Playing the Other

Dramatizing Personal Narratives in Playback Theatre

Nick Rowe

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781846425820
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

This book is an exploration and critique of 'playback theatre', a form of improvised theatre in which a company of performers spontaneously enact autobiographical stories told to them by members of the audience.

With more than ten years' experience as an actor with Playback Theatre York, the author introduces the reader to the basics of playback theatre within a historical and theoretical context. The history and development of the form is traced, from its conception in the late 1970s to its subsequent growth worldwide, and its relationship to the psychodrama tradition from which it has evolved is discussed. Through an examination of playback performances from the perspectives of performers, `tellers' of their stories and the audience, the author critically explores the nature, implications and ethics of the performers' response to the teller's experience, how notions of the public and personal are constructed, and the risks involved in improvising a response to a member of the audience's story.

Playing the Other will be essential reading for drama students, dramatherapists and all those interested in the history and use of the theatre.

Chapter 1

Setting the Scene

From The Playback Theatre Rehearsal: A Short Story

(Please see Appendix 1 for the full story.)

‘I’ve got a story!’ shouted Rona as she moved toward the storyteller’s chair. She had to move quickly, otherwise someone would get there before her. She was determined to tell a story this week since, over the last few rehearsals, she had missed out. Either she did not think of one, or one of the others got there before her, but tonight she was going to make sure. She landed on the chair, skidding as she did so from the speed of arrival, and waited for one of the company to sit on the chair next to her.

Laura joined her and said, ‘So what’s your story, Rona?’

The truth was that Rona had been in such a rush to get to the chair that she hadn’t totally decided. She hoped that when she got there it would be clear what she wanted to say, and now, with Laura and the whole group waiting, she experienced a moment of panic. ‘I’m wasting people’s time,’ she thought to herself.

‘It’s about my father,’ she said finally.

‘OK,’ said Laura. ‘Choose someone to be you.’

Rona looked at the line of four actors sitting on chairs in front of a rack of coloured cloth. Who would she choose to play her? As her eyes moved along the group she was drawn to Bridget. It was something about the way she was sitting in the chair, slightly slumped as if pressed down by some force, a tension in her face and, unlike some of the others, not looking at Rona. It was likely, Rona thought, that Bridget did not want to be chosen, but there was something about her vulnerability, her reluctance, that drew Rona to say ‘Bridget’. Bridget stood up.

‘OK, so tell me about your story,’ said Laura, putting her hand on Rona’s knee. Rona spoke of the phone call from her father telling her that he was going into hospital. She spoke of the darkening silence that had seemed to push out everything between them, filling the space with its demanding presence.

‘It made me feel cold,’ said Rona, suddenly feeling cold herself. ‘I can feel it now.’

‘Describe it to us,’ said Laura.

‘It’s kind of bleak and very, very empty...well, empty yes, but also lonely, bereft, like...’ Rona paused for a minute. ‘It’s like Sunday evenings at boarding school, in November, it’s getting darker and colder and there are weeks and weeks before Christmas. Dark, cold, Victorian, cheerless buildings. That’s what it was like.’

Rona hadn’t expected to say the last bit, but having done so she felt a little leap of excitement, an almost sexual excitement.

‘OK,’ said Laura. ‘So what happened next?’

‘My father said that he had been to the hospital and he’d had some tests and was waiting for the results – something to do with pains in his stomach. He’d never told me about that before.’

‘Choose someone to be your father,’ said Laura.

Again Rona looked at the actors. This time she had no doubt. ‘Bruno,’ she said, and Bruno sprang to his feet as if he had always known he would be chosen.

‘Give Bruno some words to describe your father in this story.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, I think he was a little nervous, a little irritated by me going on about work...it was so strange for him to phone and he seemed ill at ease.’

Laura patted Rona’s hand as she said, looking toward the actors, ‘This is Rona’s story of a phone call with her father. Let’s watch.’

Playback theatre is a form of improvised drama in which members of an audience are invited to tell personal stories to a ‘conductor’ and see these improvised by a company of actors and musicians. It is a form developed by Jonathan Fox, Jo Salas and their company in 1975 (see Fox 1994; Fox and Dauber 1999; Salas 1993) and is now practised in many countries across the world. In the playback lexicon, the contributor of each autobiographical narrative is called the ‘teller’. They are invited to sit on the stage and to recount their experience to a ‘conductor’ who, at the conclusion of the story, turns it over to the performers by saying ‘Let’s watch’. Playback practitioners usually work in companies and perform to a wide range of audiences. The company of which I am a member, Playback Theatre York, performs at conferences, for different professional groups, to people with mental health problems and professionals who worked with them, in health and social care settings and occasionally at events that mark significant life transitions (for example birthdays, weddings, and retirements).

