general term‘applied theatre’ as a broad term to indicate the use of
theatre for particular practical purposes.^7 Applied theatre is widespread,
although it often escapes the heading of‘theatre’ altogether. Frequent
examples include theatre as training or as therapy. As for the former, role-
play training techniques may be used to help people learn to deal with
certain typical situations: I have had training as a teacher, which uses
techniques of this kind; I have also made use of it to train graduate stu-
dents. Therapeutic theatre is also widespread; it is given a brutally frank
treatment in David Foster Wallace’s story, The Depressed Person. The
‘depressed person’takes part in therapeutic applied theatre, during which
...other members of her small group had role-played the depressed person’s
parents and the parents’significant others and attorneys and myriad other
emotionally painfulfigures from her childhood, and had slowly encircled the
depressed person, moving in steadily together so that she could not escape,
and had (i.e., the small group had) dramatically recited specially prepared
lines designed to evoke and reawaken trauma, which had almost immedi-
ately evoked in the depressed person a surge of agonizing emotional mem-
ories and had resulted in the emergence of the depressed person’s Inner
Child and a cathartic tantrum in which she had struck repeatedly at a stack of
velour cushions with a bat of polystyrene foam and had shrieked obscenities
and had reexperienced long-pent-up wounds and repressed feelings.^8In addition to therapy and training, theatre may be applied to awareness-
raising, such as the use of so-called‘AIDS-plays’to raise awareness and
promote debate about AIDS and HIV.^9 Some of these take place in front
of a‘street’audience, who do not realise that what they are watching is a
play and are therefore not engaged in assessing the performance as a work
of art.
Those who object to political theatre on the grounds that, being
instrumental, it is bad art are assuming, of course, that it is the produc-
tion of‘good art’that’s at stake. In some of the cases just discussed, the
success criteria are obviously completely different and the artistic
achievement hardly comes into consideration. Needless to say, where
theatre has been primarily used as a quick and economical mass tool for
education or propaganda–as, for example, were the‘Blue Blouse’troupes
who spread the word to workers and peasants after the Russian Revolu-
tion–it would be open to the creators and performers simply to accept
that aesthetic value has at most a secondary or instrumental role in their
plays. But this still leaves political theatre open to the charge that it is
bad art. This, as we have seen, depends on the notion that good artworks
last the longest or stay relevant, and I shall now turn to some objections
to this claim.
166 From the Stage to the World