Dramatherapy

Theory and Practice, Volume 3

Sue Jennings, Sue Jennings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317761686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

The third volume of Dramatherapy: Theory and Practice brings the reader up-to-date with the latest developments in the profession of dramatherapy and tackles key issues in contemporary social relationships. It shows how dramatherapy is evolving its own theory and methodology as well as specific models for supervision and assessment. Dramatherapy is now being used in a broad continuum of care and contributors give many examples of its practice in contexts of prevention, maintenance and cure.
* Incorporates method, theoretical concepts and latest research
* Covers major new themes of gender, race and politics
* 29 international contributors

Part I

Developments in theory and method

Chapter 1

‘Knocking at the gate’

Dramatherapy and the critical tradition

Roland Javanaud

Introduction

Dramatherapy has reached a point in its development where it is sufficiently well established and mature for us to to stand back and examine not only its achievements but also the current gaps in theory and practice. This chapter explores one such neglected area – namely, the relevance to practising dramatherapists of the great English literary critics.¹

Dramatherapy is an eclectic discipline, one of its greatest strengths being its ability to draw inspiration from a wide range of source materials. Ordinary, everyday experiences, such as watching soap operas on television, and more esoteric pursuits, such as exploring The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Divine Comedy or the Tarot Pack, can equally be used to form the starting point of valuable dramatherapeutic activity – and indeed all these subjects have recently been the focal point of dramatherapy workshops or published articles. It sometimes seems that for dramatherapy, as for the drama itself, there is no area of human experience which lies outside its remit. Dramatherapists arrive at the sessions they are to facilitate carrying a bag, either figurative or literal, full of the most bewildering variety of ideas and artefacts, which they take out and use, as and when the process requires.

This being the case, it oughtn’t to be too difficult an enterprise to provide examples of ways in which a study of the great English literary critics could prove beneficial to practising dramatherapists. However, my aim in what follows is to do rather more than simply that. There is, it seems to me, an important distinction to be drawn between those subjects, on the one hand, which can be used to provide materials for dramatherapy (EastEnders, Dante, etc.) and those, on the other, with which we need to be familiar in order fully to understand the origins and process of dramatherapy itself. Students on dramatherapy training courses are usually required to spend some time studying the ancient theatre, healing rituals of non-European cultures, children’s play and the literature of psychotherapy. These topics do not appear arbitrarily on the syllabus of training courses, as an alternative to any number of other topics which would have done just as well, but because students must know something about them if they are to arrive at an understanding of what dramatherapy is. In this sense, the study of Aristotle, Moreno and Slade is fundamental for the dramatherapist, whilst seeking out useful material from, say, Coronation Street or delving into the I Ching may be regarded as optional, if worthwhile, sidelines. I hope to be able to show that at least some of the work of the critics I shall be discussing below falls into the category of ‘essential basic reading for the dramatherapist’ rather than into that of ‘might be handy for a one-off workshop’, and I shall leave it to readers and, who knows, perhaps to reviewers (see note 1) to judge to what extent I am successful.

The Classical Unities

Dr Johnson’s great edition of Shakepeare appeared in October 1765, the monumental product of nine long years’ laborious study. Johnson’s edition provided the most reliable version of Shakepeare’s text produced up to that time, restoring to their original First Folio form many of the ‘corrections’ and ‘improvements’ mistakenly or wilfully made by previous editors. Extensive explanatory and critical notes on particular passages and an overall General Observation on each of the plays constitute in themselves a major critical enterprise, for which future generations of Shakespeare scholars have had good reason to feel indebted. Only when he had completed the arduous task of preparing and annotating the text did Johnson sit down to write his famous Preface to Shakespeare, one of the glories of English literary criticism. ‘At that time’, writes John Wain, in his splendid Samuel Johnson,

Johnson must have come close to knowing the entire text of Shakespeare by heart. The strongly confident generalizations of the preface are rooted in the line-by-line analysis of particular passages. Having commented on, explained, as a last resort even conjectured, thousands of times, he is ready with a grand over-all view which is like the summing-up of some great judge.

