ABSTRACT
Theatre is a practice which has potential to raise public awareness over issues inherent to the prison environment, as well as to transform the ways in which prisoners and prison authorities respond to their respective positions. This potential
has been extensively documented by practitioners based – usually – in the UK and the US. As suggested by Kershaw (2004, 35-51), however, the prison site cannot alone render radical the practice of theatre therein. What is required, instead, is that the practice of theatre in prisons be driven by a grand, politically motivated vision; not one that calls for changes on the level of individuals, but one that promotes grassroots changes on the institutional level. This is the purview of so-called applied or social theatre, which ‘rub[s] up against and reveal[s] the performative in the setting, complementing or undermining it, challenging or further heightening it’ (Thompson and Schechner 2004, 13; see also Nicholson 2005, Thompson 2006). Indeed, whilst theatre ‘has never had an easy time within the prison system … it seems very appropriate to the prison. Perhaps the performative nature of punishment and the necessary tension between the hidden and the public, which prisons depend on, make them natural sites for theatre interventions’ (Heritage 2004b, 97). To illustrate the point, this chapter focuses on applied or social theatre in Brazilian prisons, as such experience may be transposed to South Africa, particularly with regard to prisoners awaiting trial there.
