ABSTRACT
It is a popular truism that `theatre is a form of escape', an escape from the rigours or stresses of everyday life or studies or work. Is it an escape from something or to something?
The late Bernard Miles (Miles and Trewin 1981), having listed all the actors and performers that he considered great, went on to say:
all doctors, nurses and psychiatrists in their own humble or arrogant ways, transporting us into worlds beyond our everyday selves, either by escape from reality (and what harm is there in that?) or by escape into a deeper reality; either helping us to forget, or if we can bear it, to remember.
