ABSTRACT
Now, because in drama we involve people in a situation, a circumstance, which pressurizes them and causes them to work through the problem, we have to at the same time understand what the final process is going to be. You cannot go on struggling forever; otherwise people say, ‘I’ll have to get out off here. I just can’t cope with this any longer’. So, as you struggle through, you have to reach a stage in drama where there is some easement of the struggle. Some temporary feeling that, ‘Oh, it feels a bit better now’. This is, for instance, when children reach a point in their struggle where they can say, ‘I could leave it for a bit now. I understand it a bit, enough to know a bit about it’. Or, it occurs in a theatrical play in a conclusion where you know that they ‘got married’, or, ‘he dropped dead’. The feeling of conclusion. That is not the same as easement. Sometimes the situation only brings easement and not conclusion. As teachers, we need to consider very carefully when a class needs conclusion because they are not ready to tolerate the more difficult easement of the problem. As well as conclusion or easement, there is a third area – to get a new view out of it, for us to learn that it did not solve anything, but at least we are looking at it differently. ‘I’ll never again think that about people like that’ might be the new view we get out of the theatrical event. That is not necessarily the same as easement, and of course this new view may be very disturbing to us. Sometimes, in education, a new view is the most disturbing element that a teacher might set up: so risks must be calculated carefully.
