Documentary and Verbatim Theatre

Documentary and Verbatim Theatre surveys the emergence and rise of work based on real life in contemporary theatre, exploring the artists, methodologies, plays and central themes that have characterised its enduring popularity.

After charting the recent history of modern documentary theatre in the twentieth century and the debates that have surrounded it in the past thirty years, each chapter examines in depth key practices, such as headphone verbatim and extreme verbatim, and practitioners, from Anna Deavere Smith and David Hare to The Civilians and DV8 Physical Theatre. Practitioners’ chosen topics, playwriting process and engagement with sometimes fraught debates in the field are brought to the fore. Focusing on the various dramaturgical and theatrical strategies used to create and stage documentary theatre, the book provides a practice-centric understanding of some of the principal issues related to the form, including the tensions between fidelity to the documentary or verbatim record and the exercise of artistic licence, the ethical issues entailed in representing living people, the implications for actors and our understanding of acting, and our assumptions about aesthetic distancing.

This is an essential introduction to documentary and verbatim theatre for theatre studies students, teachers, and scholars, as well as theatre practitioners.