(Wain 1980, p. 255)

One of the subjects which occupied Johnson in his Preface was that of Shakepeare’s disregard of the supposedly Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. Almost a hundred years earlier, in his essay Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), John Dryden had asked a pair of related questions: were the dramatic works of the classical writers to be preferred to those of the moderns, and could a consideration of the extent to which they respectively adhered to the unities help to resolve the issue? Dryden’s essay takes the form of a dramatic dialogue, each of the four speakers presenting a contrasting viewpoint. The bulk of the debate on the issue of the unities is contained in an interchange between two of the protaganists – Crites, who argues for the superiority of the ancients, and Eugenius, who defends the moderns.

Crites begins by stating what the unities are. 1. Time: ideally the length of time it takes to perform a play should correspond to the length of time taken up by the actions the play represents, or, at the very least, the time imagined as passing in the course of a performance should not exceed twenty-four hours. 2. Place: ‘That the Scene ought to be continu’d through the Play, in the same place where it was laid in the beginning.’ 3. Action: a play should have a single main plot, to which any so-called ‘underplots’ are clearly both related and subservient.

‘If by these Rules’, claims Crites,

we should judge our modern Plays; ‘tis probable, that few of them would endure the tryal: that which should be the business of a day, takes up in some of them an age; instead of one action they are the Epitomes of a mans life; and for one spot of ground (which the stage should represent) we are sometimes in more Countries than the map can shew us.

(Dryden 1964, pp. 48–49)

Eugenius, in response, contests that, despite what is popularly supposed, the unities ever formed part of the prescribed classical rules of drama. Those of time and action may possibly have, though even that is far from certain, but

The Unity of Place, how ever it might be practised by them, was never any of their Rules: We neither find it in Aristotle, Horace, or any who have written of it, till in our age the French Poets first made it a Precept of the Stage.

(p. 55)

Finally, even if the unity rules were accepted by classical dramatists, observation of actual plays shows that in practice they were less rather than more governed by them than many playwrights of the modern period.

The reader of Dryden’s Essay is likely to derive much enjoyment from the author’s ability to depict a range of divergent opinions, all equally strongly argued and with an equally vivid, at times even pugnacious, turn of phrase. In this respect Dryden is comparable to the sensitive psychodrama director, or group member, doubling accurately and in turn for a series of auxiliaries who may be at variance or in conflict with each other. This is so much of a pattern that it is hard to say for certain at any point to which of his speakers’ positions Dryden himself inclines. It is probable, however, that Dryden, founder member of what later came to be called the neo-classical movement, believed that ‘the French Poets’, Racine and Corneille, were right to keep step with what they took to be classical guidelines, whether or not Greek or Roman authors had either known or followed them. Certainly Dryden’s own All For Love or The World Well Lost (1678) provides an extraordinary example of how a work as unregardful of the classical rules as any censured by Crites – in this case Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra – could be turned into one exemplifying them all; though whether the transformation constitutes an improvement is a question which has long since ceased to be regarded as one worth asking, Shakespeare’s play continuing to absorb audiences, listeners and readers on a worldwide basis, whilst Dryden’s carries the status of a historical curiosity.

Johnson takes a very different and, in the light of what had gone before, wholly refreshing approach to the issue. He begins by frankly acknowledging that Shakespeare’s plays fail entirely to accord with the rules of unity, most notably those of time and place:

To the unities of time and place he has shown no regard; and perhaps a nearer view of the principles on which they stand will diminish their value and withdraw from them the veneration which, from the time of Corneille, they have very generally received, by discovering that they have given more trouble to the poet than pleasure to the auditor.

(Johnson 1969, p. 69)

Johnson then restates the argument in favour of the unities, in terms not markedly different from those Dry den had put into the mouth of Crites:

The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible. The critics hold it impossible that an action of months or years can be possibly believed to pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose himself to sit in the theatre while ambassadors go and return between distant kings, while armies are levied and towns besieged, while an exile wanders and returns, or till he whom they saw courting his mistress shall lament the untimely fall of his son. The mind revolts from evident falsehood, and fiction loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of reality.

