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We have a new project, so therefore we have a new blog.

Both of you can find it on http://simplydisconnect.blogspot.co.uk/

See you there

Verbatim Theatre: an expert speaks

Sometimes my timing astounds me. Yes, this recounting of the Chronicle story has been a slow and arduous one, but look what turned up on The Guardian's website yesterday, courtesy of Richard Norton-Taylor under the headling "Verbatim Theatre Lets the Truth Speak For Itself":

Over the past few years, as attention spans started to shrink and breaking news began to dominate, there has been an explosion of verbatim theatre. Philip Ralph, the writer of Deep Cut, a play examining the deaths of four recruits at the army's training barracks in Surrey, has suggested there is a connection between a spin-obsessed government and "a form of theatre in which audiences perceive that they are getting at some kind of hidden 'truth'". It may have been boosted by New Labour, as Ralph suggests, but it has been nurtured by the secrecy and scandals that envelop individuals operating on behalf of all governments.

More and more people now appreciate what verbatim plays, this rather austere-sounding branch of political theatre, can offer.

I was initiated under Margaret Thatcher, and was astonished that in 1994 Nicolas Kent, artistic director of Kilburn's Tricycle theatre, was able to translate my edited transcripts of the arms-to-Iraq inquiry into an entertaining play. Half the Picture was performed by the most enthusiastic actors, with the prime minister of the day played by Sylvia Syms. After its Tricycle run it was shown in the House of Commons – the first time a play has been put on in the Palace of Westminster.

I began to appreciate that theatre is a tremendous platform for journalists, a medium that offers more space, more words, and more scope than newspapers and TV and radio news bulletins. Our "tribunal plays" for the Tricycle are taken from long-running public inquiries (10 years in the case of Bloody Sunday) that are treated quite superficially or incompletely in the mainstream media. Twenty-five thousand words have more impact than 250; and they become stronger still when actors are speaking them on a stage before a live audience.

Verbatim theatre, David Hare has said, "does what journalism fails to do". Robin Soans, whose plays include Talking to Terrorists and The Arab-Israeli Cookbook, has written: "The normal channels of reportage, wherein we expect some degree of responsibility and truth, are no longer reliable." Writing in Verbatim, he went as far as to say: "Only in the arts is the study of the human condition considered more important than ambition or money, so it is left to artists to ask the relevant questions." Our tribunal plays have helped to answer questions as well as pose them.

Their audiences have included many who had never previously been to the theatre. The Colour of Justice, taken from the evidence to the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, continues to be performed in schools and universities and was included on the reading lists of police training colleges. Students who have come to the Tricycle have been inspired to write their own plays from public hearings, including the recent inquests into the London 7/7 bombings.

My plays have been taken from public inquiries forced on the government by evidence of wrongdoing on the part of agents of the state – police, soldiers, officials – which have either been covered up or inadequately investigated. Tactical Questioning, which opens at the Tricycle this week, is taken from the inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa, a Basra hotel worker who died in the custody of British soldiers in September 2003, and the serious abuse of other Iraqi civilians who were detained with him.

We know, or may remember, what happened to Baha Mousa; why it happened is the question the theatre can help to answer. At the same time, it can provoke further thought about the issues which led to an episode described by General Sir Michael Jackson, then head of all our soldiers, as a "stain on the character of the British army": the way British troops are trained, how their chain of command works, their loyalties, passing the buck, ministerial accountability to parliament, international law. Tactical Questioning, I believe, succinctly and dramatically contextualises the official – necessarily long – report, expected very soon, into the Baha Mousa inquiry by its chairman, the former appeal court judge, Sir William Gage.

Others, notably Hare in The Permanent Way and Stuff Happens, have mixed verbatim material from speeches or reports with original writing. Before he wrote Black Watch, a brilliantly evocative play inspired by the famous Scottish regiment's controversial deployment to central Iraq, Gregory Burke interviewed a group of soldiers who had recently left the regiment in the pubs of Fife. "I told Greg not to go away and write a fictional drama set in Iraq, but that instead we should try and tell the 'real' stories of the solders in their own words," said the play's director, John Tiffany.

Maybe pure verbatim theatre is less creative, but it lets people speak for themselves, as Tactical Questioning does, in illuminating ways, and in ways they sometimes did not intend.

You can go to the blog itself if you want to add comments by following this link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/may/31/verbatim-theatre-truth-baha-mousa

Mine will be following soon enough.

