London Road and why I ♥ Verbatim.

Having topped off my first draft of the play on Wednesday, I decided to award myself a rest day. Despite promising Rachel and Wendy (the assistant director) the first look, on Wednesday evening I went to my parents flat in North London and read what I had written so far. My dad had reacted to the idea of listening to a reading with fidgety wariness, but said he was gripped within the first two pages, so I was delighted by their reaction. Again I am thank for their extremely useful feedback.

The next morning I walked across Hampsted Heath, and wended my way home to Brixton. In my flat I found my desire to re-approach the script to start tinkering and fine tuning somewhat lacking, so headed back in to central London. I wondered round, got my haircut, went to the bar I work in to take in it's new Boudoir-esque interior, but felt a little at a loose end. Eventually I found myself crossing the Thames and heading towards the South bank, the National Theatre looming into view. Someone had recommended to me London Road recently, a new verbatim musical by Alecky Blyth, who is apparently quite the leader of the pack in terms of verbatim innovation, so on a sudden whim I decided to check it out and managed to bag a £5 standing ticket.

I haven't been particularly lucky in my theatre-going of late. The feeling of being bored in a theatre is one of the worst, and so far this year I have been bored by shallow stylised surrealism, empty verbosity, and heavy handed direction in a number of overlong production. Therefore the 2hr and 10 minute running time made me a little nervous, however when I left the theatre at quarter to ten truly excited by the subtly and texture Blythes play and indeed by the verbatim technique.

The play is based not so much on interviews, but more recordings of Blythe's time spent with the residents of London Road in Ipswich during the period when serial killer Steve Wright was on his spree and the period following. Therefore we get to attend meetings by the neighborhood watch group and an "in bloom" prize giving, as well hearing traditional interviews done in a verity of locations from people houses, to cafes and the local shopping precinct. What make the show particularly unique is that the material Blythe collated has all been set to an "Umbrellas of Cherbourg" style musical score, with every "um," "y'know" and "yeah, yeah, yeah" intact.

The great thing was that everything that at first appeared a problem to me, eventually became a strength. The fringy set, which at first seemed a little cheep and dingy, actually gave the Cottesloe theatre the warm feeling of a community production; this might be an amateur show that the interviewees are participating in. The lack of focus on Wright himself, and only one brief scene that focused on surviving local prostitutes, at first seemed to miss the dramatic heart of the matter but in the end the focus on the unheard voices of the local community gave them both their voice and show's unique character. Personally I found the music a little too populist for my taste, but it perfectly suited the subject matter and characters. "Are we meant to feel that we're celebrating the area being cleared of prostitutes?" Asked a friend I met after the show, and again this may seem a little ideologically suspect, but I actually admired the way Blythe took an entirely ambivalent stance on the matter. "This was an event that happened and this is the effect on the people who live locally," the show appeared to say,  and left us to decide what we made of the curiously positive effect it had on galvanising the community.

There was perhaps a slightly uncomfortable feeling of laughing at the people who had given up their time to be interviewed. People's accents, relationships and bumbling speech could all seem a little caricatured for all the apparent accuracy of their presentation, yet on the whole we were invited to warm to them, and perhaps some of the laughter was through recognising parts of ourselves on stage.

Ultimately I left feeling both entertained and full of thought, which is a rare combination, and inspired by the manner in which this verbatim production had done exactly what interests me in the genre. It places real human experience in the framework of an art/theatre and asks us to question it meaning for us a human beings.

I walk the three miles home in the balmy night air, and googled "Alecky Blythe" as soon as I got in, finding this fascinating  and helpful interview; Alecky Blythe on her unique verbatim plays . I was particularly jealous to hear of her 14 month interview period and 8 months writing and editing, as I have dealt with my own 6 month period in which to do everything! Regardless, as I set out to work  on my own script today I feel both confident in what I have drawn together and the practice of verbatim work producing stunning theatre.

