In a small town in Co. Donegal the group was well on the way to creating a good forum model. This was a group of adults pursuing a course of training in Group/Community Leadership. The director of this course had experienced Theatre of the Oppressed (TOO) and wanted the group to experience it also in order, first of all, to explore how it might benefit the group as a learning tool: the group would experience TOO at this stage to investigate its own issues, concerns, oppressions. Later, members could decide if this was something they wanted to take further.

Our protagonist was preparing to rehearse her first scene. Giving what I thought might be a useful offering - purely from the point of view of theatre direction - I suggested that she, as protagonist, might face the audience a bit more. ‘I don’t think so’, was the reply. ‘I wouldn’t have had the confidence at the time.’ She was right of course. The scene worked perfectly as Julie herself directed it, its strength sourced in the truth of the protagonist’s own experience, affirmed and expressed theatrically by the group’s ability to ‘See What We Look At’, identify and take part.(Boal 1992) The forum ran, there were plenty of interventions and the group, new to TOO but for the last couple of days, wanted more of this kind of work.

Julie, a rather tentative starter in this field, but a thoughtful, reflective one, is quietly and deeply satisfied with the forum piece built from her story. The whole exercise of the forum has first of all confirmed for her that, yes, her feeling of oppression is real and valid. The event happened some time ago but she still feels a profound disquiet about it.

Yes, this has been a ‘rehearsal for reality’ in her case. She feels stronger, she says, able at last to make the approach she has often thought about in order to bring matters to some kind of satisfactory result and allow her get on with life. Referring to the main scene she remarks: ‘I didn’t realise it would be so tough with the teacher. I see how powerful they can be. But I feel powerful now, too. I have discussed this over and over with my family but it took this experience for me to clarify what I really want to say and to feel able to say it. Yes, I do feel that I will try and bring this matter to a head very shortly but I know it won’t be easy. However, I feel far more ready for it now’.

The group was enthusiastic but not euphoric. At discussion time there was much talk of how clear the issues had become as they worked through image theatre to the final piece, how this could save hours of discussion time. Great, but not the end of the story. The forum, it was remarked, may well have made the ‘seeing’ a lot, lot easier but that very visibility had also highlighted the cold reality of just how difficult it can be to confront one’s oppressors. Clearly this group had taken on board Boal’s advice passed on to them that in a forum ‘everyone’s job on stage is to be in one way or another an oppressor’ (Boal in a master class, London, 1995).

One of the things which surprised Julie was the enthusiasm with which other group members grasped her story and made it their own. This is a consistent characteristic of any of the techniques of TOO. Within the safety of the aesthetic space the group had been able to ask of themselves the questions Alistair Campbell echoes in his chapter in Playing Boal: ‘What are the issues that concern me? What do I see as potentially threatening to my physical or emotional well-being. Does anyone else in the room share my fears/concerns?’ (Ed. Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz (1994)

‘Theatre of the Oppressed,’ Boal notes, ‘is the theatre of the first person plural.’(Boal, 1995) When we see another’s images or hear their story, we as members of the group may invest that story and those characters with the colours of our own experience. If, in your story, I play the teacher, I know from the brief which you as protagonist gave the group, how that character would behave. However, in my acting I will also project my teacher, my experience blended with yours, and out of it, create a truly effective piece of theatre.

In this case, Julie had, months after the event, discovered that an encounter had taken place between her young son and a teacher at his school which upset her deeply. Not only did Julie now feel the oppression of never having confronted her son’s teacher about the matter, she also felt, as the child’s mother, considerable anger at having been left out of it all and guilty of being a less than adequate mother, of not being there to take her son’s part and give him support when he needed it. She understood the reasons for her son’s silence but those reasons added to her anger would not go away. Hence the forum.

Within this group one could reasonably have expected a story to be chosen which reflected more obviously the homogenous thrust of the group - work-related problems such as the top-heavy bureaucracy of public bodies when a Community Worker is trying to negotiate the best deal for his/her locality, resentment and accusations of intrusion by other bodies and such-like.

