Trying on the world – The case for drama

Drama in the classroom

The theatre director Jessica Swale makes an interesting distinction: ‘theatre is a medium of performance created for the benefit of an audience, drama exists for the benefit of its own participants’.

To some extent this is the difference between drama intended to promote creative engagement with a subject – like English, or history – and the study of theatre and the texts of plays. The techniques used in drama uncover a student’s imaginative capacity while encounters with scripts work to develop critical analysis. Drama connects the student to learning, it allows them to explore social experiences from within. Drama is a way to increase an individual’s understanding of themselves or of something they are reading. It stimulates a capacity for empathy and gives what is happening in the classroom a sense of immediacy and freedom. Scripts take this a stage further. They stimulate conversations not just about the self, but about society and the world. 

In his book about empathy, Paul Bloom makes a clear distinction between emotional and cognitive empathy, between feeling as someone else feels and imagining how someone else feels. It is important, he says, to impose reason on our feelings. So when we read ‘Death of a Salesman’, for instance, we are not trying to feel as Willy Loman feels, but imagine how he feels so that we might understand him and how Arthur Miller is using him to make wider comments on American society. As result we can think and talk about Willy Loman and at the time share his despair. This is not arguing for a cool detached view of the text, the performance – or our own lives. It is arguing for a rational empathy with situations and characters. Lucid compassion rather than (or as well as) aching hearts.

Drama is about trying on the world. It is about taking part and actively engaging in the lives of others. There must be intellectual analysis, but there is far more. The rational empathy that Bloom talks about. A combination of creative engagement and deconstruction, thinking and feeling at the same time. Tom Stoppard is aware of the balance between feelings and articulating a response when he writes, ‘I would rather write a play that makes people cry, whether with horror or with happiness is a secondary issue’.

During an interview for a place at an Oxford College, in Tamsin Oglesby’s play, ‘Future Conditional’, one of the characters is given a poem to read and discuss. The poem purports to be about the death of a woman who had been loved by the poet. The candidate points out that: ‘The more he (the poet) talks about his own feelings, the less we believe he knew her (the dead girl).’ The candidate has resisted unfettered empathy. She sees the poet’s responses to the dead girl as self-indulgence. Swale describes such self-indulgence as egoism, and egoism is counter-productive in creative environments – such as the classroom.

Michael Billington reaches for a balanced view when he writes in praise of Peter Barnes’ play ‘The Ruling Class’. This is a play, he says, that shows how to ‘lift the spirits while also disturbing the peace.’ Of course. drama is a way to engage and entertain – and thus lift the spirits – but it is also a way to question and challenge. As such it works to disturb the peace. Drama as in scripts, but also in those techniques and activities associated with role play and acting that lend themselves to other texts or ideas that might come up in any other school subject. 

The underlying purpose of drama is to be disruptive – to question, to unsettle. In classroom terms this simply means that the techniques of drama and dramatic texts are a powerful way to encourage learners to ask questions, challenge assumptions and, challenge complacent thinking. Drama does this through emotional and cognitive empathy, offering the possibility of catharsis, and through engaging with real and hypothetical situations and concepts that might underpin or inform texts and performance. 

The key phrase here is ‘cognitive empathy’. Thinking needs to be supported by feeling.

Telling the most urgent stories of our time

Drama is about more than a way to become involved, to increase the capacity to communicate and learn. It is also more than developing an ability to deconstruct a text – or even to identify elements in the text that connect with elements of learners’ lives. Despite the immediacy of drama to give us the words to think about personal experiences, it has to be about much more. 

Anders Lustgarten says the purpose of drama is about ‘telling the most urgent stories of our time’. In his play, The Seven Acts of Mercy’, he uses the Caravaggio painting of the same name to examine lives in contemporary Liverpool. Similarly, James Graham found his urgent story in what had happened in the House of Commons in the early 1970s. ‘Part of the journey…’ (of his play ‘This House’) … was to square up to that stuff. To demystify it. Not in a cynical way, to bring it down… I wanted to pull the curtain back and expose its soft underbelly. Its vulnerability. Its potential.’ 

