It was my pleasure to direct these two shows for PPAcademy this autumn (2020) as I was able to further explore the headphone verbatim technique and discover some innovations. On these two shows the audio actuality for actor’s use does not exist . Since these are verbatim works drawn from real life incidents, I felt it was important to try and get as close as we could to some sort of source rather than actors working in a more general way on accents and voices that might fit.

So in both cases, I asked actors to try and find the original source :ie find the voices of the people mentioned in the play or find someone similar eg: in Little Revolution an actor had to find a Turkish shopkeeper, a Romanian resident, someone living on the Pembury estate and so on. In 26 Pebbles in was possible to find some of the people who experienced the tragic shooting at SandyHook school, Conneticut in 2011 and actors used these voices as their starting point.

Actors found their source and began to try and inhabit and embody exactly what the voice was telling them. They became conduits for the voices they were listening to and developed a sensory memory for how to replicate those voices. Week 3 in rehearsals, actors checked their source and then we recorded the plays in totality with actors recreating as closely as they could the written text with the voices that they had perfected. Then in subsequent rehearsals and performance, the actors listened to the recordings of themselves as they spoke the text. This meant at all times actors were connected to their source material, albeit once removed.

It was a fascinating process and served us extremely well. The recordings we did acted as a metronome for the actors, keeping them very closely aligned to the original voices, observing every idiosyncratic detail, every nuance in breath and rhythm. It was a pleasure to work with the students from PPAcademy and to excavate further the infinite possibilities with the headphone verbatim technique.