ORAL HISTORY, COLECTIVE MEMORY AND COMMUNITY THEATRE: THE CASE OF VERBATIM THEATRE

Verbatim theatre, which reemerged from the documentary genre in Great Britain, the United States and Australia in the 1990s with a clear political intention, has also spread throughout Europe, even on the most commercial stages, where plays such as the following have been a success: Nuremberg (1997), The Colour of Justice (1999), Justifying War (2003), Bloody Sunday (2005) and Called to Account (2007), by Richard Norton-Taylor; Guantanamo (2004), by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo; The Permanent Way (2003) and Stuff Happens (2004), by David Hare, perhaps the best known of these playwrights; Talking to Terrorists (2005), by Robin Soans; Gladiator Games (2005), by Tanika Gupta; Black Watch (2006), by Gregory Burke; and Frost/Nixon (2006), by Peter Morgan. The reasons for this veritable boom have yet to be studied: distrust in governments and in the versions of the facts transmitted by the media; the need to access directly, through words offered directly to the audience, the real cases that refer to the most relevant moments of our history. Materials are presented for the audience's knowledge, with the expectation of an active response on their part or even their participation as co-creators. In this sense, verbatim theatre also connects with the tradition of "contemporary oral history", as a discipline that takes on the recording and transcription of the accounts of witnesses of the historical events, which becomes the collection and the archive of the testimonies of the people around their experiences. The existence of an oral history is particularly relevant in the case of refugees or immigrants obliged to abandon their land and wander seeking asylum, as we will see with the analysis of certain concrete examples.