PROOF Contents List of Illustrations v i i i Acknowledgements ix I n t r o d u c t i o n 1 1 Talking to Terrorists 1 5 2 My Name is Rachel Corrie 5 5 3 Called to Account 8 9 4 The Girlfriend Experience 1 3 9 N o t e s 171 B i b l i o g r a p h y 175 I n d e x 191 vii PROOF Introduction This book places actors centre stage in debates surrounding perform- ance, and demonstrates both their creative tenacity in the rehearsal room and on stage, and their reflective capacity to articulate these often private processes in interview. Playing real individuals on stage, and speaking a text created solely from those individuals’ own words, presents actors with numerous challenges. By analysing these actors’ processes in relation to the teaching and theories of actor trainers, we are able to identify the ways in which they adapt current rehearsal and per- formance techniques and invent new strategies in the service of playing a real person. Academic studies have tended to overlook actors when using first-hand interview material, preferring instead to talk to direct- ors and writers. It is this imbalance that this book aims to redress. Documentary Theatre The popularity of documentary theatre shows little sign of abating. In the arsenal of political theatre, documentary forms have become the weapon of choice. Only 25 years ago, when Derek Paget first wrote of the use of tape recorders to make documentary theatre, he noted that documentary forms were situated at the ‘edges of the professional theatre’ (1987: 317). Now, however, documentary thea- tre is firmly established as a mainstream British theatre tradition. Many leading news stories or international controversies have been swiftly followed by documentary responses on some of Britain’s most high-profile stages. Take, for example, the Iraq war; the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was arguably the most contentious political decision of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Artistic responses to the invasion took many forms, but on the British stage few were as imme- diate and powerful as the stories of those directly affected by the events. Documentary productions were numerous: director Nicolas Kent and the Guardian journalist Richard Norton-Taylor staged Justifying War (Tricycle Theatre, 2003), constructed of scenes from 1 PROOF 2 Introduction the Hutton Inquiry which investigated events surrounding the scape- goating and subsequent suicide of Dr David Kelly in the lead-up to the war. This was followed in 2004 by David Hare’s research into the background of the war in the pseudo-documentary, Stuff Happens (National Theatre, 2004). Further questions were asked in 2007, when the Tricycle staged Called to Account , a mock-court hearing to estab- lish whether Blair could be tried as a war criminal over his actions in Iraq (this production is analysed in Chapter 3 of this book). However, the exploration of the Iraq war did not end there. In the same year, the newly formed National Theatre of Scotland staged Gregory Burke’s enormously successful Black Watch , which followed the Scottish regi- ment on its tour of duty in Iraq, and explored the psychological impact of the death of servicemen on their colleagues. Following the theme of British army deaths in Iraq, Steve Gilroy’s play Motherland ( 2008 ) was composed of interviews with mothers who had lost children fight- ing in the campaign. Most recently, the Tricycle has returned to the events in Iraq with their staging of Tactical Questioning (2011), which comprises scenes from the Baha Mousa Inquiry into the death of the Iraqi national, after being beaten by British army soldiers whilst held in custody in Basra. It is clear from the example of the Iraq war alone that documentary productions are seen as an immediate theatrical response, and that theatre companies are drawn to the stories of real people when staging issues of current political debate. Documentary theatre: definitions There are a number of terms which researchers use in attempting to distinguish the use of found material from plays that are solely the play wright’s own invention. In addition to ‘documentar y theatre’, these include ‘verbatim theatre’, ‘fact-based theatre’, ‘faction’ and ‘theatre of actuality’. ‘Verbatim theatre’ warrants special mention here as it is, in Britain at least, the principal term currently used to describe these plays. According to Derek Paget, the term was coined by Clive Barker, and first appeared in print in Paget’s article ‘“Verbatim Theatre”: Oral History and Documentary Techniques’ (1987). The phrase has been contested and problematised ever since. The actual definition in Paget’s article was offered by playwright Rony Robinson, in relation to a particular set of working processes: It is a form of theatre firmly predicated upon the taping and subsequent transcription of interviews with ‘ordinary’ people, done in the context of research into a particular region, subject area, issue, event, or