Alecky Blythe and “Headphone Verbatim”: a Study of The Girlfriend Experience (2008)
Résumé
Alecky Blythe is a central figure in the landscape of British verbatim theatre. In her plays, she has developed a particular technique of verbatim where the recording of people’s interviews is played to the actors via headphones during the performance. The actors do not learn their lines beforehand but repeat a beat behind the words they hear and imitate the real people’s voice, replicating their intonations, hesitations, accents, etc. Ventriloquism – an eminently theatrical concept – is thus explored in a radical way. This chapter focuses on The Girlfriend Experience (2008), a play which welcomes the audience to the intimacy of a brothel and transforms the spectators into voyeurs – a concept related to the exposure of other people’s stories that is also examined. Basing the analysis on the published play script and on the original performance, I examine the relation that The Girlfriend Experience develops with the extra-theatrical world from a technical, dramaturgical and ethical perspective.