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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 +43»
