Plurality

Western democracies are built on a principle of free will, an ethical consequence of which is that we should have agency in how we are governed. Our choices, however, are rarely

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rational (Tversky and Kahneman, 1981; 1986) and instead are shaped by myriad influences, one of the most important of which is our perception of the intentions of others. Hattie (2009, p.254) observes that education can never be a neutral space and teachers must be aware of the power dynamics and ethical issues their classrooms create. As Dewey, Vygotsky and Bruner realised, theatre can be an educational space for exploring those influences and issues; and as Boal showed, following Freire, theatre can provide a space, not just for exploring but for challenging power dynamics. Bruner (1966, p.163) confesses a revelation in realising the power of drama after hearing ‘the intensity of the discussion of moral philosophy’ from a group of 14 year olds after watching a film of Billy Budd. He urges ‘that in fashioning the instruction designed to give children a view of the different faces and conditions of man, we consider more seriously the use of this most powerful impulse to represent the human condition in drama and thereby, the drama of the human condition’.

Theatre is a continual process of readjustment of perspectives. Greenblatt (1985, p.33) recognises it as a social event, influenced both by the time of its production and of its reception because ‘artistic form itself is the expression of social evaluations and practices’. Seidel (2013, p.7) comments on how literary study can be solipsistic, looking back to the author’s intentions rather than forward to how the book is received. By contrast, he suggests, drama study is more inclined to be outward looking, focussing as it does on the ability to make connections with the plurality of people around you and what’s going on in the world. Berry describes the purpose of theatre as:

to provoke us and make us want to talk, to discuss, to think – to communicate through language. It can make us question not only our beliefs and the way we live, it can make us question ourselves. And surely this primal need to exchange ideas and desires is basic to our sense of community (2008, p.13).

Brook (1998, pp.140-141) describes how a living theatre must be alive and political but is the opposite of politics: while politicians are required to smooth away nuance and defend big ideas, good theatre ‘must show that political absolutes are painfully relative and many commitments dangerously naïve’. Unlike the superficial sureties of politics, the illusions of theatre provide a space to explore possibilities:

In life the heat of conflict makes it almost impossible to enter into the logic of one’s adversary, but a great dramatist can without judgement launch opposing characters against one another, so an audience can be at one and the same time inside and outside them both, successively for, against and neutral […] For a few

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hours it is possible to go very far; social experiments can take place that are far more radical than any that a national leader can propose. Utopian experiences that we will never see in our lifetime can become real within the time span of a performance, and underworlds from which no one returns can be visited in safety. Together with the audience we can make models to remind ourselves of the possibilities that we constantly ignore.

Through these experiments, creating these models of experience, theatre and theatre- based practice may not directly effect political change but can stimulate dialogue affecting the imagination with tiny cultural moments that may shift paradigms. Brook describes how, through an engagement with alternative sympathies and attitudes illustrated on a stage, ‘spectators can be given a moment of perception beyond their normal vision’. This recalls Vygotsky’s observations that a child becomes a head taller through imaginative play. An imaginative engagement with the plurality of perspectives of others’ lives can expand our social, emotional and cognitive understanding as we search for the quality of democracy rather than becoming numbed by political wrangling over the rights of different interest groups.

Brook, Boyd and Gonsalves share a passion that good theatre invites an audience into an active engagement, as Rancière (2009) described, however quietly they may sit in their seats. As an example, Brook (1998, p.142) offers an anecdote about the ending of his devised response to the Vietnam War, US, which presented the audience with a current political situation but challenged them to consider the breadth and depth of the effects of that situation for different people’s lives.He describes how the show ended ambiguously with the company in tableau as one actor burned a (fake) butterfly, suggesting that we will constantly ask yet never answer the play’s key questions: ‘What is this endless chain of slaughter? How can we live with it?’ The moment was held so that it was unclear when, or if, the audience should applaud. On the first night, renowned theatre critic Kenneth Tynan impatiently called out ‘Are you waiting for us, or are we waiting for you?’ Brook takes the wider relevance of Tynan’s question as ‘the uncomfortable moment of doubt that a political performance should arouse’.

As a situation investigated through a plurality of voices, a Shakespeare play creates analogies for the political questions that compare human needs and responses across contexts of time, geography and cultures and can help us think about what we can do differently. Brook founded CIRT because he believed in the pragmatic, democratic principles of ensemble working. He describes human culture as dividing into three broad

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areas: ‘the culture of the state’, ‘the culture of the individual’ and ‘the culture of links’ where the latter digs beneath the first two in a search for what makes us all human (1996). CIRT was established to find the intercultural potential of theatre through exploring this ‘culture of links.’ Brook brought together a company driven by a sense of open curiosity and a search for the quality of truth, but with a conviction of negative capability that truth is contingent and ephemeral because ‘the moment a society wishes to give an official version of itself it becomes a lie, because it can be pinned down. It no longer has that living, endlessly intangible quality that one calls truth’ (1996, p.65). This returns us to Dewey’s sense of quality as a consciously felt moment in a flow of perception. For Brook, this means that in a moment of theatre, ‘All that matters is that the action should ring true at the moment of execution. At this instant, it is ‘right’. This is the absolute test. This is theatrical reality’ (1998, p.169, italics original). Brook’s ‘culture of links’ finds purpose in exploring the plurality of human perspectives, revealing human truths, McConachie’s ‘biocultural universals’ (2015, p.13), that are common across all cultures but are ever shifting in their cultural nuances. His description suggests a

butterfly, a creature that seems to concentrate the sheer beauty of being when it is alive, and the loss of that quality when it is skewered in death as a museum piece. The

comparison with school Shakespeare hardly needs making.