To Fictionalise or Not?

Documentary theatre puts real lives on stage, yet the sector rarely asks what it owes to the people whose words it gathers. Drawing on examples from the stage and on my own practice, I propose some methodological markers, from genuine consent to the traceability of testimony.

A Theatre That Feeds on Gathered Words

Over the past twenty years or so, documentary theatre has seen a considerable revival. The Berlin collective Rimini Protokoll opened the way by putting ordinary people on stage, using their own lives, their own knowledge, their own words as theatrical material, and related forms have multiplied in France: field investigations, reworked interviews, the presence of non-professionals on stage, performances rooted in the real. This effervescence delights me, because it reflects a desire to move beyond pure representation and into a theatre of the document, the trace, the testimony, and because it answers a real need, to put reality back into an art that its institutionalisation has at times cut off from the world.

But these performances rest on words given by real people, and the relationship formed with those people entails obligations the sector rarely discusses. I want to show here that these obligations bear on the very quality of the works, far from constraining creation, and that they translate into concrete working methods, of concern to any artistic team conducting interviews, gathering testimony, or carrying out fieldwork immersions.

Did They Consent to Becoming Composite Characters?

When an artistic team carries out fieldwork, meets farmers, factory workers, the residents of a neighbourhood, and then uses these interviews as material for a performance, it receives a great deal. The people have given of their time, their trust, their intimacy, they have spoken of their lives and their doubts, and they have consented to being interviewed. What remains uncertain is how far that consent extended. Did they agree to see their words remixed, their stories merged with others into composite characters, their names erased? In many cases the answer is no, because the question was not put to them, or because it was put too incompletely for them to imagine what it would mean, to see their life turned into fiction and performed before an audience that will never know who they are.

This question is partly a legal one, and it can return on those terms in harsh ways, but it engages respect first of all. Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), shows that any action carried out for people without them, however generous, treats them as objects and reproduces the very domination it claims to fight. The logic holds for documentary theatre. The people one meets are not a seam of raw material to be artistically transformed. They give reality, one gives them fiction in return, their names disappear, their singularity dissolves, and one can do all of this with the best intentions in the world while still using them.

The Truer It Is, the Stronger It Is

The choice to fictionalise is often justified by a dramaturgical argument, according to which composite characters allow one to reach the universal by moving beyond the singularity of particular cases. Fiction would be denser, more transmissible than the raw document. My experience leads me to think the opposite. Universality is not made by erasing singularities, it is made by passing through them. This is what the strongest documentary works show, in theatre as elsewhere. Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel laureate in literature in 2015, composes her books from monologues attributed to people who are most often named, whose awkwardnesses, contradictions, and unexpected turns of phrase produce a reach that smoothed-out fiction does not attain. Reportage comics follow the same path: Étienne Davodeau spends two years alongside the winemaker Richard Leroy for Les Ignorants (2011) and names him throughout, just as Raymond Depardon names the farmers of his Profils paysans.

Jacques Rancière, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), sets out a principle whose implications strike me as immense for documentary theatre. Emancipation begins when one posits the equality of intelligences as a starting point, and not as a horizon to be reached. To choose to fictionalise the reality of the people one has met is implicitly to assume that this raw reality is not enough, that it needs to be transformed by artistic work in order to become acceptable. This is the stance Rancière criticises.

A Hundred Residents Say Their Names on Stage

Rimini Protokoll, in the 100% City series launched in Berlin in 2008, put a hundred residents of a city on stage, each one representing one percent of the population according to statistical criteria. Their names were spoken, their real stories told, and the device produced something intense because the audience knew it was dealing with real people, in their singularity and their dignity. In France, Mohamed El Khatib brings Corinne Dadat, a cleaning woman, onto the stage under her real name (Moi, Corinne Dadat, 2015), and Didier Ruiz gives voice to former long-term prisoners who tell their own stories (Une longue peine, 2016). These performances draw their strength from the fact that nothing in them is invented and that each person answers in their own name.

By contrast, many documentary performances present characters drawn from real encounters without naming them, dissolving them into archetypes that sometimes tip into folklore, the farmer, the activist, the old peasant. Whatever the quality of the artistic work, these figures remain weaker than the people they come from, because the audience can no longer relate them to any real existence, and the emotion they arouse suffers for it.

The Contact List Is Part of the Artistic Work

One might object on the grounds of creative freedom, and it is real, no one is asking artists to give up transforming the material they gather. But creative freedom does not exempt one from an ethics, and that ethics lodges in the method, not in declarations of intent. We work in a sector that readily speaks of politics, of emancipation, of respect for people. If these values are not embodied in the working protocol itself, they remain mere discourse.

Concretely, this begins with simple gestures. When one speaks to people in the street, when one interviews them because their words interest us, one must note their name, and one must also note their contact details, in order to keep them informed and to submit to them what is being made of their words. Do the people know what we are going to do with their words? Have they read or heard what was kept? Can they refuse that a given part of their testimony be used? And their names, why should they not be given to the audience, as the names of the actors, the technicians, the authors are given?

I felt the importance of this validation on a documentary I made about the progressive school La Source. I had obtained image rights from everyone filmed, and so I was legally covered. Yet I organised a screening so that the people in the film could see themselves and check that it suited them, which led me to make a few changes. This step, which no contract required of me, seems to me essential.

This demand rests on us, and that is what makes it hard to uphold. The people who give us their words do not always see their value, they do not protect themselves, they ask for nothing. We feed on what they give us, and it falls to us to give back to them, because they will not come to ask for it.

Teenagers in Les Lilas Reminded Me of My Promise

In 2022, I went to Les Lilas a month and a half or two months ahead of a cultural project, to scout out a neighbourhood where we were going to make films with the residents. There I met some interested teenagers, I explained to them what we were going to do together, and we made, I think, a recording, and I promised to send them something, a file or an edit. I had not organised the link well, it was they who had created a WhatsApp group, I had not noted all their contact details, and the trouble is precisely that I no longer know exactly what I had promised. When I came back two months later, they told me: “you didn’t make us what you promised.” It was true, and I apologised.

This episode taught me something I had not measured, namely that my work as an artist also consists in being equal to the bond. I am the one who comes, I am the one who coordinates, the responsibility for follow-up is mine, and it presupposes a sustained organisation, a contact list kept up to date, commitments noted and honoured. The field of ecology has built a demand for traceability, knowing where the ingredients come from, through whose hands they have passed. To my mind, the same demand holds for the words we gather. Knowing whom each piece of testimony comes from and being able to account for it to the people who gave it, this falls within our responsibility as artists, and it is part of the work.