Verbatim theatre

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Verbatim theatre is a phrase used to describe a type of play that has become increasingly popular in recent years. Verbatim plays are, as the name suggests, written using only the precise words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic.

The playwright interviews people that are connected to the topic that the play is focused on and uses their testimony to construct the piece. In this way they seek to achieve a degree of authority akin to that represented by the news. Such plays may be focused on politics, disasters or even sporting events.

A verbatim style of theatre uses the real words from interviewees to construct the play. Campion Decent, Australian playwright and author of the verbatim theatre play Embers, said it is “not written in a traditional sense… but is... conceived, collected and collated”.^{[citation needed]}

Recent, high profile pieces of verbatim theatre include Talking to Terrorists by Robin Soans, My Name is Rachel Corrie by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner and The Permanent Way by David Hare.

Recorded voice delivery is an extension of verbatim theatre in which actors have recorded interviews played back to them during the performance, allowing them to directly mimic the accents and manner of speech, as well as the words, of the people they portray. This technique was pioneered by American actress Anna Deavere Smith in her play Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 about the 1992 Los Angeles riots.^{[citation needed]} A more recent example is Grandpa Sol and Lily's Grandma Rosie by Lana Schwarcz, in which Schwarz portrays the residents of a retirement home via puppetry and playback of interviews via iPod.