Verbatim theatre is both a type of drama and a way of making work. Put simply: It involves crafting a script from real people’s real words – whether they come from specially conducted interviews on a topic or from transcripts from courtrooms, TV, film, radio shows, or public inquiries – that are then spoken by actors on stage.
Verbatim theatre as a technique is often used by theatremakers who want to address a particular topic, crisis, or political moment with a degree of factual authenticity, and it has become a hugely powerful – and at times notably popular – form of theatre in the 21st century.
Other terms used to describe similar work include documentary theatre and tribunal theatre. All three are concerned with using real material to describe, bear witness to, explore, or expose real-life events, but there are important – if subtle – distinctions. Documentary theatre may make use of many other kinds of first-hand sources – written news reports, archive material, diaries, government reports, and so on – whereas, technically, verbatim theatre refers solely to the spoken word. Tribunal plays, meanwhile, are a subset of documentary or verbatim plays, and refer specifically to those using transcripts from judicial or quasi-judicial hearings.
JUMP TO
As with any subgenre of theatrical performance, there are now as many different flavours of verbatim theatre as there are artists making work. But verbatim theatre at its core is about honouring the actual words spoken by your subjects on a topic. That topic often is extremely grave; think of shows like David Hare’s The Permanent Way (2003), which included testimony from families who’d lost relatives in railway crashes, or Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors, Gillian Slovo’s 2023 play made up of first-hand testimony from the Grenfell Tower fire. Or consider the highly influential series of tribunal plays staged by Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent at the Tricycle Theatre between 1994 and 2012, which included The Colour of Justice, based on transcripts of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, and Justifying War, based on the Hutton inquiry into the death of David Kelly, the government’s Iraqi weapons expert.
But verbatim techniques can also be used for heartwarming, comedic, or even surreal effect too. Alecky Blythe’s Our Generation (2022) was a zingy charting of a generation of teenagers over five years, for example, while Breach Theatre’s Tank (2016) drew on the bizarre records of a young researcher trying to teach a dolphin to speak English.
Verbatim plays often offer a wide-ranging look at a topic, featuring a multiplicity of voices – as in Jews. In their Own Words, which was created from interviews with 12 British Jews in 2022, or The Laramie Project (2000), about the murder of a gay student, which drew on hundreds of interviews with local people. These can be performed by large casts taking on one, several, or many roles – or they can even be a solo show, as with Anna Deavere Smith’s influential Fires in the Mirror or Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, in which she collated interviews with hundreds of people and then performed them as multivoiced monologues in the early 1990s.
How people’s real-life words are spoken by actors can also vary. Some verbatim plays will use fileted or tidied-up versions of transcripts, but many make a point of including accurately imperfect speech with hesitations, false starts, and repetitions kept in. Some productions go as far as to play the actual recordings of voices into the actors’ ears, so they are mimicking real voices in real time, attempting to recreate every detail: think accents, intonations, coughs, or sniffs. This is known as “headphone verbatim,” and it can require a particular set of performance skills.
Alternatively, the choice may be made not to impersonate a real person at all, but instead to have actors speaking someone else’s words as actors. In Robin Soans’ play Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage (2015) about Welsh rugby player Gareth Thomas, for instance, six actors of all genders played him, making no attempt at mimicry.
Documentary theatre can feel close to journalism, but remember that it should still feel theatrical. Verbatim shows can use real words in non-naturalistic ways, a tactic most famously seen in verbatim musicals such as Blythe’s London Road (2012), which turned interviews from a community in Ipswich where five women were murdered into a musical, scoring every “um” and “ah.” Similarly, Breach’s After the Act (2023) transformed interviews about living under Section 28 as a gay person into a synth-pop musical.
How verbatim material is arranged into a drama is down to the playwright. To deliver a great verbatim play, however, its structure should still echo some elements of a more conventional play: having a sense of narrative throughline or momentum, a theme to be explored or a question to be solved, a cast of characters we can root for or invest in, and a sense of urgency and tension. The building blocks of good drama – action, conflict, and change – should still be present in your verbatim play.
Credit: Alena Lom/Shutterstock
There is always an ethical consideration when representing real people onstage. Subjects or interviews should not be seen as merely a source for you to extract juicy or titillating material from; trust, respect, and honesty are the bedrocks of a healthy creation process. If your piece is based on interviews, consider including your subjects in the creative process, allowing them to give feedback on scripts or early performances.
Fact-based verbatim theatre can feel like it has a higher degree of objectivity than a fictional play, but it’s worth remaining wary of claims of objectivity in any piece of art. After all, verbatim play creators are always engaged in the act of shaping the narrative. They choose whom to interview and what material to include, and they guide the audience’s understanding of a topic, often juxtaposing different accounts or points of view. Anyone making verbatim theatre has a responsibility to think carefully about how they make new meaning from stitching together real words spoken in a very different context.
In some cases, there may also be legal reasons why you cannot use certain material or identify certain people in a verbatim show, such as if legal proceedings are ongoing or the person is a minor.
Finally, you also want to take good ethical care of your audience. Trigger warnings or content clarifications may be particularly important when a subject is grounded in fact. There may also be careful choices to be made around depictions of harrowing real-life events. In Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors, for example, it was made clear to the audience that there would be no literal depictions of fire.
The process of working on a verbatim play will likely share many similarities with any other theatre acting job. You’ll get a script and have a period of rehearsal, working on understanding your character and uncovering the emotional truth within the words.
It’s likely, however, that the experience will have its own distinct flavour. There may be less opportunity for exploring different line interpretations than with a regular script, and more focus on recreating the intent behind the words – and ad-libbing or going off-book is certainly a no-no!
There may be greater emphasis on how you deliver a line, and perhaps an unusual level of mimicry – especially with headphone verbatim. It’s also likely that you will have to transform into several different people in one production. Nailing a malleable physical and vocal performance while still being precise and detailed can be a key technique for verbatim plays featuring a large number of voices.
It’s also likely that working on a verbatim play will involve more background reading, research, talks with experts, and talks with the people whose voices feature in the play during the rehearsal period than is usual. Many verbatim plays are based on government inquiries, major trials, catastrophic events, gross mismanagement, and institutional failings, and such subjects may require a different level of research and background engagement than your average play.