The author of this blog is Rib Davis. Rib teaches an online training course on oral history and theatre that is accredited by National Life Stories at the British Library and the Oral History Society. To find out more see the course page for Transcript to Script: Turning oral history into plays for stage and radio.
Burnout, Ellen Bradbury’s play at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, exploring burnout in many different contexts; At the Rainbow’s End, Claire Summerskill’s play at Hope Mill Theatre, Manchester, exploring homophobia and transphobia experienced by older LGBT people in care settings; The Talking Drum: Voice of the Andover Estate, at the Park Theatre, London, exploring the lives of an Islington community. These are all theatre production either very recently performed or about to be performed. And they are all very closely based on oral histories.
Oral history-based plays are very much in fashion. Some of them are ‘verbatim’ plays (although the term is often used for plays which do not, in fact, use absolutely 100% words from the interviews) while others describe themselves as documentary plays or, sometimes, semi-verbatim. They have been in fashion for some time. Alecky Blythe’s London Road was a huge success at the National Theatre in 2011, as was David Hare’s The Permanent Way back in 2004. But we can go a long way further than that, to Peter Cheeseman’s Fight for Shelton Bar at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke, in 1974, or to its antecedents in the Radio Ballads of Ewen McColl and Peggy Seeger in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Of course playwrights have used interviews for centuries. You are writing a play about the world of finance: go and talk to some financiers. Sometimes the playwright may have jotted down a few of their actual words, which might find their way into the final script, while on other occasions it is their opinions and attitudes – as well as hard information – that the writer is going to use, informing the characterisation, perhaps, or the plot. The use of interviews – recorded or not – is a perfectly respectable part of the research process of any playwright, even while the product may be essentially fiction.
But what is the attraction of using the exact words off the tapes, changing as few of them as possible, or in some cases not changing them at all? I think it’s about authenticity – the authenticity of meaning and of speech. The language itself is a great part of it. Spoken language is a mess – a wonderful mess, but a mess nevertheless. We stop and start, we self-correct, we umm and ah, we repeat ourselves, we don’t talk in grammatical sentences, and some people I know hardly ever bother to finish their sentences at all. That’s before we get on to pronunciation and dialect. Written language, on the other hand, tends to be more polished, more considered, generally closer to ‘standard English.’ A script for a normal play is a strange animal situated somewhere between these other two beasts, in that it is written language (the playwright has invented it) but crafted to appear to be spoken language. I know from experience how difficult it is to write spoken language that is convincing, that carries all the individual traits of people talking together. The language of oral history-based scripts might be considered even more strange, as this is originally spoken language, recorded, transcribed and edited to become written language – a script on a page – then to be transformed back into spoken language through performance. But despite the oddness of the process, despite the editing and sometimes re-contextualising, there is an authenticity to this language: the audience know that these are the words that someone spoke.
Yet authenticity and truth are not the same thing. The words of the script may be authentic, but we have chosen who to interview, what to ask and what not to ask, which parts of the interview to use, the theatrical context in which to present the words and then how they are to be delivered. So I am always wary of the ‘true story’ tag: the same material can be edited and presented in a thousand different ways, each of them reflecting the understanding and choices of the writer, director, cast and company.
Often we choose to write oral history plays in order to present the lives of a community, whether a community of location, sport, work, religion, ethnicity or whatever. But of course there are limitations as soon as we choose to portray a community while not creating fictional characters and while leaving the original language almost untouched. How do we create dialogue and interaction when working from a set of recorded monologues? How do we actually tell the story? And what is our responsibility to our interviewees when they are portrayed on stage?These are the sorts of questions we grapple with when writing oral history-based theatre, and we are still grappling…
