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Verbatim theatre, a type of drama based on actual words spoken by ‘real people’, has been at the heart of a remarkable and unexpected renaissance of the genre in Great Britain since the mid-nineties. At the present time, verbatim theatre is often denied the status of ‘new writing’ because it disrupts the dominant ideology’s cultural certainties (authorship, process of composition, status of the text). By alluding to a possible relationship between verbatim theatre and the new writing genre, this paper will suggest that there have been, however, many crossovers and similarities between the two approaches which merit critical reevaluation. Certainly, the verbatim output of the past two decades, characterised by the absence of any prescribed form and a commitment to aesthetic experimentation, serves as a testimony to the growing permeation of verbatim techniques into new writing. 4 See Arts Council England (2009) ‘New Writing in Theatre 2003-2008: An Assessment of New Writing wit3The term ‘massaged verbatim’ was coined by Australian playwright Alana Valentine to designate the opposite of ‘pure verbatim’, the use of verbatim techniques to create fiction and the shaping of the interviews around an invented narrative structure. Such a term, I would argue, carries the promise of the unexpected, stretching verbatim theatre in a way it had not been before where ‘there is no pretence that the play is anything more than a fiction’ (Valentine). What is clear from all her observations is that ‘verbatim is diversifying and changing and growing to the point now where it is beginning to reach for all the skills and tools of the classically trained dramatist.’ Indeed, contemporary plays in the new millennium do not have to be one or the other, they can be both at the same time.
Interestingly, the Guardian published in the summer of 2013 an article entitled ‘Open Court: did it change the face of new writing?’, following the Royal Court’s New Writing Summer Festival where Matt Trueman seemed to concede that the inclusion of ‘dramatists, storytellers, verbatim playwrights poets presenting monologues, lectures, readings audio plays and even those pieces that could readily be described as “plays”’ further interrogated the British phenomenon of new writing. Opening with a presentation of both these categories in a theoretical outline, we will then proceed to a demonstration of how these categories apply in dramatic and theatrical practice, before examining in more detail the changing paradigm within contemporary practice. The study ends by arguing that the increased funding following the Boyden Report led to both a reconsideration and broadening of the definition of what new writing could possibly mean in our fast-moving era of globalisation.4Verbatim theatre in Britain is widely held to be enjoying a golden period in the new millennium. Shows like London Road and Black Watch are popular hits both at home and abroad; inventive companies such as DV8 Physical Theatre are pushing the boundaries of what verbatim theatre is, while ‘it seems that new writing is everywhere, and everywhere it is attracting new audiences’ (Sierz 2013, 249).
Yet, it would be non-controversial to posit that, by tradition, the relationship between new writing and verbatim theatre is a troubled one whereby the latter is often approached with extreme radicalism. 5 Lucy Prebble and Richard Bean have both written verbatim monologues for the 2006 National Theatre’s10However, this is not an impregnable position and so called ‘new writing’ playwrights themselves have begun to experiment with verbatim theatre which serves as a testimony to the way verbatim techniques have recently permeated new writing. David Hare, Mark Ravenhill, David Edgar, Dennis Kelly, Caryl Churchill, Tanika Gupta, Gregory Burke, Lucy Prebble, Richard Bean and Linda McLean—to name only ten of them—have all crossed the line into the territory of verbatim theatre with various degrees of involvement.
For instance, Mark Ravenhill in A Life in Three Acts makes the verbatim process explicit from the outset in the opening of Act One: ‘Hello, I’m Mark Ravenhill. I’m a playwright.
In the past few weeks, I’ve been talking to the performer Bette Bourne about his life. We’ve divided our conversation into three parts. A life in three acts. Tonight is part one. We’d like to read you edited transcripts of our conversations. Ladies, gentlemen and all others—Bette Bourne’ (3).
David Hare in The Power of Yes—a verbatim play on the financial crisis—uses a different ploy to reveal the origin of his text by dramatising himself under the fictitious name ‘The Author’ (3) as well as the process of making the verbatim play: ‘Author: Honestly, we’re not going to get anywhere if you insist on writing the play for me. You have to give me the material, not the play’ (6). The reader is rapidly made aware that there is a strong correlation between this mysterious author and the real author David Hare when a corporate lawyer named Harry Lovelock mentions that he ‘saw his previous plays, Stuff Happens and The Permanent Way’ (4). Tanika Gupta’s Gladiator Games is again different when it comes to uncovering its verbatim origin. She provides the reader with a very thorough list of sources that are clearly identified within the text: ‘Verbatim text reproduced from these sources is marked with an asterisk in square brackets.; the references are given at the end of the reproduced text in the form shown above (V1a, V3, etc). Anything unmarked is a dramatization based on events/hearsay’ (28).11As I shall argue, the two categories are not as linear and stable as one might think and new writing at its broadest includes a wide variety of configurations:going to see ‘new writing’ no longer necessarily means going to a theatre at 8 pm in the evening and watching a play on the stage. That there has been a diversification in not just where (eg site specific) and when (late night shows, festivals) you see some new writing but also in what format (short piece presentations, readings, more experimental work, etc).
