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Contemporary Theatre Review

ISSN: 1048-6801 (Print) 1477-2264 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gctr20

Staging the Democratic Deficit: Or, Three Uses ofthe Interview

Steve Bottoms

To cite this article: Steve Bottoms (2015) Staging the Democratic Deficit: Or, Three Uses of theInterview, Contemporary Theatre Review, 25:2, 190-204, DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2015.1020713

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2015.1020713

Published online: 30 Apr 2015.

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Staging the Democratic Deficit:Or, Three Uses of the Interview

Steve Bottoms

‘A general election is not merely a counting and logistical exercise, but amass cultural event that says something about a nation at a particularmoment in time.’ So wrote political commentator David Aaronovitch in afeature article for the London Times, during the run-up to the 2010 UKGeneral Election. To support the contention, he went on to discuss ‘twovery different plays that together create a fascinating, partial picture’ ofthe then-present cultural moment, by examining two ‘very differentsamples of the British electorate: the exclusive and the excluded’.1 InLaura Wade’s scabrous black comedy Posh (which had recently premieredat the Royal Court Theatre)2, Aaronovitch saw satirised a continuingculture of ostentatious privilege among the wealthy and powerful.Conversely, in Look Left Look Right Theatre Company’s new verbatimplay Counted,3 he heard a collage of voices drawn from interviewresearch, many of them under-privileged and expressing a clear sense ofdisenfranchisement with the political process. Counted, Aaronovitchwrote, constituted ‘a strangely compelling and poignant series of sugges-tions about how democracy is imagined and experienced’.4

In the five years since the 2010 election,Wade’s Posh has been revised for aWest End commercial run (2012) and then reworked again as a mainstreamcinema release (The Riot Club, 2014).5 Counted, by contrast, sank withouttrace following its initial run in the Old Debating Chamber of London’sCounty Hall, and a short, post-election regional tour. These relative fates arenot, I should stress, undeserved: viewed with hindsight, Posh was much thebetter play (and arguably a still better film), and its success speaks of itscontinuing cultural relevance, in a country run by a government of OldEtonian millionaires.6 I want to argue, however, that the comparative failureof Counted also says something important about the recent ‘culturalmoment’. If mainstream politicians andmedia commentators have struggledto comprehend the manifest and mounting disaffection with the existingdispensation among the British electorate (from English riots to Scottish

1. David Aaronovitch, ‘ANation Divided: Teaor Claret?’, The Times,20 April 2010<http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/stage/theatre/article2482389.ece>[accessed 26 October2014].

2. Laura Wade, Posh,(London: Oberon,2010): first performedat the Royal CourtJerwood TheatreDownstairs, London,9 April 2010, dir. byLyndsey Turner;transferred to theDuke of York’sTheatre, 11 May2012.

3. Look Left Look RightTheatre Company,Counted: first per-formed at CountyHall, London, April2010, devised by SteveBottoms, BenFreedman, and MimiPoskitt.

4. Aaronovitch, ‘ANation Divided’.

5. The Riot Club, dir. byLone Scherfig(Universal PicturesInternational, 2014).

6. Of the 29 members ofPrime Minister DavidCameron’s first cabi-net, appointed follow-ing the 2010 election,23 had estimatedassets worth more than£1 million. See GlenOwen, ‘The Coalitionof Millionaires’, DailyMail, 23 May 2010<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1280554/The-coalition-millionaires-23-29-member-new-cabinet-worth-1m–Lib-Dems-just-wealthy-Tories.html>[accessed 27November 2014].

Contemporary Theatre Review, 2015Vol. 25, No. 2, 190–204, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2015.1020713

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

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referendum), it is in part because of the difficulties inherent in representingsuch widespread, multi-faceted, and often inchoate dissatisfaction. Thechoice of County Hall as performance location for Counted, directly acrossthe Thames from the Houses of Parliament, was conceived by Look LeftLook Right as a gesture of bringing marginal voices to be heard in the centreof power. But did those voices, considered collectively, have anything coher-ent to say? Could they, indeed, even be heard properly in this unorthodoxvenue? The location ‘must have seemed like a bright idea’, MichaelBillington noted in the Guardian, ‘but although the material is fascinating,the acoustics are terrible’.7

This article attempts a cautious, belated archaeology of the making ofCounted, a process that taught those of us involved (I was one of its writer/editors) some valuable lessons both about verbatim theatre specifically, andabout the difficulties of political representation more generally. From a scho-larly perspective it also provided important insights into the problematics ofinterdisciplinary collaboration. AlthoughCountedwas professionally presentedby Look Left Look Right in co-production with Camden’s Roundhouse, itwas also themost publicly visible outcome of the research project ‘TheRoad toVoting’, conducted by arts and social science researchers at the University ofLeeds between 2007 and 2011.8 The source material was a body of almost 60interviews conducted in contrasting West Yorkshire locations by StephenColeman, Professor of Political Communication (who was prominently fea-tured by Channel 4 News in their own package about Counted). As a project,‘The Road to Voting’ was predicated both on the exploration of publicfeelings and attitudes towards electoral processes, and on the creation (in thewords of one proposal document) of ‘an original series of art works that willboth inform and be informed by a social science research context’.9