Graham clearly saw the relevance of that story to the lives and society of his audience in the present day. His intention to use the play to demystify in order to expose vulnerability and potential might just as well apply to what ought to happen, through text or improvisation, in classrooms where drama is a key approach.    

What Tom McCarthy writes about the history of early theatre is illuminating: ‘Greek theatre was not simply a means of entertainment, nor even of representing society back to itself; rather it provided the smithy in which the basic concepts that underpinned the state were forged in the first place – a quasi-sacred mechanism for placing order and meaning in the world.’  Theatre should not be about perpetuating an unchanging view of the world, what McCarthy describes as a process of maintaining ‘ a static inward facing… self-contained order,’ but be the smithy where students learn to open their minds to new ideas – and by implication, challenge the old. Using the techniques of drama, as well as actual plays, helps us and those we teach find order and meaning in the world. It is through such plays and techniques that students are able to make the leap from the personal to the public, from emotional to cognitive empathy, from what – using August Wilson’s image in his play, ‘Fences’ – needs protecting and understanding on the individual’s private side of the fence, to what needs confronting on society’s side of the fence.

Unlocking the text

Thinking of plays and performances as a ‘smithy’ where new ideas are forged might lead to an entire focus on what the play’s author had on his or her mind at the time of writing, and for the students, as a result, to think their job begins and ends with an unravelling of that context. Effectively just a translation of an author’s priorities and motives. This is fine, and worth doing of course, but there is more. Although the text contains answers to questions about character, motive, context and language, that does not mean that those answers will always offer an unchanging interpretation of the play – (or novel, or poem, or film). Often, especially with set plays, we are reading them out of context. That particular author’s context is just one part of what can turn out to be a much wider picture. The truth is, when a theatre company prepare a production, they cannot avoid the contemporary context. It is, or should be, in plain sight.  

This observation is not only about finding within a text, a personal relevance. It is also about linking the society shown on stage to the society beyond the doors of the theatre. Shakespeare’s apron stage, reaching out not only to be close to his audience but to say to them at the same time that these actors and their feelings are close to your experiences, and the society this play is describing is now in a conversation with your society. The play’s wider issues are your wider issues. It is almost as though Shakespeare was reaching out and taking hold of the lapels of the audience in order to stress his words and his closeness. 

Sometimes in the theatre we are taken aback by what appears to be a radical reinterpretation of a classic play – a new setting, a different time period, characters who dress and live their lives in what appears to be a startlingly contemporary context. Tanika Gupta’s take on Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’ and on Brighouse’s ‘Hobson’s Choice’ are good examples of a retake on familiar texts. Ibsen’s original play is dominated by Nora’s restlessness and her need for domestic honesty. The play traces the course of what turns out to be a domestic revolution. Nora’s final decision to walk out on her husband, Torvald, is usually read as a feminist gesture. Gupta sets the play in the same year as the Ibsen original, 1879, but in a different place – British colonial Calcutta. The play moves from the need for domestic honesty, to an attack on colonial hypocrisy and what was a play about the end of a marriage, becomes a play about the end of Empire. Gupta sets ‘Hobson’s Choice’ in Salford much later than the original, fifteen years after Idi Amin expelled 70.000 Asians from Uganda. Brighouse’s Victorian Salford and its questioning of the conventions of blind obedience is replaced by a Hindu community where family conventions are similarly rigid. It is a play about family, gender and the problems caused by an angry and complacent older generation. Gupta adds the political landscape of the late twentieth century and issues of race. Alan Bennett has said that there are moments in our collective pasts when ‘history rattles over the points’. Drama enables us all to hear that noise. 

If you are interested in the ideas in this article you can find more detail in Redefining English for the More Able by Ian Warwick and Ray Speakman. Routledge 2018