ABSTRACT
Oral history and verbatim theatre have many overlapping features, but some of their core aims diverge. These similarities and differences are addressed in this chapter.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the ‘bottom-up’ approach of oral history – interviewing those whose lives had seldom been recorded – was emerging on both sides of the Atlantic as more popular than interviewing the rich and powerful. In the 1970s, oral history (in the form of recording, transcribing and archiving interviews) was finally accepted as a legitimate discipline by history departments within mainstream academia.
Paul Thompson and other oral historians argued that their practice could enable the voices of the working classes to be heard for the first time not only by historians, but also by working-class people themselves. Significantly, this understanding was also shared by several verbatim theatre practitioners in England during the same period, the most influential being Peter Cheeseman who, in his ‘Stoke Documentaries’, produced plays that told the stories of local working-class narrators.
In assessing what verbatim theatre and oral history can teach each other, their shared aims and practices are discussed, as well as the basic differences between the two disciplines, since noting both the points of intersection and of divergence provides valuable insight for oral historians and verbatim theatre practitioners alike.
