Blog based theatre

Emma John discusses how blogging is being adapted for theatre productions:

No fewer than four shows based on blogs are appearing at this year's Fringe, including Girl Blog From Iraq: Baghdad Burning, taken from the writings of 27-year-old "Riverbend", who records daily life in Iraq. But what's surprising is that the wave of blog-inspired theatre has been so long in coming; after all, it's the world's fastest-growing genre of writing. (As Adam notes at one point, there are 80,000 new blogs created every day in the UK alone.) And with the increasing appetite for verbatim theatre that tells life like it is, blogs offer an apparently limitless source of material.

But does it work? The whole point of a blog is that it's formless and personal. Do the random musings of someone at their computer keyboard really make good theatre? Mann, who devised, compiled and directed Bloggers, was sure enough about the possibilities to give up his producing job at ITV and spend two months sifting through 10,000 blogs for stageworthy stories...