From interview to script; reflections on the process so far...

My ability to update this blog has been restricted in recent weeks by the tedious but highly necessary process of transcribing the interviews. In all I collected five interviews, four with individuals and one with a group of six. In total this added up to around 8 ½ hours of interview material. As a rookie it took me around an hour to transcribe ten minutes of interview, which gives some indication of how long the process took. Yet having the interviews fully transcribed is really quite essential, for reasons I will explain below.

Last week I met with three actors to start turning these interviews into a script. It is always fun working with actors, and for all the seriousness of the subject matter having fun is key factor in making the process productive. People need to feel able to experiment, take risks and feel supported in that. Having a break for a cup of tea and a chat about common interests outside of the script is therefore as much part of the process as the serious read-throughs and improvisations, as it is by far the most effective way of building trust. The week was fully focused on script development.  We touched on staging ideas but as the full final cast wasn’t available there was no point in pinning things down yet. It was more about knowing that a theory or idea had the potential to become a fully fledged staging during the rehearsal process in August. As such the actors did one hell of a lot of reading; trying this section with that section, trying it again with further cuts, exploring how broken up the speeches and narratives should be. Having the pressure to write up, edit and cut every evening so the actors had something new to try the next day, was tremendously useful for me. A process that may have taken weeks took days, simply through being able to hear how things were working and seeing the project as a whole.

Another very useful  few hours were spent developing a degree of dramatic adaptation from one section of the interviews. This particular interview lent itself well to this kind of adaptation, due to the number of figures and conversations the interviewee described. Yet prior to the development week I had sat in front of my computer having no idea how to go about this. I therefore felt like I was asking a lot of the actors to simply improvise scenes based on the interview, with only a few scenic guidelines (i.e. what happens in the scene and what information needs to be put across). I felt like I was going to make them rather vulnerable, but this is where the importance of the trust we had as a group came into play and in reality I needn’t have worried. The first time round the actors stumbled through the scenes in as cheerfully chaotic manner as could have been expected. But without saying much, a second attempt began to establish a rough structural framework and started to produce some interesting and subtle dialogue. Watching it I was becoming quickly aware of what each little scene needed to lift it to a level where it would work within the context of the whole play. Sitting down that evening to write up the dialogue I felt far more confident in the what I was doing.

By Friday we had just over 90 minutes of material to share with a small guest audience. Yet my feeling, looking at the paper that represented the script covering to floor in little piles, was that I was still faced with a large and rather unmanageable thing that was going to take a lot of strong arming to get it to fit into a tight and succinct piece of theatre. Rather like being faced with a bilious sleeping bag that is supposed to fit into a six inch  square stuff sack. Here though the audiences feedback and comments were enormously useful. I now have two weeks off work to pull together a first draft proper, but feel my task has been make a lot easier, and I must particularly thank Rachel and Maxwell for their contributions.

Here though are some further points that I will take account the next time and recommend to anyone who is interesting in making this kind of work.

Interviews

• Meet your interviewees first for a coffee and a chat about the nature of the project, and hold the interview within the next seven days. Not meeting people first is awkward at best, and threatening at worst. Equally however every time we agreed to hold an interview in over a weeks time, the interview never happened as people got on with their lives and forgot about it.

• In the initial meeting talk about the project and some general issues, but don’t get too far into the interviewees story. If a good relationship built up quickly between us the interviewee was often quick to start sharing and made many interesting points, but then in the interview proper it is hard to recapture these with the same freshness as you are going over things that you already know, so it feels artificial

• Activists are generally the most happy to talk, and are used to sharing their experiences and have strong opinions, making for lively and productive interviews. It’s a brave decisions for a private individual to talk, respect their boundaries and be very aware of the emotive nature of what you asking them to discuss.

• If someone decided they don’t want to be interviewed or stops returning your calls don’t push it. It’s their story, their life and ultimately their decision. We are theatre makers trying to make socially responsible and mutually beneficial work, not News of the World reporters.