If I raised a quizzical eyebrow on first encountering this wording, itwas because uses of the arts in allegedly interdisciplinary or inter-professional contexts have rarely, in my experience, involved a partner-ship of equals. The non-arts partner tends to assume a kind of author-ity status, believing that its own expert knowledge simply needs to be‘jazzed up’ somehow by artists, in order for its message to be trans-mitted to a new audience. There is usually scant regard in this equationfor the particularities of the creative medium, and little understandingthat – in Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrasing – the medium is themessage.10 The proposal for ‘The Road to Voting’, however, held outthe intriguing promise of reciprocity – suggesting that the creativeprocess might not only be informed by, but also inform, the socialscience research. It was on this basis that, as a theatre-maker,researcher, and then-University of Leeds colleague, I became involvedas a collaborator in the project – sifting, editing, and arranging theinterview materials into a draft script. This was then handed to, andfurther developed by, Look Left Look Right’s co-artistic directors BenFreedman and Mimi Poskitt. This article traces first Coleman’s and myattempts to make ourselves legible to each other as researchers,through the medium of the interview, and then my equally challengingtask of working with Look Left Look Right to develop this ‘practice-as-research’ enquiry into a play that would meet their needs as ayoung, professional theatre company. I then conclude with some

7. Michael Billington,‘Theatre: Counted?’,Guardian, 21 April2010, p. 40.

8. See Brenda Hollweg’sessay in this issue foran overview account of‘The Road to Voting’project, (pp. 177–89).

9. Stephen Coleman andVanalyne Green, TheRoad to Voting: ProjectOutline, unpublisheddocument for internalcirculation at theUniversity of Leeds,2007.

10. Marshall McLuhan,Understanding Media(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

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reflections on the question of audience that underpinned the wholeproject: Coleman’s desire to see his research find a new, lay audience,through a creative medium, was mirrored by the company’s desire to

Image 1 Simon Poland as the Interviewer in Counted, at the Speaker’s seat in the OldDebating Chamber of London’s County Hall (May 2010). Photograph courtesy of LookLeft Look Right.

Image 2 Simon Poland and Molly Taylor in Counted. Old Debating Chamber, CountyHall, London (May 2010). Photograph courtesy of Look Left Look Right.

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further build an audience for their own work. In certain respects, then,our position resembled that of the politician in relation to the electo-rate: what assumptions did we make about who our audience mightbe, and about what they might be willing to hear?

Interviews as Theatre

Documentary theatre practice has a distinguished and varied history stretchingback a century or so, but ‘verbatim theatre’ – in which, as the name suggests,the performed text is based on the edited transcripts of verbal testimony – hasemerged as an identifiable sub-genre only in the last two decades. During the1990s, American practitioners including Anna Deavere Smith and MoisésKaufman developed influential variants of the form, and in the 2000s verbatimbecame popularised as a concept thanks to a series of plays by dramatists suchas David Hare and Robin Soans, seeking to respond to the intense politicalclimate post-9/11. The popular tendency has often been to see verbatim playsas having a privileged relationship to the real, when compared with conven-tional drama: ‘This claim to veracity on the part of the theatre maker […]changes everything. Immediately, we approach the play as not just a play butas an accurate source of information.’11 As I argued, however, in a 2006 essayfor The Drama Review, the playwright’s role in selecting, editing, and juxta-posing verbatim sources necessarily involves an implicit (and often none-too-subtle) editorialising process: ‘such plays can too easily become disingenuousexercises in the presentation of “truth”, failing (or refusing?) to acknowledgetheir highly selective manipulation of opinion and rhetoric’.12

In my conversations with Stephen Coleman, it quickly became clear thathe had a similar set of concerns around the unreflexive uses of interviewmaterial in ostensibly empirical research. ‘The social sciences’, Law and Urrynote, ‘are relational and interactive’, and their research methods ‘are perfor-mative. By this we mean that: they have effects; they make differences; theyenact realities; and they can help to bring into being what they alsodiscover.’13 The interview situation is a prime example: far from being atransparent medium for the transmission of the subject’s true, unguardedfeelings and beliefs, the interview is a form of dramatic encounter conductedaccording to certain established (though not always acknowledged) beha-vioural conventions. Yet the tendency in both social science literature andverbatim drama is to edit the interviewer out of the conversation, decontex-tualising respondents’ words ‘in the form of long block quotes. […] Theseexcerpts are expected simply to speak for themselves.’14 Hence, in verbatimtheatre, the tendency for plays to be assembled as a series of talking-headmonologues delivered straight to the audience.15 As playwright David Edgarremarked despairingly in 2008, ‘[w]hy is the first question for an audience ata contemporary political play not “how have they shown the horrors ofterrorism and war?” but “will it be stools or chairs?”’16

A guiding principle for our work in developing Counted, then, was todramatise the interview process itself, rather than obscuring it. This wouldhave the effect not only of reintroducing dialogue to the drama, but ofinviting audiences to pay attention to the performative, two-way dynamicsof the interview exchange – in which particular kinds of questioning elicit

11. Will Hammond andDan Steward,Verbatim Verbatim(London: Oberon,2008), p. 10.

12. Stephen Bottoms,‘Putting the Documentinto Documentary: AnUnwelcomeCorrective?’, TheDrama Review, 50.3(Fall 2006), 56–68(p. 57).

