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FOREWORD texts. Peter Slade revolutionised the use of drama with his book Child Drama.? He placed the child’s personal development above learning to act and studying plays and this changed the whole dynamic of drama teaching in UK schools. Rather than having to rely on reading skills and reading texts, children could bring themselves to the drama in a sort of living through approach. As Ádám Bethlenfalvy explains it in this research: "When used without capital letters living through drama refers to simple experiential improvisations that can be part of many different genres of drama with a variety of aims"? and when used with capital letters the drama “focuses on creating improvisation where participants are in role and experiencing and dealing with some sort of crisis within the fictional situation”. Starting her teaching career at Newcastle University, at the same time as Peter Slade’s work was becoming known, was a person who was to become a world leader in the field of drama in education, Dorothy Heathcote. Heathcote started running courses for experienced teachers who wanted to learn about teaching drama to young people. From the start she was concerned that young people should be involved with Living Through Drama as the main form of their engagement with and experience of drama. Heathcote developed her sophisticated thinking and theory primarily through her own practice. Her work developed over the years into what could in time be seen to be two distinct phases. One came to be called ‘A man in a mess’ drama and the other, which I think she would regard as her major contribution, the development of ‘Mantle of the Expert’ drama. This switch of focus to Mantle of the Expert was explained by Heathcote as her coming to see that education should be the focus of the work of drama teachers not drama itself. Adam Bethlenfalvy usefully traces the development of her theorising and pinpoints clearly the major differences that mark out these two major forms of her drama teaching. By one of those interplays between necessity and chance the second most important teacher in this field, Gavin Bolton, was appointed to teach drama in education courses at Durham University. This university is only some 20 kilometres distant from Newcastle University where Heathcote was teaching. This began a life-long sharing of experience and influence between these two fine teachers of teachers and children. This proximity, developing into a personal and professional sharing, had a particular influence on Bolton’s theory and practice. The ‘necessity’ part of the dialectic was the extraordinary progressive period of education that was taking place in the UK in the 1960s, 2 Peter Slade: Child drama, London, University of London Press, 1954. Adam Bethlenfalvy: Living through extremes in process drama, Budapest, Karoli Konyvek, 2020, 22. Bethlenfalvy: Living through extremes, 22. + 10 +