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!)