ABSTRACT
The Rainbow of Desire was first of all viewed by some Theatre of the Oppressed adherents as a kind of anachronism, a throw-back, or worse, a heresy. This is because its connections to the mother-ship—perhaps the mother-tree is better—appeared to these critics as more tenuous than those of Forum Theatre. Rainbow of Desire was redeemable, but only by pushing hard to re-cast this work into the field of ideology by stressing that its subjects are never the individual and their behaviour, but rather the individual as representative of a class or ideology, their behaviour then being understandable in those terms. Rainbow almost always shows a single scene, which is then exploded into multiple scenes, but the context is different. In London workshop, a Rainbow of Desire session with an older woman who wanted to confront her ex-husband about his years of lying about his affairs: she wanted him to “fess up” to her, rather than getting away with continued lies.