(p. 69)

Having presented the argument thus, fairly and even forcibly, Johnson now proceeds, in one of the most sparkling passages in the whole of English prose, to tear it to pieces. I make no apology for quoting at length.

The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour at Alexandria and the next at Rome, supposes that when the play opens the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria and believes that his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in the days of Antony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may imagine more. He that can take the stage at one time for the palace of the Ptolemies may take it in half an hour for the promontory of Actium. Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation; if the spectator can once be persuaded that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Caesar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason or truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is no reason why a mind thus wandering in ecstasy should count the clock, or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brains that can make the stage a field.

(p. 70)

The old argument for the unities had been basically a logical one. If we believe ourselves to be in a particular time and place at the start of the action, it is illogical to expect us to imagine ourselves elsewhere at some later point. Johnson takes the line of contesting the initial premise. Thereafter, even if the argument following from it is valid, the conclusion it delivers will be false. What makes Johnson’s approach so startlingly innovative, however, really has nothing to do with logic. The question which interested him is in fact a psychological one: what processes are going on in the minds of those present at, and perhaps absorbed by, a dramatic performance? The answer which he provides is perhaps the earliest statement of the engagement/distancing synthesis which lies at the heart of dramatherapy theory and practice. Johnson clearly understood that the spectators at a play, and, one might add, the performers, simultaneously know that they are not present at the time or in the places the play represents and yet, in some sense, believe and even respond as if they were.

Sixteen years prior to the publication of Johnson’s Preface, Henry Fielding included in his novel Tom Jones (1749) a hilarious chapter which gives an account of a visit by Partridge, an uneducated countryman, to a London theatre for a performance of Hamlet. Partridge provides a perfect example of the ‘mind wandering in ecstasy’ referred to by Johnson. Throughout the performance he remains incapable of differentiating between the representation and the thing represented. At each appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father he disrupts the performance and distracts the audience by his cries of fear and alarm. This is all good slapstick humour, in Fielding’s richest vein, but it raises important issues for the dramatherapist.

On many occasions, in different dramatherapy groups, I have used an exercise which I call ‘Jungle Escape’, first introduced to me by David Powley when I was a student on the York Dramatherapy training course. Group participants are invited to imagine that their plane has crashed in the middle of a jungle and that they have been captured and imprisoned by hostile natives. They are told that a guard stands outside their place of confinement, and that beyond him lies a high wall. Past the wall lie a series of further obstacles, including a crocodile-infested swamp, a waterfall, a desert, a mountain range, etc. Before the improvisation starts they are given time, as a group, to select three items to take with them on their bid for escape.

This can be a very powerful, absorbing and at times even frightening exercise. As a participant in it, I remained aware throughout that we were in fact in the drama studio; at another level, however, the bare floorboards and plain walls seemed to have turned into stepping stones across perilous fast-flowing rivers or into vast sand dunes. Other participants, actually my colleagues, became either staunch allies or mortal enemies. I have since seen the same experience replicated countless times amongst participants in groups where I have facilitated the exercise. The role of the facilitator is that of encouraging engagement in the activity, whilst at the same time remaining alert to the genuine risk, at a time when emotions are prone to be running high, of groups members becoming so taken up by the fantasy that they lose sight of the line which divides it from reality. It is sometimes helpful for the facilitator to take a small, occasional part in the improvisation (e.g. friendly spirit), from where he or she² can steer the action at critical or dangerous moments, without disrupting the spell.

Similar concerns around the issues of engagement and detachment are of course very much the business of the psychodrama director. The protaganist who is exploring her current difficulties needs to get emotionally ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Developments in theory and method
• Part II Applied dramatherapy with individuals and groups
• Part III Gender issues in supervision and practice
• Part IV Dramatherapy, politics and culture