The unnatural collision of fact and fiction, and the intricacies or potentials of the integration of documentation and script, is pertinent to our work as a company. The ideal of crafting a scripted performance, interjecting factual accounts, will be a challenging theatrical concept. The notion of ‘the realities of representation’ always comes into focus when practitioners work with verbatim material. Stephen Bottoms comments “Realism and reality are not the same thing and unmediated access to the ‘real’ is not something that theatre can ever honestly provide” (Bottoms, 2006, pp. 56-68). You can present a realist perception where by you encourage the audience to accept a given situation as it’s presented. To propose to present a staged reality, where by you are stating something as actually existing is impossible to present, mainly due to the liminality of the theatrical space.

Janelle Reinelt suggests that, “The promise of [verbatim] is to establish a link between spectator’s quest and an absent but acknowledged reality” (Reinelt, 2009, p.10). The Stephen Lawrence inquiry transcripts provide the factual material for our current experimentations. Although this documentation consists of verbatim testimonies, doesn’t necessarily make the presentation a concept of reality, as all dialogue is naturally mediated. The questionable claims of authenticity of the spoken word become increasing problematic when dealing with this complex genre. When verbatim is explored as a performative tool, audience accumulate a preconceived idea that they will have access to a ‘truthful’ representation. The genre actually in some respects falsely manifests itself in relation to achieving the unachievable. When an actor recites verbatim, there is a passive embodiment through the actor, which diminishes the assumption that the reality is ‘truthful’. The actor, who itself is a liminal object, is a real person, embodying a real person. Although the spoken word is ‘truthful’ its representation is troubled by a false sense of reality.

It’s this sense of reality we will be exploring. Roy Williams’ play Fallout features a fictional protagonist, whose story is based on a factual event. Williams’ has created a scripted interpretation of the events surrounding the fatal deaths of Stephen Lawrence and Damilola Taylor. Through the use of verbatim sourced from the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, will allow us to question the idea of an acknowledge reality. An actor transitioning from a fictional character to a verbatim voice will challenge the concept of an audience’s perception of the ‘real’. By consciously merging the two genres, will allows the work to experiment with the audience’s phenomenological engagement, through either an acknowledged or detached relationship with the factual.

 

 Works cited:

Bottoms, Stephen (2006) Putting the Document into Documentary: An Unwelcome Corrective? in TDR: The Drama Review, volume 50:3, pp.56-68

Reinelt, Janelle (2009) The Promise of Documentary in Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson eds. Palgrave Macmillan Publishers Limited: Hampshire