Verbatim Theatre in South Africa: ‘Living History in a Person’s Performance’

Abstract

The first decade of the twenty-first century has brought with it an over-whelming interest in and production of life narratives ranging from published autobiographies and biographies to talk shows, gossip columns in newspapers, and internet sites like Witness that bring together artists, Human Rights activists and grassroots communities throughout the world (Schaffer and Smith, 2004, p. 38). It is thus significant, but not surprising, that Michael Ignatieff claims that, during this decade, ’human rights has become the dominant moral vocabulary in foreign affairs’.1 Along with this has come an artistic and academic interest in what was documentary theatre, and now in the UK has been termed ’verbatim theatre’. Stephen Bottoms suggests that ‘a compulsion to reportage on current events has displaced the 1990s vogue for “in your face” plays of Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, et al.’ (2006, p. 56). Some have theorised that this has been the response to a failure in journalism.2 Plays by David Hare, Max Stafford-Clark’s Out of Joint Company, which also commissioned Robin Soans’ Talking to Terrorists (2005), plays at the Tricycle Theatre such as The Colour of justice (1999), Justifying War (2003) and Bloody Sunday (2005), all mark some of the key examples of this kind of theatre in the UK.