CHRONICLING CHRONICLE III

Just as William Burroughs once claimed that language was a virus, so its replicant, verbatim theatre, adapts and mutates according to its situation. In some cases, actors repeat words freshly delivered to them via an earpiece to the audience, giving them no time to adopt a theatrical persona. In others, rehearsed performers will sit before the audience telling monologues drawn from interview. Others still will be accelerated arguments in the form of character collages or edited versions of official inquiries, designed to bring focus to recent political dilemmas. Those who have seen or heard of David Hare’s collaborations with Max Stafford-Clark (more of whom later), or Richard Norton-Taylor’s précis of the Hutton Inquiry, Justifying War, will be familiar with this approach where the author seeks to take up a moral baton he feels has been dropped by his contemporaries in journalism.*

Verbatim has made its name in TV and film, too, with Nick Park’s Creature Comforts and Clio Barnard’s truly harrowing drama-documentary The Arbor utilising the same device of having recorded interviews replayed and lip-synched by others (with obviously different intentions and effects). The one thing these mutations have in common, however, is an emphasis upon language, both in terms of syntax and – in some cases – the spaces between words; the ums, clicks and verbal tics that can convey as much feeling as any stretch of dialogue. There is a belief that somehow the words, without the filter of a writer selecting and shaping them, reveal a truth that goes beyond their apparent content.

Here was clearly a device with not only a history (Max Stafford-Clark cites a 1976 Joint Stock play Yesterday’s News as the first time he had encountered verbatim methodologies) but also with potential. My problem was that I felt that drama, theatricality, tension – call it what you will – was the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater of invention. The Norton-Taylor projects seemed to be incredibly dull mini-replicas of incredibly dull inquiries, preaching to the converted. Meanwhile, others felt like experiments with the form that might heighten audience involvement (or make it more self-conscious) but brought nothing to the stage itself.

And then came Black Watch. On DVD. This is about twenty minutes in and shows the variety of influences at work here.

I stand by my criticisms of the recent tour: the play’s sheer scale notwithstanding, this is a tale of working men with an impossible job. It’s a piece about the people and for the people and it should therefore be affordable by the people. However, if the filmed version above is any indication of the quality of the stage presentation then this was one mighty play indeed, worthy of its various plaudits. Combining dance with combat, formality with filth, pageantry with low humour, bawdiness with tragedy , Gregory Burke created one of the dramas of the decade by using verbatim not just as a framing device nor as a raison d’etre but as a tool: essential but not exclusive.

There was no way I could attempt to match the feats achieved by the National Theatre of Scotland, but I could emulate them in my own small way. They had, after all, made the expensive and epic seem raw and intimate; I could at least achieve the latter half of that equation. A verbatim-based theatre piece that provided the audience with a good night out, based around a social issue: seemed simple enough as a task.

All I had to do was to decide what I was going to write about.

*The excellent book of interviews with these practitioners, verbatim verbatim, edited by Will Hammond and Dan Steward, goes further into these variations than is possible within a blog. I’d highly recommend it (but you’re not borrowing my copy!)

CHRONICLING CHRONICLE: II

Having been a drama student in Liverpool during the 80s, and a male to boot on a regular basis, I found myself – in the words of Howard the Duck – trapped in a world I never made. It would be hard to call it a time of innocence. The Toxteth riots and the miners’ strike were symbols of a northern fury not merely misunderstood, but actually inflamed by the government in London. Poverty was rife, as was theft; it may seem counter-intuitive but somehow a lack of possessions made you more vulnerable to burglary, not less. Along once-thriving roads like Smithdown, the only growth industry was in boarding up shop windows. “Security by EXPO” was more prevalent than “La’s” graffiti.

Meanwhile, the life of a student – particularly one in the liberal arts – wasn’t all it was cracked up to be either. The advent of AIDS along with a post-feminist insistence that all men were potential rapists where even the most casual appreciation of a woman’s attractiveness marked you out a sexist pig – a misogynistic neanderthal who deserved to be deprived of his knackers courtesy of the nearest scythe. The resultant combination meant that twenty years after the sexual revolution on campus, your average first year saw about as much action as a Benedictine monk. At least the monk had the brandy to sustain him.

However, all this paled into comparison beside the drama of the time. The dawn of Channel 4 had led to a swathe of earnest, heartfelt and tedious state of the nation plays and programmes. The aggression of the left over low pay and slum-like housing conditions was giving way to liberal half-formed theories about Sandinistas and the importance of drinking Nicaraguan coffee. There wasn’t much fun being had, and any that was available had to be right on – as the phrase went - or not at all.

Of course, this is a generalisation and a sweeping one at that. There was Berkoff with his visceral visions of urban hell, studded with the poetry of the gutter; there was Godber’s Hull Truck Company, looking to find drama and humour in such northern delights as Rugby League and the local nightclub; there was Willy Russell, single-handedly packing out the Everyman with his tale of mid-life redemption, “Shirley Valentine”, performed by the author himself after his original Shirley – Noreen Kershaw – fell too ill to perform. But my abiding memories of the time are of a huge amount of preaching to the converted in trades union halls and Labour clubs, an awful lot of Brecht, and a lot of awful Brecht.*

Those notable exceptions above notwithstanding, theatre in the 80s could be a drab and soul-crushing affair, more akin to a lecture than an entertainment. Yet despite this, I couldn’t quite embrace the hedonistic surrealism of the site-specific or street theatre events that followed and became almost an essential part of the music festival scene of the late 90s onwards. While I admired the efforts to take performance to non-theatrical venues, the drama somehow got lost on the way. Here was ritual a’plenty, but without substance. There had to be a ground somewhere between these two extremes that didn’t smack of compromise.

