ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to existing discussions within oral history that can inform the work of verbatim theatre practitioners. Following postmodern feminist thinking, for many years, oral historians have addressed power dynamics within the interview situation and identified how levels of trust between a narrator and an interviewer can affect the quality of disclosure during an interview. Playwrights are therefore encouraged to identify their own positionality since they rely on interview content to create their plays, and fuller disclosure from narrators provides richer possibilities during the development of a script.
The question of positionality relates to whether the playwright is from the same or a different population as their narrators and whether or not they have shared experiences with those whom they interview. When narrators come from a marginalised community, the importance of the interviewer sharing a similar identity or experience is, arguably, far greater than when interviewing people from more mainstream or powerful sectors of society. Although it is common practice in oral history, and other disciplines where interviewing is a key part of the work, for researchers to identify their insider or outsider status (or some less binary version of these terms), using the tools of intersectionality, and reflect upon its relevance to the disclosure of the narrators, far less analysis of this process has occurred within professional verbatim theatre practice and scholarship.
Possibilities of reflection by a narrator who contributes to a verbatim theatre piece are also addressed in this chapter which concludes with an examination of the implications of the oral historian Michael Frisch’s concept of ‘shared authority’ when applied to verbatim theatre processes, asking if co-creation is ever a realistic possibility in dramatic productions based on interviews.