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This not only captures different kinds, and sometimes younger, audiences but also has the added benefit of giving emerging writers and artists a wider range of opportunities to hone their craft in whichever direction it might be going. (Dunton, Nelson and Shand 8)12In this context, the fast-moving 21st–century in British theatre can be seen to have dialectically produced new methods for theatre practitioners, as well as reinventing the existing notion of new writing inasmuch as it is always in active negotiation with prior theatrical practices. It is at this level that verbatim theatre can potentially engage with new writing and open its horizons.13The logic of oppositions I described earlier is interestingly productive of new works.
More precisely, it engages a kind of writing circumscribed by neither genres nor artistic conventions. What brings the two approaches together, then, determines a new field of practice which ‘varies from most verbatim scripts’ (Bartlett 25). Consequently, we might look for works that are positioned between ‘the “pure” verbatim format’ (Hopton 18) and what has been conventionally understood as new writing. Aleks Sierz notes this shift of practice and concludes that ‘factual theatre moves closer to the individually imagined worlds that new writing is so good at showing’ (2011, 58) while David Lane argues that verbatim theatre’s ‘sources are increasingly “authored” rather than objectively presented’ (78). Scojo lick of the week pdf merger. Interestingly, this is a two-way process as ‘the fashion for verbatim theatre influenced even fictional stories’ (Middeke, Schnierer and Sierz xiv). Thus, we are inclined to locate theatre experiments at the nodal points between verbatim theatre and non-verbatim theatre, works in hybrid forms that foreground both their verbatim origins and imagination processes.
Such a positioning between reality and fiction, fluctuating between a predetermined model of theatre and the very absence of determination generates a whole range of formal possibilities. Admittedly, these are clear entailments of the ever-expanding field of new writing. Anderson, Davey.
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‘The best shows of 2011: Michael Billington’s choice’. The Guardian on the Web, 4 Dec. 2011, last accessed on November 4, 2012.———. ‘V is for verbatim theatre’. The Guardian on the Web, 8 May 2012, last accessed on December 13, 2013.Blythe, Alecky.
London: Nick Hern, 2011.Boles, William C. The Argumentative Theatre of Joe Penhall. London: McFarland, 2011.Burke, Gregory.
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London: Nick Hern, 2005.———. ‘Hard Times for British Plays? David Edgar Defends the Political Vibrancy of British Playwriting’.
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Political Plays. London: Oberon, 2012.Hare, David. Stuff Happens. London: Faber & Faber, 2004.———. The Power of Yes: A Dramatist Seeks to Understand the Financial Crisis. London: Faber & Faber, 2009.Haydon, Andrew. ‘Theatre in the 2000s’.
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15–28.Kelly, Dennis. Taking Care of Baby. London: Oberon, 2007.Lane, David. Contemporary British Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.Middeke, Martin, Peter Paul Schnierer and Aleks Sierz.
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Reading and London: University of Reading and Victoria & Albert Museum. NotesThe last of three conferences organised by the AHRC-funded project ‘Giving Voice to the Nation: The Arts Council of Great Britain and the Development of Theatre and Performance in Britain 1945-1995ʼ, an important research investigating the relationship between Arts Council subsidy, arts policy, and theatre practice.Within a UK context, continental practice typically means a different way of approaching theatre in Europe. For instance, Germany does not have a text-based tradition and the director is often said to be at the centre. Playtexts are easily adapted to suit a specific production’s purposes.
Site-specific texts belong to the broad church of performance and feature a type of production whose text is very different in kind from traditional plays. Such texts have different structures to accommodate a productive engagement with a particular location.
Collaboration or devised theatre involve a type of writing for performance devoid of an identifiable playwriting figure. Postdramatic theatre is an umbrella term coined by Hans-Thies Lehmann to designate a change of paradigm in theatre-making that radically departs from dramatic theatre.