Setting the Scene

I am an enthusiast of playback theatre. Over the ten years of my involvement with Playback Theatre York, I have derived enormous personal and professional benefit from telling my own stories and playing back those of others. Although it is important that the reader is aware of my enthusiasm from the outset, it is not my intention to write an apologetic for playback theatre; that would I think produce a less interesting and less relevant book. At this stage of its development a critical and interrogative approach is needed to bring into focus the pressing ethical questions raised by playback around telling, representing and bearing witness to autobiographical narratives. Playback theatre is a young discipline and quite understandably much of the writing to date has been aimed at explaining the practice, enthusiastically justifying its efficacy, or describing its development. A canon of literature which exposes the practice to critique has not yet developed. This book aims to open up some of the debates related to the telling and performing of personal stories in public places, which are often heard amongst practitioners, but have not yet reached a wider audience.

In light of this, and in order to rehearse some of these debates, I will begin with an example from the work of Playback Theatre York that, although acceptable to the teller and the audience at the time, on reflection raises significant issues related to the representation and ethics of personal narratives.

A Gift at Christmas

The performance takes place near Christmas time in the community mental health centre of a town in the North of England. The audience is comprised of about 50 people with mental health problems and the professionals who work with them. In the centre of the stage is a line of five chairs on which the actors are seated. There is a musician to the audience’s right surrounded by musical instruments. An assortment of coloured fabric is hanging on a clotheshorse at the back of the stage. To the left there are two chairs; one is occupied by the ‘conductor’ and the other is empty and awaits the first ‘teller’.

A woman in her late thirties or early forties comes forward. She tells the conductor that her story is about ‘...getting my daughter back on Christmas day’. Her story begins on Christmas Eve; she is sitting in the lounge of her house with her new partner, her eight-year-old daughter, her ex-husband and his new partner. They are making ‘small talk’. She tells the conductor and the audience that because of her ‘illness’ her daughter has been living with her ex-husband. We learn that the daughter is to spend Christmas with her father – the teller’s ex-husband, but as the father and his new partner prepare to leave, her daughter asks if she can spend Christmas with her mother instead. After the initial reluctance of the father it is agreed that this will happen. The teller is clearly delighted by this and describes it as ‘a wonderful Christmas present’. The conductor asks her to choose an actor to play herself. She chooses Viv, calling her ‘the big woman’ – she herself was large – and she chooses Greta to be her daughter. The conductor says ‘A Gift at Christmas, let’s watch.’ While the musician plays, some of the actors collect fabric from the clotheshorse. They stand on either side of the stage facing each other. When they are ready, the music stops and one-by-one they enter the stage to form an initial tableau.

The enactment begins with this ‘still tableau’. The daughter sits on one of the chairs and the ex-husband sits beside her, putting his hand on her knee. The mother stands across on the other side of the stage. They begin to make ‘small talk’, repeating the words ‘small’ and ‘talk’ in different combinations. The father takes his daughter’s hand as they start to leave and he tells her what a great Christmas they will have together. They turn their backs to the mother and move away from her so that the diagonal between the two groups stretches across the stage. The mother speaks to the audience about how much she will miss her daughter; she begins to cry. As she speaks of how much she wants her daughter to share Christmas with her, the daughter begins to turn towards her mother and reach out toward her. The father resists this turn, pulling his daughter toward him. The daughter pulls against her father and continues to move towards her mother. The father lets her go. As mother and daughter meet they began to dance, slowly at first, but gradually the energy of their dance builds and finally they are vigorously swinging each other across the stage. The audience applaud and cheer in delight. The dance ends with a hug. The performers turn and look at the teller and await her response.

The conductor asks the teller to comment upon the enactment. She is crying as she reports that she liked the way the actors danced together and that it was ‘lovely’ when all the audience joined in. She seems to find it difficult to speak further. She returns to her seat, accompanied by applause led by the performers.

Although this story of A Gift at Christmas is not one of the most effective of Playback York’s enactments, I have chosen it because it reveals what is the main subject of this book: the complexities of the performer’s response to the teller’s story¹. It is clear that for the teller the most important aspect of this enactment was the response of the audience and the sense of affirmation that this afforded her. For her it was ‘lovely’ that the audience applauded and joined in her joy at having her daughter for Christmas. This validation of experience is one of the most important claims that are made for playback theatre. The telling of personal stories and the subsequent enactment can counter that most destructive of beliefs: that we are alone in our experience. In many cases, it can provide a space for what the German playback practitioner Daniel Feldhendler calls ‘a culture of remembrance’ (2001, p.8).