• Everyone is different and you have to be responsive to get the most from people and make them feel comfortable. Some people wanted to see the questions beforehand, and that requires them to be quite well formed. My preferred option was to simply bring along topic headings, and allow interviewees to choose how to define that and what they want to say. But you have to be aware of what questions are contained within each topic so if someone is struggling to know what to talk about you can be more targeted.

• Some people will happy discuss their lives with very little input from you, but sometimes a more conversational tone, in which I shared a lot of my own life experiences, was more productive. This was nice as I want to build a genuine and lasting friendly relationship with each interviewee, as I am hugely grateful to their contribution and would love them to continue in giving feedback throughout the project.

• Listen! On a number of occasions I listen back to an interview and realised I had not asked them to expand on a potentially important point.

• Make sure you understand peoples narrative and ask them to clarify things if you don't.

• Be completely clear on how you will use the material. This is an area I somewhat lacked in this time round, as I was speaking theoretically, I didn’t warn people I may not use their material at all (as has happened) whilst assuring them that their time and experience will be useful to the project as a whole.

• This point I make above leads me to my next point on interviews. Don’t do too many. When I spoke to iceandfire theatre company, who regularly do this work, they said three to five interviews will be enough. Ultimately I interviewed nine people but to create a focused script, with three actors, without too much character swapping, only six of those voices are used.

• People will have a lot of opinions about what they want the show to be, and how they think it should be used. Obviously you need to make the project useful to them, as it they are essentially investing in it so don't get prickly about it, but also you need to be firm on your own focus and remind people that there are a lot of interests that have to be balanced.

Script

• Transcribe everything. It’s tedious but to have the whole interviews laid out before you when it comes to editing is essential. At the points where I tried to be lazy and skip bits, I would listen through a few minutes then its potential would suddenly strike me and I would have to go back anyway. The pressures of time meant I didn’t have everything transcribed by the development week and ultimately these where the interviews didn’t get used. You can’t work with the recording in the same way.

• Equally paraphrasing the interviews will lose the uniqueness of the speaker voice and their emotional state. The time will come when you need to tidy things up into more theatrical language but this won't be apparent till you have worked with actors. An example of this is when one interviewee described how he would have killed himself if he did not have a boyfriend who supported him through his time in detention. As we read that section of interview each repartition and stutter became incredibly moving, and adds to the stories already innate power.

• Narrative is best. By the end of the development week it is the three most fully described narratives that form the back bone of the show, broken up by three single speeches from three other interviews (all from the group interview).

• Don’t add things that simply demonstrate an idea, rather than developing main narrative points. One speaker told a short but shocking story about racism on the gay scene, but  trying to fit it in it just seemed out of place and tokenistic. You can’t cover every issue in an hour.

• A focus; I entered the development week without a clear idea of what the focus of the play was. A lot of the speakers had experienced repression on the basis of religion, and I thought this and their relationship with faith might be it. I therefore drew together various comments on this to form part of the end of the play. But Rachel said this seemed unfocused, essentially meaning it appeared to come from no where given what had gone before. On the plane home to London however it suddenly struck me what the focus of the play we had created was; the play draws parallels between the persecution people experience as gay men in their home country, to the persecution they experience here as asylum seekers. This seems to be a powerful point, and I am glad it has emerged from the material rather than trying to force something on it from the beginning.

• If you have too many interviews for the time and number of actors to deal with you have to cut some of them. This is painful, but you will end up with a confusing, overstuffed mess if you don’t and that serves no purpose to anyone.

• Having a lot of material is good, because you have a lot to choose from, but it also means you have more to cut. I’m really sad at how many fascinating insights and stories aren’t going to be in the final script.

• For any subject matter like this there has to be something positive to end on. Maxwell, a refugee himself, was particularly keen to make this point. I don’t want to give away how I plan to do this now, but I feel confident in making something magical and powerful for the audience to go away with.