13. John Law and JohnUrry, ‘Enacting theSocial’, Economy andSociety, 33 (February2005), 390–410(p. 392).

14. Les Back, The Art ofListening (Oxford:Berg, 2007), p. 17.

15. There have, of course,been some notableexceptions to this‘editing out’ of theinterviewer. GregoryBurke’s Black Watch(National Theatre ofScotland, 2006) fea-tures a writer figurespeaking to membersof the Scottish regi-ment, in an echo ofBurke’s own researchprocess for the play,although these scenesare dramatised and noclaim is made to anystrictly ‘verbatim’ sta-tus for the dialogue.More recently, AleckyBlythe staged herselfas an interviewer onthe streets during the2011 London riots, inher verbatim playLittle Revolution(Almeida, 2014).

16. David Edgar, ‘Doc andDram’, The Guardian,27 September 2008.<http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/sep/27/theatre.davidedgar> [accessed27 October 2014].

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particular kinds of answers. As Coleman notes in his monograph on theresearch for ‘The Road to Voting’, How Voters Feel, the way in which inter-views ‘are tinged by the relational effects of power is complex and routinelyunder-explored’.17 In a play exploring mounting popular disaffection withpolitical participation, it seemed important to foreground the awkwardquestion of power relations in the form of the drama as well as its content– and the fact that I was not myself the interviewer allowed me the criticaldistance necessary to focus on these dynamics. Take, for example, thefollowing exchange with a middle-aged, female respondent from Leeds,which I identified early in the drafting process as the play’s ‘prologue’. Itsuited this introductory role partly because it so neatly summarised some ofColeman’s research concerns around the affective dimensions of voting, andpartly because of the understated, but nonetheless entertaining frisson oftension detectable between interviewer and respondent:

INTERVIEWER: Do you vote?RESPONDENT: I’ve always voted.INT.: Always?RESP.: Yeah. Well, since I’ve been able to.INT.: Would you ever not vote?RESP.: Abstain?INT.: No, not go along.RESP.: Not, not, not knowingly, I mean if I was out of the country… I

wouldn’t make a point of coming back or doing… as long asthere’s a polling station within walking distance I’d probably goand vote if, you know, because it’s, it’s… ease of access really.

INT.: So you wouldn’t come back from your holiday to vote, but youcertainly wouldn’t ever miss it knowingly. Why is that?

RESP.: Because people have fought for it, you know, to get a vote, itwasn’t an easy thing, people throwing themselves under horsesand all kinds of things, you know…

INT.: You think it’s a duty?RESP.: Erm. (Pause.) I don’t really know… a lot of people don’t vote

because of apathy or erm… they’d rather be in the pub.INT.: So what is it about voting, that’s so off-putting?RESP.: It’s a very isolating action. (Beat.) I think it is. When you go to

a polling booth everything is kind of err secret, you hidebehind a booth, you…

INT.: You’re not technically hiding from anyone, are you?(Pause.)

RESP.: Well there are some people who might be feeling rather ashamedor, you know, wouldn’t want other people to see where theywere putting their cross for whatever reason that might be…

INT.: Have you ever felt ashamed?RESP.: Pardon?INT.: Have you ever felt ashamed?RESP.: No.INT.: Would you be just as happy if everyone in the polling station

could see what you were putting down?

17. Stephen Coleman,How Voters Feel(Cambridge:Cambridge UniversityPress, 2013), p. 103.

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RESP.: Yeah, wouldn’t bother me at all.INT.: But these people who feel ashamed, what do you think it is about?RESP.: I thinkmost people are aware that, most people who vote, the vast

majority of people who vote, are not really sure of their convic-tions… at all. And therefore… if other people could see their…they’d feel more exposed if people could see them voting.

INT.: This description you give of the polling station makes it seem avery uninviting place. Is that how you see it?

RESP.: Definitely. It’s like something from the Communist era really.INT.: Why?RESP.: I think so, I mean, they’ve got wooden billboards, a table with

nothing on it, and err then they’ve got a box that looks like it’scome from Morrisons or somewhere and… It’s not very enti-cing is it really?

INT.: How would you make it enticing?RESP.: A cup of tea would go down well wouldn’t it for most people, I

think.INT.: Anything else?RESP.: A biscuit maybe? I think they should do the voting first – and

then a separate room, somewhere they can go and discussthings and have their tea.

INT.: You only get a cup of tea if you’ve voted?RESP.: Well you have to have some kind of carrot.

This scene, strangely compelling in its shifts between the grandiose andmundane, between the assertive volunteering of opinions and a hesitancyabout sustaining them, neatly illustrates Coleman’s suggestion that theresponses of ‘The Road to Voting’ interviewees ‘sometimes approachedthe inventiveness (and instability) of the poetic’.18 Its appeal, perhaps, liesin the fact that, even at her most defensive, the respondent admits to feelings(or at least, projects them onto imagined third parties) that many of us willprivately recognise but might be hesitant to acknowledge to others. Herdefensiveness, moreover, arises from Coleman’s strategy of calmly but insis-tently asking deliberately awkward questions: ‘Have you ever felt ashamed?’Indeed, this interview, which was sequentially the fiftieth to be conducted,

is indicative of the increasingly provocative approach that Coleman adoptedas the research continued. This was a response to the realisation that most ofhis respondents were tending to adopt one of two, semi-scripted ‘roles’ inreaction to his more structured questions. The first might be characterised asthe dutiful citizen, a role in which respondents treated their questioner as akind of authority, and so gave him the answers they assumed he wanted tohear (as at the outset of the scene above: ‘I’ve always voted’). Such assertionsmay ormay not be sincere (consistently, a higher proportion of people reporthaving voted at elections than have actually voted), but either way, theinterviews became ‘a stage on which enactments of civic competence andresponsibility were played out’.19 The alternative mode of response, char-acterised byColeman as ‘cynical chic’, involved the respondent purporting tobelieve that democracy is a flawed, duplicitous process and that s/he is tooshrewd to be taken in by it.20 Here, the attitude toward the interviewer,instead of deference, is either one of assumed parity (you know this too,

18. Coleman, How VotersFeel, p. 94.

19. Ibid., p. 100.

20. See Nina Eliasoph,‘Political Culture andthe Presentation of aPolitical Self’, Theoryand Society, 19(August 1990)465–94.

