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AB: It often takes away all the tension and everything becomes explicit.
MF: Yes, all the subtlety disappears. I am not saying it is a technique that
shouldn’t be used. I took a visitor to talk to Dorothy a year before she died.
She was in great form, very funny, reminiscing. And at one point she said
“I hate hot seating, it is not at all the subtle thing it should be”. I think she was
commenting on the conventions approach when it is used too mechanically.
AB: And of course she breaks down hot-seating into 20 different forms in
her conventions list, there it has the subtlety. Do you think the form defines
the quality of the learning?
MF: I think the answer must be yes. I don’t think there has been much
detailed work done on this, but my sense tells me that must be true. Going
back to the integrated approach, the whole basis of that is that form and
content become indivisible when we talk about meaning. I think form is
a complicated word, it has got at least five different meaning when people
write about it in drama, but if we just take it as a choice of convention; for all
the strengths the tableaux has, and it has a lot of strengths, the potential for
learning, must be limited to some degree. But it is something that has not
been addressed enough in the research literature [...] I think certain forms
predominate pragmatically, because they are more accessible. I think the key
to using tableaux successfully is immediately thinking about content, and
levels. What is the level below what they are looking at? Are we conveying
ambiguity and at what level? But it has got to be limited, the potential for
learning using this form. [...] When I was teaching drama in school we taught
from week to week a kind of living through and it was a big success one week
and then a disaster the next week. This illustrates how challenging it is to
employ successfully I was a younger teacher. That is how I learnt.
AB: How would you define living through drama?
MF: If you had asked me a month ago to comment on the value of living through
my answer would probably have been a bit different, I have been influenced by
David’s book. But as regards definition, I think living through is participating in
the drama in a way that whatever is happening it is unfolding in real time. So it is
the difference between starting to improvise the situation now and planning it.
And I think that is the key difference for me. I always thought the emphasis
on living through partly came about through Dorothy Heathcote’s Three looms
waiting. 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.
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