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Interviews
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Robin Soans and Verbatim Theatre (2) The Writer He began working in verbatim theatre after appearing in Waiting Room Germany by Klaus Pohl at the Royal Court. This was a German play that contained the views of 23 people from both sides of Germany, five years after the Berlin Wall came down. This was a nerve-racking play to perform as there were no props but it also proved to be very powerful and engaging with so much direct address to the audience. "I realised that far from being bored, the audience were hanging on our every word, they were completely absorbed. An entire layer of cynicism is removed because they know that the words are real. It is almost like taking a filter from a lens". Out of the blue, Stephen Daldry asked him to write an English version, Across the Divide, which was based on a large number of interviews in Ken Livingstone's Brent East constituency in the months following the 1997 general election. There is still a possibility that this work may be revived, possibly containing a new set of interviews with the same people, everyone from a bag lady to a jet-setting millionaire, ten years on. Soans closest collaborator has been Out Of Joint director, Max Stafford Clark with whom he has acted six times (including Etta Jenks, Three Birds Alighting on a Field and Shopping and Fucking) and who has also directed two of his plays. This means that Soans was in at the start of In-Yer-Face theatre, playing Brian in Shopping and Fucking. Ravenhill's work was so powerful that even as it was opening to shock from many viewers and critics, the actors knew they were performing in something really special. One night in 2000, Stafford Clark, in company with Mark Ravenhill, almost kidnapped Soans after a performance at the opening of Soho Theatre. Over dinner at the Groucho Club he was commissioned to write a sequel to Rita, Sue and Bob Too. This would explore what had happened to the northern community in the eighteen years since Andrea Dunbar's play was written. "I was amazed, dumbfounded and delighted" and in about three months A State Affair was in rehearsal. He faced a similar experience about three years later when Tim Roseman and Rima Brihi needed a writer for what became The Arab-Israeli Cookbook. In September 2003, Soans interviewed 80 people, both Palestinian and Jewish in Israel over a "dangerous and exhilarating" three-week period during the Intifada. The conclusion that he has now reached is that "A human play is twice as political as the political play you thought of in the first place. It is far more effective than mindless agitprop. Just watching people getting on with their lives has an amazing cumulative power". He currently has two other verbatim theatre projects on the cards. One is a play about scandal. "I want to take the opposite of the tabloid view. I want to look at people trying to stem the tide and live in the shadow of scandal. This is the story we never get". He also has another project that he is pursuing with the Royal Shakespeare Company about which he is far cagier. In addition, he has another play that is the opposite of Verbatim Theatre, we both struggle for the right word perhaps because this is what is commonly known as "Theatre". The Gate of Paradise is a play about doubt. It tells the tale of an art critic who loses the confidence that he has always had in his judgment. Once again, this is putting human nature under the microscope and, inevitably, is still influenced by Verbatim Theatre. As he says, "All the best writers, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Miller and Pinter for example, constantly use real life as a basis for their material and they clearly derive their idiosyncrasies from real conversations." As he put it, "Some things I could never have written gleam with truth". It is only bad writers that use clichés. Andrea Dunbar was asked once "Why did you end the scene there?" Her answer said it all: "They went round the corner at that stage and I couldn't hear them any more".
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