Sillages Critiques (Jun 2014)
“Theatre’s Other: Event and Testimony in British Verbatim Plays”
Abstract
A particular kind of remembering and staging of our transient contemporary “reality” has become prevalent in the UK since the end of the twentieth century: verbatim theatre. This is a form of documentary theatre that stages theatre’s other – events and experiences as they are lived by actual people and rendered in witness testimonies that are transcribed word-for-word, edited into a play, and performed by actors. This essay examines four permutations on the verbatim mode: Dennis Kelly’s Taking Care of Baby (2007); and three pieces from a co-authored series of short plays on the 11 September 2001 attacks on the USA (9/11), Decade (2011) – Samuel Adamson’s Recollections of Scott Forbes , Simon Schama’s Epic, and Alexandra Wood’s My Name is Tania Head. Together, they plays enable an interrogation of what happens when theatre’s other – lived events and experiences – are staged. Whereas Adamson and Schama seem to employ verbatim in an attempt to narrow the gap between theatre and its other – the reality of the 9/11 attacks –, Wood and Kelly appear to insist upon the impossibility of such an endeavour. Whereas for Adamson and Schama the historical source material of the witness testimony is presented as credible, for Wood and Kelly this credibility, and the “reality” it purports to describe, are thrown into doubt. And yet, I conclude by arguing that too much is perhaps made of the fact that verbatim theatre might aspire towards an impossible coincidence between “real” events, document, and fiction. Regardless of the verbatim author’s and director’s intentionality, any play is a negotiation between “real” events and their representation, a fact of which I feel spectators are aware.
