Plymouth, and Lizzie Roper

Some symmetry has set in. I attended the Drum Theatre here in Plymouth the night before the interview for the new post at the University. Now I've been again, on the evening of my first day in the new job. The stroll down to the theatre took just five minutes from my new apartment overlooking Plymouth Hoe - furnished at present by an inflatable bed. This is posted from my new office on the city campus. There's traffic noise outside but it's otherwise bucolic enough, looking out onto a short stretch of lawn, a fine stone wall, and trees beyond. I'm grateful for it.
The show at the Drum was Peccadillo Circus, a solo show from Lizzie Roper. She interviewed a range of folk about their sex lives. Those 90 minute interviews are edited down to 55 minutes played on an iPod strapped to her arm - she then gives a verbatim account of what they said, compete with stutters, repetitions and vocal sounds. Some verbatim theatre works by memorizing lines. This playback approach, according to Lizzie Roper in conversation afterwards, brings in an extra discipline. You can't just let your actor's mind take over, you deliver the person exactly how they appeared. 'I hear what they're thinking' Lizzie told me, inhabiting their thoughts as she delivers their dialogue.
She is clear that her role in the process includes being a writer, selecting and splicing the material - and also, I must say, conjuring it out of people. All her characters have come to see the show, and been well pleased with the representations of themselves. The hour was filled with a neat run of powerful stories, some very fine 'writing' in among the lines (though no written form of this show exists at all). Lizzie Roper was still distressed at the number who walk out in moral outrage from what has been clearly advertised in advance as a filthy show - 10 stormed out of Glasgow in the previous performance. Plymouth seemed well up for it all. The show was bawdy and brazen, but big-hearted too. With characters ranging fro the dominatrix and the gay man trawling for sex across Europe to an elderly Jungian psychoanalyst, it was surprisingly intimate and tender.