Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T18:32:13.790Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Educational Drama and Radical Theatre Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Abstract

In the early issues of New Theatre Quarterly, David Hornbrook initiated a debate on the role and techniques of drama-in-education to which several other notable practitioners subsequently contributed. Since then, the continuing need to defend the very existence of drama within a curriculum-oriented system has perhaps disinclined drama-in-education workers from a theoretical exploration of their methods and purposes. But the argument that the subject should be concerned with theatre practice has, suggest Stephen Lacey and Brian Woolland, overlooked the reality that drama-in-education, in important and fundamental ways, already reflects at its own level certain kinds of innovative theatre practice – and they illustrate their arguments from the work of Brecht, Boal, and Paulo Freire, comparing the models they offer with a drama-in-education project as realized by a class of twelve-year-olds in a typical comprehensive. The article concludes with the authors' own analysis of the approaches to character and to dramatic structure employed, and how these reflect a ‘radical theatre practice’ with which practitioners in present-day ‘mainstream’ theatre might profitably engage.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Additional Bibliography

Bond, E. and Heathcote, D., The Fight for Drama – the Fight for Education (Newcastle: NATD, 1990).Google Scholar
Freire, P., The Politics of Education (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985).Google Scholar
Goode, T. ed., Heathcote at the National (Banbury: Kemble Press, 1982).Google Scholar
Lacey, S. and Woolland, B., ‘Drama-in-Education: a Radical Theatre Form’, 2D, Leicester, VIII, No. 2 (Summer 1989), p. 415.Google Scholar
Lovell, T., Pictures of Reality, (London: BFI, 1980).Google Scholar
O'Neill, C. ed., Dorothy Heathcote: Collected Writings on Education and Drama (London: Hutchinson, 1983).Google Scholar
Redington, C. ed., Six TIE Programmes (London: Methuen, 1987).Google Scholar