Then I recalled my participation in a debate on The Guardian’s website over the nature of theatre and what it should be doing in times of austerity and politi...

I know - my eyes are glazing over, too. Tell you what, why don’t I just attach it? We’ll call it Exhibit A and for those of you who don’t want to guess, I’m entered under the nom d’internet of “yeruncle” (calling myself ‘Bob’ was both a blind alley and a bad pun that seemed like a good idea at the time). Grab yourself a cuppa and marvel at how much shit can be expelled by arty liberals in one morning. Particularly yeruncle.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/jul/16/cuts-theatre-economics

Recovered?

Leaving aside that I was wrong in a number of ways about “Black Watch” - more of that later – there were some aspects of that digital conversation that have gone on to shape this current, early, incarnation of Chronicle Theatre.

Firstly, that theatre is way too expensive.

Secondly, I do a lot of talking out of my arse.

Thirdly, there was a challenge out there to marry journalistic endeavour to theatrical voices and not come up with something dull but worthy.

Given that I was a theatrical with an NCTJ qualification in magazine journalism (don’t go looking for any articles – I may be trained but I’m lazy), it seemed as though I was particularly, if not uniquely, qualified to meet this challenge. But how?

First stop, verbatim theatre and “Black Watch”.

*Strangely, there wasn’t a vile amount of Weill.

CHRONICLING CHRONICLE: I

Memory is an unreliable historian. Despite it’s only having been a week or since the last performance of “No Particular Place To Go”, this is no less true than if I were trying to record events from a year or a decade ago. How quickly we contrive to mythologize or edit the events of our lives to give them a significance or even a structure that they would not naturally possess is almost a thing of wonder in itself. However, having failed to make concurrent notes, I shall have to rely upon that unreliable historian when trying to record matter and not myth.

So to the beginning, and even now that’s not true because there is a prologue to all this but I’ll try to explain it as we go along or we’ll never get started. My constant partner in theatrical crime James Weisz and I were in a rut. Various plans but no direction. Mock-celebrity tributes to dead film stars, sketch shows, two-man plays: we were active, certainly, but formless. The only attribute these activities seemed to have in common was that we two were involved. It was James who complained about this first. Strange, as I thought he was happiest amidst this frantic confusion.

There are certain local companies I admire as companies, even if I disagree with some of their methodologies. One, for example, has created an identity for itself by staging short plays from unknown writers that range in tone from the surreal to the hilarious to the poignant. It has a high quality threshold. However, due to the economics of fringe theatre, the authors have often gone unpaid (or relatively lowly paid) for their input. Meanwhile, promising troupes of actors have often disassociated themselves from the company following disputes over money.

This situation may be changing, with the company performing more devised and commissioned pieces, but the fact remains that – no matter what its internal/teething/financial problems - the company stands for something. When people come to its performances, they know what they are getting. As a result, it sells to packed-out houses in Brighton and Edinburgh, has been nominated for various prestigious awards, and is developing its portfolio.

Naturally, I wanted some (if not all) of that.

Taking an overall view of the work James and I had orchestrated over the past few years, there was one small thread running through it all. Small and simple: we were telling stories. This was glaringly obvious when it came to the plays, less so with the other activities. Yet the tribute to Dennis Hopper had been an opportunity to indulge the various mythologies of Hollywood’s bad boy, while the best of our sketches were narratives in themselves.

As an inveterate, some might say intolerable, punster I naturally ran through the various definitions of story-telling within my precious Chambers Thesaurus. This may not be strictly true; it may have been the Roget or just the on-line version. Again memory’s lack of reliability, but the principle remains the same: I was seeking synonyms.

Story n. account, ancedote (sic), article, chronicle…

I don’t feel the need to take you through "novel, plot, recital..." and the rest. Chronicle had a pleasing ring to it. I think it’s the consonants: a symmetry of three and three. Thus was Chronicle Theatre born.

Now all I needed to do was work out what that meant.

A POSTER AT LAST

Soon the tale can be told of how we got this far...

TAKING THE PLUNGE

So the ad's gone out - first auditions take place on the 18th and 20th of October.

We've only bleedin' gone and done it, haven't we? Set up a theatre company with no play, no actors and no home.

But we do have an idea, and that's enough to get us started.

Being such a new company, both Chronicle and its methods will need time to grow as we discover which avenues are worth following and which lead merely to a dead end. Which is where this blog comes in.

Put simply, this site will chronicle...Chronicle.

From diary entry to philosophical enquiry, from shocking exposé to silly gag, as the company develops, so will this blog to incorporate the thousands of tiny moments that go to make up any act of creation.

Naturally, we want you to come along for the ride so feel free to send your comments either directly here if you're feeling bold, to our e-mail address chronicle.theatre@yahoo.co.uk if you're a bit shy, or even add something to our FaceBook page if you want to be our friend. Who knows, your suggestion could change the way a whole theatre company does things. Or it might even be your story we end up telling.

Let's take a deep breath and find out, shall we?