The Shared Journey

Extract

It has often been pointed out that drama—and theatre, its focused form—can be liberating to people who find themselves oppressed by what might be called ‘restricted personhood’, conditions of individual belonging which make it hard for them to be both independent and cooperative in their relationships with other people. Because of its combination of a definitive structure with a stimulating imaginative freedom, drama helps those contained within narrow personal boundaries, as in depression, or limited by the absence of recognisable structure, a stable and recognisable image of the self as distinct from other people, as in schizoid thought disorder.

These are not the only ways in which psychologically oppressed people are helped by the experience of participating, however sporadically, in an alternative world in which their difficulties no longer exert the same kind of hold upon them. Even those for whom theatricality constitutes a characteristic source of communication about their personal distress—hysteric personalities who act out their problems as an alternative to thinking about them—seem to gain insight from being included in other people’s scenarios. This happens when they take an active part in the proceedings, as in drama, or when the magnetic force of theatre draws them into the action of the play without any conscious effort on their part—unless it be the determination to remain aloof! The most noticeable difference in behaviour occurs among people suffering from what are generally described as anxiety states, particularly social phobias, when the dramatic milieu reproduces the effects of desensitisation techniques within a wider, more realistic context, one which is more easily harmonised with life in the outside world; comprising, as it does, an exercise of imagination in which everyone present co-operates—an interchange of ideas, feelings and expectations which is not merely life-like but is human living.