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right?), or of faintly hostile superiority (why do you care?). Whether dutifulor cynical, however, these adopted interview roles are distinctly limited interms of characterisation, and Coleman found himself having to look forways to jolt respondents off these predictable tracks in order that moreinterestingly personal responses might be elicited: ‘The aim of the interviewwas to hear what the interviewee had not come to say’, he remarks,tellingly.21

This approach, sufficiently unorthodox in terms of social science practicefor Coleman to discuss it at some length in How Voters Feel, is strikinglysimilar to the method pioneered by actor–playwright Anna Deavere Smithin her own interviewing process. ‘They start out singing a familiar song,with a predictable pattern’, she explains of her respondents, ‘but what Iwant to do is get them to break that pattern while they’re talking to me,because when they break it, they do things that are so specific to them andonly to them. […] I think we can learn a lot about a person in the verymoment that language fails them.’22 By rendering her interviewees’emphases, hesitations, and repetitions with uncanny, studied clarity (ratherthan seeking an illusion of spontaneity), Smith provides spectators with akind of doubled, critical awareness not only of what is being said, but of theway in which it is said. This approach has proved influential for subsequentverbatim theatre practitioners, including Look Left Look Right’s co-artisticdirector Ben Freedman. ‘It was the meanderings that I was really interestedin’, Freedman explains of his initial attraction to Smith’s work, ‘the waythat non-utterances and silences and people being incoherent often saysmore than vocab’.23 There was a sharp contrast, here, with Freedman’sprofessional experience of making documentary films for British television,in which an interviewee’s language is usually expected to serve a brisklyfunctional role in a pre-scripted narrative:

Often in a documentary script you write what you call ‘dream sync’, which isyour dream of what you want the person to say at this point. And then you goout and try to get it. You’ve done your research so you’re not necessarilyputting words in their mouths – but you’ve worked out a logic to the story andyou know what you need at this point in the sequence for it to make sense.Television can be very formulaic in that way, whereas with verbatim [theatre],your research is the show: you just let people talk and then figure out later howto edit it. Plus people’s guard is down because there’s no cameras. When it’sjust a little tape recorder on the table, people tend to be quite free with whatthey say.24

There are ethical issues involved here, of course, and a basic one for workconducted like this is to allow any respondents who are to be identifiable ascharacters in a play to see and approve their attributed ‘lines’ in the editedscript. Freedman’s interest here is not in deceiving interviewees into disclos-ing a ‘scoop’, but in capturing a different kind of texture in the way voices areheard. Look Left Look Right’s first production, Yesterday was a Weird Day,was staged at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in rapid response to the 7July bombings in London that year. ‘The news reports were reflecting aunited city that knewwhat it thought’, Freedman recalls of the circumstancesthat drove him and Poskitt into action:

21. Coleman, How VotersFeel, p. 101.

22. Anna Deavere Smith,Talk to Me: ListeningBetween the Lines(New York: RandomHouse, 2000),pp. 51, 53.

23. Ben Freedman,unpublished interviewwith author, 14October 2012, Leeds.

24. Ibid.

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The vox-pops were really trite and squashed people’s views into quite neatforms: ‘We’re being very stoic’; ‘We’ll keep going’; ‘I was there when such-and-such happened’. It was all very crash-bang-wallop, and yet when youactually spoke to people about what was going on, there was a lot ofincoherence.25

Yesterday was a Weird Day attempted to capture a greater complexityof feeling and diversity of opinion around the bombings than was appar-ent in the mainstream narrative – although that narrative duly reabsorbedthe play: ‘a crucial piece of instant historical evidence, vividly recapturingthe cheerful stoicism of bewildered Londoners’, reported the Stage.26 In2008, the company’s next production, The Caravan,27 presented theperspectives of families displaced by the UK-wide flood events of June2007, and who – forgotten by the news cycle – were still living intemporary accommodation a year later. Staged inside a caravan, for justeight audience members at a time, the 30-minute performance created avividly claustrophobic impression of what living in such conditions mightbe like. Opening at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to critical acclaim,before touring the UK (including parking itself outside London’sRoundhouse and Royal Court Theatres), The Caravan fused verbatimdrama with site-specific staging to evoke affective dimensions of livedexperience that would be very hard to capture on television. During theperformance I witnessed, the sound of rain hammering onto the roof ofthe caravan perfectly accentuated the themes of the play.Freedman and Poskitt, both former students of mine at Glasgow

University, seemed the natural people to approach about developing thematerial from ‘The Road to Voting’ into a play, and they proved respon-sive to my soundings for two key reasons. One was, as Freedmanacknowledges, ‘the sheer amount of material’ already collected throughColeman’s research process: ‘that was incredibly exciting – and not justthe quantity but the quality in terms of the cross-section’.28 The otherattraction was the possibility that, with this material, this emerging com-pany could create their first ‘full-length’ performance, on a vital publicissue, to coincide with the likely timing of the 2010 General Election. ‘Wewere at a point in our story as a company where we wanted to make a bigshow’, Freedman notes, ‘a show that got big audiences, and toured thecountry, and got a bit of press coverage’.29 In order to create such a piece,however, we had to confront the question of how to invest this wealth ofsimilarly-structured interview transcripts with a dramatic through-line thatwould maintain audience interest and attention for 90 minutes or more.

