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BEING IN THE SITUATION — THREE RE-INTERPRETATIONS OF LTD
In another lesson from her earlier book Drama Structures titled Disaster
the participants are invited to deal with a catastrophe that took place 25 years
ago. After they work out the details of the nuclear explosion, which they
decide happened due to a series of government blunders, they start working
on a memorial to the disaster that young people born after it decided to
make. They work on the crisis from a distanced frame, but then O’Neill
makes it their problem with a move that Bolton claims “Heathcote was by
the mid-1970s deliberately avoiding”.“* The participants talk about their
ideas to the representative of the State Council for the Arts who is unhappy
about the way they want to present the disaster and pressures them to take
a more positive approach. She talks of an official explanation of the disaster
which puts the blame on an unbalanced worker, but insists she cannot talk
about the details. The participants of the lesson then work in small groups
on how different segments of society have changed since the explosion
drawing the outlines of a repressive society.” As we can see, there are two
different elements in this drama that create the change. On the one hand,
it is obviously the disaster itself that changes society, but within the drama
it is the meeting with the lady from the council that makes the logic of living
in some sort of repression experienceable. One of the options offered for
continuing the drama is looking at one day of a person and walking it through
individually, and so continuing to engage in the subject of state repression.
We see a situation that is undergoing some sort of radical change forcing
the people affected by it to re-evaluate their position and react to the situation
in O’Neill’s example of LTD.
When asked about what problems she likes to engage in O’Neill explains
that “drama is good at looking at the relationship between people, and what
people do to each other. [...] Whether the subject is war or something more
domestic; how can we understand evil in the world, how can we understand
damage people do to each other?”.° In O’Neill’s process drama it is often
the participants who bring the specific problem into the drama based on
the pre-text offered by the teacher. The connection between the problems
they face in reality and in the fiction also depends on them, and on the teacher
noticing what the interests of the group are. I continue with some examples
of structures used by O’Neill to enhance the participants’ engagement in
the event and then carry on to look at examples of the nature of spectatorship
and learning enhanced by process drama.
“7 Cecily O’Neill — Alan Lambert: Drama Structures: a practical handbook for teachers,
London, Hutchinson, 1982.
Bolton: Acting in Classroom Drama, 230.
19 O’Neill-Lambert: Drama Structures, 185.
150 O’Neill: Interview, 3.
148
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