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BEING IN THE SITUATION — THREE RE-INTERPRETATIONS OF LTD
above that the “pivotal scene represents the beginning of my planning, but,
typically of this kind of programme, it cannot necessarily be the beginning of
the lesson itself”.'”” In the lesson, after a short explanation about the puritans,
Bolton asks the participants to collect superstitions in groups, and then
asks them to put their initials by the ones that they are individually affected
by. He plays a game in which those who say that superstitions do not affect
their lives are playfully harassed, and then mimes cursing a doll and passes
it around, highlighting a social practice of the time together with the ‘as if’
they are all stepping into with the miming. The students work on a complex
depiction task, showing the families living in the village as they would like
themselves to be seen by the village, but are asked to leave a hint of something
in the image that is not quite like how the family would like others to see
them. The depictions are presented by the heads of the families, while Bolton
questions them in role as the Priest. The Priest finally states that some families
are lying, because some of their children have been out naked, dancing in the
woods. He sends people in role as parents out of the room while giving those
in role as children a chance to decide for themselves if they were ‘guilty’ or
‘innocent’. The families enter the space marked as the church together and
the pivotal scene begins. The whole group improvisation is later broken into
sub-groups without stepping out of role, so that the parents can question
their children, but then it joins up into a full group event again. Finally, when
the scene finishes the participants in role as kids can show their parents if
they were actually innocent or guilty, and Bolton says “there is much laughter
for many of the ‘parents’ were genuinely deceived”.'?®
The first part of the lesson works towards bringing the world of
the teenagers and the world of the drama closer to each other. Concepts and
gestures present in both worlds are used in the tasks to enhance this, and
again there is a build-up of using sign, entering the ‘as if’ of the drama. First
the mimed doll and then the depiction made by the groups bring an awareness
of signing and reading signs in drama and also a consciousness of pretence
within the fiction. The families pretending ‘as if’ everything was fine within
the fiction can be seen as a parallel to contemporary teenagers behaving ‘as if’
they were puritans. Bolton makes the connection between the different ‘as ifs’
quite explicit, when he says that “the participants in ‘living through’ drama
behave as we all behave when we make an effort to present a social event to
each other in ‘real life””.° The difference is that when participants engage in
the drama they are aware of playing a ‘role’, this might not be so in a social
event. Bolton doesn’t place any emphasis on building the individual roles of
the participants. He stresses connecting the social context of the fictional
27 Bolton: Acting in Classroom Drama, 223.
228 Ihid., 227.
129 Ibid., 181.
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