Dramaturgical Challenges

The various collaborators on the play had found shared creative interests inwhat might be called the ‘grain’ of the transcribed interviews – in theirtensions, inconsistencies, and revealing incoherences. Yet we quickly discov-ered that the very different uses to which interviews are put in the sociologicaland theatrical contexts presented us with some significant methodologicalproblems. For all Coleman’s concern to scratch at the individuality of the

25. Ibid.

26. John Thaxter,‘Reviews: Yesterdaywas a Weird Day’,Stage, 13 February2006 <http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/11534/yesterday-was-a-weird-day> [accessed27 October 2014].

27. Look Left, LookRight, The Caravan,Pleasance Courtyard,Edinburgh, August2008.

28. Freedman, unpub-lished interview.

29. Ibid.

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respondent through his questioning strategies, the fact remains that socialscience research is less concerned with individual experience per se than withidentifying patterns across and between social groups. Individual voices canoften usefully be cited as being illustrative of, or contrary to, wider patterns ofresponse, and the semi-structured, qualitative research interview certainlyappears more personal in orientation than the pure number-crunching ofquantitative data. Yet it is nonetheless ‘best suited for exploring similarity,not for establishing systematic differences’.30 Patterns of commonality inresponses to the various set questions are identified and analysed, whereas, bydiametric contrast, drama requires individually identifiable characters, andrequires that their stories maintain audience interest by being in some wayextra-ordinary, as well as recognisable.Two or three such narratives were quickly identified amongst

Coleman’s raw interview transcripts. There was the case, for example, ofa British West Indian woman whose family had, for many years, beenconfronted with explicit threats of racist violence if they dared to showtheir faces at their local polling station. The gradual waning of thishostility over the course of decades had meant that, in recent years, shehad finally felt able to exercise her democratic rights. Yet when the far-right British National Party (BNP) had recently begun canvassing forvotes in her area, ‘that was like a kick in the teeth’. In another vividlyrecounted tale, a young British-Asian woman who had run away fromabusively patriarchal conditions in her parents’ home described her fear ofeven registering on the electoral roll, because it might enable her family totrack her down. The irony was that these narratives, volunteered by therespondents rather than being elicited by Coleman himself, were ofrelatively little use to him from a sociological point of view. Tellingthough they might be about societal conditions, past and present, therewas no pattern to be identified in relation to other respondents.Conversely, in dramatic terms, these narratives jumped out as potentiallypivotal moments for the play. Indeed when Poskitt and Freedman begancasting actors, almost all of whom would play multiple roles, a keyconsideration was to ensure that these two characters be played accordingto ethnicity, without resorting to dubiously ‘colour-blind’ cross-casting.By contrast with these stand-out narratives, however, most of the inter-

views told us very little about the respondents as individual people: theiropinions and feelings about voting were being canvassed, but there wasoften little sense in character terms of where the respondents’ attitudes‘came from’. Nor, indeed, did most of the interviews run for long enoughto permit much of a sense of character to emerge: Coleman had typicallyspent around 30 to 40 minutes with respondents (longer with the morefluent, less with the more reticent), a time frame within which mostpeople’s views on voting seemed to be largely exhausted. By contrast,Freedman and Poskitt would normally aim to spend an hour or two withinterviewees – or even ‘hang out for the afternoon’ – in order to allowthem time to unwind and relax sufficiently to speak more personally.The advantage of Coleman’s data set, however, was in the range and

depth of its social cross-section: it quickly became clear that one way toapproach the editing of the transcripts was by presenting respondents inrepresentative groups, rather than as individuals. I was fascinated, for

30. Shadd Maruna,Making Good: HowEx-Convicts Reformand Build Their Lives(Washington, DC:AmericanPsychologicalAssociation, 2001),p. 51.

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example, by the way that the length of people’s responses to Coleman’squestions often seemed indicative of their own degree of social privilege.In the first set of interviews, conducted with young mothers at a SureStart Centre in one of the more socially disadvantaged suburbs of Leeds,the respondents’ answers were mostly brief, hesitant, sometimes literallymonosyllabic. Indeed, to stage these speakers, we had no choice but tostage the interviewer as well, since removing his gently coaxing question-ing would render the responses all but unintelligible. By striking contrast,the second set of interviews was conducted with golf club members in aprosperous Yorkshire market town, men whose inherent self-confidenceallowed them to speak in ‘block quotes’, unprompted, for considerableperiods of time. Contrasts such as this seemed to me integral to the ‘story’of Coleman’s research, and so I sought to foreground them by splicingtogether material from several interviewees in each setting, in order tocreate group ‘scenes’. Thus, the Sure Start respondents were reconceivedas a kind of focus group convened in a visibly institutional setting, withthe interviewer asking questions to all of them simultaneously. By con-trast, I proposed presenting the golf club members in a set of isolatedarmchairs under spotlights, since these men had been interviewed in theirown homes rather than in a common social setting. In this scene, respon-dents would be presented speaking in intercut monologues, with barelyany prompting needed from the temporarily side-lined interviewer.Theatrically, this grouping strategy worked well up to a point, allowing

