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FOREWORD this is the role of the child’s imagination. A gap is opened up where this understanding is created: where a human or less human self is created. As Adam Bethlenfalvy explains it most usefully: It is the conflict between what he calls the radical innocence and encultured layers of the palimpsest self.’ Bond sees this as an unresolvable conflict which does not have a right solution, but creates a problem, a hiatus in understanding to which each person needs to respond individually. Bond conceptualises this conflict within the self as the "human paradox". “The paradox is the sudden, dramatic assertion of radical innocence when it is confronted by a conflict between itself and social “14 states Bond. teaching, which social teaching cannot reconcile or conjure away Responding to these unresolvable conflicts are acts of creating the self, according to Bond," as the responder creates her stance in relation to the questions arising from the conflict. He states that drama’s subject is "society in people”.' 7 As the author explains, it is a Drama Event (to use Bond’s terminology) that creates this gap for the audience which, if they enter it, they must use their imagination to resolve the conflict. Again, as Adam Bethlenfalvy explains it: “The central concept of my research, the Drama Event is linked strongly to the human paradox discussed above. It is the dramatic expression of the clash produced within the self between our human need for justice and the elements of the culture we live in that become ingrained in our selves”.'* The author identifies eight underlying dramaturgical structures used by Bond in his plays and the main part of this research consists of exploring the possibility of using these structures in a series of drama lessons he creates and teaches. These lessons, again, usefully cover a range of ages and abilities which provides scope and depth for the research. He explores how “ownership and control of the fiction creates engagement in the drama but the loss of control over the narrative can create extreme moments and a motivation to understand and build the story further”.'” The key development he makes, however, in the final series of lessons, is to arm the young people with some of the drama devices used by Bond in his own plays and to co-opt them as fellow researchers. He describes the two dimensions of this approach as follows: 12 Edward Bond: Freedom and Drama, in Plays: 8, London, Methuen Drama, 2006, 212. 133 Ibid. Edward Bond: Commentary on The War Plays, in The War Plays, Revised edn., London, Methuen, 1991, 258. 15 Bond: Freedom and Drama, 210. 16 Ibid., 212. Bethlenfalvy: Living through extremes, 86-87. 18 Ibid., 87. 9 Ibid., 230. + 13 +