combination PROOF Introduction 3 of these things. This primary source is then transformed into a text which is acted, usually by the performers who collected the material in the first place. (Robinson, quoted in Paget 1987 : 317) Since this first definition was offered, researchers have attempted to rework and rephrase Robinson’s description to adequately embrace the multifarious forms of verbatim theatre that have been developed in the intervening 25 years. The debate has centred on the question as to whether Robinson’s description of verbatim theatre as ‘predicated upon ... taping’ should be taken to mean ‘exclusively based on taping’, or if, in fact, the definition should encompass productions which are merely based on recorded interviews. In their study of contemporary Russian verbatim theatre, Mark Lipovetsky and Birgit Beumers state that although this is a key distinction, at the moment both approaches fall under the umbrella term ‘verbatim’. They identify the looser def- inition of a verbatim play as ‘constructed on the basis of interviews conducted by the playwright (or by the creative team) with real people’ (2008: 296). However, they also recognise ‘verbatim in the more strict sense of the term – that is, directly using recorded or reported speech on stage’ (2008: 297). Similarly, Mary Luckhurst highlights the importance of the ability of documentary theatre-makers to prove their findings. She notes that ‘verbatim theatre, in its purest sense, is understood as a theatre whose practitioners, if called to account, could provide interviewed sources for its dialogue’ (2008: 213). Despite these disagreements with regard to the specifics of the def- inition, it is clear that verbatim theatre is understood to be based on the spoken words of real people. We shall see that My Name is Rachel Corrie was based entirely on written rather than spoken testimony, and as such falls within the wider field of documentary theatre, rather than verbatim. I also agree with Janelle Reinelt that ‘“verbatim” needlessly ups the ante on the promise of documentary ... “verbatim” as a category over-extends what was a sufficiently rich and proximate archive in all these cases’ (Forsyth and Megson 2009: 13–14). In add- ition, American scholarship does not use the term ‘verbatim’. Hence, ‘documentary’ is the most useful term to categorise and unite the pro- ductions analysed here, though naturally some commentators who are quoted prefer to use the term ‘verbatim’. The absence of the actor’s voice With the rise in popularity of documentary theatre has come an intensification of publications on the subject. The body of literature PROOF 4 Introduction has tended to focus on questions of authenticity and, particularly, the complex and problematic relationship between the testimony from which these plays were derived and the productions themselves. Despite these interventions, the analysis of acting processes in docu- mentary theatre has been almost entirely overlooked. The two most significant recent publications on documentary theatre are notable for their lack of focus on acting. Will Hammond and Dan Steward’s Verbatim: Verbatim (2009) featured seven new interviews with docu- mentary theatre-makers. Although in the blurb for the book the authors stated that they would ‘discuss frankly the unique oppor- tunities and ethical dilemmas that arise when portraying real people on stage’ (2009: back cover), the collection omitted actors entirely and Hammond and Steward only interviewed writers and directors. Finally, although Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson’s excellent edited collection Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present (2009) was ambitious in scope, there were no essays dedicated to questions of performance, and none of the contributors interviewed actors. This lack of focus on acting is curious since Derek Paget’s afore- mentioned research into the first wave of British documentary pro- ductions featured interviews with performers. However, the absence of actors’ narratives has begun to be addressed in research into documentary theatre. For example, Bella Merlin, who appeared in Max Stafford-Clark’s production of David Hare’s play, The Permanent Way ( 2003 ), has written about her experiences in an art- icle in Contemporary Theatre Review (2007c) and in a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to David Hare (2007a). Her work is an attempt to analyse the ways in which her Stanislavskian approach was challenged when playing a real person in Hare’s play, and her experi- ences will be considered in Chapter 1 . In addition to Merlin’s research, from 2007 to 2010 a research team under the leadership of Derek Paget at the University of Reading conducted a project entitled ‘Acting with Facts: Actors performing the real in British theatre and television since 1990’. Though not lim- ited to theatre or to documentary forms, this project began to involve actors in the analysis of performance.