Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2023

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.

Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-03934655 , version 1 (11-01-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03934655 , version 1

Citer

Déborah Prudhon. Alecky Blythe and “Headphone Verbatim”: a Study of The Girlfriend Experience (2008). De Gruyter. The New Wave of British Women Playwrights, In press. ⟨hal-03934655⟩
117 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

  • More