Do I like verbatim theatre? Up to a point, Lord Copper. As I wrote three years ago after seeing Alecky Blythe's London Road at the National Theatre, it's a genre that has its limitations. When a writer restricts herself to exactly reproducing words that have been recorded, it can be no more than an exercise in a rather basic form of journalism. London Road benefited from a brilliant staging by Rufus Norris that included songs and music, giving the action a ritualised quality that divorced it totally from its ostensible subject, a grisly series of murders in the red-light district of Ipswich.
In Little Revolution at the Almeida, many of the same strengths and weaknesses are evident as Blythe the writer, dictaphone in hand, gets to grips with the London riots of 2011. There's no music this time, and director Joe Hill-Gibbins has gone for a naturalistic style rather with no hint of ritual or formality. There are some very sharp acting performances, notably from Lucian Msamati, Ronni Ancona, Melanie Ash, Lloyd Hutchinson and Barry McCarthy. Imogen Stubbs and Michael Shaeffer play an impeccably BoHo couple from the middle-class side of the tracks in north London, who plan a tea party ('normal builder's tea, everyone?') to raise funds for their local Sri Lankan newsagent, whose shop has been wrecked by looters. The tea party (with cakes donated by Marks and Spencer) forms a backdrop against which the community's divisions are revealed. On one side, the property-owning bourgeoisie of Clapton Square, on the other, the Pembury Estate, scene of long-running conflicts between local youths and the police. But even on the working class side of the fence, there are stark divisions between women who feel their teenage kids are being victimised by the police and white working class council tenants who want more law and order. 'The Old Bill did nuffin!' is their view.
This isn't a play 'about' the riots any more than London Road was 'about' the Ipswich murders. We don't see much of the police, or the rioters; to hear their voices, we have to read the programme, which reproduces a series of excellent interviews by the Guardian's Paul Lewis. Though the sound effects are deafening at times, what the play delivers are distant echoes of the real events, as experienced by local residents. At times it's very funny, particularly as the local class faultlines become apparent and the media, particularly the BBC, come to investigate. But the real conflicts are happening offstage. I missed any insight into how Hackney is coping three years later, and I wanted to hear the voices of the hundreds of young people who were arrested and convicted.
With a community chorus of around 30 in addition to the actors, space is limited. The Almeida, a smallish theatre by London standards, has been transformed with some difficulty into a theatre in the round, but the acting area is tiny, limiting what the director can get the cast to do. For a lot of the time, they are sent offstage away from the action.
One of the production's best ideas, however, is the presence of Alecky Blythe playing herself; this could have turned into a piece of postmodern whimsy, but it works very well because she manages to send herself up something rotten, as a middle-class lady with a dictaphone who finds herself on the outer fringes of the riots, trying to make sense of where 'It' is happening but lacking the journalistic skills to find out.
What would Bertolt Brecht have made of the London riots? Something a lot more gutsy, more political and unafraid to take sides. Above all, he would have used his imagination to create characters with more depth than the ones whose words are reproduced in this play. Blythe's scrupulously neutral approach delivers no real artistic truth. It's a common error among journalists that truth is found by switching on the recorder and getting people to talk into the microphone. Firstly, there are conscious and unconscious choices to be made in selecting the interviewees and editing their words. And secondly, the characters may telling the lady with the microphone what they think she wants to hear.
I think a dictaphone can be a terrific research weapon for a playwright. But the artistic imagination is, or should be, always more important.
Pretty much my sentiments about this piece. It's the first verbatim theatre I've seen so didn't have anything to compare it to and while it had its moments I was left wondering what that element actually added.
Posted by: Rev Stan | September 07, 2014 at 10:09 AM