Performing oral history as verbatim theatre: A practice-led investigation

This dissertation is predicated on the search for fresh perspectives on an ethical and progressive verbatim theatre practice through the application of oral history theory and method. The use of personal testimony is central to the practice of verbatim theatre, as it is in oral history. Amongst those theatre-makes who work with testimony, the qualitative interview continues to be a key method deployed in the generation of testimonial evidence for performance. Few codified or generalisable guidelines exist for ethical verbatim practice. The negotiations involved in each individual interview event, and the subsequent treatment of the oral testimonies are, in general, specific and unique to each theatre-maker. Within the oral history discipline, interview negotiations are based upon, and designed around, a clearly defined theoretical framework. From an oral history perspective, the testimonial material is conceptualised as a co-created, inter-subjective, collaborative endeavour, shared between the researcher/playwright and the narrator. One key consequence of placing this conceptualisation at the heart of the theatre-making process involves the re-orientation of the primary relationship which predominates in verbatim performance. In the oral history integrated mode, the primacy of the relationship between theatre-maker and spectator is displaced and that which exists between the theatre maker and the original narrator of the testimony is privileged. This Practice-as-Research (PaR) led investigation will interrogate the significance of this shift in orientation, as it may be seen to manifest across each of the creative stages of the verbatim process; that is the interview stage, the interpretation stage and the playwriting stage. A central component of this study is creation and presentation of a verbatim playscript DIGITAL:the play. This script emerged from a case study involving a series of oral history interviews which were undertaken with a group of former employees at a computer manufacturing company DIGITAL Equipment Corp. The vimeo recording of the rehearsed reading presentation of this script constitutes the artefact in which this explorative, critical and reflexive body of research is articulated