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Why verbatim theatre gives a voice to the voiceless

Word for word: Anna Deavere Smith interviewed 250 people to create her show Notes From the Field
Word for word: Anna Deavere Smith interviewed 250 people to create her show Notes From the Field

Telling truth is a revolutionary act. Especially when we’re living through a time at which facts seem to be less important than the prevailing narrative and you can cry “fake news” at anything you don’t agree with.

We all love stories and we want to hear them straight from the horse’s mouth, or as close to that as we can possibly get.

Verbatim theatre takes the real words of interviewees and uses them to construct a play. It’s journalistic theatre, if you will, and its practitioners argue that it presents a higher degree of objectivity.

“Verbatim theatre offers an audience a truth and authenticity that even the most well crafted and researched plays can't,” says writer and director Robin Belfield, who has recently published a book about it: Telling the Truth: How to Make Verbatim Theatre.

“With regular plays, the playwright's imagination is at large and, although it may have a historical or emotional truth, it is a represented realism.”

Anna Deavere Smith is credited with pioneering the form, from her one woman plays in the early 90s about the riots in Crown Heights and Los Angeles. For the first time in 25 years, she returns to London, bringing Notes From the Field to the Royal Court Theatre, a piece about the schools to prison pipeline in America for which she conducted more than 250 interviews.

Two more powerful verbatim plays grace London stages this month: Fatherland at the Lyric Hammersmith uses the conversations between fathers and sons in the playwrights and producers’ hometowns to discuss issues around nationality, masculinity and the weight of expectation.

#BeMoreMartyn, at the Southwark Playhouse for just one night on June 3, celebrates the life of Martyn Hett, who died in the Manchester Arena bombing a year ago. The hashtag started trending on Twitter after the announcement of his death, and Hope Theatre Company asked eight of his closest friends what meant to “be more Martyn”. Their words have revealed the essence of an extraordinary young man and the importance of being unapologetically yourself.

So why is verbatim theatre becoming a more popular practice for playwrights?

“We are besieged with a constant barrage of information,” says Belfield, “and different media platforms all barking for our attention and especially now, in the current climate of 'fake news', the integrity of that information is unclear. Verbatim theatre offers an antidote to all that and it's at its best when it offers a voice to the voiceless.”

He says that now is the time for verbatim theatre. Social media gives us access to as many stories as we can greedily consume, but it’s the ones who shout the loudest that get their point across.

Theatre in general takes a magnifying glass to many aspects of the world that we don’t get to see, but verbatim delivers these stories to you direct from the mouths of the speaker, filter free. Belfield says that this is where the shift is: in serving the people whose words they are voicing rather than those of the playwright.

Of course, nothing is completely objective and there is a delicate balance between remaining faithful and presenting a compelling story.

“It demands huge amounts of patience and skill to observe and, more importantly, listen to the testimony in order to make sure they are represented accurately,” he says, adding that the responsibility of deciding which words make it in and which don’t “requires a huge amount of integrity”.

In 2015, writer and director Peter Darney brought to light a long-running phenomenon that many people in the UK had been unaware of. 5 Guys Chillin’ exposed the prevalence of chemsex between men who sleep with men, and how it was being exacerbated by dating apps.

Chemsex is the act of having sex under the influence of psychoactive drugs, namely mephedrone, GHB and crystal meth. The play fuelled a conversation around the practice and the fact that 1 in 10 gay men now live with HIV, and chemsex is now seen as a major national health crisis. It is now being made into a feature film called Clapham Trashbag.

He interviewed five men he “met” on Grindr about their experiences, fashioning the conversations into a play set at a chemsex party. He agrees with Belfield about the need to approach the subject with integrity.

Peter Darney's 5 Guy's Chillin' in production at the King's Head Theatre
Peter Darney's 5 Guy's Chillin' in production at the King's Head Theatre

“You have a responsibility to make sure that you represent them accurately,” Darney says. “I was meeting a lot of people with difficult relationships with drugs, sex and mental health, so making sure that the person was not high at the time I interviewed them and were able to give genuine consent was paramount, as was ensuring their anonymity.”

Do audiences react differently knowing that the stories being told are to the letter?

“Yes, very much so. That made them more funny, more extreme, more painful and brutal, because ultimately they were true. People often said ‘I can’t believe that’, but we knew that we were honestly reflecting the experience of people from that world and, in that, we were able to expose it, to provoke debate, discussion and reflection in the community.”

Verbatim theatre has the potential to expose us to truths that we might otherwise have overlooked. Many different forms of art may do this in many different ways, but perhaps there are some subjects that speak for themselves.

Fatherland runs at the Lyric Hammersmith May 25 - June 23

#BeMoreMartyn is at the Southwark Playhouse June 3

Notes From the Field runs at the Royal Court Theatre June 13 - June 23