Verbatim theatre, a type of drama based on actual words spoken by real people, has enjoyed a remarkable and unexpected renaissance in Britain since the mid-1990s. This chapter argues that the television presentation of verbatim theatre plays raises important questions about aesthetic experimentation and political significance in contemporary culture. Drawing on Bolter and Grusin’s theory of remediation, the chapter also charts the complex ways in which both the political and aesthetic contours of verbatim theatre are reconfigured in the translation of the plays from stage to television. Through a comparative analysis of the Tricycle Theatre’s Justifying War (2004) and Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2007), this study explores whether the move away from theatre implies a change of function and therefore a change of identity for verbatim theatre. Dividing the discussion of the plays into two main sections—the first concerning ‘immediacy’ and ‘hypermediacy’ and the second their political dimension—the chapter posits that the new context of mediation redefines the audience’s engagement with verbatim theatre. The second section also interrogates whether the identified shift that verbatim theatre undergoes in the translation to television inevitably involves a process of depoliticisation, thus endeavouring to articulate the friction between verbatim theatre’s political purposes and the reverberation of television as a journalistic medium. The conclusion reached is that verbatim plays serve an oppositional politics, the voice of which is amplified by television. The chapter thus not only documents the significance of verbatim plays on television in the first decade of the twenty-first century but also contributes to a broader scholarly discussion about verbatim theatre as cultural intervention within a contested and contradictory field of engagement.
In this edited collection, scholars use a variety of methodologies to explore the history of stage plays produced for British television between 1936 and the present. The volume opens with a substantial historical outline of the how plays originally written for the theatre were presented by BBC Television and the ITV companies as well as by independent producers and cultural organisations. Subsequent chapters analyse television adaptations of existing stage productions, including a 1937 presentation of a J. B. Priestley play by producer Basil Dean; work by companies including the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stoke-on-Trent’s Victoria Theatre and the Radical Alliance of Poets and Players; the verbatim dramas from the Tricycle Theatre and National Theatre of Scotland; and Mike Leigh’s comedy Abigail’s Party, originally staged for Hampstead Theatre and translated to the Play for Today strand in 1977. Broadcast television’s original productions of classic and contemporary drama are also considered in depth, with studies of television productions of plays by Jacobean dramatists John Webster and Thomas Middleton, and by Henrik Ibsen and Samuel Beckett. In addition, the volume offers a consideration of the contribution to television drama of the influential producer Cedric Messina who, between 1967 and 1977, oversaw BBC Television’s Play of the Month strand before initiating The BBC Television Shakespeare (1978–85); the engagement with television adaptations by modern editors of Shakespeare’s plays; and Granada Television’s eccentric experiment in 1969–70 of running The Stables Theatre Company as a producer for both stage and screen. Collectively, these chapters open up new areas of research for all those engaged in theatre, media and adaptation studies.