OpenSpace.ru 01/02/2012
Anna Banasyukevich
Translated by Csenge Nagy
Edited by Elena Susanna Weygandt
MIKHAIL UGAROV assures that writing a play in the Verbatim technique is actually much more difficult than writing a conventional play.
“Verbatim” (in Latin, “literally”). A special dramaturgical technique with an unclear foundation. It is believed that it was invented by the British, while the British themselves believe it began at the Moscow Art Theatre, when the creator (Maksim Gorky) of the play На дне / Lower Depths went to Khitrov Market and talked to the then homeless people, who were not called homeless yet.
There are two languages in Russian, as has already been proven by philologists and linguists. Oral Russian and written, literary Russian. All drama is written in Russian, it is subject to the laws of grammar, sentence construction, rhythm. Oral speech, on the other hand, is built according to completely different laws. It is a different language altogether. The difference between written and oral is like the difference between French and English. In oral speech there are a lot of silences, pauses, and some contextual cues. For example, I can see that my interlocutor understands me, so I leave something out, implying something to myself.
How is this technique valuable for the actor and for the theatre? There are a lot of reservations, mistakes, and corrections in spoken speech that are usually thrown away in written Russian, while in fact these are the most valuable things as they speak the most about a person’s mental state. How a person makes mistakes, how a person contradicts themselves… All this is the score of a person’s mental life. When you blog, for example, you edit yourself a lot. When you tell a story, you edit yourself to a much lesser extent, especially if you’re talking to friends. Of course, when you speak in front of an audience, you edit a little bit, you control your speech. Verbatim is built on these features of oral speech.
In essence, Verbatim material is an interview, but not a journalistic interview. Whereas a journalistic interview gets information out of a person, a Verbatim interview gets everything out of a person: his or her mental state and mood, mainly. The method of collecting material “a la Verbatim” is to ask certain questions to quite a large number of people. The answers, it would seem, should be similar, but they will turn out to be completely, polarly different. A person can talk a load of nonsense, but by the context we will realize that a kind of drama has happened to them. Then, roughly speaking, the text itself is not important. We understand
something about them not by what the person says, but by how they speak – how they make mistakes, what vocabulary they use, and how they mix high and low styles. There is a popular belief that Verbatim is a primitive technique: take a tape recorder, go out into the crowd, come home, transcribe it, and you have a play ready. I’ll tell you as a professional: verbatim is much more labor-intensive work than writing a regular play. It’s easier for me to write two of my own, authored plays than to do one based on Verbatim. Because Verbatim is a huge body of material, and it involves deciphering and understanding how to build a structure. I can’t add to it, I can only edit it. So it’s a very time-consuming thing and, in principle, it’s quite rare in the theatre.
It needs to be understood that documentary theatre and Verbatim are different concepts. Documentary theatre is a broader concept, it uses different techniques, including artistic metaphor. If a performance is based on any document, it is documentary theatre. While Verbatim is a technique. That’s why, by the way, it surprises me when a director or playwright says: I don’t like Verbatim. But it’s just a technique; how can you like or dislike it. You can just not use it. It’s not a direction in art, it’s not an aesthetic, it’s not a genre. It is a technical method for creating something more.