ABSTRACT
Donna Soto-Morettini’s “The Real Housewives of Ipswich: London Road, and the Relationship between Verbatim Theatre and Structured Reality Television” raises the question: when lives, our reality is converted into theatre, how much of the reality is retained? She looks at the recent Verbatim theatre production of London Road, based entirely on interviews with residents reacting to the murder of five women in 2006. The text is “real,” verbatim, but there is nothing beyond that since actors essentially perform “the familiar rituals of the talk show,” here scripted from real life. London Road, in short, presents what is there, but without context. Conversely, despite its status as low-level theatre, reality TV uses actual people, not actors; the confrontations, however, are set up, staged. Still, the audience, even while being titillated, is exposed to conflicting viewpoints – the dialogue, if you will, has a context that London Road lacks.
