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THE Roots OF LIVING THROUGH DRAMA — HEATHCOTE AND MAN IN A MESS
I was introduced to Living Through Drama through that, it was shown as a best
example of living through. And it was only later that I realised that it wasn’t
exactly living through drama in the sense that we believed it to be. It was actually
more a piece of theatre where they knew what was going to happen. But living
through has that immediacy and that quality of things unfolding in real time. It is
unbelievably engaging and exciting and vibrant.”
Fleming highlights an issue that is central in the problems related to
the perception of living through drama. The phrase living through doesn’t
refer to participating in a continuous improvisation, it is about how the
participants can experience and relate to a fictional crisis. It is focused on
facilitating ‘being’ in the situation for the participants.”
Another important aspect of Heathcote’s approach is also apparent in
the film, this is the way she steps into role and participates in the drama
together with the children. Working with teacher-in-role and the whole
group together has also been considered a central element of the LTD. Bolton
refers to Davis as an example of someone who uses other dramatic forms
and structures to create the living through experience for participants.”
I investigate his work beside Bolton’s and O’Neill’s later in this chapter.
In Three Looms Waiting Heathcote says drama is just a man in a mess.
She refers to theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, who is quoted by Bolton as defining
a play as being “an ordered sequence of events that brings one or more of
the people in it to a desperate condition which it must always explain and
should, if possible, resolve”.”* Bolton points out that it is “the two sentences
together that formulate a principle for Heathcote: it is not enough to give
children a taste of ‘a state of desperation’ through drama, for inherent in that
dramatic experience must lie the potential for explication”.” The nature of
the mess, the details of the state of desperation referred to above are central
to understanding LTD, so I will investigate some examples of the situations
from Heathcote’s early work.
The Crisis — What are the Participants Living Through?
In one of her early articles, Heathcote is quite clear about what subject
matter she considers appropriate for drama when she states that “dramatic
activity is concerned with the crises, the turning points of life, large and
Fleming: Interview, 1.
Davis: Edward Bond and Drama in Education.
Bolton: Acting in Classroom Drama, 220.
78 Ibid., 177.
79 Ibid.