us see clear contrasts of circumstance and attitude between the varioussocial groups in Coleman’s sample. Partly to provide dramatic contrast,such group scenes were interspersed with others retaining the originalone-to-one interview format. I also attempted to create an ongoing,quasi-musical structure of theme and variation, as the interviewer putsthe same questions to varying respondents, and elicits sometimes strik-ingly different answers. Nevertheless, it was clear from the outset that inorder to become coherent as a play, these draft scenes needed an over-arching dramaturgical premise: the microcosmic contrasts between differ-ent interviews provided interest from moment to moment, but where wasthe ‘hook’ for the audience? As Freedman notes, verbatim theatre permitsmore structural freedom than the television documentary,

but you’re still striving for conflict, you’re still striving for jeopardy: ‘What’sgoing to happen, why do I need to keep watching this?’ The only differenceis that with theatre you’ve got an audience that’s a bit more patient,whereas with TV, if it’s not obvious, people just change the channel.31

My sense was that, in the absence of any other ‘big story’ to hang thenarrative on, the dramatic progression of the play had to mirror that of theresearch process itself. With the interviewer as the only consistent presenceacross the interviews, he provided the connecting thread between them andhad to become, in effect, the play’s protagonist. But what were his motiva-tions, what was driving him to undertake these enquiries? Somewhat cau-tiously, Coleman consented to my conducting a series of interviews withhim, in order to provide the play with another layer of verbatim material thatmight be intercut with the transcripts from ‘The Road to Voting’.

31. Freedman, unpub-lished interview.

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These discussions swiftly supplied us with the central dramatic ‘crisis’ tobe introduced at the start of the play – the issue of falling turn-out,particularly among younger voters. ‘If you’ve got over half the peoplein the 18–30 age group not voting’, Coleman observed,

you’ve got an immediate problem for democracy and a long-term crisis fordemocracy. The immediate problem – they’re not voting now. The long-term crisis – when do they acquire the habit and why should they? Thegreat nightmare is that polling stations become places in which you wouldonly expect people to enter with walking sticks. The question is, can youhave a situation where on polling day you walk into a polling station and itlooks like a busy supermarket, it looks like a street festival, it looks likepeople are not only being counted but they actually feel counted, becausethey’re part of the community?32

The play (which found its title in this passage) thus sought to set up a senseof mission or quest on the part of the researcher: he was not just gatheringimpartial data, but trying to understand a profound democratic deficit. Inorder to further flesh out the interview process as dramatic action, I alsointerviewed Coleman’s erstwhile research assistant, Valentina Cardo, whocould be staged as the figure carrying bundles of paper and recordingequipment (Sancho to Coleman’s Quixote), and who added another vividlayer of verbatim material. ‘We were just desperate to start interviewing’,Cardo told me of the decision to go first to the outlying Sure Start Centre:

I don’t know Leeds very well but I had the impression that we kept going andgoing and going in the car, and then at the furthest point we stopped, andthere was Sure Start. I had no sense of where I was. None whatsoever.33

For me, this sense of urgency and disorientation provided dramaticcontext for the ‘focus group’, as indeed did Coleman’s own admissionthat ‘I was very very nervous about starting there because these are notthe sort of people I feel most comfortable talking to.’ The room in whichthe interviews were conducted, he recalled, was ‘a room for changingbabies. It had very little chairs’.34 Those child-size chairs, inducing phy-sical awkwardness in the actors, were written into the play’s staging.Even as my draft script was taking shape, however, Freedman and

Poskitt were registering concerns around the Interviewer’s proposedcentrality to the play. It was one thing, they felt, to have audiencesunderstand this figure’s intellectual rationale for his enquiries, but quiteanother to make them care about him as a human being. These concernsemerged from test-readings of some of my draft scenes, conducted inLondon with invited audiences, which suggested that the listeners foundthe Interviewer figure too ‘academic’, and wanted less of him. My sense,however, was that these issues might be overcome if we could learn moreabout what was driving the character personally and emotionally.Coleman was at first understandably reticent about ‘becoming the story’in this way, but his own perspective on the material had also beenchanging during the process of hearing his own interview exchangesread back to him, in draft script form. Where, habitually, he would skim

32. Stephen Coleman,quote excerpted fromunpublished interviewswith author, October2009–March 2010.

33. Valentina Cardo,unpublished interviewwith author, January2010.

34. Coleman, unpublishedinterviews.

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past his own transcribed words in order to focus on the respondent’s, ‘itbecame clear that this acute sensitivity to interviewee responses was ratherlike an account of a one-sided telephone conversation’.35 He graduallybegan to see himself as being, indeed, ‘a participating actor with his ownstory to tell – or withhold’.36

Thus, over the course of our conversations, Coleman became increas-ingly forthcoming about a personal story, which – it became clear – washighly pertinent to an understanding of his research. Though born aLondoner, he grew up as the child of a Jewish family that had left Europe‘in circumstances not entirely of their choosing’, and the spectre of war andHolocaust had been very much present during his youth: ‘I think that mustbe why, at a fairly young age, I got quite – sort of – obsessive, in a fairlycalm and restrained way, about associating myself with the cause ofdemocracy.’37 This acknowledgement, I realised, could provide a vitalsense of personal motivation for the play’s Interviewer. Coleman’s enqui-ries were not just some impartial, academic exercise, but were rooted in aprofound sense of identification with the disadvantaged outsider:

When I first went to university – it was me and a friend of mine who camefrom the East End – we were at University College London. They had a lotof porters who used to wear red coats, and we used to think, ‘They’re gonnacatch us one of these days, give us a red coat and make us become porters.’ Itwas always that assumption that ‘We don’t really belong here, we’ve kind ofgot in through being clever, you know, that’s not the way into a university.’So there was a – there were sort of senses of shame, anxiety, embarrassment.All of that, you’re gonna get amongst immigrant kids now. All of that you’regonna get amongst the sons of working-class people who go to university.38

By presenting something of this background in the form of monologicreminiscences, my emerging draft of Counted sought to establish theInterviewer figure as a kind of human bridge between the different sectionsof society being depicted – as someonewho understood experientially as wellas intellectually the issues involved for disadvantaged outsiders who feel thatthey don’t ‘count’. If audience members understood this, I thought, theymight also understand the concern and frustration that at times manifesteditself in a surprisingly forceful questioning of certain interview respondents.

Imagining the Audience

In my emerging draft script, the structural movement of the play started totake shape. We would begin with the start of the research process, explainits ‘mission’, and map out an initial sense of contrasts between socialcontexts as they relate to voter ‘buy-in’ (as in, for example, the youngmums and golfers juxtaposition). As the play developed, we would thenmove gradually towards darker, more difficult material, by interweavingColeman’s revelations about his background with interview materialexploring working-class disaffection with mainstream politics and the com-pensatory attraction of far-right parties such as the BNP.39 Admittedly, Iwas altogether less certain how to conclude the play, but this issue became

35. Coleman, How VotersFeel, p. 104.

36. Ibid.

37. Coleman, unpublishedinterviews.

38. Ibid.

39. Five years on, ofcourse, it is the UKIndependence Party(UKIP) – lessobviously tarnishedwith overt racism –that has become themore acceptablerecourse for such dis-affected voters.

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moot when I realised that Freedman and Poskitt were independentlypursuing a very different set of assumptions about its construction.The cross purposes we had been working at were in part the result of

communication difficulties resulting from the geographic distance betweenLeeds and the company’s base in London (a mirror, perhaps, for fault-linesin the political process between constituencies and Westminster). Freedmanand Poskitt’s response to the lukewarm interest in their test-readings hadbeen to seek out new material of their own, specifically with a view tospicing up the mix with some more engagingly theatrical material. Theybegan conducting new interviews using their own tried and tested meth-ods, which prioritised two principles. The first was to seek out people withongoing stories to whom they could return more than once, in order tocreate a sense of temporal development in the play’s narrative. Conductingcareful research in newspapers and online, Freedman identified individuals(mostly in the Yorkshire area, to maintain consistency with Coleman’smaterial) with potentially intriguing stories. An independent councillor inPontefract, for example, who had run for office using some of the winningsfrom a lottery jackpot, was campaigning to have traffic lights put at aparticularly difficult junction in town. This was a practical, local cause thatfocused the political process around a visible outcome.Freedman interviewed the councillor individually first, but the material

eventually used in Counted came from a subsequent interview with him,his wife, and his children. This was conducted in pursuit of Look LeftLook Right’s second operating principle – namely that, by interviewingcouples or families, who know each other well, more engagingly personal(and theatrical) exchanges can be generated than with a solo respondent:‘You wait for one of them to venture a controversial opinion’, Freedmanexplains, ‘and then you say to their partner “Do you agree?” Then you waitfor the fireworks. And that’s the drama, there’s two people talking to eachother.’40

This approach allows the interviewer to be edited out of the transcriptwithout it reverting to monologue, although it also, of course, evades theanimating question that Coleman and I had set ourselves in initiating thedramatisation process: what happens if we don’t pretend the interviewerisn’t there? There was also, for me, a question as to the suitability of thegrouped interview in approaching the subject at hand. It had worked wellin exploring shared, lived experiences such as the London bombings anddisplacement by flooding. But was it as well suited to exploring people’sfeelings about the electoral process? The act of voting, after all, is usuallyconducted alone, in the privacy of a wooden booth. In the Pontefractscene, the father is predictably derided by his wife and children for expres-sing personal political opinions they have heard before, yet the resultant‘fireworks’ added little of consequence to the play’s content because politicsas a subject is being loudly evaded rather than grappled with. The sceneremained in the final cut, however, because Poskitt and Freedman felt thatit provided a lighter, more playfully theatrical take on the issues at hand.‘At the end of the day it’s all about the audience’, Freedman contends:

‘If you don’t engage the audience, you’re not going to get your nextgig.’41 This refreshingly frank acknowledgement flies in the face of WillHammond and Dan Steward’s contention, in their book Verbatim

