Interviews, verbatim, structuring a play!

We listened to every ones interviews and it was very interesting to hear all the significant differences between them all.

The interviews ranged from the University Nurse, students of St Mary's themselves, a pub landlord and Suz's mum. There were many clashes of opinion, for instance, the Nurse and The landlord were coming from completely different places, one who works within the alcohol trade and one who has spent the past fifteen years dealing with the after effects of alcohol, poisoning, obesity and sexually transmitted disease. We listened to people talk about initiations, getting each other 'smashed' and downing three pints within thirty seconds.

The next task was to think about these interviews in terms of structuring a show, what interviews could we use, what order should they be in?

We discovered after having put the interviews we chose in an order for a show that you have to be incredibly careful in how you structure them. Our order was as follows:

Jumbo The Bouncer
Basket Ball Vice President
Adam, Rugby League
Stuart Green (cabbage patch) and University Nurse together
Suze's Mum

We talked about our decisions and that was fine but it was then brought to our attention that it was potentially an anti drinking message and quite one sided. Therefore, to me when making a verbatim play you cannot structure things on the basis that it will flow well or look nice. You really have to interrogate the content of the interviews and make sure you create tensions, different opinion in order to get a show that is diverse in it's subject matter, so that it's not all of one thing. You have to be careful not to lecture, not to present a one sided argument because a potential audience would feel disconnected from it, they don't want to sit down for an hour and be told that what they do is bad, or wrong. Especially if you showed a play about anti-binge drinking to an SU hall full of heavey drinking rugby boys. I think you have to taylor the show very carefully in order to make it controversial but not too in your face, 'this is my message and everyone has to listen'. I believe DV8 did this somewhat well as the information wasn't so bold and shocking that I found it too intense, there was a good balance between the differences in story.