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collaboration came in the form of a BBC documentary, produced by Philip Donnellan for the Midland Region, on the production of The Staffordshire Rebels (BBC2, 8 January 1966), a play about the English Civil War which the Victoria Theatre Company staged in 1965. Not only does the documentary provide a unique insight into Peter Cheeseman’s method of constructing documentary theatre, it also reveals how the company dramatised historical subjects from a distinctly ‘local’ perspective. Not long after this, while the company was staging a production COOKE PRINT.indd 37 05
been on the performances in ‘An Unearthly Child’, it is necessary to explain the term and briefly trace its development. Social realism is a form that was variously associated with the visual arts, documentary, theatre and film before being applied to television. It was John Bratby’s painting of a kitchen sink that originally gave rise to the term often associated with or substituted for social realism after being appropriated for David Sylvester’s 1954 article of that name; the ‘kitchen sink drama’ most commonly associated with the birth of social realism in the
), The Tricycle: Collected Tribunal Plays 1994–2012 ( London : Oberon ). Burke , G. ( 2010 ), Black Watch , 2nd ed. ( London : Faber ). Cantrell , T. ( 2013 ), Acting in Documentary Theatre
Parker, the producer of the BBC Radio Ballads (1958–64)—who were working for BBC Midland in Birmingham—went to see a performance of the Victoria Theatre’s first documentary theatre piece, The Jolly Potters , which was about the 1842 Staffordshire pottery riots. 3 They shot some scenes from the play but the footage was never broadcast. 4 The following year, however, Donnellan produced the BBC2
demonstrated documentary theatre’s new cultural importance. In America, too, a similar appetite for the kind of testimony now used in docudrama has long been evident in the work of Anna Deveare Smith (Fires in the Mirror, 1992; Twilight: Los Angeles, 1994). More recently Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s 2002 play The Exonerated (about prisoners on death row) mirrored Stuff Happens by making a successful trans-Atlantic switch in 2006. Factual dramas in all media are enjoying a heyday, and the synergy that now exists between entertainment industries is evident in, for example
connection with European left-wing politics proved the undoing of early American theatrical experiment. The war years and the McCarthy period virtually expunged that type of theatre in the USA, and the continuity was partially lost in Europe too. This history is more clearly rendered in the term ‘documentary theatre’. The resurgence of this form in the 1960s saw a great many serious issues investigated and not just in Piscator’s productions. The theatrical style pioneered by Piscator and by Bertolt Brecht was in a sense re-discovered after the Second World War. When
Lovely War gives the amount as $3.25 million. Dux_Attenborough.indd 59 15/08/2013 10:25 60 richard attenborough 36 Paget, ‘Oh What a Lovely War and the token tradition of documentary theatre: an investigation into the origins, manifestations and influence of documentary theatre in the UK’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 1988, Manchester University, SM D77811, British Library, London. 37 Author’s interview with Attenborough, Richmond, Surrey, 16 February 2007. 38 Quoted in Margaret Hinxman, ‘A Lovely War for British films’, Sunday Telegraph, 6 April 1969. 39
materials’ (1995: 35). The turbulence that results from screening a version of an anterior reality cannot be accommodated without further television talk (for this is what such TV programmes inevitably contain). This, then, is another convention of docudrama. In a similar way documentary theatre performances often trail in their wake such things as foyer displays of documentary material, extensive programme notes (even including facsimile documents), and post-performance discussion.19 In television the extra-textual includes continuity announcements, talk-show appearances
(2005), about atom scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The libretto was by Peter Sellars, or rather it was compiled from a variety of sources somewhat in the manner of Documentary Theatre. Sellars also directed the first performance.33 There are more British than American examples of documusical, but, as might be expected, HBO co-produced one (with Cinemax) for their ‘America Undercover’ series. Showgirls: Glitz and Angst (2003, director: Kirby Dick) explored the onstage and backstage lives of Las Vegas showgirls and featured music and song, both in rehearsal and
to know how to create cinema we must return to Méliès, and for this a good number of Lumière years still lie ahead of us.) With its combination of documentary, theatre and fantasy, Le Sang d’un poète established the formal parameters of Cocteau’s film work. The films that followed developed these three formal strands in a multitude of ways and to varying