Playback theatre can provide a space the collective remembering and the sense of validation and belonging that this offers. For example Maria Elena Garavelli (2001) has written of her playback performances with relatives of ‘the disappeared ones’ in Argentina; and Susan Evans and William Layman (2001) staged a playback performance for the families and friends of fire-fighters following a forest fire in Washington State. These instances, and others I will refer to later, provide evidence of the capacity for playback theatre to provide a space for affirmation and collective remembrance.

However, A Gift at Christmas also raises issues that are considerably more problematic. In the enactment the actors produced a kind of ‘Hollywood moment’ – a moment in which triumph was written unambivalently upon the narrative. When the mother and daughter danced, there was no room for ambivalence, despite all the unanswered questions that lay within the story: why had the daughter been separated from her mother? Did she stay with her permanently after this reunion? How did the father feel at losing his daughter for Christmas? Why had the mother lost the daughter in the first place? The power of the narrative of ‘triumph’ had such strength that we were all willing to suspend the difficult questions. After all, who could resist a ‘gift of a child story’, especially at Christmas? One could ask whether the performers were ‘spinning’ the narrative in order to produce the desired effects in the audience. There is always the risk that a story will be subverted to the needs of the listeners, or to be more politically nuanced, to the desires of those who hold the power to represent it. This is clearly an issue in playback practice, particularly since the form is designed in such a way as to give the performers a powerful hold over ‘the means of representation’. Playback always raises questions about the interpretive responsibilities of the performers.

The vignette also raises questions concerning the relationship between the teller’s narrative and the enactment. If the performers are not replicating the story, what are they doing? In what sense, if at all, can we say, as some playback practitioners do, that the performers are conveying the ‘essence’ of the teller’s story? Would it not be more accurate to say that they are responding from their own subjectivity, desire and theatrical sensibilities to the story? What are the ethical implications if this is the case? For example, the teller did not say that she had cried on that Christmas Eve, yet the performer showed her doing so. Perhaps she did this to clarify and heighten the poignancy of the storyteller’s situation and/or perhaps to dramatize her own subjective response to the narrative. In any case the performer was stepping beyond the told story and although one might argue for the theatrical efficacy of her doing so, significant ethical issues are nevertheless raised. It seems that, particularly in light of the title of this book, questions need to be asked concerning the limitations of ‘playing the other‘.

Another question concerns the nature of autobiographical narrative. The performers are not the only participants in the playback process who are responding to the presence of the audience, the tellers are also doing so. Personal stories told in public places are inevitably performed stories. It is not possible to assert a direct correspondence between the teller’s experience and the narrative told in a performance. It more likely that the narrative will be inflected by the various contexts of its telling – the stories and enactments that preceded it; processes of identification that are present for the teller during the performance; the dialogue between the teller and the conductor; and the response of the audience during the telling. If it is not possible to assert that correspondence, then any supposed linear progression or straightforward translation from experience to recounted narrative and then on to its enactment is significantly complicated. We need to ask questions about what is happening to the nature and quality of personal narratives when they are told in public places.

A Gift at Christmas suggests that there is an intense awareness of the audience amongst both performers and tellers, and inevitably this will significantly influence the telling and performing. Although the response of the audience to the story was clearly important for the teller in my example, a critic of playback may legitimately wonder whether playback theatre can potentially debase individual experience. They might argue that the demands of the performance will force complex individual narratives into culturally familiar channels – that caricature will replace idiosyncrasy.

This vignette also poses questions about the way in which personal narratives are enacted. Why do playback performers choose to improvise? Is there something about improvising ‘in the moment’ which makes a significant contribution to the teller’s account? On what sources do the performers draw in responding to the teller’s narrative and how do their different subjective responses inflect the ongoing dramatization? Despite the difficulties of writing about the improvisational process – it is always a compromise with complexity – I will want to address these questions in the forthcoming pages.

Another set of questions surrounds the position of the teller in playback theatre. Their posit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Setting the Scene
• Chapter 2 Openness and Ethics
• Chapter 3 Personal Stories in Public Places
• Chapter 4 Narratives and Memory Work
• Chapter 5 A Very Different Kind of Dialogue: The Symbolic in Playback Theatre
• Chapter 6 On ‘The Narrow Ridge’: The Performers’ Response to the Story
• Chapter 7 The Exploration of Occasion: Improvisation and Playback Theatre
• Chapter 8 The Ensemble
• Chapter 9 The Ethical Limitations of Playback Performing
• Chapter 10 Reflexivity and the Personal Story: Playback Theatre as Social Intervention
• Chapter 11 Concluding Thoughts
• Appendix 1 Playback Theatre: A Short Story
• Appendix 2 ‘Short Forms’ Used in Playback Theatre
• References
• Subject Index
• Author Index