naivety and youthful idealism.
	www.culturewars.org.uk /Frames/Theatre.htm (3594 words)

	The British Theatre Guide: News from the North West - 5th June, 2005
		There will be workshops on how to write for the stage, readings of new plays by emerging talent, discussions with some of the country¹s leading writers of film and theatre and a piece of verbatim theatre about Liverpool's proposed managed zone for sex workers.
		This week, the auditorium of the Octagon Theatre in Bolton is turned into the grassy knoll of a music festival and a live band will be playing hits from the first Summer of Love.
		John Paul Zaccarini performs the 2002 Total Theatre Award winner at Edinburgh Festival Throat - "a witty and sexy synthesis of circus, physical comedy/cabaret and dance with something profound to say about masculine identity and vulnerability" - at the Contact Theatre on 9, 10, 17 and 18 June.
	www.britishtheatreguide.info /news/NWN050605.htm (376 words)

	FLYING INKPOT THEATRE REVIEW: Boxing Day: The TsunamI Project by The Necessary Stage
		A part of me protests at this, saying that theatre should be used to express human tragedy theatrically and dramatically, that it should not be impotent in the face of real disaster.
		The company employed the Verbatim Theatre method, which relies on accurate transcripts of interviews, to present the words of actual survivors of the tsunami as they spoke them.
		Writer Haresh Sharma made no attempt to forge a narrative out of the disparate monologues that resulted, merely editing them and arranging them as might the producer of a TV news special, so much of the production was simply a series of verbal snapshots, unconnected save by what they all discussed.
	inkpot.com /theatre/05reviews/0506,boxiday,ml.html (1808 words)

	Encore Theatre Magazine
		Some theatres are ugly and dull: the Palladium is a horror, the Queen's may one day bounce back into architectural fashion but it seems unlikely; the Dominion has all the cosy merit of a warehouse and the Apollo Victoria, is an arrestingly unattractive building.
		It feels frivolous to insist on what they used to call the theatre theatrical when matters are so urgent, but we should hold our nerve and ask the questions, because to bite them back is to despair of the theatre when we should be exploring its most political contours.
		Last year's Theatres Trust report estimated that £17m needed to be spent annually until 2018 to make the West End viable in the long term as public performance spaces.
	encoretheatremagazine.blogspot.com (15087 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Underlying the presentation of new theatre is fierce competition for the prestigious awards on offer, not that this is the ostensive focus, but it does raise the stakes nicely for those chosen to participate.
		Long live live theatre!’ This production illustrated the way that the Festival aspires to the highest level of professional theatre practice: this is why the festival attracts enormous loyalty from the regular attendees over the 50 years it has been running.
		As fairly inexperienced theatre writers their agenda was less to explore collaborative theatre practice in developing their play but more to get ideas of how to transform their substantial amount of research and thinking on the subject to the stage.
	www.dramaturgy.co.uk /happening/newsletter_march04.html (3326 words)

	Guardian \| What to say about ...
		You were stricken with apathy at the recent elections but your political appetite has been whetted, you declare, by a string of lively docu-dramas at the theatre.
		Guantánamo's popularity must in some part be down to its use of the fashionable technique of direct quotation, or verbatim theatre, to recount the stories of the prisoners and their families, you say, echoing the Daily Mail.
		As you purchase your ticket for Guantánamo, you take the opportunity to tell the box-office vendor that this latest wave of verbatim theatre can be traced back to David Hare.
	www.guardian.co.uk /print/0,3858,4953239-111355,00.html (412 words)

	Guardian \| The Laramie Project
		The result is a remarkable piece of verbatim theatre that pieces together the story of Shepard and presents a detailed portrait of a small US town, in the residents' own words.
		When it is bad, it panders to a Jerry Springer-style true confessions sensationalism; at its worst, it is like irresponsible journalism, a lie that misrepresents people and their lives.
		When it is done with scrupulous care, as it is here, it places theatre at the centre of a public debate about what kind of society we live in and would like to live in.
	www.politics.guardian.co.uk /print/0,3858,4626400-108884,00.html (363 words)

	Royal Holloway : Department of Drama & Theatre - Chris Megson
		My doctoral research explored the impact and legacy of 1968 on the development of political theatre practices in Britain.
		Currently, I am writing a book on Naturalism in the theatre (for Polity Press), which extends my interest in theatrical documentary, ‘verbatim’ theatre and performative negotiations of the ‘real’ (I have a particular interest in the Tribunal Plays that have been performed at the Tricycle Theatre, and elsewhere, over the past ten years).
		These interests inform my teaching in the department which focuses on Modern British and American drama, theatres of resistance, directing and Naturalist theatre, and I supervise a number of postgraduate/research students working in these areas.
	www.rhul.ac.uk /Drama/staff/megson_chris (577 words)

	R E A L T I M E (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		But to get at the truth, at what went unsaid, at the appalling complicity that has made asylum seekers’ lives so miserable for so long under successive Australian governments, that is the real task.
		Much of the theatre that has emerged since the Tampa incident has been strongly felt, but has been mostly a rallying call, if a necessary one, to the converted.
		Ben Ellis’ Some People for the Sydney Theatre Company promised an undoing of the language that has so knotted Australia into acceptance of Howard dogma, but despite moments of real insight—the everyday turned surreally political—it went down the predictable path of Australian family pathology.
	www.realtimearts.net /rt59/gallasch_version.html (814 words)

