Meet the MDEE speaker: Alecky Blythe

Performer, director and writer Alecky Blythe founded verbatim theatre company Recorded Delivery in 2003, and has gone on to make award-winning work for theatre, TV and film: most notably 2011-12 National Theatre production London Road, with music composed by Adam Cork, and most recently Our Generation – a National Theatre and Chichester Festival Theatre production in 2022.

Blythe is now recommended as a practitioner for study as part of A Level Drama and Theatre specifications. Her work and process are enormously accessible to students of theatre, as her techniques are so quick to replicate, and involve technology with which young people are entirely comfortable. She also has the great advantage (over the likes of Stanislavski and Brecht) of being a living, breathing, still-working practitioner, making new work which students can experience, but also running workshops in schools whereby they can try out her methods first-hand.

I am therefore absolutely thrilled to be welcoming Blythe to the first day of the Music & Drama Education Expo on Thursday 23 February, where she'll be joining me on the main performance stage for a Fireside Chat interview, after which teachers will be able to ask questions for a full understanding of her verbatim process ‘from the horse's mouth’.

The method

Blythe's method is to record real-life interviews which form the source text of her plays, and then in rehearsal actors will listen to these recordings and replicate the vocal cadences of the original speaker – right down, as Blythe says, to the ‘umms and ahhhs and the b-b-b-s’. In the case of London Road these cadences actually developed into sort of spoken songs, highlighting the musicality of the human speaking voice by underscoring it instrumentally.

My call with Blythe bore much resemblance to a part of her verbatim practice and carried with it some of the hilarious challenges encountered by any who try to record a real-life conversation and reuse it for artistic purposes, with Blythe's dog making a comedic appearance. Blythe herself was enormously personable. She is currently working on her first play for radio – due for broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March – and on a feature-film, demonstrating the versatility of the verbatim technique as a basis for storytelling.

Of the radio play, based around the lives of shoppers in a well-known department store, Blythe says ‘I think people have often thought in the past “surely your stuff is a natural fit for radio” because, of course, it's quite ‘talky’, but in another way I think part of the joy of it is seeing the actors transform and double up, and of course you don't quite get that in radio. But what you gain is obviously a very rich texture in terms of the vocal cadences, and I can really put those to the forefront. So, it's a new skill. You have to slightly adapt your approach, and storytelling techniques are different.’

Ever-evolving

The feature film is also a departure from the ‘norm’, in that Blythe is using a hybrid of verbatim source material and, for the first time, scenes that she has written herself. ‘It's something that I've been wanting to do, but obviously terrified about doing it,’ she explains. ‘But I have loved it. As well as being scary, the blank page is also really liberating because I'm not bound by “oh, they said this, why didn't they say that?” Having control is great!’

Blythe is the first to clarify that she didn't invent her technique, but was taught it in a workshop at the Actors’ Centre by Mark Wing-Davey (now a professor at NYU), who himself learnt it from Anna Deveare Smith. ‘I came to it as an out-of-work actor,’ she explains. Wing-Davey ‘passed on this style of recording real people, editing those words, and then playing the real people on stage – keeping their proper voice mannerisms and delivery by way of wearing earphones in rehearsal, and he taught that to me in a workshop. And I took to it and was inspired by it and went and made my own show as a bid to try to get an acting agent. But I ended up with a literary agent. Life takes you in unplanned directions.’

Addressing young people

Now, alongside her ongoing creative output, Blythe herself teaches her methods to young people. ‘I send out a handful of MP3 audio tracks that kids just need to have uploaded onto their phones,’ she tells me. ‘They don't need to do any prep for the workshop, and then I teach them the technique, and it's really fun, because they don't need the script in their hands.

‘I often find that teenagers take to it really well, better often than seasoned actors who've come to audition for me. They're just up for it, they're like, “yeah, cool, earphones,” and they don't have a set idea of what acting should be. I find they really are very good at the acting technique: this teaches you it, because it teaches you listening.

‘I think what's also liberating is that with the development of smartphones they've basically got the capacity to make a show from their phone. There's free, simple software that you can get for either PC or Mac to do the editing, so they don't need to invest in anything to make their own show from scratch.

Within a two-hour workshop, I can explain how to perform it, as well as how to go out and make it. They're then equipped with the whole toolkit to go and make their own show, which I think is really empowering. It gave me a career, so it's nice to be able to share that with youngsters and inspire them. At the end of every session there's always a couple who have loads of questions, and you can tell that given half a chance they're going to go out and make something.’

Alecky Blythe will be talking to Sarah Lambie on the Performance Stage at the Music & Drama Education Expo from 11.15am on Thursday 23 February 2023. To register for free attendance, go to www.mdexpo.co.uk