Here, though, was Boal’s notion of ‘osmosis’ in action: ‘The smallest cells of social organisation...contain all the moral and political values of society, all its structures of domination and power, all its mechanisms of oppression. The great general themes are inscribed in the small personal themes and incidents. When we talk about a strictly individual case, we are also talking about the generality of similar cases...(Boal, 1995)

In its particularity the story was unique to Julie - few, if any the group members had children with a serious problem at school. What engaged them keenly and provoked strong feelings of identification and sympathy was the ‘generality of similar cases’ - Julie’s having to encounter and challenge an authority figure whose power is backed up by the prevailing culture, age-old custom and tradition. This in a small Irish town. Such encounters stimulated a resonance in the group that caused her story to be chosen as ‘the model’.

However, like any good forum the protagonist had other peripheral problems in addition to this central one. It was a forum that had certain complexities in it and would not be too easily solved, if solved at all. Those acting as family members and friends as well as teaching staff made it as difficult as possible within believable boundaries for the protagonist to find solutions that might work. Julie, then, knew what she was talking about when at the end she said ‘I feel far more ready now.’

I am reminded here of students/participants in TOO who sometimes express a genuine concern regarding the role of oppressor, in particular a discussion which arose after a performance of The Gap by Cardboard Citizens (a London-based theatre company made up of homeless people) here in Dublin some years ago, directed by Adrian Jackson. The consensus from Cardboard Cits. was that the enactment of an oppression is not a problem compared to the real thing! ‘You don’t help us with anything if you make it easy.’ Since then I have encountered no protagonist who disagreed with this.

What, then, is the function of Forum Theatre? In a nutshell, it is to be subversive in a way that provokes understanding, learning and, for want of a better word, to throw up possible coping strategies to assist a group or individual in investigating possible solutions to particular oppressions or challenges. It is, in Boal’s own words ‘to activate, dynamise audience and actors to explore other personas, other ways which give me more power in a situation. It is to learn another kind of behaviour if it will help me out of my oppression.’ Forum does not compel, it doesn’t say ‘this is what you must do’, but it does say ‘maybe you could try this or that, but it’s up to you to decide in the end.’

In bridging the gap between theory and activism Boal has set up a learning system where Julie was director, dramaturge as well as protagonist in her own story. The event enabled her not only to clarify where and what her central issues really were, but also to experience and practise possible ways of dealing with those issues. In doing this the protagonist negotiates for herself the intricacies of whatever power structures or bodies she will have to encounter. Here, the ‘I’ of now can dip into the ‘I’ of the past and negotiate the possible ‘I’ of the future. There are no magic solutions but if I can practise a role in the aesthetic space then maybe I can use that experience elsewhere.

The value and need for this kind of learning at almost any age was highlighted at a moment during the National Conference on the Teaching and Usage of English in U.C.D., Belfield, at the end of January this year when our attention was drawn in an opening address to a kind of artificial learning that can take place in education generally. Some students, studies are beginning to show, can produce a reasonably high level of verbal skills in dealing with their particular specialisation. However, what teachers need to watch out for is that students can and do transfer whatever linguistic skills they learn in these contexts to their own lives. This is not always the case, it seems, and is, in my opinion, somewhat alarming. In TOO workshops participants frequently remark that the image, in stimulating an understanding and feeling of control of an emotion or a condition, facilitates the appropriate language flow.

In demystifying the theatrical process it strikes me that Boal points towards another kind of mystery: the astonishing ability of ‘non-actors’, given a decent training period and sound facilitation, to grasp this work with both hands and come up with pieces of theatre which can hold their own anywhere, giving truth, if it is needed, to Boal’s often-repeated assertion that ‘what we learn in Theatre of the Oppressed, we learn by artistic means.’

In such an atmosphere, I believe, true and real education is taking place, recalling Elmer Andrews’ assertion that it is "in the fifth province of art (that) the restless, neurotic self becomes a central strategy for survival and resistance to determinism."(Andrews 1989)

Andrews, Elmer: The Fifth Province (The Plays of Brian Friel)

Boal, Augusto: Games for Actors and Non-Actors (Trans. Adrian Jackson), Routledge, London, 1992.

Boal, Augusto: The Rainbow of Desire (Trans. Adrian Jackson), Routledge, London, 1995.

Ed. Mady Schutzman and Jasn Cohen-Cruz: Playing Boal, Theatre, therapy, Activism. Routledge, London, 1994