40. Freedman, unpub-lished interview.

41. Ibid.

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Verbatim, that documentary theatre-makers ‘have much more interest inbeing honest’ than do journalists, and ‘less to gain from lies and spin’.42 Aprime concern for Look Left Look Right was for Counted to be a showthat could raise the company’s profile by attracting a broad public.Freedman acknowledges, with hindsight, that the source material webegan with might have been ‘better suited to a smaller, a more academic,a more fringey audience – a more kind of intellectual audience’,43 but heand Poskitt decided that Counted needed a certain briskness and snappi-ness in performance – a determination to entertain as much as to inform.Idealistically, perhaps, my own conviction was that if you ask people topay sustained attention to detail and nuance, they might rise to thechallenge because they feel respected. As Jacques Rancière warns in TheEmancipated Spectator, theatre-makers should always be cautious aboutassuming that ‘the sensation or comprehension of the spectator’ is some-how lagging behind their own privileged understanding of the material.44

Just as, in Rancière’s words, ‘[e]very spectator is already an actor in her[own] story’,45 so is every spectator (in a democracy) already a voter, withher own experiences and attitudes to compare with those dramatised.Look Left Look Right’s own imagining of their desired audience

eventually resulted in the produced version of Counted becoming alighter, less complex affair than I had envisaged – a colourful collage ofquick takes. The inclusion of their own interview material alongsideColeman’s meant that some fairly ruthless editing had to be imposedduring rehearsals, with some scenes being greatly condensed and otherscut altogether. Little of the more personal, reflective material I had drawnout of Coleman was retained in the performance script, and the Assistantcharacter based on Cardo was excised altogether. Freedman acknowl-edges with hindsight that the company may have tried a little too hardto inject pace and humour: ‘in retrospect, I think we took massive poeticlicenses with the way we presented it – playing to stereotypes, trying to befunny’.46 The golf players, for example, were played with much posheraccents than their real-life counterparts, and were shown wildly practisingshots as they spoke. Frustrated as I was by some of these decisions,however, I was also personally responsible for some of the more unfortu-nate short-cuts taken by the final performance.During rehearsals, for example, under pressure to find cuts, I proposed

abandoning the opening Sure Start scene altogether and replacing it with analternative focus-group scene involving a group of respondents at an innercity community centre. Both scenes, I reasoned, were essentially aboutyoung people disaffected from the voting process, and we did not need torepeat this core point by presenting both. What I overlooked, in my haste,was the very different texture of these two composited scenes. At Sure Start,the exchanges were dominated by a sense of stumbling hesitancy, and stagingthis at the outset of the play would have helped establish the extent of the‘democratic deficit’ being depicted. These respondents, largely failed byschool and society, simply did not have the confidence to venture opinionson the political process to a stranger, and this should have been the point ofthe scene (one respondent was so lacking in self-belief that she assumed thatany vote she cast, even for a singer on the TV show The X-Factor, would be avote for the losing side). Concerned not to risk testing the audience’s

42. Hammond andSteward, VerbatimVerbatim, p. 10.

43. Freedman, unpub-lished interview.

44. Jacques Rancière,The EmancipatedSpectator, trans. byGregory Elliott(London & NewYork: Verso, 2009),p. 16.

45. Ibid, p. 17.

46. Freedman, unpub-lished interview.

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patience too early in the show, I suggested that the community centre group– composed of more obstreperously opinionated respondents –might makefor a more bracingly combative opening. This ignored my own carefulpositioning of the latter scene at the mid-point of the play’s development,when the Interviewer is becoming more assertively provocative in hisengagement with respondents. By placing it at the start, we simply succeededin making the Interviewer seem unnecessarily pushy, without having doneanything to provide the audience with an understanding of his motives.

Inconclusive

It would be a mistake, perhaps, to berate ourselves too much about theshortcomings of Counted as a piece of theatre. The production, featuringa versatile cast of six and directed with verve by Mimi Poskitt, received far-from-embarrassing press reviews (the Daily Telegraph awarding it a com-mendable four stars). It struggled, however, to find audiences willing topay to attend a play about voting at a time when the election (and,latterly, its aftermath of coalition-forming) was receiving blanket TVcoverage. And perhaps, whatever the dramaturgical decisions taken, ourattempts to translate social science research interviews into engagingtheatre was a Sisyphean task from the outset. Verbatim drama is onlyever as good as the story that can be woven around the component sourcematerials, and as Freedman notes shrewdly, ‘the irony is that we weretrying to make a play about people not being engaged by politics. Buthow do you get an audience to watch a play about apathy?’47

The circularity of that problem reflects, perhaps, on the still moreintractable problem of how to re-engage participants at all levels of thedemocratic process. Counted had set out to try to represent the under-represented, by using verbatim theatre to explore the fine grain of notonly what people say about electoral participation, but how they say it; toexplore the complex feelings of awkwardness, shame, anger, and bewil-derment that so many of us feel when confronted with the imperative tovote. Yet ‘representing the unrepresented’ is of course exactly whatpoliticians of all stripes claim to want to achieve, and in our varyingattempts to edit these revealing interview close-ups into an engagingstory, we had resorted to narrative methods directly comparable tothose that political parties are so often criticised for. As a writer, I hadattempted to turn the messenger into the message, by treating theInterviewer as the central character and using his own history as theemotional driver – a strategy reminiscent of ‘personality politics’. Asproducer–directors, Freedman and Poskitt had simplified and acceleratedthe material, resorting to theatrical tricks in the urge to entertain – andthereby invited the accusation (not least from me) of ‘dumbing down’.Looking back on a somewhat fraught process with the cool distance ofhindsight, the experience of Counted gives me newfound respect forpolitical performers and the catch-22 dilemmas they face every day –when every attempt to engage runs the risk of merely contributing furtherto the electorate’s disenchantment with those who seek to woo them.

47. Ibid.

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