ABSTRACT

After the interviewing process, the next stage in the creation of a verbatim play is the process of transcribing the interviews and then scripting excerpts from them into a dramatic piece. Most playwrights will transcribe their interviews, with the notable exception of practitioners such as Alecky Blythe and others who work with recorded interview material which is fed through an earpiece into the actor’s ear and reproduced during the performance.

At the transcription point, however, certain practices diverge for oral historians and verbatim theatre playwrights. Oral historians regard the interview as a form of historical documentation of the spoken word. The whole recording and transcript, if one exists, will be preserved and, whenever possible, made accessible to researchers and also members of the public. In verbatim theatre however, the playwright, when looking through a large amount of interview material, is faced with the task of rigorously pruning the content and selecting stories, phrases, descriptions, responses and other comments for inclusion in the script. These excerpts are ones which best suit the writer’s artistic, ideological, pedagogical or political aims for the piece, and they will appear in the final production. But the interview transcription is frequently never seen by anyone other than the playwright.

Finally, in this chapter, options are outlined for which verbatim form a playwright might chose for their own scripting process – ‘exact verbatim’, ‘massaged verbatim’ or some other kind of dramatic portrayal of the narrators’ original interview content.