Verbatim Theatre

DEFINITION: Verbatim theatre is a style of documentary theatre, composed of the exact words spoken by people interviewed about a certain topic or event. It is theatre created from interviews collected with real life people about an event or subject. Those real life people are then portrayed on the stage, by actors.

The playwright will usually talk to people who are effected by or connected to the subject matter of the play, creating audio recordings of the interviews as they go along. The writer will then use these testimonies to construct a piece of theatre about the chosen topic. The recordings used by the actors to create the most believable characterization possible; they copy, not only what the person has said, but also, how they have said it with coughs and stutters and all the 'imperfections' left in. This helps the portrayal of the character feel much stronger. During reheasals, the actors will listen to the recordings and repeat exactly what they hear, a few seconds after they hear it. They will repeat this technique until they have become completely familiar with the speech. In the performance, the actors will, generally, wear earpieces or headphones, and will be listening to the recordings as they perform, to ensure they keep as true to the original speech and do not fall into their own speech patterns.

If you write from your imagination, then you are writing from your own recolection of people's way of life. Whereas, with verbatim theatre, if you go out and collect evidence about peoples way of life, things are revealed to you which are completely extraordinary and unexpected.

Because verbatim as about the spoken word, it can become quite dull for an audience to just watch people talking for an hour or so, which is the reason why it is necessary for verbatim practitioners to be very creative with the way they are presenting the information and the characters on stage. The question 'how are we going to bring this to life in an interesting way' is often a question asked by writers and directors. This is either done by incorporating dance, or music or complex staging.