ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to address the two most prominent critiques of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), one diametrically opposed to the other. The first—and one shared by a majority of critics—is one that praises the interactive and ludic aspects of TO on the way to criticizing it for its political core: its attachment to the concept of oppression, supposedly too Manichean or “over-simplistic” for understanding the current world. From the perspective of this critique, oppression would be merely the result of “bad” choices made by powerful free wills of people who would just need some enlightenment to correct their actions. On the other hand, the second prominent critique explored here, a more radical one, finds fault with the interactivity of Forum Theatre as a resource that would inevitably—by giving a disproportionately large amount of agency to the characters—lead to a depoliticization of any issues represented. In this latter critique, politics would then be evacuated and replaced by moralism. Such a critique leads then to two other questions that the chapter explores: Would there be any other dramaturgy that could avoid the moralistic pitfall? If such a critique is right, how do we explain the global success of TO?
