Joseph Rykwert

摘要

The Will to Build sounded grimly Maoist, but my affable Hong Kong friends invited me to see this spectacle, improbably promoted by the British Council, and it would have been churlish to refuse. My apprehension at being forcefully edified was due to my ignorance, as well as to my reluctance to read the small print. I should have known, if not about the Theatre du Pif, then at least about the kind of'verbatim theatre'the company practises. Edifying it certainly turned out to be, but not in the obnoxious way I'd feared. Verbatim theatre makes a collage of reported comments - some overheard, some obtained in interviews - and welds them into a performance. In its present form, it is about 20 years old, and has been used very successfully by more 'conventional'playwrights. David Hare turned it into a manifesto against the misdeeds of privatised railway companies and their Blairite protectors in his 2004 play The Permanent Way, while Robin Soans' Talking to Terrorists (2005), for which the writer interviewed former terrorists and victims of terrorism, had great resonance.