	outofjoint.co.uk - The Official Out Of Joint Theatre Company website.
		I was reminded of this while watching Out of Joint's Talking to Terrorists, the latest superb piece of verbatim theatre from those masters of the form: the director Max Stafford-Clark and the writer Robin Soans.
		But the eternal question raised by factual theatre like this is whether it does anything fictional theatre can't.
		Robin Soans’s powerful and probing piece of theatre expertly selects, cuts and interweaves the verbatim accounts from former terrorists, their victims and the politicians who attempt to negotiate with them.
	www.outofjoint.co.uk /prods/reviews_t2t.html (2927 words)

	canberra.yourguide (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		The company with the odd name, version 1.0, returns with more scabrous verbatim theatre, which it describes as "essentially about the process of citizenship.
		As you enter the theatre, some of these matters are brought viscerally to mind as a hooded man walks gingerly, barefoot along a board spiked with vicious nails.
		He's instructed where to put his feet safely by a cold-voiced woman; and his progress is videoed at ground level on to screens around the TV studio set.
	canberra.yourguide.com.au /detail.asp?class=features&subclass=features&category=feature&story_id=408930&y=2005&m=7 (663 words)

	Independent Online Edition > Features (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		The Waterman family are the subject of Butterfly, a new piece from the Quarantine theatre company, which, since it was set up by Richard Gregory and Renny O'Shea in 1998, has thrived on using ordinary people to explore the relationship between truth and artifice within theatre.
		It might be tempting to see Quarantine's work, with its emphasis on the authenticity of the performance, as possessing a similar journalistic authority to the verbatim theatre of Nicholas Kent's Tribunal plays at London's Tricycle, and recent plays by David Hare, both of which source material directly from testimonies given by members of the public.
		Quarantine acquires its theatrical conviction from the fact that, unlike in most theatre, the actors are able to insist on the truth of their own performance.
	enjoyment.independent.co.uk /theatre/features/article34665.ece (1378 words)

	National Theatre : Teachers : INSET
		Day two: Using the body and space to create theatre that will engage an audience when there is minimal text, story and character.
		Exercises explore notions of theatre as outlined in Brook’s The Empty Space, with a focus on teaching strategies for A-Level students.
		This intensive week includes the opportunity to participate in practical workshops, seminars given by NT theatre professionals and group presentations devised by participants.
	www.nt-online.org /?bid=11 (1424 words)

	The Wrecking Ball \| New Political Theatre
		In political theatre, as with any kind of drama, it’s not enough to know the story you want to tell; you have to be sure you’re telling it in the right way.
		And opening soon at The Hampstead Theatre in London is The Rubinstein Kiss, which is based on the persecution and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of having sold secrets to the Soviets during the height of the Cold War.
		of the theatre and inspired all of us at Theatre Second Floor in the 70’s…and he was a great friend…and a brilliant mind….a mind the likes of we may never see again.” A small service is being held today (Monday 8 August), with a celebration of his life and work being planned for September.
	www.thewreckingball.ca (1584 words)

	Talking to terrorists from Guardian Unlimited: Culture Vulture
		While factual theatre can sound a bit too much like hard work, if not downright dull, there's nothing boring about this brilliantly staged and acted evening.
		The idea is for the audience to leave the theatre feeling sympathy for both terrorist and victim.
		This is theatre as politics by other means.
	blogs.guardian.co.uk /culturevulture/archives/2005/07/05/talking_to_terrorists.html (560 words)

	icLiverpool - Terrorists telling their own stories
		He particularly recalls one woman going into her garden to collect a lemon and returning to tell him that she could never forget the bullet holes in the gate.
		The lecture in the middle is what Newsnight or The Guardian might use but that's the difference between newspapers, television and the theatre.
		There were some he spoke to who did not wish to discuss certain aspects of their lives, the man who organised the blowing up the the Brighton hotel, for example, declining to discuss "operational aspects".
	icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk /entertainment/theatre/tm_objectid=15587624&method=full&siteid=50061&page=3&headline=terrorists-telling-their-own-stories-name_page.html (422 words)

	Nuclear Veterans Verbatim Theatre Project Update
		The play is about recognition and justice, centring on the experience of the veterans and their families, using the verbatim theatre approach which is anchored to interviews with veterans, their widows and children.
		In verbatim theatre, the interviews are taped and meticulously transcribed, before a script is devised from the interviewees’ spoken words.
		To capture the authenticity of each participant’s story the Verbatim Theatre technique allows the script to include and reflect an accurate ‘voiceprint’ of both the stories being told and of the people telling them.
	users.bigpond.net.au /anva/play_update.htm (608 words)

	Craig Murray - Talking to Terrorists (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		A play currently running at the Royal Court Theatre addresses the painfully immediate issue of terrorism and gives a voice to those involved or affected by it.
		One problem with verbatim theatre in the past has been a tendency to patronise its sources with a layer of caricature, of knowingness, in the portrayal of the speaker, undercutting the words with an imposed commentary on the person who said them, often for the sake of cheap laugh or an easily scored point.
		This is not so much verbatim theatre as imperative theatre.
	www.craigmurray.co.uk /archives/2005/07/talking_to_terr_1.html (632 words)

	Red Pepper \| Arts \| Stuff Happens. An epic piece of storytelling, Michael Kustow (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Before evaluating Hare’s play, currently being performed on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage – the most central public stage we have in the UK, it would be worthwhile looking at the currents of political theatre that have preceded it.
		Another kind of political theatre is the theatre of burlesque and satire; theatre that has a kind of cartoon aesthetic.
		Stuff Happens has neither the deliberate flatness of ‘verbatim theatre’, nor, though it is witty, the entertainment euphoria of satire, nor, because it is too close to the event, the anguished insight of Shakespeare’s history plays, which are Hare’s model and whose classical clarity he often achieves.
	www.redpepper.org.uk /Oct2004/x-Oct2004-Kustow.html (1505 words)

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