Role-playing

Role-playing refers to the changing of one's behaviour to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role. While the Oxford English Dictionary offers a definition of role-playing as "the changing of one's behaviour to fulfill a social role", in the field of psychology, the term is used more loosely in four senses:

Amusement

Many children participate in a form of role-playing known as make believe, wherein they adopt certain roles such as doctor and act out those roles in character. Sometimes make believe adopts an oppositional nature, resulting in games such as cops and robbers.

Roleplay (disambiguation)

Roleplay may refer to:

RolePlay (play)

RolePlay is a 2001 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, the third in a trilogy of plays called Damsels in Distress (GamePlan and FlatSpin being parts one and two). It is about an engaged couple, Julie-Ann Jobson and Justin Lazenby whose engagement party is interrupted by unexpected intrusions.

Background

See also: Background on Damsels in Distress (plays) page.

Damsels in Distress was originally intended to be only a pair of plays: GamePlan and FlatSpin. However, during early preparations, Ayckbourn had an idea for a third play, RolePlay. When the cast agreed to the third play, the end of the Stephen Joseph Theatre's 2001 season was altered to accommodate this third play. Like the other two plays, this drew some inspiration from the London Docklands, where Alan Ayckbourn has a flat, and people often do not know each other well.

Characters

As part of the Damsels in Distress trilogy, RolePlay was written to use the same seven actors as the other two plays in the series. In this play, the characters are: