Rowe, Nick - Playing The Other - Dramatizing Personal Narratives in Playback Theatre PDF

Playing the Other
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Playing the Other
Dramatizing Personal Narratives
in Playback Theatre
Nick Rowe
Jessica Kingsley Publishers

London and Philadelphia
First published in 2007
by Jessica Kingsley Publishers
116 Pentonville Road
London N1 9JB, UK
and
400 Market Street, Suite 400
Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA
www.jkp.com
Copyright © Nick Rowe 2007
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Rowe, Nick, 1954-
Playing the other : dramatizing personal narratives in playback theatre / Nick Rowe.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-84310-421-6 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-84310-421-0 (alk. paper)
1. Improvisation (Acting) 2. Drama--Therapeutic use. I. Title.
PN2071.I5R69 2006
792.02'2--dc22
2006032988
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978 1 84310 421 6

ISBN eBook pdf: 1 84642 582 4
Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Athenaeum Press, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear
This book is dedicated to Major Dennis Rowe and Mrs Anne Rowe,
my dear parents, whose kindness and love sustains me still.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 9
SPECIAL NOTES 9
Chapter 1 Setting the Scene 11
Chapter 2 Openness and Ethics 31
Chapter 3 Personal Stories in Public Places 43
Chapter 4 Narratives and Memory Work 61
Chapter 5 A Very Different Kind of Dialogue:

The Symbolic in Playback Theatre 79
Chapter 6 On ‘The Narrow Ridge’:

The Performers’ Response to the Story 99
Chapter 7 The Exploration of Occasion:

Improvisation and Playback Theatre 119
Chapter 8 The Ensemble 135
Chapter 9 The Ethical Limitations of Playback Performing 143
Chapter 10 Reflexivity and the Personal Story:

Playback Theatre as Social Intervention 159
Chapter 11 Concluding Thoughts 173
APPENDIX 1 PLAYBACK THEATRE: A SHORT STORY 185

APPENDIX 2 ‘SHORT FORMS’ USED IN PLAYBACK THEATRE 193
REFERENCES 197
SUBJECT INDEX 203
AUTHOR INDEX 207
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Hazel and Rebecca who have lived the stresses and anxieties of this
book over the many years of its development. Without them this would not have been
possible.
I am also very grateful to Playback Theatre York who gave permission for me to
conduct the research within the company. Without their support, encouragement, and
skill this book would have not have been written. I acknowledge my enormous grati-
tude to: Di Adderley, Andy Bird, Bernard Campbell, Susanna Cunningham, Sarah
Fallon, Marie Flanagan, Viv Hathaway, Louise Larkinson, Greta Mikaelson, Steve
Nash, Felicity North, Louise Peacock, David Powley, Claire Smith.
York St John University have supported this work consistently, through financial
means and through releasing me for study leave. I am very grateful to them. I also rec-
ognize the support of C4C: Collaborating for Creativity, an HEFCE-funded Centre for
Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University. Finally, I am deeply indebted to
Professor Baz Kershaw whose wise advice sustained me through my PhD, which
provided the basis for this book.
Special Notes
Gender pronouns
To avoid the clumsiness of using ‘his/her’ or ‘she/he’ I have used gender pronouns
randomly. It will be clearly indicated if the usage of a gender pronoun is deliberate.
Playback Theatre York

Playback Theatre York has kindly given me permission to make use of examples of
their work and discussions in this book. In general, and with their permission, I have
used the first names of company members. There are occasions, however, when the
sensitivity of the material has led me, in consultation with the people involved, to use
pseudonyms.
9
Chapter 1
Setting the Scene
From The Playback Theatre Rehearsal: A Short Story

(Please see Appendix 1 for the full story.)
‘I’ve got a story!’ shouted Rona as she moved toward the storyteller’s chair. She
had to move quickly, otherwise someone would get there before her. She was
determined to tell a story this week since, over the last few rehearsals, she had
missed out. Either she did not think of one, or one of the others got there before
her, but tonight she was going to make sure. She landed on the chair, skidding
as she did so from the speed of arrival, and waited for one of the company to sit
on the chair next to her.
Laura joined her and said, ‘So what’s your story, Rona?’
The truth was that Rona had been in such a rush to get to the chair that she
hadn’t totally decided. She hoped that when she got there it would be clear what
she wanted to say, and now, with Laura and the whole group waiting, she expe-
rienced a moment of panic. ‘I’m wasting people’s time,’ she thought to herself.
‘It’s about my father,’ she said finally.
‘OK,’ said Laura. ‘Choose someone to be you.’
Rona looked at the line of four actors sitting on chairs in front of a rack of
coloured cloth. Who would she choose to play her? As her eyes moved along
the group she was drawn to Bridget. It was something about the way she was
sitting in the chair, slightly slumped as if pressed down by some force, a tension
in her face and, unlike some of the others, not looking at Rona. It was likely,
Rona thought, that Bridget did not want to be chosen, but there was something
about her vulnerability, her reluctance, that drew Rona to say ‘Bridget’. Bridget
stood up.
‘OK, so tell me about your story,’ said Laura, putting her hand on Rona’s
knee. Rona spoke of the phone call from her father telling her that he was going
into hospital. She spoke of the darkening silence that had seemed to push out
everything between them, filling the space with its demanding presence.
11
12 PLAYING THE OTHER
‘It made me feel cold,’ said Rona, suddenly feeling cold herself. ‘I can
feel it now.’
‘Describe it to us,’ said Laura.
‘It’s kind of bleak and very, very empty…well, empty yes, but also lonely,
bereft, like…’ Rona paused for a minute. ‘It’s like Sunday evenings at
boarding school, in November, it’s getting darker and colder and there are
weeks and weeks before Christmas. Dark, cold, Victorian, cheerless build-
ings. That’s what it was like.’
Rona hadn’t expected to say the last bit, but having done so she felt a little
leap of excitement, an almost sexual excitement.
‘OK,’ said Laura. ‘So what happened next?’
‘My father said that he had been to the hospital and he’d had some tests
and was waiting for the results – something to do with pains in his stomach.
He’d never told me about that before.’
‘Choose someone to be your father,’ said Laura.
Again Rona looked at the actors. This time she had no doubt. ‘Bruno,’
she said, and Bruno sprang to his feet as if he had always known he would be
chosen.
‘Give Bruno some words to describe your father in this story.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, I think he was a little nervous, a little irritated by me
going on about work…it was so strange for him to phone and he seemed ill
at ease.’
Laura patted Rona’s hand as she said, looking toward the actors, ‘This is
Rona’s story of a phone call with her father. Let’s watch.’
Playback theatre is a form of improvised drama in which members of an

audience are invited to tell personal stories to a ‘conductor’ and see these
improvised by a company of actors and musicians. It is a form developed by
Jonathan Fox, Jo Salas and their company in 1975 (see Fox 1994; Fox and
Dauber 1999; Salas 1993) and is now practised in many countries across the
world. In the playback lexicon, the contributor of each autobiographical
narrative is called the ‘teller’. They are invited to sit on the stage and to
recount their experience to a ‘conductor’ who, at the conclusion of the story,
turns it over to the performers by saying ‘Let’s watch’. Playback practitioners
usually work in companies and perform to a wide range of audiences. The
company of which I am a member, Playback Theatre York, performs at con-
ferences, for different professional groups, to people with mental health
problems and professionals who worked with them, in health and social care
settings and occasionally at events that mark significant life transitions (for
example birthdays, weddings, and retirements).
SETTING THE SCENE 13
Setting the Scene

I am an enthusiast of playback theatre. Over the ten years of my involvement
with Playback Theatre York, I have derived enormous personal and profes-
sional benefit from telling my own stories and playing back those of others.
Although it is important that the reader is aware of my enthusiasm from the
outset, it is not my intention to write an apologetic for playback theatre; that
would I think produce a less interesting and less relevant book. At this stage
of its development a critical and interrogative approach is needed to bring
into focus the pressing ethical questions raised by playback around telling,
representing and bearing witness to autobiographical narratives. Playback
theatre is a young discipline and quite understandably much of the writing
to date has been aimed at explaining the practice, enthusiastically justifying
its efficacy, or describing its development. A canon of literature which
exposes the practice to critique has not yet developed. This book aims to
open up some of the debates related to the telling and performing of
personal stories in public places, which are often heard amongst practitio-
ners, but have not yet reached a wider audience.
In light of this, and in order to rehearse some of these debates, I will
begin with an example from the work of Playback Theatre York that,
although acceptable to the teller and the audience at the time, on reflection
raises significant issues related to the representation and ethics of personal
narratives.
A Gift at Christmas
The performance takes place near Christmas time in the community mental
health centre of a town in the North of England. The audience is comprised
of about 50 people with mental health problems and the professionals who
work with them. In the centre of the stage is a line of five chairs on which the
actors are seated. There is a musician to the audience’s right surrounded by
musical instruments. An assortment of coloured fabric is hanging on a
clotheshorse at the back of the stage. To the left there are two chairs; one is
occupied by the ‘conductor’ and the other is empty and awaits the first
‘teller’.
A woman in her late thirties or early forties comes forward. She tells the
conductor that her story is about ‘…getting my daughter back on Christmas
day’. Her story begins on Christmas Eve; she is sitting in the lounge of her
house with her new partner, her eight-year-old daughter, her ex-husband and
his new partner. They are making ‘small talk’. She tells the conductor and the
audience that because of her ‘illness’ her daughter has been living with her
ex-husband. We learn that the daughter is to spend Christmas with her father
– the teller’s ex-husband, but as the father and his new partner prepare to
leave, her daughter asks if she can spend Christmas with her mother instead.
After the initial reluctance of the father it is agreed that this will happen. The
teller is clearly delighted by this and describes it as ‘a wonderful Christmas
present’. The conductor asks her to choose an actor to play herself. She
chooses Viv, calling her ‘the big woman’ – she herself was large – and she
chooses Greta to be her daughter. The conductor says ‘A Gift at Christmas,
let’s watch.’ While the musician plays, some of the actors collect fabric from
the clotheshorse. They stand on either side of the stage facing each other.
When they are ready, the music stops and one-by-one they enter the stage to
form an initial tableau.
The enactment begins with this ‘still tableau’. The daughter sits on one of
the chairs and the ex-husband sits beside her, putting his hand on her knee.
The mother stands across on the other side of the stage. They begin to make
‘small talk’, repeating the words ‘small’ and ‘talk’ in different combinations.
The father takes his daughter’s hand as they start to leave and he tells her
what a great Christmas they will have together. They turn their backs to the
mother and move away from her so that the diagonal between the two
groups stretches across the stage. The mother speaks to the audience about
how much she will miss her daughter; she begins to cry. As she speaks of how
much she wants her daughter to share Christmas with her, the daughter
begins to turn towards her mother and reach out toward her. The father
resists this turn, pulling his daughter toward him. The daughter pulls against
her father and continues to move towards her mother. The father lets her go.
As mother and daughter meet they began to dance, slowly at first, but gradu-
ally the energy of their dance builds and finally they are vigorously swinging
each other across the stage. The audience applaud and cheer in delight. The
dance ends with a hug. The performers turn and look at the teller and await
her response.
The conductor asks the teller to comment upon the enactment. She is
crying as she reports that she liked the way the actors danced together and
that it was ‘lovely’ when all the audience joined in. She seems to find it diffi-
cult to speak further. She returns to her seat, accompanied by applause led
by the performers.
Although this story of A Gift at Christmas is not one of the most effective of
Playback York’s enactments, I have chosen it because it reveals what is the
main subject of this book: the complexities of the performer’s response to the
teller’s story1. It is clear that for the teller the most important aspect of this
enactment was the response of the audience and the sense of affirmation that
this afforded her. For her it was ‘lovely’ that the audience applauded and
joined in her joy at having her daughter for Christmas. This validation of
experience is one of the most important claims that are made for playback
1 I have chosen the term ‘response’ deliberately to stress that the performers’ work cannot be a ‘replication’
or ‘reflection’ of the teller’s story, but as a response that is inevitable influenced by complex subjective,
dramatic and context-dependent factors.
theatre. The telling of personal stories and the subsequent enactment can
counter that most destructive of beliefs: that we are alone in our experience.
In many cases, it can provide a space for what the German playback practi-
tioner Daniel Feldhendler calls ‘a culture of remembrance’ (2001, p.8).
Playback theatre can provide a space the collective remembering and the
sense of validation and belonging that this offers. For example Maria Elena
Garavelli (2001) has written of her playback performances with relatives of
‘the disappeared ones’ in Argentina; and Susan Evans and William Layman
(2001) staged a playback performance for the families and friends of
fire-fighters following a forest fire in Washington State. These instances, and
others I will refer to later, provide evidence of the capacity for playback
theatre to provide a space for affirmation and collective remembrance.
However, A Gift at Christmas also raises issues that are considerably more
problematic. In the enactment the actors produced a kind of ‘Hollywood
moment’ – a moment in which triumph was written unambivalently upon
the narrative. When the mother and daughter danced, there was no room for
ambivalence, despite all the unanswered questions that lay within the story:
why had the daughter been separated from her mother? Did she stay with
her permanently after this reunion? How did the father feel at losing his
daughter for Christmas? Why had the mother lost the daughter in the first
place? The power of the narrative of ‘triumph’ had such strength that we
were all willing to suspend the difficult questions. After all, who could resist
a ‘gift of a child story’, especially at Christmas? One could ask whether the
performers were ‘spinning’ the narrative in order to produce the desired
effects in the audience. There is always the risk that a story will be subverted
to the needs of the listeners, or to be more politically nuanced, to the desires
of those who hold the power to represent it. This is clearly an issue in
playback practice, particularly since the form is designed in such a way as to
give the performers a powerful hold over ‘the means of representation’.
Playback always raises questions about the interpretive responsibilities of the
performers.
The vignette also raises questions concerning the relationship between
the teller’s narrative and the enactment. If the performers are not replicating
the story, what are they doing? In what sense, if at all, can we say, as some
playback practitioners do, that the performers are conveying the ‘essence’ of
the teller’s story? Would it not be more accurate to say that they are respond-
ing from their own subjectivity, desire and theatrical sensibilities to the
story? What are the ethical implications if this is the case? For example, the
teller did not say that she had cried on that Christmas Eve, yet the performer
showed her doing so. Perhaps she did this to clarify and heighten the poi-
gnancy of the storyteller’s situation and/or perhaps to dramatize her own
subjective response to the narrative. In any case the performer was stepping
beyond the told story and although one might argue for the theatrical
efficacy of her doing so, significant ethical issues are nevertheless raised. It
seems that, particularly in light of the title of this book, questions need to be
asked concerning the limitations of ‘playing the other’.
Another question concerns the nature of autobiographical narrative. The
performers are not the only participants in the playback process who are
responding to the presence of the audience, the tellers are also doing so.
Personal stories told in public places are inevitably performed stories. It is
not possible to assert a direct correspondence between the teller’s experience
and the narrative told in a performance. It more likely that the narrative will
be inflected by the various contexts of its telling – the stories and enactments
that preceded it; processes of identification that are present for the teller
during the performance; the dialogue between the teller and the conductor;
and the response of the audience during the telling. If it is not possible to
assert that correspondence, then any supposed linear progression or
straightforward translation from experience to recounted narrative and then
on to its enactment is significantly complicated. We need to ask questions
about what is happening to the nature and quality of personal narratives when
they are told in public places.
A Gift at Christmas suggests that there is an intense awareness of the
audience amongst both performers and tellers, and inevitably this will sig-
nificantly influence the telling and performing. Although the response of the
audience to the story was clearly important for the teller in my example, a
critic of playback may legitimately wonder whether playback theatre can
potentially debase individual experience. They might argue that the
demands of the performance will force complex individual narratives into
culturally familiar channels – that caricature will replace idiosyncrasy.
This vignette also poses questions about the way in which personal nar-
ratives are enacted. Why do playback performers choose to improvise? Is
there something about improvising ‘in the moment’ which makes a signifi-
cant contribution to the teller’s account? On what sources do the performers
draw in responding to the teller’s narrative and how do their different sub-
jective responses inflect the ongoing dramatization? Despite the difficulties
of writing about the improvisational process – it is always a compromise
with complexity – I will want to address these questions in the forthcoming
pages.
Another set of questions surrounds the position of the teller in playback
theatre. Their position as a spectator rather than as an actor distinguishes it
from other cognate practices such as the theatre of the oppressed, psycho-
drama and dramatherapy. As is evident in my example, the teller only has a
limited time to comment on the actors’ work; there is usually no systematic
opportunity for them to reflect at length on the enactment. This clearly
places playback theatre at variance to such practices as psychodrama and
dramatherapy in which a thorough discussion of the enactment it considered
essential. What are the implications of the relative lack of involvement of the teller
in playback theatre?
It is clear from what I have said here that when personal stories are told
in public places, significant ethical issues are raised concerning the exposure
of the tellers and the responsibility and accountability of the performers.
This brief rehearsal of some of the questions raised by playback practice
gives an indication, albeit sketchy, of the direction of this book. In forthcom-
ing pages it will be necessary to set this out in more detail and with more pre-
cision. Some consideration of the history and scope of playback theatre will
set these questions into a clearer focus and wider context.
Playback theatre: history and scope

Jonathan Fox, the founder of playback theatre, described the first playback
theatre performance as follows:
It is Sunday afternoon in winter, the early afternoon sky bright
despite a cover of cloud. The light pours in through the big windows
of the church hall, in the centre of which are placed about thirty
chairs facing a line of plastic milk crates. On one side of the crates sits
a collection of musical instruments. On the other side brightly
coloured cloth hangs from a wooden prop tree. The voices of children
resound in the hall as their parents usher them in and help them off
with their coats. In a back room I am with my actors. We are facing
our first performance with a new company and a new approach called
Playback Theatre. It is totally improvisational. Our objective is to act
out, using mime, music, and spoken scenes, the personal stories of the
audience. (Fox 1994, p.1)
That first playback theatre performance took place in New London, Con-
necticut in the spring of 1975. The audience were friends and families of the
actors, gathered together for ‘…improvisational theatre based simply on the
real life stories of people in the audience, enacted on the spot by a team of
actors’ (Salas 1993, p.9).
Later in that year, Jonathan Fox moved, with his partner Jo Salas, to New
York State and formed what later to be was called the ‘original playback
theatre company’. They performed in Poughkeepsie, a small town in the
Hudson Valley, close to where, in 1936, Jacob Moreno had founded the
Beacon Hill Sanatorium and had developed the clinical application of psy-
chodrama.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, in August 1999, Playback Theatre
York hosted the Seventh International Playback Theatre Conference to
which 265 people from 26 different nations attended. Companies from
Australia, Japan, Austria, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the United States, Finland,
Germany, France, Holland, Hungary, England and Italy performed in what
was, to date, the largest playback theatre conference to be held. The growth
of playback theatre is remarkable and plans for the next international confer-
ence in Sao Paulo, Brazil suggest that this will continue.
Jonathan Fox, as joint editor of the first book of essays on playback
theatre wrote: ‘I am…the one who first conceived the playback idea’ (Fox
and Dauber 1999, p.9). Fox was an actor and teacher with a particular
interest in the oral tradition of pre-literate societies and a distaste for ‘the
competitive, sometimes narcissistic aspects of the world of the mainstream
theatre’ (Salas 1993, p.9). In the early 1970s, he had worked for the Peace
Corps in Nepal and had been struck by the ‘redeeming roles of ritual and
storytelling in the pre-industrial village life of rural Nepal’ (Salas 1993, p.9).
With his partner, Jo Salas, a musician and therapist, he returned to the
United States where he encountered psychodrama and worked with Zerka
Moreno, the widow of the founder of psychodrama, in Beacon, New York.
Clearly inspired by psychodrama and by Moreno’s wife, he wrote:
What I heard from her lips, and what I witnessed under her guidance,
felt like a revelation. Here was true community theatre. Here was
theatre that made a difference. Here was emotion. Here was often
stunning beauty. (Fox and Dauber 1999, p.10)
He experimented with improvisation and what he called ‘immediate theatre’
(Fox and Dauber 1999, p.9), eventually founding a small company called
‘It’s All Grace’ in 1974 (Salas 1993, p.9). The company mainly comprised
some of the parents of a small experimental school where he and Jo Salas
sent their children. It was this group, which, in 1975, staged the first perfor-
mance of what later was to be called playback theatre.
Fox describes his ‘discovery’ of playback theatre as his ‘café vision’. This
is elaborated by Jo Salas:
One day, over a cup of hot chocolate in a diner, the idea came to him:
an improvisational theatre based simply on the real life stories of
people in the audience, enacted on the spot by a team of actors. (Salas
1993, p.9)
We should note the ‘cup of hot chocolate in the diner’ and query what the
writer was trying to convey in this strictly unnecessary elaboration. The
everyday and accessible homeliness and innocent beginning that is sug-
gested hints at a particular perspective on playback. The act of uncovering
origins inevitably involves the reading and writing of ‘genesis’ stories. These
stories often tend to simplify – so in some way we may imagine that, back in
the spring of 1975, the founders of playback faced less complexity than is
the case at the present time. They often seek to convey qualities of innocence
and freshness. This can be detected in the opening paragraph of this account,
which refers precisely to the weather conditions and ‘the light pouring in
through the big windows of the church hall’. There is a sense here of bright
new mornings and of epiphany. This ‘genesis story’ is particularly potent
when, as is the case of playback theatre, there is a single founder whose
life-partner has also been involved from the outset. The existence of this
‘original’ parental pairing is a powerful formula for myth-making and the
formation of charismatic forms of leadership. I have not escaped this trans-
ferential dynamic nor have, in many cases, the playback community as a
whole. Individual playback companies often operate very independently;
however, at international events, where the tensions of a large organization
operate, there sometimes seems to be a tendency to gather around these
founding figures. In a recent interview with Fe Day, Jo Salas recognizes the
problems that over-identification with a founding figure – especially a male
one – have caused:
It’s such an old model of the world that there’s one name, one person
– and it’s almost always a man… The truth is much more complex.
And the truth is that Jonathan’s vision was absolutely central. This
was the person that we were following. It was very significant that he
was someone who was both charismatic and tolerant – he held the
group together. But the truth is also that his idea would have
gone nowhere without me and the other people in the company.
(Salas 2004a)
Although this has undoubtedly had a significant impact on the development
of playback theatre, it is important to make two important caveats. The first
is that most playback practitioners throughout the world practice in compa-
nies, which although may be affiliated to the International Playback Theatre
Network operate independently, and second that playback theatre is not
alone in having its charismatic founding figure; we need only think of the
role Augusto Boal has played in the theatre of the oppressed and the Moreno
family in psychodrama.
Soon after that first Sunday afternoon performance, Fox and Salas
moved to New Paltz in the Hudson Valley where Fox could finish his studies
at the Moreno Institute. During that period, fellow psychodrama students
complemented the nascent playback company. The Moreno Institute con-
tributed to the development of playback theatre, not only in providing some
of the early actors but also by paying the rent of their rehearsal space for the
first two years. The influence of psychodrama has continued to be crucial in
the development of playback theatre; for example, the establishment of
playback in Europe was made far easier by the significant presence of a
psychodrama community in, for example, Germany and Finland. Jonathan

Fox continued this connection, editing in 1987 The Essential Moreno,
a collection of Moreno’s writings on psychodrama, group method and
spontaneity (Moreno 1987).
The Original Company performed weekly through the late 1970s and
early 1980s to a mixture of regular and new audience members. Perfor-
mances were also given at conferences, to schoolchildren, prisoners, the
elderly, people with mental health problems and people with learning dis-
abilities. It was clear from this that the genre was establishing itself as being
available for disadvantaged groups and this has been the case throughout its
history. It is clear that, from the outset, playback theatre was maintaining the
psychodrama tradition from which it had partly emerged, in having a clear
intention to explore the efficacious and restorative potential of the theatre
form. Fox described in 2000 that the ‘original playback vision’ was to
‘recapture that kind of ceremonial enactment in which there is no distinction
between art and healing’ (Fox 2000, p.14).
Fox describes the development of playback’s dramaturgy within the
original company:
Our mission was to find effective dramatic forms for the enactment of
any and all personal stories. We tried many different ways, some
dance-like, others clowny, others psychodramatic. Over time we
learned that our form demanded its own aesthetic. Some of our
experiments suited the Playback approach and became part of our
dramatic tradition, while others, after a hot period of discovery,
turned out to be less effective and were eventually dropped. (Fox
1994, pp.3–4)
Of course, since then there have been innovations and developments to play-
back’s dramaturgy. For example The Theatre of Spontaneity International
(founded in April 1990), an international group of playback theatre per-
formers, developed some new forms, which are still used by Playback
Theatre York.
In 1980 four members of the company were invited by Francis Batten to
travel to Australia and New Zealand. They performed and led workshops in
Auckland, Wellington, Sydney and Melbourne. By the following year the
Sydney and Melbourne companies were performing, followed by Auckland,
Wellington and Perth in 1982 and Christchurch in 1984. By the
mid-1980s, playback theatre was firmly established in the United States and
Australia and began to develop more widely. In 1984 Jonathan Fox visited
Japan, Annette Henne formed ‘Playback Theatre Schweiz’ in Switzerland in
1988 and Christina Hagelthorn established a company in Sweden in the
same year.
In 1986 the original playback theatre company disbanded, exhausted

by the constant performing and travelling, but by then playback seems to
have been well established in the United States. The history of playback
theatre from this date has been one of accelerating growth across the world
and has been characterized by the challenges that result from responding to
increasing cultural diversity and from managing a growing organization. In
1990 the International Playback Theatre Network was established and the
first edition of its newsletter Interplay was published with an Australian,
Mary Good, as editor. In Europe, Christina Hagelthorn formed The Theatre
of Spontaneity International, a loose group of playback practitioners who
performed together annually in a different European city.
The 1990s were clearly a period of rapid growth for the playback
theatre movement. The number of companies in the United States rose
rapidly and in Australia playback theatre was given considerable impetus
with the establishment of the Drama Action Centre in Sydney. This centre,
founded by Bridget Brandon and Francis Batten, both of whom had trained
at L’Ecole Jacques Lecoq, focused on improvisation, commedia dell’arte,
clowning and community-based theatre. It provided fertile soil for the devel-
opment of playback theatre companies in Australia and New Zealand with
many company members training there.
The development of playback theatre in Britain has been, in contrast to
other key countries, a relatively slow process. The first British company was
formed in June 1991 when Susanna Cunningham and David Powley invited
Christina Hagelthorn to work with a group of interested therapists, teachers
and actors in York. After this weekend, Playback Theatre York was formed.
This company is still performing with nine of the original founding
members; it is the company that this author joined in September 1994. The
formation of a London Company followed shortly after in September 1991.
At the time of writing there are 12 playback companies in Britain.
Outside the English-speaking countries, playback theatre has been
developed most actively in Finland, Germany and Japan. The reasons for this
are no doubt complex, but are certainly related to the presence of
pre-existing psychodrama practice in Finland and Germany, and the work of
key figures – Jonathan Fox in Germany and Japan, and Deborah Pearson,
Robyn Weir and Christina Hagelthorn in Finland.
Rapid growth and diversification has presented considerable challenges
in terms of responding to and welcoming differences in approach, while at
the same time trying to maintain what is understood to be the key character-
istics of playback theatre. The widening international development of
playback has also caused many participants from white Caucasian back-
grounds to face the complicity of their nations in the oppression of
non-white, indigenous peoples. This was particularly in the case at the Perth
Conference in 1997. Playback theatre grew within white, middle-class,
educated communities of the Western world and, to a large extent, devel-

oped a philosophy and discourse that reflected that fact. The growth of
playback within such very different countries as India, Botswana and Fiji, as
well as within such communities as the indigenous peoples in Australia, and
Afro-Caribbean people in the USA, has challenged the movement to
respond in both its practice and discourse. Judy Swallow, one of the
members of first playback group, acknowledges this challenge:
Playback theatre has spread all over the world, and has expanded
through the social and artistic visions of its practitioners. There is
wonderful cross-pollination as groups meet and share new forms and
ideas. Practical questions arise – inclusion/exclusion? Themes
addressed overtly/covertly? How much ‘quality control’, and by
whom? When can playback theatre be harmful? How can it be used
to further justice? (Swallow 2000, p.16)
Great distances of discourse and ideology lie between that 1970s Sunday
morning in New York State and the diverse playback communities of the
early 21st century. Explanations and theories developed in the early days of
playback theatre arose out of its white, Western and affluent beginnings and
these need to be – and undoubtedly will be – challenged in order to suit the
cultural and geographical diversity of contemporary practice. It may be that
in some important respects playback theatre had outgrown its roots; it is
hoped that this book may help in re-thinking playback for the 21st century.
Playback in the contemporary world

Playback theatre did not solely grow out of the will of a group of people in
New York State – the ground for its growth was prepared by social and
cultural trends in the post-war West. It emerged at the last quarter of the
20th century out of the fertile soil of Moreno’s psychodrama, the experi-
mental and improvisational theatre of the 1960s and 1970s and the shifting
sands that Francois Lyotard terms the ‘post-modern condition’. The picture
is a complex and contradictory one, but we see trends through the second
half of the 20th century that paved the way for the emergence of playback
theatre. The practice joined and was fed by larger movements which
emphasized:
1. The growing distrust of ‘grand narratives’ such as Marxism and

Freudianism have led to the valuing of individual stories and
experiences. Universal explanations are rejected in preference for
local accounts.
2. A shading of the boundaries between the fictive and the real. There
is a growing recognition that our personal stories borrow from the
world of fiction and that a sharp distinction between truth and
fiction is hard to sustain. This gives practices like playback theatre
the chance to experiment and improvise.
3. A fascination with ordinary lives, which partly derives from
democratization. It is not just the lives of the powerful that form
the subject of popular culture. As we see in ‘reality TV’ the
experiences of ordinary people are regarded as worthy of exposure.
These features of the Western world are counter-balanced by other trends,

which may be seen simultaneously as both contradicting and contributing to
the above. For example, the explosion in the means, speed and ease of com-
munication enables the geographical and class boundaries of the past to be
traversed and the patterns of political action to be radically altered while, at
the same time, potentially homogenizing cultural and political expression.
Playback theatre would not have grown at the rate it has without this. Addi-
tionally the growth of capitalist consumption has allowed a wider range of
personal expression and an ideological emphasis on ‘doing your own thing’,
while simultaneously reducing the range of options through the marketing
practices of huge multi-national corporations. It could be argued that
playback theatre’s emphasis on acknowledging and validating individual
experience has partly been stimulated by these developments.
Three examples of current playback practice

In this section I set out three examples of current playback practice in order
to give some indication of the diversity of the work and its geographical
spread.
1. Playback theatre at a time of grieving

On the 10th July 2001, a forest fire swept through the Chewuch River
Valley, USA, after a small blaze started by an unattended campfire exploded
out of control. Fire-fighters were caught out by the speed of the blaze and
four were killed. On the Sunday afternoon following the funerals, the North
Central Washington Playback Theatre Company from Wenatchee, Washington
State offered a ‘debriefing’ performance for the entire crew who had been
involved in fighting the fire. Members of the Company Susan Evans and
William Layman wrote soon after the event:
we met with crew members before the enactment to establish consen-
sus agreements involving privacy and confidentiality. As can be
imagined the Playback Debriefing was very intense as this was the
first opportunity that the entire crew had to gather together since the
tragedy. (Evans and Layman 2001)
They go on to offer some lessons they felt the company learned from this
remarkable event. These include advising performers in events of a similar
nature to recognize that some members of the audience will feel their
presence to be an intrusion. They advise: ‘playback whatever emotions you
get including anger at you for being there.’ They also urge that the very
private nature of the work needs to be protected ‘which means keeping
media away from the event and being careful about how such stories are
written up for public use.’
The proximity of this playback performance to the traumatic event is
unusual and the company’s experience is thus particularly important in
understanding how playback theatre can work with recent trauma. There
have been other instances of performances that follow traumatic events: for
example Paul MacIsaac and Playback Theatre New York City did a perfor-
mance in the shadow of the ‘U.S.S. Enterprise’ soon after the 9/11 attacks;
and the Hudson Valley company staged a performance entitled Stories of a
Changed World a day after the event. However what is striking about the
NCW performances is the use of playback in the case of recent and very
personal loss.
2. Playback theatre in Tel Aviv

The Tel-Aviv Playback Theatre was founded in 1990 by Aviva Apel-
Rosenthal and it continues to offer regular performances to local people and
organizations. Not surprisingly, stories of the continuing conflict in Israel are
told during its performances and the company considers that they may have
a role in providing a forum for the airing of these stories and for the
opposing views that inevitably emerge when they are told. One of the
company members, Nurit Shoshan, told me of two stories told at a recent
performance that illustrate the potential of playback theatre to provide what
Fox calls a ‘radical social encounter’ (1995, p.4) in which issues of conflict,
reconciliation and forgiveness can be explored. They are stories which, in a
sense, ‘speak to each other’ about the complex moral and ethical decisions
faced by all those caught up in the violence.
In this performance held for the parents of those who had been killed
during the sectarian violence, an Israeli woman told of losing her son and of
the numbing grief that followed. For a year she sat at home, unable to
continue with her life. Finally she decided that to improve her own situation
she would try to establish contact with Palestinian parents who had also lost
children in the conflict. It seems that this was an important step for her in
moving on from incapacitating grief; it also was a way of her doing some-
thing to heal the divisions in her society.
Following the company’s enactment of her story, a man came on to the
stage and told about losing his daughter in a suicide bomb attack. Not long
after she died, he read in the local paper of an Israeli pilot who had been
given instructions to fire a missile at a house thought to contain suicide
bombers. The pilot, knowing that the house was likely to contain women
and children, could not use his weapon. On reading this the teller described
his anger at the pilot for sparing the life of the person who may have been
responsible for the death of his daughter.
In both these stories the tellers, the audience and the performers are
faced with the complex ethical dilemmas that are always thrown up in times
of conflict. The desire for forgiveness and reconciliation in the first story is
set against the understandable anger in the second. As Nurit Shoshan told
me, the audience and the performers can empathize with these contradictory
feelings described by the tellers. The work of the company provides a vivid
example of how playback theatre may provide a space for exploring contra-
dictory ideas and opposing accounts – and perhaps most importantly – a
means through which they can be acknowledged.
3. Mixing castes: a playback company in Chennai, India

In Chennai, South India, Cyril Alexander and the Sterling Playback Theatre
Group have performed regularly in the villages, beaches and social care orga-
nizations around the city. The company is unusual because of its composi-
tion; its members include different religions, castes, ethnic groups, and
people of different socio-economic status. This was important to the group’s
founders, Cyril explains:
Because Sterling Playback theatre has members from different back-
grounds, the group process is different, the group members will
know about the differences and they will learn how to work with dif-
ference. In this way differences are helping the group members to
grow and develop new things. (Alexander 2003)
The mixed composition of the company is important because they often
hold performances where issues of difference and inequality are important
to the audience. For example, the company performs for mixed groups of
Muslim, Christian and Hindu people, and through the structure of a
playback performance aims to create ‘a platform for inter religious dialogue’.
The company have also been doing work in a children’s jail in Chennai.
Clearly, accessibility is an important issue for the company. This is
evident not only in the make-up of the group, but also in their choices of
venue. They are prepared to hold their performances in villages, beaches and
in local institutions. In light of this they have adapted existing playback

forms and developed new ones in order to work with groups who, for
example, surround the stage or who are more likely to come and go as the
performance develops.
An overview
In this book I aim to address some of the questions identified earlier in this
chapter and to raise more as they arise in the analysis of playback’s practice.
In Chapter 2, two interrelated themes will be considered: the ethics of telling
personal stories in public places and the concept of openness, which I will
propose is a key feature of successful playback performances. Playback per-
formers and audiences are often acutely aware of the risks attendant to
telling personal material in a public place. In this chapter I will open up
debates around the ethics of playback and consider some of the criticisms
which have been directed at the practice. At this stage no response or
apology will be offered, the aim will simply be to air these important debates
since they open up the questions that surround the practice of dramatizing
personal stories in public places. In later chapters I will consider these as they
arise in relation to specific aspects of playback practice. Closely related to
this, I will discuss the kinds of stories and performances that seem to consti-
tute successful playback events. The term openness will be employed to
denote a kind of playful indeterminacy and ambivalence that characterize
certain stories and effective playback performing.
It is one of the aims of this book to establish firmly that the types of
stories and performances that are possible in playback theatre are always
profoundly influenced by context. The tellers’ decision concerning what to
tell and the performers’ choices do not take place in a vacuum, but are always
inflected by personal and collective history, cultural associations and prac-
tices. In Chapter 3, I will substantiate this claim by looking in detail at the
impact a sense of place has upon teller and the performers. I will look at how
expectations of the event may be influenced by cultural context and by infor-
mation received by audience members and performers. As an audience
gathers for an event, complex clues are given concerning its nature and the
role the audience will play. This is particularly important in playback theatre
where the audience’s participation is crucial to its success. In Chapter 3 I will
also be interested in how the particular configuration of the space shapes
audience expectations and thus influences their decisions concerning which
stories to tell.
In Chapter 4, I examine the nature of the autobiographical narrative told
in playback theatre performances. I am particularly keen to bring into
question the notion, often employed in playback discourse, of the ‘essence’
of the story. To pre-suppose that the teller’s story has an essence is to suggest
that it is a stable entity uninflected by historical and performative contin-

gency. To pre-suppose this tends to prevent us from recognizing that each
time the story is told it will change in response to the differing audiences and
the personal necessities acting upon its teller. To maintain an idea of the
teller’s story as having an essence also masks a recognition that the past is, to
a large extent, created in and for the present; we tell stories to serve our
present needs and in response to the demands and promptings of the context
in which they are told. This is no mere academic point: if we refigure our
understanding of the story told in performances then what is happening in
playback theatre is refigured.
To understand this Lifegame can provide an interesting contrast. Lifegame
is a format devised by Keith Johnstone in which one person is invited to tell
their life story and see that enacted. The programme notes inform us that the
aim of Lifegame was
to talk to someone about their life, improvise scenes based on the
stories they tell, find out ‘how it was’ and maybe as we are watching
remember how it was for us. (The Improbable Theatre Company
1998)
The striking similarities and differences to playback theatre are interesting
and provocative, particularly in relation to the phrase to ‘find out how it was’.
Certainly the performers were aiming for as much verisimilitude as they
could with the teller’s memories, to the extent that he was asked to lay out
the scene for the actors and given a bell to ring if the actors were particularly
‘close to the truth’ and ‘a buzzer’ if they were off the mark.
Playback theatre does not give that kind of control to the teller, or to put
this another way, actors in playback have a great deal of freedom in develop-
ing the enactment. If it is not helpful to conceive of playback actors playing
back ‘the essence of the story’ or ‘to show it how it was’ – as the performers
of Lifegame seek to do – then what are playback performers offering? The
answer to this question is, in many ways, central to this entire book. The per-
formers do not portray essences or replicate the past, rather they respond to
the teller’s narrative within the dramaturgy of playback. That response, as I
shall detail in later chapters, is never more than wholly human and, I would
argue, the more interesting for that.
In Chapter 5, I will consider one aspect of playback’s dramaturgy in
some detail: the frequent use of the image and the symbolic. In playback
there is a clear and marked juxtaposition of the ‘telling’ and the ‘enactment’.
The former is delivered in a verbal and relatively ‘literal’ style; the latter
draws on a wide array of theatrical, imagistic and figurative devices to play
the story. Fox claims that playback theatre permits a ‘different kind of dia-
logue’ within the performance; I will examine this claim and suggest that the
use of the figurative and symbolic in playback’s dramaturgy has the effect of
permitting openness within and between the personal stories told. The teller’s
narrative – already inflected within the conductor/teller dyad and by the
performative nature of its production – becomes an open field of association,
reference and allusion. The teller’s narrative is opened up to the play of the
performers.
In Chapters 6 and 7, I will look in detail at the performers’ response to
the teller’s story. In Chapter 6 I will be particularly interested in what is
going on in the minds and bodies of the performers as they prepare for the
enactment that will follow and what thoughts, impulses, images and ideas
motivate the performers toward dramatic action. It will become apparent
that actors in their listening and subsequent response need to find, to quote
one of the actors, ‘a world half-way between self and character – a no-man’s
land, a half-way place’. On this ‘narrow ridge’ between self and other they
are able to draw on subjective promptings as well as on the details of the
story. The performers’ response is a complex one, drawing as it does on a
range of impulse and influences that are perhaps impossible to fully describe.
But that difficulty of description should not lead us to assume that some
mystical or magical processes are at work: the performers’ response always
remains fully human and ultimately understandable.
In Chapter 7 I will look at improvisation in playback theatre. I will
propose that the fact that the work is improvised is important and will
suggest that improvisation can challenge predictable and settled versions of
personal and cultural narratives and loosen established cognitive schemas.
When the performers improvise with the teller’s story, they create a more
open and porous work that can loosen the grip that one ‘take’ can have. The
notion of ‘in betweenness’ will be explored further in this chapter, and there
will be an analysis of the tensions performers need to maintain in their work
in order for it to do justice to the teller’s story while at the same time animat-
ing it with something new and surprising. However we need to be cautious
of attributing too much to spontaneous improvisation, and in this chapter I
will qualify and nuance the contention that the performer’s response
emerges out ‘the spontaneous moment’. The performers do not plan the
enactments beforehand; nevertheless they are based on certain patterns of
response that are developed through rehearsal and previous performances.
As Barthes wrote of any text, the performers will draw on ‘bits of code,
formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social language’ (Barthes 2000,
p.183). Their work perhaps can never be freshly minted and ‘unique’.
In Chapter 8, the playback ensemble will be considered. I will propose
that the sustained company life in which most performers practise playback
theatre is crucial in protecting both the players and the teller from the
excesses of an improvised theatre form. It is the ensemble which provides the
conditions for risk-taking in performance and which allows a kind of safety
net if the performer loses his way. Additionally, by providing a space within
which performers can rehearse their own stories, the company offers a
means through which they can experiment and explore the difficulties, sen-
sitivities, and pitfalls of playing the other.
In Chapter 9, the ethics of playback theatre performing will be consid-
ered. I will attempt to raise questions that go to the heart of the playback and
bring into question the ethical responsibilities of the performer: what are the
limitations of the playback actor? Can we play a teller no matter how cultur-
ally ‘strange’ to us? If we accept that our performances are always influenced
by our culture and ideology, then is it ethically acceptable to represent
another? Can the performer ethically assume the power of interpretation
over another’s story? I go on to consider what an ethics of playback perform-
ing may look like and propose principles that may protect the performers
and audiences from some of the risks of telling and performing personal
stories in public places.
Jonathan Fox has argued that the ‘ultimate purpose of playback theatre’
is to promote a ‘radical social encounter’. In Chapter 10, I will examine to
what degree it is possible to regard playback as a tool for social intervention.
Amongst playback practitioners there seem to be three main claims that
support playback’s capacity to intervene politically and socially, namely, that
playback provides an opportunity (i) for marginalized groups to tell their
story; (ii) for opposing voices to be heard, and (iii) for groups and communi-
ties to remember collectively and create/recreate their own history. I will
exemplify and discuss these claims and then go on to think through two
interrelated criticisms of playback practice in relation to its credentials as a
tool of social intervention. These first, are that the lack of involvement of the
teller in the dramatic action significantly reduces his or her interpretive
control over how the story will be represented and second, that the structure
of the event does not allow the participants to question the decisions of the
performers. While accepting these criticisms as ones that playback practitio-
ners should take seriously, the chapter will conclude with a proposal that
playback theatre provides a space in which the story can be opened up in
order that the teller and the other spectators can see that what happened to
the teller (and thus potentially to all of us) may be represented (re-presented)
in other ways. To put this another way, I will suggest that effective playback
opens the story up to multiple levels of reflexivity so that performers, specta-
tors and teller can see its ‘workings’ – that they can view how it is repre-
sented and so how it might be represented differently. This, I will suggest, is
a key means through which playback theatre can have political and social
impact.
Limitations
All written accounts of theatre practice are inevitably limited. This is espe-
cially the case for improvised theatre. Theatre is a live event, taking place in
the here and now; attempts to preserve its ‘liveness’ run into significant diffi-
culties. Memory of the performance decays quickly and forms of written,
video or audio recording cannot retain the vivacity of the moment. The par-
ticular contexts of the event, namely, the perceptual sets of the participants
and the particular patterns of meaning that emerge during the performance,
cannot be preserved. Specifically, playback theatre derives its energy
through relationships in the here and now, relationships between perform-
ers, spectators and tellers. Our memory of these relationships is always
partial (Clifford 1986) in both senses of the word – it records only ‘part of ’
any experience and it is always and unavoidably subjective.
The scope of this book is also significantly restricted by the limitations
of the writer. Although I refer briefly to playback practice in other compa-
nies and countries, this book cannot cover the liveliness and variety of
practice across the globe. A thorough and detailed account of this work still
needs to be written.
One further limitation needs to be noted. In this book my experience
and interest has largely concentrated on the issues and experiences of the
playback actor. The reader will not find a thorough consideration of the
work of the conductor – or indeed of the musician – in this book. With refer-
ence to the conductor, whose role is crucial in receiving the teller’s story, this
is a significant omission and the book should be read in the light of this.
Having noted this, however, the title suggests my particular concern – the
ethics and possibilities of playing the other – and it is hoped that I will be
forgiven for concentrating on this area of playback practice. Readers inter-
ested in the role of the conductor should refer to Salas’ Improvising Real Life:
Personal Story in Playback Theatre, Fox’s Acts of Service, and Fox and Dauber’s
edited book Gathering Voices: Essays in Playback Theatre.
Chapter 2
Openness and Ethics
In the evening following what we felt was a particularly successful performance,

the company were eating together. A discussion developed concerning the last
story of the show. A man had come on to the stage unsure of what his story was,
but knowing that he had been moved by the previous one. The story he eventu-
ally told concerned the death of his mother, the loss of his father in early child-
hood, and communication with his mother at a séance. He began to cry as he
told this, so much so that without invitation his wife came up on stage to comfort
him. We discussed our concerns about the ethics of allowing the man’s vulnera-
bility to be so publicly revealed. We worried that we may have manipulated this
situation. One member of the company argued that it was ‘therapy without
boundaries’ – without the protection and continuity of the ongoing therapeutic
relationship. It is a discussion we have had regularly over the years. I would
suppose that many other companies have had these kinds of discussions.
The truth is that, to some extent, we hope for these kinds of stories in playback
theatre. But, as is clear here, we also feel some unease when they are told. What
are the characteristics of these stories? What is the unease we feel? What does it
mean to talk about playback theatre as ‘therapy without boundaries’? Does this
epithet have any truth to it? What are the ethical implications of asking for
personal stories to be told in public places? In this chapter I will attempt to
address these questions. It will not be possible to reach any conclusive answers,
but hopefully the discussion will introduce some key issues that will be
addressed in different ways throughout this book.
As playback practitioners what do we hope for in a playback theatre per-
formance? Put simply, we aim for personal stories to be told which are signifi-
cant to the teller and the audience. We hope that the actors and musicians will
be able to ‘add something’ to the story, so that tellers and spectators will see,
hear, and feel something that may be surprising or that may be an acknowledg-
ment of something that has been concealed. We hope that this surprise and
31
acknowledgement will stimulate new stories that may not have been told
otherwise. We hope therefore for a kind of fluidity or openness in the perfor-
mance so that stories and the truths they reveal can be examined, explored,
reflected upon and perhaps changed. The act of telling in public can, of
course, in itself produce change and re-evaluation, but the practice is
designed to expose the story to the particular energies that are available
through dramatic improvisation.
Openness is the term I have chosen in this book to denote the fluidity that
constitutes effective playback theatre. I do not mean to use the word in its
common usage, however. When openness is referred to as a desirable objec-
tive in playback performances, I do not necessarily mean the openness of
significant self-disclosure or emotional catharsis. I am using the word rather
like Umberto Eco (1989) does when he talks about the ‘open work’. He is
thinking of art work which has an unfinished quality that invites elaboration
and exploration. Playback stories and enactments can have that quality of
openness to them; they can invite expansion, investigation and playful
engagement. In the following sections the nature of open stories and open
performing will be considered. In subsequent chapters some of the qualities
of a performance that allow openness or inhibit it will be examined.
All this talk of openness may produce unease in the reader. Isn’t this just
‘therapy without boundaries’? In the second part of this chapter the signifi-
cant ethical concerns raised by playback practice will be introduced and
acknowledged. Those worried about the ethics of playback tend to make
two main points: the first is that something is happening in the wrong place
– it is inappropriate to call for personal stories in public places – and
the second is that playback involves the manipulation of the teller for
the purpose of spectacle. These are significant criticisms, and should be
taken seriously. They crop up throughout this book as the ethical and
epistemological problems of playing the other are addressed.
Openness: open stories

Probably the most difficult and challenging stories to enact in playback
theatre are those with a clear structure and narrative direction, the kind of
stories that have the quality of having been told before. For example, it can
be difficult to play a detailed story of a journey that leaves out the subjective
experience of the teller, or an articulately told and well-crafted anecdote, or a
story in which the teller is careful to distance herself from it, or a story
which has a ‘punch’ line that produces laughter or shock during the telling.
It may seem surprising that it is the well-crafted stories which present more
problems rather than, say, those with disorganized narratives. They are
difficult for the performers, because they allow little room to respond or
elaborate. The story has been told in such a way that it appears that there is
OPENNESS AND ETHICS 33
little more that can be added through dramatization. The audience already
know where the story is going and how it will end; they have already heard
the punch line. It can be difficult for the actors to find a way to play the story
without disappointing the audience. They need considerable skill to add
anything new. To some extent these stories are a response to the apprehen-
sion of telling a personal story in a public place. Out of an understandable
need for defence, these stories are ‘closed’. They don’t leave very much room
for the actors to open them up to exploration and elaboration.
These kinds of stories are often told at the beginning of performances
when the levels of anxiety are high. They are common in large venues where
audience members do not know each other, or in small settings where unease
is produced through the unfamiliar intimacy. They are told when audience
members are not sure of each other, or when the spectators detect anxiety
and uncertainty amongst the performers. A note of caution needs to be
sounded here however: I do not mean to suggest that these kinds of stories
are unwelcome in playback performances. They often have the function of
warming up the audience and the performers and, perhaps more impor-
tantly, they can produce emotional effects in the audience that lead on to
stories that have more potential for exploration through playback. The
‘problem’ of these stories lies with the performers and the conductor, not
with the audience. However they are not stories for which playback is best
suited. It is to those stories I now wish to turn. Consider these two stories:
1. The Sisters
About halfway through a performance to an audience of health profession-
als and academics interested in personal narrative, a woman came on stage
to tell a story. She began by saying that she was not sure what she wanted to
tell, but that she had been thinking through the day about a forthcoming
reunion with her estranged sister. She talked about the incidents that had
caused the rift in their relationship and her hopes for their meeting. She also
talked about their closeness when they were children. When asked by the
conductor, she said that she wanted to see what had happened and the
anticipated reconciliation.
2. The Glass Door

(C = conductor and T = teller)
C. How long ago did this story happen?

T. About one month ago.
C. Tell us something about yourself at the time of this story.
T. Cool and trendy…well I wasn’t really. I had been to America and had
met lots of people. I was back at College and going to the bar. I was
wearing really weird clothes…orange glasses. There was a group of
boys in the trendy bar…
C. A trendy bar…was there a not so trendy bar?
T. Yes (laughter). There was this group of boys I was trying to impress…and
one boy in particular! I pushed at the glass door to get in the bar and fell
straight through it. There was no glass in the door! Someone said
‘Maybe you should try wearing glasses’. I felt such a fool!
C. Choose someone to be the guy you were trying to impress.
(T chooses an actor)
C. What was his name?
T. (laughing and looking rather embarrassed) James…
C. And some words about James.
T. He’s really cool, he’s in the ‘in crowd’.
C. This is T’s story of falling through the door. You watch…
Both these stories in their different ways give the performers a great deal of
room to work in. The story of The Sisters presents the actors with the possibil-
ity of exploring the archetypes of sister relationships and the broad sweep of
time allows a counterpoint between how it was then and how it is now. The
idea of ‘reconciliation’ gives the actors and the musicians a chance for imagi-
native creation. The Glass Door at first glance seems rather like one of the
‘closed stories’ I have referred to above. But, one could suggest, it is really a
story about feeling foolish and being humiliated; it offered the actors an
opportunity to explore the dynamics of social embarrassment that are
familiar to us all. It also may have provided a prologue or overture to stories
that came later in the performance. Both of these stories are ‘open’ because
they allow development and elaboration on the part of the performers.
In playback theatre an ‘open story’ is one which leaves room for the per-
formers to explore and elaborate. I prefer the term ‘open stories’ to what is
sometimes called ‘deep stories’ in playback discourse. The problem of
‘depth’ as it refers to personal stories is twofold: first, it implies high levels of
evident personal disclosure that are not necessarily appropriate or desired in
a public performance, and second, the idea of ‘depth’ implies a judgment
concerning the story which is often very difficult to make. There are stories
in playback which on the ‘surface’ appear simple accounts that give little
away of the emotional world of the teller, but which, in the context of the
performance and of the other stories told, can have a significant impact. We
cannot make a judgment about the ‘depth’ of a story without doing a disser-
vice to intentions of the teller. The notion of open stories avoids these
problems by focusing on the impact on the possibilities available to the perform-

ers in the subsequent enactment.
The notion of the ‘open story’ bears some similarity to what Umberto
Eco calls an ‘open work’. In his analysis of contemporary art forms, Eco
looks at work which leaves the completion of the artwork to the performer
or to the audience. He suggests that these works are unfinished and possess ‘a
halo of indefiniteness’ that makes an open work ‘pregnant with suggestive
possibilities’. He goes on to say that an open work ‘sets out to stimulate the
private world of the addressee so that he can draw from inside himself some
deeper response that mirrors the subtler resonances underlying the text’
(Eco 1989, p.9).
For Eco, open works are characterized by their ‘suggestiveness’, ‘ambi-
guity’ and unfinished nature. Open stories in playback have similar charac-
teristics: they invite the performers to continue them. Although open stories
often lead to more interesting enactments in playback theatre, I am not sug-
gesting that in themselves they are necessarily desirable. Stories in playback
emerge out of the context of their telling and there are occasions when
the conditions are not suitable for stories which invite the exploration of
the performers and self-disclosure on the part of the teller. I am not using the
term ‘openness’ in the sense of ‘honesty’ or ‘frankness’. A high level of self-
disclosure is not a defining characteristic of the ‘open story’. Rather, open
stories are ones that are incomplete – one might use the term ‘loose’ here –
and thus invite the performers to explore and elaborate upon them. They are
stories which do not conclude dialogue but open it up.
The characteristics I suggest for open stories are as follows.
1. Open stories tend to have a looser narrative structure and seem

to emerge or be discovered through the act of telling. The teller
has not decided the precise shape of the story before she comes
onto the stage; but as she begins to talk to the conductor it
begins to take shape.
2. Open stories possess a degree of self-reflection apparent in their
telling – the teller in some way is aware of the provisional and
constructed nature of the story they are telling. In other words
there is a sense in which the teller is aware that the story could be
told differently and is curious to know what the conductor, the
audience and the performers will make of the story.
3. There is often a degree of self-disclosure in ‘open stories’. There is
a sense in which the teller is taking a risk by telling this story in
this context. I do not however wish to suggest that ‘openness’, in
the sense that I am using it, is synonymous with ‘honesty’.
4. Open stories are not necessarily ones in which there is a high

degree of expressed emotion. The expression of emotion in a
public performance is dependent on cultural and personal factors; it
does not necessarily indicate significant self-disclosure.
5. Open stories often employ or invite symbolic exploration. The
teller may make use of metaphor, or the way in which it is told may
suggest that to the performers.
6. Open stories invite the response and experimentation of the
performers.
7. Open stories often have the quality of being unfinished. They are
not neatly tied up, but leave room for elaboration.
As we have seen open stories tend to produce an open response from the per-
formers. If the story is told in a ‘spirit of openness’ then the performers are
more likely to respond in that way. The opposite is also true: if the perform-
ers’ response to the story is ‘open’ it more likely to produce open stories. It is
to that response that I now wish to turn.
The performers’ response

During rehearsal the teller talked of her sense of loss at the death of a close
colleague. She spoke about how difficult it was to imagine that she would
never see him again. Viv, cast as the teller’s actor, sat stage left with a drum in
hand and said simply, ‘I knew a man,’ then as the funeral developed
onstage, ‘I once knew a man who opened doors for me’. Then at the end as
the body leaves the mourners, Viv says:
We say it with smiles, we say it with tears.

We say it in minutes, we say it over years.
And yet we have no other word than this…goodbye.
Later Viv told me: ‘the poem is a dreadful misquote of an actual poem that I
wrote in my little quotation book when I was about 14/15 years old. The last
line is (I think) correct, but the rest I just cobbled together as best I could. It’s a
bit of a blur. What is interesting to me is the fact that I thought at that tender
age that there would be a lot of ‘goodbyes’ ahead. On my mum’s flowers at
her funeral I simply wrote ’goodbye’. It really is the only word.
In his discussion of Walter Benjamin, Peter Brooks tells us that an autobio-

graphical narrative is a gift. It is:
an act of generosity to which the receiver should respond by an equal
generosity, either in the telling of another story…or in the comment-
ing on the story told, but in any event by the proof that the gift has
been received, that the narrative has made a difference. (Brooks 1994,
p.87)
In Chapter 1, I suggested that performers do not play the essence of the
teller’s story, but rather that they responded to it from their own subjectivity,
partiality and through the dramaturgy of the playback form. I agree with
Brooks that the generosity of the teller’s story calls for ‘equal generosity’ as
‘proof that the gift has been received, that the narrative has made a differ-
ence’. This is perhaps the first and most important duty of the actor or
musician: to show that the ‘gift’ of the story has been received. The perform-
ers aim to do this through their response. This, I think is evident in the
example above. Viv responds from her own memories and makes use of these
to enact the teller’s story.
The performer’s response does not always succeed and sometimes tellers
feel that the performers have not listened to their story. In Poland, for
example, Playback Theatre York performed a woman’s story about being
caught up in a crowd of football fans. We played it for laughs. It was clear at
the end that the teller felt we had missed showing the fear she felt at being in
the middle of the crowd. The conductor asked us to do it again. Perhaps out
of our anxiety of playing to a Polish audience for the first time, we had not
listened to her properly. Or perhaps we were too keen to entertain the
audience. What is clear is that in any enactment, the teller needs to receive
the impression that their story has been ‘received’ by the performers. Their
response must demonstrate this in some way. Of course, as the title of this
book suggests, this raises all sorts of ethical issues that will emerge in the
forthcoming pages. For now I want to sketch out what are some of the
general characteristics of the performers’ response to the story, characteris-
tics which I hope will demonstrate the complexity and provisional nature of
that response.
First, the performers’ response will always be ‘partial ’. I take this word
from the writing of the anthropologist James Clifford and mean it in both
senses: as both ‘committed’ and ‘incomplete’ (Clifford 1986, p.7). He was
referring to the writing of ethnographic accounts, yet his notion of ‘partial
truths’ applies equally well to the playback performer. The performer will
from his subjectivity emphasize those aspects of the story to which he is, for
what ever reason, committed or attracted and inevitably make choices that
will render the enactment an incomplete version of the story told in the per-
formance. Walter Benjamin’s comment in relation to storytelling applies
equally to the playback enactment. He writes: ‘traces of the storyteller cling
to the story the way that handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’
(Benjamin 1970, p.92).
Second, the performers’ response will always be profoundly influenced by

context. In each of the different environments in which playback theatre is
performed, different takes on what is considered ‘public’ and ‘personal’ will
be negotiated and established. This is a dynamic process: performers and
spectators will be engaged in a constant negotiation and re-negotiation of
what can be revealed in a public place. The nature of the autobiographical
narratives and the subsequent enactments will always be inflected by these
complex considerations. The performers’ work will also be influenced by the
stories and enactments that preceded it; processes of identification that are
present for the performer during the performance; the dialogue between the
teller and the conductor; and the response of the audience during the telling
and the enactment.
Third, the response of the performers is almost always intra- and inter-
personally polyphonous. It is the product of multiple voices and perspectives
working together. There is no authoritative playwright in playback theatre;
it is what Jonathan Fox calls ‘non-scripted theatre’ (Fox 1994). The enact-
ment develops out of the interplay of many ‘voices’. Each performer will
bring different perspectives to the enactment. Each performer will also be
aware of many internal impulses and points of view that might direct their
action. There is no authoritative version of the story; it is brought together
by the democratic collaboration and interaction of multiple points of view: a
process inherent in improvisation that Keith Sawyer calls ‘collaborative
emergence’ (Sawyer 2000).
If we accept the players’ response as partial, contingent and polyphon-
ous, then the idea of their playing the essence of the story seems highly
problematic. Whatever develops after the conductor says to the audience
‘Let’s watch’ is far less stable than that. However what does happen when the
actors are working well is that they open the story up. By ‘working well’ I
mean that the performers are working openly. They make themselves avail-
able to the affective, somatic and cultural possibilities suggested by the story,
just as Viv does in the example above. The open performing has many of the
characteristics of open stories:
1. When the actor is performing openly, she tends to allow the

action to emerge or be discovered through the act of
performing. The actor does not decide what she will do before
she comes onto the stage, but allows the enactment to emerge
through improvisation with the other actors and the musician.
2. Open performing is characterized by close ensemble work.
Performers work together to produce the enactment. There is no
one actor who controls its overall direction.
3. In open performing the actor or musician often have a high level of

personal commitment to the story and their involvement in it. They
describe feeling empathy and personal connection to the teller (see
Chapter 6).
4. There is often a degree of self-disclosure in open performing. There
is a sense in which the performer is taking a risk in their
performance.
5. Open performing produces work that is, in some way, unfinished,
allowing the teller and spectators space to attribute their own
meaning and interpretations to the work.
The response of the performers in playback theatre is always and only a

human response to another’s story. The performance can be wonderful,
generous, risky and inspired, but it is never more than human. As such it can
heighten awareness of the means and the narrative structures we employ to
represent experience. It is axiomatic of the current interest in ‘narrative
therapy’ that we can be trapped, as well as validated, by our own stories.
Effective playback loosens the ‘ties’ of the story, opens up other possible
interpretations and reveals the means through which we make sense of our
experience.
The story has been told in such a way that it invites exploration from the
performers, who in turn produce work which opens the story up to different
perspectives. To put this another way, I would say that openness in telling
and performing liberates the teller and spectator from the tyranny of the
closed, fixed viewpoint. Stories can enslave individuals and communities; the
playback process at its best opens these stories to investigation and playful
restructuring. These arguments will be substantiated in the forthcoming
chapters. For now as a kind of ‘taster’ for my idea, consider this proposal
from the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas. He speaks about the central
importance of play in psychoanalysis. His point resonates with the notion of
‘openness’.
Bollas is concerned with re-thinking Freud’s notion of free association –
a process which Freud saw as being an important vehicle toward ‘truths’
inaccessible to the conscious mind. In his re-framing of the relationship
between the therapist and patient, Bollas asserts that the fundamental
agency of change in psychoanalysis is not the discovery of truths; rather it is
the free associative and playful discourse in the relationship itself. He writes:
If unconscious thinking is too complex to be grasped by conscious-
ness, if one person’s unconscious can communicate with another’s
unconscious mind only by playing with it, then psychoanalysis
is a radical act – freeing the subject from character restraints and
intersubjective compliances through the naturally liberating and

expressive medium of free association. … The fundamental agency of
change in a psychoanalysis is the continuous exercise of this freedom,
which ultimately deconstructs and disseminates any narrative
action…and establishes in place of the morality of the thematic a dis-
sembling spirit that plays the self into myriad realities. All along, what has
seemed to be the means to truth – free association – is the truth itself… (Bollas
1995, pp.69–70) [my emphasis]
Having rejected the notion that playback performers replicate the teller’s
story, or convey its essence or offer authoritative interpretations, I want to
explore the proposal that playback can provide a space for ‘free associative
discourse’ that opens up the teller’s narrative by exposing it to the multiple
perspectives of the performers. Effective playback performances are ones
which permit openness in telling and performing. In subsequent chapters I
will consider the conditions for open stories and open performing and will
propose the notion that effective playback allows a kind of open play with
the teller’s story.
Ethics and playback theatre: listening to its critics

I am aware that my claim for the importance of openness in telling and per-
forming raises significant ethical issues. Playback theatre always does this;
performing personal stories told in public spaces is bound to throw up ques-
tions of privacy and exploitation. It raises questions about the problems of
playing the other and the potential manipulation of the tellers who offer
their stories. It may seem strange to devote a section of an early chapter to
playback’s critics; however this book aims at looking at the complex ethical
issues raised by the form. It is not my aim to rebut criticism or to write an
apologetic, but rather to open these issues up for examination and discussion
and debate. Arguably we learn more about our practice from its critics than
from its supporters, and it is in this spirit that this chapter is written. Perhaps
because playback theatre is such a risky venture for performers there is little
robust criticism of the work. When there is, it may tell us something impor-
tant about how playback contravenes or challenges contemporary practices
and mores.
In Britain – and I daresay in other Western countries – playback theatre
contravenes common theatre conventions. By asking audience members to
tell a personal story in a public place, the form breaks the usual rules of theat-
rical gatherings. Theatre events do not usually invite audience participation;
indeed to do so is often likely to produce significant anxiety amongst specta-
tors. In most Western theatre, the boundary between stage and auditorium is
rarely crossed and the audience role, although essential for the success of the
event, is confined to socially defined contributions such as applause,

laughter and silence. Inviting audience members to share autobiographical
material publicly in what resembles and is designated by the performers as a
theatrical event is, at the very least, to introduce ambiguity into the minds of
spectators unfamiliar with playback theatre.
Playback theatre, as some of its critics point out, does not offer the care-
fully constructed boundaries of the therapy space, yet it invites participants
to tell personal experiences. It does not invite the usual responses of theatre
audiences, but instead suggests that the performance will not be possible
without their contribution. Spectators might ask: what kind of public place
is being created here? What responses are required from the spectator? What
kinds of stories is it ‘safe’ and appropriate to tell in this public place? It is
hardly surprising that many audience members speak of their tension in the
early moments of the performance.
Not surprisingly, critics have responded to these concerns through cor-
respondence with the company. There are two related concerns: the first is
that a public performance is an inappropriate place to ask for personal stories
to be told, and the second is that the tellers are being manipulated for enter-
tainment and spectacle.
Some years ago, Playback Theatre York received two letters from
audience members who had attended a performance to an audience of users
of mental health services and local professionals. The two correspondents
were psychotherapists. Their letters follow a similar theme, which may be
summarized as a concern about the ‘framing’ of the playback event and the
psychological safety of the participants. The first correspondent complained
that some tellers were left weeping after the performance of their story and
that the enactments had been done for ‘entertainment’. For this writer it was
almost unthinkable to consider the sharing and enactment of personal
stories in a public setting as entertainment. It was clear that the writer
believed that something was happening in the wrong place. The second cor-
respondent also shared her concern about the telling and enacting of
personal stories in public places and wondered what kind of event she
was attending which although suggestive of therapy does not possess the
‘therapeutic boundaries’.
Another criticism some years later picks up on this theme. Elinor
Vettriano (1999), having attended the International Playback Theatre Con-
ference, writes, ‘I found myself questioning the safe nature and validity of
this form of theatre’. She goes on to wonder whether there is the ‘safe con-
tainer’ of dramatherapy present in the playback theatre practice and asks
important questions about the form. In the same article, Maggie Morgan asks
the same questions, writing:
In certain ‘contained’ contexts, Playback could have a most effective

role. Questions need to be asked, however, about boundaries and
even accountability. It is an artistic form worth much more than being
an up-market Oprah Winfrey show. (Vettriano 1999, p.9)
It is clear that these correspondents felt that they had attended an event that
did not possess the ‘boundaries’ they believed to be important when
personal stories are told. More than that they felt that the performers were,
perhaps salaciously, making use of this confusion of categories; that the
tellers, at best, were not fully informed about the nature of the event and, at
worse, manipulated into providing personal stories for ‘entertainment’.
These are very serious criticisms of the form. Are the boundaries between the
personal and public so blurred in playback performances that it constitutes a
psychologically unsafe environment? Perhaps some tellers feel as I did after
telling a story during rehearsal:
Through telling the story I am over-exposed. I over-stepped my own privacy.

Revealing what, at that moment, was not safe to reveal, I opened a wound,
perhaps to appease, to please, or to be seen – and then I could find no way to
close it. One of the other actors said to me ‘People will only tell stories that
they feel safe to tell’. Is this true? Is it not possible that tellers will find them-
selves stumbling into saying more than they wished to say, or more than they
had expected?
Is the risk too great? Is it too much to hope for the openness I have described
in this chapter? Is playback just another example of the exploitation of the
individual’s desire to be seen no matter what the cost that is so evident in TV
shows like Big Brother and Oprah Winfrey? In order to address these questions
it is first necessary to understand what is going on in playback performances.
How do place, the dynamics of telling, the dramaturgy of playback, and the
nature or playback acting and improvising shape the telling of personal
stories in public places? Once that analysis is conducted the ethical questions
raised here and the possibilities for openness can be reconsidered.
Chapter 3
Personal Stories
in Public Places
The Rats
The performance took place in a community mental health centre in the North
of England. Before it began, I was sitting in the audience talking to a woman
about the forthcoming show. I asked her what story she might tell. She told me
about a recurring dream of being attacked by rats in her bed. The rats start to
bite her; she calls out, but when her mother comes into the room the rats bite her
as well. In the dream she always wakes up terrified. I said to her that if she
wanted to, she could tell this story during the performance.
Much later, when the conductor invited the next story she stood up and
came forward on to the stage area to applause from the audience and the
actors. I felt a mixture of dread, excitement and some responsibility. I had sug-
gested to her that she could come forward to tell the story and, I thought, she
had taken up my suggestion and done so. It did nor occur to me then that she
might be making up her own mind about telling the story? She began in a
nervous and rather timid fashion to tell the dream she had told me. I was aware
of her vulnerability and of my anxiety at what would happen. As the story
unfolded I was aware of the conductor trying to find a redeeming end to it. She
asked questions like: ‘When you wake up are there any things that make you
feel better?’ and ‘Is there an ending to the dream that you would like to see?’ To
both of these questions the teller said ‘No’. It was clear, I think, that she just
wanted to see the dream. The teller was asked to cast herself in the dream and
she chose C. For her mother she chose M (a worker in her Centre). The rats were
then cast as a chorus by the conductor.
The action begins with C holding a cloth as if it were a pillow. The music
conveys a rising sense of foreboding. The rats are far stage right. The mother
attaches a long piece of elastic to her daughter and moves stage left holding the
other end and a grey cloth. As the action continues we see the dream begin to
move across the sleeper’s face. The rats begin to call to the dreamer and move
toward her.
43
I felt a shiver of fear as the rats began and I looked toward the teller to see
her reaction, I saw her trembling and nodding her head. The rats begin to
circle the dreamer and she became increasingly terrified; they call out to her,
using her name and calling, ‘We are going to get you’. She calls out for her
mother who moves toward her gathering in the elastic as she does so. I
remember thinking that this was not how the teller described it. She had said
that her mother entered and the rats started to bite her too. What impulse had
led M to change the story? This was an act of interpretation beyond the story
told by the teller.
Mother comforts her daughter saying, at first, that everything is alright
and later, that she must learn how to stand up to the rats. Mother demon-
strates by shouting at the rats to go away; they retreat a little. She places the
grey cloth between her and the rats and shouts to them that they must not
‘cross the line’; she then takes a large hand drum from the musicians’ table
and says ‘This is how you do it!’ She bangs the drum. The dreamer shouts ‘I
can’t’ repeatedly, before taking the drum and rather timidly, at first, beating
it. The rats retreat slightly; encouraged by this she beats the drum more
loudly; the rats retreat further. A look of triumph grows on her face and she
says ‘I can do it, I can do it’. The rats begin to come closer again and again
she beats the drum.
As this was happening I watched the teller,1 she seemed to be totally
absorbed; there was a smile on her face, as if enjoying the defeat of the rats.
Nevertheless, we had changed her story. The action ended with the dreamer
repelling the rats one more time with growing confidence and the mother
looking over with pride. They all turned to the teller, to indicate the end of the
piece.
The conductor asked the teller if that was the way it was, and if there was
anything in the story that was particularly strong for her. She said it was good
when the actor beat the drum to get rid of the rats, but she said ‘I can’t do
that’. The conductor thanked her for her story and she returned to her seat to
applause. The conductor asked if there was anybody in the audience who
also had frightening dreams. A number of people nodded and I put up my
hand to tell of a dream that I used to have of insects crawling all over me.
Another person in the audience described a nightmare she had regularly.
Personal stories in public places

Usually Playback Theatre York is very keen to avoid trying to find a ‘happy
ending’ to a teller’s story. There are plenty of examples in the company’s
history when they have enacted the story with the same emotional force
with which the teller told it. It is clear that in this example the particular cir-
cumstances of the performance – the venue, the audience, the fact that one of
the actors was a worker at the Centre (M), the fearful and psychotic-like
1 The fact that the audience can see the teller watching the story is a key aspect of playback theatre.
PERSONAL STORIES IN PUBLIC PLACES 45
nature of the story – may have persuaded us to find a resolution not provided
by the teller. The episode emphasizes the key role played by context (venue,
audience composition and pre-existing relationships) in the decisions made
by the performers. It is clear that the conductor and the performers were
being influenced by the nature of the venue and by their own perceptions of
such a place.
In the last chapter I stressed the humanness of the actors’ response; in this
chapter I will consider in some detail how context influences decisions about
telling and performing – how perceptions of place shape what happens on
stage in the auditorium. I will analyze the impact that perceptions of ‘public
place’ has on the disclosure of personal stories in playback theatre, and I will
be particularly interested in how ‘place’ can inhibit or encourage the telling
of open stories and its ‘bedfellow’, open performing. I will demonstrate how
a complex range of factors influence the spectators’ decision about the kinds
of stories they will tell in different public places.
I use the term ‘public’ here fully recognizing its ambiguity and contin-
gency; that the nature of what is construed of as ‘public’ is a dynamic process
dependent on expectation, perception and negotiation. Despite the ambigu-
ity of the term, its usefulness for my purpose lies in the tension between the
public and the personal which is, I will suggest, a key characteristic of a
playback performance. Alongside the manifest telling and performing of
personal stories there is always the question: what can be told here? In
Chapter 10 I will explore this tension in more detail.
How the individual spectator and the audience answer this question and
how they draw the line between the personal and the public will be
mediated by a complex interplay of subjective, relational and environmental
factors operating in and around any particular venue. The spectators’
personal and cultural history, their perceived and actual relationships with
other participants, and the configuration of the space and context, will all
influence how they interpret the event and thus shape their decisions con-
cerning what is appropriate personal disclosure.
I will contribute to the debate initiated in the last chapter concerning the
ethics of telling in public places by suggesting that playback theatre ‘drama-
tizes’ this tension between the personal and the public, drawing attention
not only to the conventions of personal disclosure that may be ascribed to
certain spaces, but also to the implications this may have for the private and
cultural domains that lie outside a particular performance. In other words
what I am suggesting is that playback theatre is not just about the telling and
dramatization of personal stories, it is also concerned with, and sometimes a
challenge to, accepted views concerning the boundaries between the personal and
the public.
In order to make sense of what happened during the telling and per-
forming of The Rats, it will be important to look at how context shapes
playback events.
Space
In his analysis of space Henri Lefebvre writes:
Vis-à-vis lived experience, space is neither a mere frame, after the
fashion of the frame of a painting, nor a form or container of a virtu-
ally neutral kind, designed simply to receive whatever is poured into
it. Space is social morphology… (Lefebvre 1991, p.95)
In relation to human experience then, space does not exist prior to the social
processes that construct it. Space is not a container in which human relations
take place but it is rather, as the geographer Doreen Massey puts it, ‘the
product of interrelations’ (Massey 2005, p.9). This is no mere academic
point. It suggests that space, far from being a neutral frame, is formed and
changed by the actions of those who interact with it. One could say that
spaces bear the imprint of those that inhabit them. With reference to theatre
spaces then we can go along with Richard Schechner when he writes that
‘[T]heatres everywhere are scenographic models of sociometric process’
(Schechner 1988, p.164). Theatres are, to some extent, maps from which we
can ‘read’ social processes at work. To look closely at theatre spaces and how
they are organized is likely to reveal far more than the ‘merely’ spatial. An
analysis of the spaces constructed by playback theatre companies for their
performances is likely to tell us something about the intentions of the per-
formers and the responses of the spectators. It is important to adopt a
broader definition of ‘place’ than merely the physical environment in which
a playback performance occurs. I am suggesting a notion that may be better
termed ‘context’, since it seeks to convey all the subjective, informational,
and environmental factors that build towards a spectator’s perception of a
particular performance.
A note of caution needs to be sounded however. As Massey points out,
we limit our conception of space if we consider it solely a representation
from which social processes can be mapped. To do so she argues eloquently,
is to ‘tame the spatial into the textual and the conceptual; into representa-
tion’ (Massey 2005, p.20). Especially in the theatre, space is livelier – more
plastic – than that: space itself is shaping the work of the performers and the
responses of the audience. Despite this caveat, however, tracing the con-
struction of playback spaces will illuminate some of the processes that influ-
ence the spectator’s decisions about telling personal stories in a public places.
Before the event: the horizon of expectations

Susan Bennett writes that ‘theatre audiences bring to any performance a
horizon of cultural and ideological expectations’ (Bennett 1997, p.107). She
argues that we cannot regard the audience’s ‘horizons of expectation’ as
fixed; rather these shift in response to the complex influences that act on the
spectator as they anticipate a theatrical event. In this section I will explore
this process, aware that such expectations will significantly influence the
audience’s reception, the roles they assume during the performance, and
their sense of collective identity.
CULTURAL FACTORS
All audiences bring to a performance culturally inscribed expectations of
what constitutes a theatrical event. These will be influenced by
socio-economic and geographic factors as well as by personal history and
experience. Personal and social histories of theatre-going are bound to influ-
ence what audience members come to expect from a performance. There is
however an additional dimension as spectators anticipate the performance;
they will arrive with expectations and conventions concerning appropriate
levels of public self-disclosure that are profoundly inflected by culture and
personal history. Past history and socio-cultural ‘rules’ concerning what is
appropriate to reveal in public will always be at work in performances.
To a large extent, the notion of what is private and what is acceptable to
reveal in a public place are always socially and culturally defined. Consider
for example Fadwa El Guindi’s claim that Western notions of privacy are
closely related to the Western constructs of ‘individualism and individual
rights to property’ (El Guindi 1999, p.82) whereas Arab ideas are ‘relational
and public’ (El Guindi 1999, p.82). I cannot comment on the veracity of this
claim, but it does nevertheless suggest that broad cultural and ideological
forces are at work when personal stories are told in public places.
Socio-economic class, cultural and religious belief and geographical factors
are certain to influence the boundaries of privacy in a public space. It is
perhaps the case that cultural notions concerning mental health were at play
in the way the performers approached The Rats story. It was clear that the per-
formers in The Rats were certainly aware of this in the decisions they were
making. After the performance I spoke to the conductor; her language
suggests an awareness of context that may not have been present at another
performance:
We were all quite anxious; there was a level of anxiety about how
fragile are the ego strengths here in the audience. It was a terrifying
dream…and perhaps the actors were feeling my nervousness…
However, one needs to be careful not to over-determine the cultural and

socio-economic factors that influence the audience’s expectations. Although
for example the British are often seen as reticent when it comes to the display
of personal feelings in public, it would be a mistake to build this into a
general rule concerning the behaviour of British audiences. No audience is a
homogenous group; complex subjective, cultural and environmental factors
will be at work to mediate broad national characteristics. In considering any
playback theatre audience, one must always be aware of the risk of cultural
stereotyping.
NEGOTIATION WITH THE HOSTS

The negotiation with the hosts of a performance usually takes place on the
telephone or by e-mail some months beforehand. The company are particu-
larly interested in the size and composition of the audience, the performing
space, and the aims that the host has for the event. Usually the host will fund
the performance and they may ask for certain themes, related to the wider
event or to the institution, to be explored. Most performers do not rely on
playback for their income – although the Brazilian Sao Paulo company is an
exception in this respect – and this means that economic concerns are less
influential in shaping the way that the company works than may be the case
in professional theatre companies. There are exceptions: for example when
Playback Theatre York was asked to perform for British Airways in 1998,
the relatively large fee and the clear and forceful wishes of the funders to
create a kind of ‘Hollywood ending’ for their employees caused the
company to adapt their work quite considerably. This episode will be dis-
cussed in more detail later in this chapter.
Most theatre companies need to carefully select a repertoire to attract a
particular audience (Bennett 1997, pp.117–9), whereas playback compa-
nies are not under this pressure. Nevertheless, it is likely that the wishes of
the hosts, their understanding of the purpose of the event, and their
thoughts on the nature of the audience will affect the performers’ work and
their capacity to perform openly. In turn, it is probable that the audience will
detect this and, in response, make decisions concerning their own level of
personal involvement.
TIME AND PLACE

‘Everywhere’, Richard Schechner writes, ‘…theatre occurs in special times
in special places’ (Schechner 1988, p.161). Time and place are crucial
issues in determining the audience response to performance. As Raymond
Williams has written, the most common kind of signal of an art work is its
‘occasion and place’ (Williams 1981, p.131). In the case of playback theatre
different occasions and places will lead spectators to construct different

kinds of public places and thus inform their decisions concerning levels of
personal involvement. This will have a significant bearing on the openness
of telling and performing.
It is unusual for playback to take place in venues solely designated for
theatre. Most performances of Playback Theatre York are ‘embedded’ in host
institutions (such as mental health day centres) or in wider events (for
example, conferences or training days). This is a crucial factor in the con-
struction of the audience and their sense of collective identity. The company
are usually visitors rather than hosts; inevitably this has a bearing on the
dynamics of relationships in the performance. It is common for audience
members to know each other, to be familiar with the venue, or to be
responding to issues that are pertinent to the institution or event in which
the performance is embedded. For example, the location of the performance
within a venue familiar to the audience is likely to lead to pre-existing
patterns of social interaction being replicated to some extent in the perfor-
mance; this will significantly influence the nature of personal disclosure
considered appropriate. In The Rats the actor cast to play the mother of the
teller was a worker within the centre. She knew the teller and had worked
with her. It is perhaps no coincidence that she was chosen to play the teller’s
mother and, as the actor told me later, there was no doubt in her mind that
her previous knowledge of the teller was influencing how she performed
the story.
Spaces are always defined against the territory that surrounds them. A
space is given meaning by that which lies beyond it. Specifically, a theatre
space is shaped by the particular cultural and geographical attributes of what
lies outside its boundaries. In playback theatre, the dynamic between
inside and outside can be crucial in determining the type of public space
experienced by the spectator and thus their decisions concerning personal
disclosure. In turn, the nature of the personal stories told in a performance
will influence the spectator’s ‘take’ on the cultural spaces that lie inside and
outside the theatre space. A performance which takes place in a hotel
function room for example, will partly be shaped by its cultural geography;
the way that economic and social activity are defined through the use of
space will have a bearing on how public theatre space is conceived. Further-
more, the nature of personal disclosure in this particular space is likely to
lead to a reassessment of what constitutes the public domain beyond the
performance itself.
The timing of a performance can also have a bearing on degrees of
openness in performing and telling. Since most performances are embedded
in institutions or wider events, it is much more common for venues to be
either at the base of the commissioning host or at the site of a wider confer-
ence or training event; it is also common for these performances to take place
during the day to accommodate the particular audience. There are excep-
tions: for example, the Sydney Playback Company hold monthly evening
performances in a local drama space, nevertheless it remains common that
performances take place at host venues and at times designed to be suitable
for the anticipated audience. Aside from the logistical ease of locating events
at places and times suitable to the audience, there are perhaps two further
related reasons why companies do so. They are reasons I would suggest that
are closely related to a desire amongst playback practitioners to render the
event in some way efficacious:
1. Holding performances at convenient places and times expresses

a wish to reach audiences that may not usually be able to access
this kind of theatre – what Bennett calls the democratization of
theatre through geography (Bennett 1997, p.128). The desire to
bring playback theatre to marginalized groups or, as Fox puts it,
to ‘those who suffer or are not heard’ (Fox and Dauber 1999,
p.196) is an important factor in understanding the genre.
2. Theatres are, as Schechner tells us, ‘maps of the cultures where they
exist’ (Schechner 1988, p.161) and thus their geographical location
carries ideological loading. Playback’s preference for
non-traditional theatre venues is a desire, shared with other
non-traditional theatre groups, to ‘escape the tyranny of
architectonic grandeur and its aesthetic and ideological
implications’ (Elam in Bennett 1997, p.136).
PRE-SHOW ADVERTISEMENT
In the practice of Playback Theatre York, as the audience enter the space
they will often discover the company brochure placed on their seats. With
regard to shaping expectations of purpose it would have read:
Playback theatre is community theatre, where the real moments,
dreams and stories of the audience are spontaneously improvised.
With the help of our conductor you can tell your story: choose the
actors to play the parts and then sit back and watch as it is brought to
life by our company of actors and musicians. Sometimes people come
with stories they want to tell and, sometimes, stories are inspired by
the performance. Sometimes people come simply to watch. This
positive and enjoyable process demonstrates that everyone’s story is
worth telling. Stories can be hilarious, humdrum, tragic or joyful –
any moment, however small, can make a playback story. (Playback
Theatre Brochure 2002)
This provides some indication to the audience of what to expect in the forth-
coming performance. It also alludes to the possibility that the performance
will be efficacious (‘positive and enjoyable’) and it reveals a democratic
desire for audience involvement (everyone’s story, however small, ‘is worth
telling’). Playback theatre practitioners tend to suggest to the gathering
audience that the performance is, in some way, intended to be efficacious.
The pre-show advertisements and the invitation to tell stories suggests that
their telling enactment may bring about personal and social change or, in
some way, promote personal insight. Playback theatre adopts practices and
holds certain desires with regard to the audience which point toward some
kind of healing potential in performances. These indications of the perfor-
mance to follow will play a part in shaping audience expectation and
contributions.
Before the performance begins, it is common for audience members to
discuss and ask questions about what will happen and what will be expected
of them. It is likely that as they read the brochure they will be trying to
decide what may be appropriate to tell in this space. Their nervousness is not
surprising in light of the unfamiliarity of the event that is about to take place.
Gathering
As the spectators gather for the performance, there will be a series of signals
to shape their expectations and thus their reception of the event. If theatres
are ‘scenographic models of sociometric process’ then particular social rela-
tionships in performances may be ‘read’ back from the ways that the
audience are guided as they gather and are subsequently placed in relation to
the stage, the performers and each other. In the case of playback theatre, it is
a gathering process that is likely to suggest to spectators that their participa-
tion will be encouraged, and that there will be some fluidity across the
stage/auditorium boundary. It is also likely to point to the constructed and
extemporized nature of the event to follow, and thus draws attention to the
means of representation at work in the performance.
In most cases playback audiences will be invited into the space when all
the preparations are completed; spectators will find as they gather in the
space that the lights are up and they are able to see each other. They have an
opportunity to observe each other and to finesse their expectations of the
performance and make decisions concerning their own level of psychologi-
cal safety. This will be crucially affected by the size of the audience and their
familiarity with each other, any interaction with the performers, the view
they have of the stage and, crucially, the integrity of the boundary between
the theatre space and the outside.
AUDIENCE SIZE AND COMPOSITION

Audience size and composition will be an important factor in determining
the kind of involvement spectators will feel able to make. A larger audience
who do not know each other, for example, are likely to make very different
decisions with respect to their involvement than a small and familiar group.
For an audience comprising of 80–100 conference delegates who may not
know each other or be familiar with the space, it is likely that there will be
less attention paid to who is ‘allowed’ to enter the performance and, since
playback is not usually performed in dedicated theatre spaces, there may be
problems with sight-lines and acoustics. These concerns, together with the
need to ‘entertain’ a large audience, tend to produce a less intimate
performance – one more directed to humour or to clear, unambiguous
representations. The ‘public’ nature of these performances often means that
the prospect of telling a ‘personal’ story is daunting. Stories tend to be those
which have a clear narrative and structure which can often leave less ‘open-
ness’ for the performers to explore. In general, not surprisingly, as audience
size and unfamiliarity to each other increases, so the levels of personal dis-
closure and identification decrease; it is likely that there will be more
concern about how far the story will ‘spread’; the stories tend to become
more closed, structured and narrative-driven; and performers tend to take
fewer risks in pushing the enactment beyond what was actually told to them.
It is far less likely in larger performances that the enactments will be
questioned or that the tellers will be invited to discuss them.
ENTERING THE SPACE

As spectators enter the space it is common for them to be greeted by the per-
formers, who will introduce themselves, encourage conversation and apprise
them of what to expect in the forthcoming performance. In a small gathering
it may be possible for the performers to meet most of the audience; in a large
one this will not be possible. This ‘mingling’, as the York Company calls it, is
designed to promote audience participation from the outset, begin processes
of identification between actors and spectators, and give the performers an
opportunity to ‘read’ the makeup of the audience. It may also suggest that
the audience will be able to view ‘actor’ as well as ‘character’ during the per-
formance; this is likely to maintain awareness of the constructed nature of
the theatrical event and as Schechner suggests, that this kind of self-
reflexivity is indicative of a desire to render the theatrical event efficacious in
some way. The size of the audience will be a significant factor in determining
the effect the pre-performance meeting with performers will have on the
way spectators interpret the nature of the space.
As both Schechner (1988) and Bennett (1997) argue, this gathering
process is crucial for transforming a group of individuals into an audience.
In playback much of this process is designed to prepare the audience for the
particular kind of involvement required during the performance, one that
requires them to move back and forth from spectator to active contributor.
Occasionally a playback company will forgo this gathering phase, for
example, the Sterling Playback Theatre group in Chennai, Southern India,
regularly perform on local beaches to passers-by who may join after the
performance has begun or leave before it is completed. However, most
companies seem to conduct these early moments in similar ways in order to
prepare the audience for the particular kind of involvement required in
playback.
VIEWING THE ACTING SPACE

When the spectators are seated they have the opportunity to view the acting
space and this will provide further clues to the forthcoming performance.
In structuring the relationship between the performers and spectators,
playback companies almost always create a recognizable ‘proscenium’
arrangement. In the rehearsal room and in performance they look to arrange
the audience seating so that it faces a rectangular space (sometimes elevated)
bordered at the back by a wall and arranged as already described at the
outset of this thesis. The stage area is clearly identifiable. Unlike many
script-based theatre performances, what is on stage is not a foretaste of the
fictional world to be represented in the play. Although, as Schechner (2002,
pp.160–1) points out, in the history of theatre illusionistic stage sets are the
exception, nevertheless the non-fictive nature of the playback set is likely to
carry a message for the spectators as they take their seats and wait for the per-
formance to begin. One might say that the space points rather more to the
performative aspects of the forthcoming show than to the representational
ones. Although space can never be neutral or free from social mediation,
what they see is an open performing area that awaits the arrival of the
performers and, they may deduce, the enactment of their stories. That the
performance may not yet be ‘planned’ and that it may be partially dependent
on their involvement is likely to produce anxiety or anticipation in the
audience and influence the way they interpret the nature of the public space
in which they are gathering. It may be that the non-representational nature
of the space prepares the spectators for what Bruner calls the ‘subjunctive
mood’ (Bruner 1990, p.53). The openness of the playing area may suggest to
the teller an attitude of uncertainty, receptiveness and fluidity.
AT THE EDGES OF THE SPACE

In psychotherapy and other therapeutic practices where personal stories are
disclosed, there is commonly an emphasis on the psychological safety
provided by a rigorously maintained spatial boundary (Clarkson 1995, p.48).
It is considered crucial that the space is free from intrusion and activity at its
edges, so that the client feels safe enough for personal disclosure and cathar-
sis to take place. Playback theatre performances vary considerably in the
degree to which they allow movement around or across the threshold of the
theatre space. This variable is likely to influence audience decisions concern-
ing the nature of the public space. In general it is likely that activity at the
boundary of the theatre space will influence, and be influenced by, the nature
of the event taking place, the existing power relations amongst audience
members, and the audience size. As I will exemplify later, activity at the
threshold is a symbolic indication of the kind of public place that has been
created. If, as psychotherapists maintain, the preservation of clear bound-
aries are essential for personal disclosure, then the activity that takes place at
the edges of a playback event will contribute to the kind of decisions the
audience make concerning their level of personal disclosure.
To conclude: in each of the different environments in which playback
theatre is performed different takes on what is considered ‘public’ and the
‘personal’ will be negotiated and established. This is a dynamic process; per-
formers and spectators will be engaged in a constant negotiation and
re-negotiation of what can be revealed in a public place. To invite audience
members to recount autobiographical narratives in public places is always
likely to invite a process of evaluation concerning the psychological safety of
doing so and the nature of the public space in which it is to be told. The
nature of the autobiographical narratives and the subsequent enactments
will always be inflected by these complex considerations. The degree of the
openness of the stories and the performing will be highly dependent upon
the factors that have been outlined.
In order to exemplify these processes I will now briefly consider four
different playback venues. An analysis of a playback rehearsal, a perfor-
mance to a small audience, a show in a mental health agency and at a large
conference event will enable me to illustrate some of the theoretical issues
identified in the previous section. I will not systematically deal with all of
these issues for each venue; however, I will be particularly interested in how
different venues, audiences and host agencies influence the performance and
the decisions spectators make concerning the stories they tell.
Four performances
The rehearsal
Playback Theatre York meets to rehearse for a day once every two months;
rehearsals usually take place in the rooms of a public institution such as a
college, hospital or gym. The rooms are not usually dedicated performance
spaces; therefore some rearrangement is required to make it suitable for
playback. This is not an event open to others; intrusions are discouraged;
non-company members are only allowed to attend after discussions and

with the agreement that they take a full part in the rehearsal. This is largely
because, in common with other playback companies, the group rehearses by
staging enactments based on the personal stories told by its members.
The carefully protected privacy of the space provides the opportunity
for company members to risk significant personal disclosure. This is also
supported by the long-standing relationships that exist between company
members. Close friendships that have extended over 15–20 years in some
cases create an intimacy that allows both personal disclosure and the open
expression of emotion. We might say that this is the least ‘public’ of the per-
formance spaces being discussed here, in the sense that tellers do not feel so
acutely that they are ‘going public’ with their stories; they are fairly certain
of the limited dissemination of their story and of the supportive response of
the audience. This intimacy can make it difficult for new members to join
and the level of personal disclosure can, in my experience, sometimes
be unsettling. Nevertheless, rehearsals often provide the most favourable
circumstances for open stories and open performing; both tellers and
performers are more likely to permit the stories to be opened up to
exploration and experimentation than is usually the case in more public
performances.
Stories told in rehearsal often have a different quality than they have in
performance. The sense of privacy and psychological safety in rehearsal
makes it more common for tellers to recount experiences that are driven less
by narrative than by ‘a feeling’ or by a nebulous sense of discomfort. The
‘openness’ of their story invites the performers to explore its meanings and
significance through improvisation and interaction with each other. The
‘events’ that would usually ‘signpost’ the direction of the improvisation are
less apparent and the actors are more free (than they would be with a story
with a clear narrative direction) to open the story up to a play with meaning.
Additionally, because of the relative psychological safety in rehearsal,
the performers are more prepared to experiment and take risks with the
story. In rehearsal, in my experience, it is more likely that performers will feel
safer to explore the performative aspects in an enactment than they would in
a more public performance. This is likely to lead to the kind of play with
meaning which, I argue, is a key characteristic of effective playback.
The intimacy and familiarity in rehearsal make it more likely that
the tellers will express their dissatisfaction with an enactment. It is not
uncommon for the performers to replay it in response to this; this is a rare
event in a public performance. However the wish to re-do an enactment is
driven as much by issues of ‘quality’ as by the teller’s feelings that their story
has not been satisfactorily played. Rehearsals give an opportunity for
company members to discuss their work at length and this can sometimes
expose a tension between the teller’s wish to explore personal material and
the company’s need to rehearse and improve the quality of their work.
The rehearsal space is therefore a very particular kind of public space:

one which is more likely to permit open stories and the associated will-
ingness of performers to pay attention to the performative aspects of
an enactment. In rehearsals, not surprisingly, there is more room for
performative exploration and experimentation with the meanings that may
be attributed to the teller’s story. For the participants, in my experience, the
intimacy of rehearsals often leads to a re-evaluation of the levels of disclo-
sure and vulnerability that may be possible in other places; work and
personal relations are often reassessed in light of the particular space created
in rehearsal. In a performance to a small audience some of the intimacies of
the rehearsal remain, but concerns about personal disclosure create a very
different space for the telling of personal stories in public places.
The small ‘intimate’ performance

Often Playback Theatre York is invited to perform to a relatively small
audience (15–30 people) who wish to explore a particular theme or a shared
set of experiences; the company regularly stage performances for General
Medical Practitioners (GPs), for example. These performances are part of a
wider training event and usually take place in a hotel function room in the
evening. This produces a particular kind of audience: the ‘delegates’ are at a
hotel, away from home, they have just had dinner, they are not with their
usual work colleagues and they may therefore be able, to some extent, to
relinquish their professional roles. However, as they arrive at the perfor-
mance and meet the performers they will discover that they are expected to
contribute stories from their professional lives; this is not the kind post-
dinner entertainment that sometimes takes place at professional conferences.
The work of the day is not over; it continues after dinner. This is likely to
produce some ambiguity – not to say ambivalence – in the minds of the
spectators.
It is not uncommon in these performances for members of the audience
to draw attention to a perceived similarity with ‘therapy’ or ‘psychotherapy’
– an impression produced presumably by the invitation to tell personal
stories, the small size of the audience, and the expectation that stories will be
re-interpreted in some way. Considering their professional role, it is likely
that the audience remain acutely aware of the consequences of telling a story
and of the uncertainly of how widely their words will be disseminated. Any
determination of the public nature of this space therefore is ambiguous and
this can produce both anxiety and jocularity. It may be that the audience
remain unsure about what kind of public event they are attending. On the
one hand, certain cues suggest ‘entertainment’ (after dinner events are
usually considered entertaining), on the other hand the associations with
psychotherapy suggest another and perhaps conflicting kind of event. This
ambiguity is present in many playback performances. In this event it can be

reflected in the stories told: some reveal the vulnerabilities and stresses of the
work of a GP, while others seem, on the surface, to be humorous incidents
designed to amuse the audience and perhaps break the tension.
Although audience members may not know each other, their shared
professional background and their small number can permit stories which
disclose professional vulnerabilities and perceived failings. However the
small size of the audience can sometimes produce discomfort. Susan Bennett
makes this point generally: ‘When a theatre has very few spectators, the
sense of audience as group can be destroyed. This fragmentation of the col-
lective can have the side-effect of psychological discomfort for the individ-
ual which inhibits or revises response’ (Bennett 1997, p.131).
The ‘sense of audience as group’ is partly established by the boundaries
created between auditorium and stage and between the theatre space and the
surrounding environment. In these small performances the audience are very
close to the performers; there is often no clearly marked physical boundary
between the stage area and the audience seating. This is likely to increase the
psychological discomfort of the spectators and to render the nature of the
public space ambiguous. If spectators have not attended a playback perfor-
mance before, they may for example be anxious that they will be required to
perform. In these small performances the entry to the theatre space remains
intact: there are usually no exits or entrances throughout the show.
With their carefully protected outer boundaries, proximity of the per-
formers and small audiences, these performances bear some similarities to
playback rehearsals; they certainly can produce significant self-disclosure.
However, the ambiguity concerning the nature of the public space intro-
duces an element into the performance that is not usually present in
rehearsal. In an event that seems to be neither quite theatre nor quite therapy,
questions are raised and dramatized about what personal experiences can be
revealed safely in a public space; questions that are likely to resonate beyond
the performance itself. In my next venue for analysis – a mental health centre
– these questions remain, but are inflected differently by context and
expectation.
A performance in a mental health centre

The performance in which The Rats was told took place in the dayroom of a
community mental health centre. The venue was located near the city centre,
although access was limited to professionals, and those who had been
accepted as members of the centre because of recognition of their mental
health problems. Mental health establishments carry particular kinds of
cultural and historical associations that are likely to shape the reception of a
playback performance. They are places that often exclude the general public
to either offer ‘asylum’ to its users or to ‘protect’ the public from the imagined
dangers presented by people with mental health problems. They are places
which often attract pejorative unofficial nomenclature, a sure sign that they
produce unease in the general population. The theatre space at this event there-
fore would carry associations as much by what lay outside it as by what took
place inside.
The room where the performance took place was a familiar space that had
been transformed for the performance; this is likely to have signalled a change
from routine to the audience, and perhaps suggested the potential for a transfor-
mation of everyday relationships and identities. However familiar spaces just as
often suggest familiar patterns of relationship and holding a performance at a
venue so loaded with ideological weighting may well trigger pre-established
roles and patterns of interaction. To a significant degree it is likely that specta-
tors came to this performance with expectations and roles partly defined by the
institution in which it was held. In an establishment designated as a place to
promote personal change, it may have been presumed that the performance
would be directed to that end. This may stand in contrast to a playback perfor-
mance at a large conference, for example, which may be anticipated as one
which will focus on the conference theme and provide an entertaining diversion
from the main event. These contrasting expectations are likely to influence the
nature of personal disclosure and the audience sense of collective identity.
To a certain extent these expectations shaped the split in the audience roles:
between mental health users who would be expected to tell their stories, and
professionals who may not. Users of the centre attended the performance by
virtue of their role as people who had experienced mental health problems,
while professionals attended as providers of therapy and specialist support.
These roles would have significantly influenced the degree to which the differ-
ent groups would be prepared to reveal personal material. A pattern of personal
disclosure may be hypothesized here: by and large, the users of the service
would expect – and be expected – to tell their personal experience to profes-
sionals, but not expect that disclosure to be reciprocated. This ‘pattern’ is likely
to have been replicated – and occasionally challenged – in the performance.
Pre-existing roles may also influence the kinds of story told; it is likely that
certain types of stories, particularly those related to mental health problems,
would be regularly told to professionals and would be framed within the partic-
ular understandings present in mental health contexts. Because of their under-
standing of their professional responsibility, professionals may be protective of
users and may attempt, for their ‘safety’, to limit the kinds of stories that would
be safe to tell in a public space. In the performance it is likely that these patterns
of personal disclosure would be continued.
This performance produced interesting dynamics in relation to the bound-
aries of the theatre space which were likely to have influenced the audience’s
decisions concerning their psychological safety. Perhaps because the space was
a meeting room which the members and staff of the centre were accustomed to
entering and leaving informally, there was continual activity around the one
doorway into the theatre space. People entered and left regularly to, for
example, have a cigarette or answer the phone. Boundaries in psychiatric
institutions are often contested sites that are in the control of professional
groups and, although the movement in this agency seemed relatively free, it
is interesting to note that there seemed to be a preponderance of staff at the
doorway, ‘guarding’, as it were, the exits and entrances. There may have been
another reason for their presence there; in a cultural event that did not clearly
mark social hierarchy, it may be that it was a means of marking their separa-
tion and difference from the centre’s users. It seems that the boundary to the
theatre space was employed as a symbolic marker of power and status rela-
tions. It is likely that this activity at the doorway influenced decisions con-
cerning the nature of the public space and therefore the extent of personal
disclosure that was possible there. Throughout the performance there con-
tinued to be activity around the door that is likely to have reduced the sense
of psychological safety in both the audience and the performers.
The large conference venue

Large conference venues produce a different kind of public event. The size of
the audience, their unfamiliarity with each other, the distance of many of the
spectators from the stage, and the likelihood of regular activity at the
doorways often produces a sense of being in a public space where significant
self-disclosure seems inappropriate. Spectators tend to tell less open stories
that have the well-crafted quality of having been told before, or they prefer
to be less personal, telling stories which could be seen to apply to the
audience as a whole. Because the performers are concerned with projecting
their voices and with overcoming the difficult sight-lines in large venues, the
work tends to be less intimate and more declamatory. They are less likely to
be responsive to each other during the enactment and in general ‘open per-
forming’ is more difficult to sustain.
At a hotel near Heathrow Airport in December 1998, Playback Theatre
York staged a performance to about 100 ‘middle managers’ of British
Airways. Their line-managers had asked the company to contribute to a day
designed to prepare the staff for the changes that were soon to be imple-
mented. Unusually the company were to be a part of a day which had a
definite desired end-point summed up in their hope for a ‘Hollywood
ending’, in which the anxieties about change (which were to be aired earlier
in the day) would be replaced by excitement and anticipation of the future.
The fee was considerably larger than the company were used to, and it is
likely that this led the company to accept rather uncritically the managers’
remit. There is no doubt that the nature of public disclosure was inflected by
the audience’s awareness of the presence of their managers and the particular
corporate ethos of the organization.
This was a public space ‘monitored’ in some way by the BA management.

The types of stories they told, their level of personal disclosure and the
performers’ response were all coloured by this awareness. The BA perfor-
mance emphasized the contingency of autobiographical storytelling in
playback performances: politics and power are always influencing to some
degree the audience’s construction of public place. In performances with
large audiences, these dynamics may be more difficult to address than in
small gatherings where the pressures to conform are less marked. The
BA performance was an interesting one because it challenged company
members to review the political and ethical status of their work. It suggested
that playback theatre could be employed to serve purposes that are not nec-
essarily in line with the performers’ political or ethical orientation, and that
the telling of personal stories in public places is not a universal and
unequivocal ‘good’.
Concluding remarks
Gaston Bachelard observes that ‘all really inhabited space bears the essence
of the notion of home’ (1994, p.5). In the space created for a playback per-
formance the imagination of the spectator draws on her memory of similar
places in order to make sense and to make safe. The stories told in playback
are always shaped by this, and in their turn, shape public space. What is
remembered and brought to mind in a performance is always being shaped
by place and context. A sense of place is then further created by these
memories. The performers are not immune to this process: as The Rats
vignette shows, a sense of place will always have a significant impact on the
conductor, actors and musicians. As the performance unfolds, their work will
be altered and defined by that sense of place.
In general we can argue that stories where ‘the sense of risk is palpable’
are more likely to be told in smaller more intimate and ‘protected’ spaces,
where the size and the familiarity of the audience allow self-disclosure, and
where ‘the politics of the space’ do not inhibit certain types of stories being
told. However, this is not always the case: ‘intimate’ public spaces can, as we
have seen, produce a sense of fragmentation of the collective and reduce the
audience’s feeling of psychological safety. What is clear, however, is that
stories in playback are products of the place in which they are told, a conclu-
sion which renders the notion of the ‘essence’ of the teller’s story problem-
atic. The ‘openness’ of the stories told and the subsequent enactment are pro-
foundly influenced by the audience’s sense of place. In the next chapter I will
explore this further, analyzing the nature of memory, autobiographical nar-
rative and the ‘performing’ of personal stories in public places.
Chapter 4
Narratives and Memory Work
In his novel Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre writes that ‘a man is always a teller of tales,
he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything
that happens to him through them; and tries to live his life as if he were recount-
ing it’ (2000, p.61). Playback theatre is clearly organized around the stories of
members of its audiences; therefore some consideration of the nature of narra-
tive will be important if we are to understand the peculiar performed stories told
in playback. In this chapter I will also look at the complex relationship between
memory and narrative so eloquently expressed by Nabokov when he writes
that ‘the supreme achievement of memory is the masterly use it makes of innate
harmonies when gathering to its fold the wandering and suspended tonalities
of the past’ (cited in McConkey 1996, p.271). Before doing this, however, I
begin with a story of my own which will form the basis of much of the
discuscion that follows.
The ‘teller’: The Red Coat

In September 1998 my father died. With my mother and two brothers, I was at
his bedside through the last hours of his life. As his breathing became more
laboured and we wiped away the foam that kept gathering at his mouth, we
talked about his life and, in clumsy ways, spoke about our feelings towards him.
It was the first time we had all been together without partners and children for
over 30 years, and I was aware of the old battles, long forgotten, but still
capable of animating and distorting the relationships between us.
Dad died slowly, but seemingly without pain. Over the last hour he seemed
to stop breathing many times and then would take one further breath – some-
thing that I remembered from my nursing days to be called ‘chain-stoking’. The
gaps between these breaths gradually lengthened until finally he was silent. My
mother held his hand and with a look of terrible and unbearable pain, asked
each of us where we thought he was now. Struggling for some sort of answer,
but refusing to repeat some neat formulaic answer, I said, finally, ‘I don’t know’.
61
After a short while, I went downstairs to see how my seven-year-old

daughter was and to tell her that my dad had died. As I walked outside into
the quiet residential street I saw Rebecca in the distance on her bicycle, easily
visible in her red coat, which seemed radiant in the bright sunshine. A neigh-
bour stood across the road, smoking, I went over to him and asked him for a
cigarette. He lit it for me, being, for a moment, the father that I had lost.
Together we stood smoking watching Rebecca’s exuberance – the scintillat-
ing redness of her coat against the deep blue sky, the sharp late September
air brightening the image.
I told her that ‘Papa’ had died and asked if she would like to see him. She
said she would and we went upstairs. She sat on my knee, by his bedside,
holding me tight as we talked about what had happened.
I wrote this passage in March 2001, two and a half years after the death of
my father. By coincidence it was written on the day of my daughter’s tenth
birthday. Having written it, I went to collect her from school with a feeling
of calmness, almost of completion. For a moment I felt better disposed
towards the world.
The autobiographical narrative and playback theatre

Stories are ubiquitous in playback theatre; indeed, the autobiographical nar-
rative and its dramatization give the practice its organizing focus. This
chapter is devoted to the ‘personal story’ and its characteristics, as they seem
to emerge in a performance. The aim of this chapter will be to destabilize the
notion, often present in playback discourse, of the ‘essence’ or the ‘heart’ of
the teller’s story. I will propose that such a conception suggests an ‘essential’
story existing beyond mediation and contingency. It suggests, and this is
important for our understanding of playback theatre, a story which, in some
way, could be replicated or mirrored by the performers in their enactment. It
will be my proposition that it is misleading to conceptualize playback
theatre in this way because it denies the relational, negotiated and context-
rich nature of playback performances. It denies the humanness of the
response and fails to recognize that the past is, to a large extent, created in
and for the present. If the story has an ‘essence’, it is a fluid and dynamic
thing that is always being created to serve the moment and the place.
In this chapter I will discuss the complex relationship between memory,
narrative and the self. I will propose that the veracity of autobiographical
narrative is inevitably inflected by the need for coherence, intelligibility and
reparation of the past. As seems clear from The Red Coat, the relationship
between my ‘experience’ and the story I wrote in March 2001 raises
profound questions relating to the nature of memory and its representation.
It is not possible to maintain that there is a direct correspondence between
NARRATIVES AND MEMORY WORK 63
the experience of the teller and the narrative they tell. Instead what we must
conceive of is a cumulative process of mediation that begins with the experi-
ence (as I sat at my father’s bedside I was already developing the first ‘drafts’
of the story) and extends onwards through subsequent ‘tellings’ to (and
after) the enactment. Indeed it may plausible to suggest that this process
begins before the experience (I had anticipated my father’s death and to
some extent had created a story of how it would be). Playback theatre can be
seen, then, as intervening in and inflecting this, perhaps endless, process of
mediation. Such a conception requires us to re-think playback. Rather than
viewing the performers as capturing the ‘essence’, we must see them as
entering into what Annette Kuhn (1995, p.107) calls ‘memory work’. A
complex process she argues ‘is potentially interminable: at every turn, as
further questions are raised, there is always something else to look into’ (p.5).
To conceptualize playback as an intervention in ongoing memory work is to
re-figure the practice as one of many representational responses to the com-
plexity of experience rather than as a final ‘essential’ version; playback
theatre can be seen in this way as pointing rather more to the future than to
the past.
The re-thinking of playback performing as a response to, and an inter-
vention in, the teller’s ongoing ‘narrativization’ rather than as a replication
of some essence of their story is further strengthened by the proposition that
playback theatre stories are particular sorts of narratives that derive from the
means of their production. It is not possible to regard stories told in playback
theatre performances as existing independently of the act and location of
their telling. They emerge through a complex process of dialogue between
teller and conductor and what’s more that they are told within, and with a
view, to performance. Such an argument recasts playback stories as contin-
gent and context-dependent entities embedded in complex interactions. The
delivery of the teller’s narrative is performative in the sense that it draws atten-
tion to, and is inflected by, the circumstances of its telling.
Homo Faber: narrative and the self

It was a stormy night in the Bay of Biscay and his sailors were seated
around the fire. Suddenly the crew said, ‘Tell us a story, Captain’. And
the Captain began; ‘It was a stormy night in the Bay of Biscay…’
Ciaran Carson, Fishing for Amber: A Long Story (cited in Kearney
2002, p.1)
In the last quarter of a century there has been an increasing interest in
the autobiographical narrative and its function in conferring coherence,
intelligibility and identity. This has been apparent within psychology
(Bruner 1990; Sarbin 1986), philosophy (Kearney 2002; MacIntyre 1985;
Polkinghorne 1988) and in psychotherapy (Brooks 1994; McLeod 1997;

Toukmanian and Rennie 1992).
The notion of ‘Homo Faber’ or the ‘motivated storyteller’ (Hermans and
Hermans-Jansen 1995) may, perhaps, be best introduced through the
work of the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre. In After Virtue, MacIntyre is
concerned with the ‘liquidation of the self into a set of demarcated areas of
role-playing’ (1985, p.535). He rejects the idea of a self as a mere accumula-
tion of social roles. Instead he posits, ‘a concept of self whose unity resides in
the unity of a narrative which links birth to life to death as narrative begin-
ning to middle to end’ (1985, p.536). The self is unified through and by
narrative.
He argues that it is ‘natural’ to think of the self in narrative mode and that
narrative is ‘the basic and essential genre’ for the characterization of human
action. For MacIntyre, this privileging of the autobiographical narrative is
an ethical imperative. He proposes, as Bruner has done in psychology,
placing the individual’s idiosyncratic accounts at the centre of philosophical
analysis.
He goes on to propose that narrative provides the primary means
through which human beings achieve ‘intelligibility’. He also argues, as
Sartre does in the quotation that opens this chapter, that we imagine our-
selves as characters in a story whose identity is formed through the creation
of narrative. He writes ‘personal identity is just that identity presupposed by
the unity of the character which the unity of the narrative requires’ (MacIn-
tyre 1985, p.548).
Narrative is, according to MacIntyre, the organizing principle of human
identity. Human beings are, from this point of view, on a ‘narrative quest’ for
intelligibility, identity and teleological closure. It is a compelling vision of
the organizational power of the narrative; however it does seem to be in
danger of reifying that narrative as a structural and organizing progenitor of
the self. This would lead us into the same problems that accrue if we maintain
the notion of a transcendent self. I would agree with Greimas when he writes
‘Narrative structures do not exist per se, but are a mere moment in the
generation of signification’ (Greimas 1991, p.293). A ‘mere moment’: auto-
biographical narrative structures are provisional and dynamic; they are
drawn into the process of remembering and constituting identity. Rather
than giving narrative the status of providing overall organizing authority,
perhaps they are best seen, as Barclay suggests, as improvisational acts in the
fluid creation of subjectivities or, as he calls them, protoselves. He writes
that ‘…autobiographical remembering is largely an improvisational act.
Accordingly, the improvisational activities that are characteristic of autobio-
graphical remembering – for example, ongoing justifications of fleeting
feelings in and between people – create protoselves, or remembered selves in
the making’ (Barclay 1994, p.70).
Lyotard’s conception of the contemporary self is similarly a dynamic

and evanescent one. He writes that the self
does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a
fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever
before. A person is always located at ‘nodal points’ of specific com-
munication circuits… Or better, one is always located at a post
through which various kinds of messages pass. (Lyotard 1984, p.15)
In this conception, the self is not transcendent, nor has it vanished into
Baudrillard’s hyperreality (1983); rather it is, as Holstein and Gubrium
argue, ‘first and foremost, a practical project of everyday life’ (2002, p.70) [my
italics]. The self is a constant and ongoing project of self-construction and
‘reparative reconstruction’. The self is not merely a ‘sea of images’ (in
Holstein and Gubrium 2002, p.61), but is engaged in the pragmatic exercise
of constituting itself within the discourses and actions of everyday existence.
Playback theatre through its invitation to ‘perform’ a story and to view its
enactment intervenes in this process of self-creation.
Reparative reconstruction
The past is unrecoverable. The events I describe at the opening of the chapter
can only ever be the traces of what really happened. The last hours of my
father’s life, recalled so much later, cannot reclaim the lived experience. What
remains are visual, acoustic and linguistic images – the red coat, the brilliant
sunshine, the white foam that gathered around his mouth, the sound of his
last breath, the strange phrase ‘chain-stoking’, which seemed so appropriate
to a man who had been brought up in smoky pre-war London and whose
pipe-smoking is one of my abiding images of him.
From these images a narrative has been created and refined over time. It
has been a narrative told many times, that has gradually formed into a shape
that somehow carries the existential weight of that time for me. I am
reminded of what David Powley, one of the members of the York Company,
said about a story told in a playback theatre performance we were discussing.
A story he said is ‘a ship that carries us across a sea of pain’. Or, as Cox and
Theilgaard (1987, p.24) write of metaphor, it is able to ‘carry the existential
weight’ of loss. Annette Kuhn puts this well when she writes:
Although we take stories of childhood and family literally, I think our
recourse to the past is a way of reaching for myth, for the story that is
deep enough to express the profound feelings we have in the present.
(Kuhn 1995, p.1)
As soon as my father died my task was one of ‘remembrance’. Not only to

remember, and so to commemorate him, but also to find a way to invest the
bare events of his dying with significance – a significance fitting to mark the
death of a man on whose knee I sat to watch The Lone Ranger, and whose
thumb was exactly the same shape as mine. The events of that Sunday in Sep-
tember do not seem enough for me; they needed to be infused with
something more. They needed poetic images, a narrative – a shape that gives
me pleasure and even a sense of being at rest.
This is my story, it marks who I am; I was there, and this was my father.
My story is ground on which I can stand and on which I cannot be easily
contradicted. This narrative, which undoubtedly will be endlessly rewritten,
identifies me – as much as the similarity of my thumbs to my father’s thumbs
does. In writing this story and telling and retelling it, am I not engaged in
what Mark Freeman calls ‘rewriting the self ’? (Freeman 1993).
The task of remembrance establishes a sense of the continuity of self.
This continuity for Wyatt is ‘as much a reparative reconstruction as it is an ele-
mentary condition of remembering’ (1986, p.199). Intense anxiety may
occur when this sense of continuity is thwarted and the past appears frag-
mented into a disparate series of events without coherence. One might argue
that the act of remembering, particularly through narrative is, to borrow a
phrase from the psychoanalyst Murray Cox (1978), a ‘compromise with
chaos’. It may be considered as an attempt to bring coherence to the
disordered, topsy-turvy nature of experience and so ‘author’ the self as
continuous and unified. In writing this story of my father’s death, two and a
half years after the event, I continue a process of ‘reparative reconstruction’, a
process that began as soon as he died (if not during and before) and which, I
imagine, will continue on into the future. One might argue that each rewrit-
ing of these memories further fictionalizes the memory, replacing the
inchoate flux of the experience with a ‘workable’ personal myth, capable of
carrying the affective weight of that time and, in some way, commemorating
my father.
Poetry drugs the dragon of disbelief

The story enacted
The Red Coat was written some two and a half years after my father’s death. It
seems to have performed an act of remembrance in the course of my
bereavement, but it is also a story that was partly shaped by telling the story of
my father’s dying day at a playback rehearsal in early October 1998 – only
weeks after the event itself. I had arrived at the rehearsal uncertain whether I
was emotionally ready to perform but very keen to tell my story. I told the
actors about the red coat and cast Susanna to be Rebecca. This actor,
swathed in red cloth, circled the stage throughout the enactment, making a
very strong impression on me, to such an extent that this is now the only part
of the enactment that I remember. The performance altered my memory of
the event, or at the very least, pushed to the foreground the red coat aspect of
it. Subsequent retellings have always stressed that aspect, arguably far more
forcefully than would have been the case if I had not viewed that perfor-
mance. This has altered my narrative, giving me an image that previously did
not have the resonance it now has. It is clearly the case that the performance
has, amongst other things, contributed to the fictionalizing of one aspect of
the story – literally reinforcing what I later discovered to be fictional – that the
coat was pink and not red.
These processes of remembrance serve the present and future as much, if not
more than, the past. Raphael Samuel puts it succinctly when he writes that
‘the past is the plaything of the present’ (Samuel 1996, p.429). Furthermore,
for this task of remembrance to be achieved, the precise veracity of the narra-
tive is not the priority. For example, when I showed this passage to my wife,
she told me that Rebecca’s coat was pink rather than red, albeit a very bright
pink. Perhaps surprisingly, this does not destroy the efficacy of the narrative
for me. The vivacity and the ‘passion’ of ‘red’ is what are required for the
story. On the borderline between life and death, the colour must be red –
pink will just not do.
It is clear that we cannot rely on any naive notion of a direct correspon-
dence between primary experience and autobiographical narrative. Must we,
therefore, treat personal story with scepticism, as being closer to fiction than
fact? Must we condemn the autobiographical as mere anecdote? As Bruner
(1990) has argued this has been the often-undeclared strategy of academic
psychology throughout the period when behaviourism and later behav-
ioural-cognitivism held sway. The veracity of memory, of course, has always
been regarded with scepticism in psychoanalysis, which looks for the
evasions, the resistances, the repressed and the symptomatic in the patient’s
recollection of the past. In psychoanalysis desire is always interrupting
accurate recall. Can we ever trust memory?
Recognizing, as Michael Ventura does, that ‘memory is a form of fiction’
(Hillman and Ventura 1993, p.22) does not invalidate it. Rather it recasts
memory as ‘an interpretative act the end of which is an enlarged understand-
ing of the self ’ (Freeman 1993, p.29). Annette Kuhn writes, ‘As the veils of
forgetfulness are drawn aside, layer upon layer of meaning and association
peel away, revealing not ultimate truth, but greater knowledge’ (Kuhn 1995,
p.5).
‘Memory work’ which is always in one sense fictionalizing may deepen
an understanding of self and other. As can be seen from my Red Coat story, it
involves a ‘rewriting of the self ’ that looks as much to the future as to the
past. The child’s red coat shimmering in the autumn sun points to a faith in
what the future may hold. As Mark Freeman asks, are autobiographical nar-
ratives not ‘…rooted in a kind of faith, in what it might mean to live well – a
faith that, however labile and transient, we cannot live without?’ (Freeman
1993, p.49).
In light of this, according to Donald Spence the task of the therapist
becomes one of enabling the patient to achieve ‘a kind of linguistic and nar-
rative closure’ (Spence 1982, p.137) in which the therapist becomes more of
‘a pattern maker than a pattern finder’ (p.284) engaged in an ‘artistic strug-
gle’ (p.294). He approvingly quotes Isenberg, ‘poetry drugs the dragon of
disbelief ’ (p.269).
Peter Brooks (1994) asserts that there is increasing agreement that psy-
choanalysis is a ‘narrative discipline’. He writes that the psychoanalyst is
concerned with enabling the patient to arrive at ‘a recomposition of the nar-
rative discourse to give a better representation of the patient’s story, to
reorder its events, to foreground its dominant themes, to understand the
force of desire that speaks in and through it’ (Brooks 1994, p.47). One could
make a plausible case, I think, that one of the aims of playback is to ‘fore-
ground’ the story’s ‘dominant themes’ and to understand and enact ‘the
force of desire that speaks in and through the story’.
Personal stories give playback theatre its organizing focus. The form is
built around the telling of a series of stories throughout the performance. As
we have seen, these stories are altered through the act of telling and dramati-
zation and, as we shall see later, these stories are also altered by the act of
being told in and for a performance. In that sense it is clear that playback
intervenes in the memory work of teller and the audience. Stories about our
experience always leave much unsaid; there are always gaps and omissions.
There are limits to what personal narrative can carry.
The limits of narrative

The creation of autobiographical narrative involves a loss. Because ‘narrative
truth’ conforms to its own needs for ‘good form’, coherence, intelligibility
and closure (Abbott 2002), it will always have a tendency to omit or edit out
that which cannot be held by it – especially when told in public places. Nar-
rative is always a compromise with the inexpressible and its representation
always involves loss. As Peggy Phelan puts it: ‘when writing about the
disaster of death it is easy to substitute interpretations for traumas. In that
substitution the trauma is tamed by the interpretative frame and peeled away
from the raw, “unthought” energy of the body’ (1997, p.5). Narratives are
purposeful acts; they are designed to convey something. In doing so they
often omit that which is not immediately relevant. I did not, for example,
recount in The Red Coat, the drawing of an army officer on the wall of my
father’s bedroom, which evoked so strongly in me a sense of ‘cruelty’ that I
attribute to the army life that I was immersed in as a child. I did not do so
because that was part of another story – a story of old battles, long forgotten,
but still capable of animating and distorting relationships in the present.
This was not the story I had chosen to tell.
Trauma limits the possibility of autobiographical narrative. As Peggy
Phelan writes, ‘[T]he symbolic cannot carry it: trauma makes a tear in the
symbolic network itself ’ (Phelan 1997, p.5). Narrative, as an interpretative
act, may perhaps be seen as an inadequate substitute for trauma. Phelan
quotes Blanchot (1986): ‘The danger is that the disaster should acquire
meaning instead of body’ (Phelan 1997, p.17). Trauma can perhaps be said
to be marked deeply in the body – carried viscerally in the tissues and
sinews and unavailable for representation. As the memory psychologists,
Lucy Berliner and John Briere (1999), suggest memories of traumatic and
emotionally-laden experiences may be partially encoded ‘at the somato-
sensory level, as opposed to more exclusively at verbally mediated levels’
(Berliner and Briere 1999, p.9).
The limits of narrative may mark the limits of what is possible in playback
theatre. Usually playback theatre conductors ask for tellers to come to the
teller’s chair to tell stories; they are therefore asking for memories that have,
in some way, undergone processes of narrative patterning. This clearly limits
the possible material that may be handled. By contrast, drama and dance
therapists, for example, may work through the body and so perhaps permit a
broader range of expression. Phil Jones writes that through dramatherapy a
client can ‘…explore the relationship with their body in terms of the prob-
lematic memories and experiences with which their physical self connects’
(Jones 1996, p.164). A client may encounter, through a dramatherapy
exercise, memories that are, at first, only accessible through the body,
perhaps later finding some verbal expression for them. In playback theatre
this kind of ‘embodied discovery’ is not available to the teller, largely
limited, as she or he is, to oral expression. The requirement for verbally
expressed autobiographical narrative from the teller in playback theatre acts
as a limit to the possible modes of expression open to him or her. In playback
theatre, it is the performer who encounters and embodies the teller’s
narrative – we might say – for or in the place of the teller. This marks a key
characteristic of playback theatre practice, the consequences of which will
be explored in forthcoming chapters. It is the performers’ body, and personal
and cultural memory that stand in for the teller. Of course this raises significant
ethical issues; nevertheless in doing so it may be that they can, when
playback is at its best, enrich the narrative with images that offer the teller
and spectator glimpses of that which cannot be represented in narrative
form. Performing bodies may find images for memory encoded at the
somatosensory level.
Autobiographical narratives in playback theatre

performances
Narratives told in playback theatre performances are forged by the circum-
stances of their telling. They do not arrive as autonomous entities ready and
complete, to be delivered in the performance. They are inflected by context,
the dialogue between teller and conductor, by the fact that they are per-
formed in the presence of an audience, and by their tendency to draw upon
other texts.
To explore this further I offer a verbatim account of a story told during a
performance of Playback Theatre York to drama students and staff at a
drama college. In fact it was the performance that followed the rehearsal at
which I had told The Red Coat. Because of my ‘raw’ feelings, I chose not to
perform at that event and so I had the opportunity to record in writing the
dialogue between the teller and the conductor as it was spoken. It is not an
exact transcript, but was written out in full after the event. The vignette has
been chosen because it illustrates the complex, reflexive and dialogic charac-
teristics of personal narratives told in playback performances. In the story we
find the teller concerned about the impact the telling may have upon the
audience as he remembers the effect the telling had in the earlier drama
workshop. The particular kind of public place created here – a student/staff
group known to each other located in a familiar college venue – may have
played a part in producing a story that reflexively draws attention to its effect
upon the listeners. A group of students and staff may be highly aware of the
impact their words are having and how that might affect their continuing
relationships. In any event the sense of guilt that the dream provokes and
reveals heightens the levels of reflexive awareness and performativity in the
telling.
The dialogue takes place between the conductor (‘C’) and a male teller
(‘T’) in his early thirties.
The Dream of Murder

The telling begins with the conductor asking the teller to choose someone to
play him. He chooses one of the actors.
C. When did this story take place?

T. A long time ago. Well it is about a dream that I had about a year ago –
no more like six months ago. Although the dream is based on something
that happened in real life.
C. Tell us something about you at the time of the dream.
T. I was enjoying the first year as a mature student. I had transferred from
English and Computer Studies to Drama and I was really enjoying it.
I had a lot of energy. I told this dream in a drama workshop and people
were terrified by it. I’m worried I might terrify the audience.
Before the dream, about 10 or 12 years before, when I was perhaps
(I’m giving away my age here) 23. I was in the town where I had been a
student and happened to be reading the newspaper, I came across a
small article about a friend of mine and it said that he had committed
suicide. I was really shocked and it was worse because our friendship
had not ended on good terms. After that I couldn’t get him out of my
mind, I saw people in the street who looked like him…someone who
had the same haircut or clothes and I thought it was him.
C. Choose someone to be your friend.
T. Could the actors choose someone?
C. I would prefer you choose.
The teller points to one of the actors.
C. Tell us about your friend.
T. He was called David. He was wild.
C. Are you wild?
T. I’m a tempered version of him. He looked like me. We had a close con-
nection.
C. A close connection. OK. Tell us about the dream.
T. It is the middle of the dream. I can’t remember the beginning. I know in
the dream that I have killed him. I know what it is like to kill someone. I
pull out my jumper from the washing machine – it is covered in blood.
C. How did you feel?
T. I feel remorse and terror. I could commit murder. I remember that we did
not part on good terms. I woke up shocked. It is with me now. I know
what it is like to kill someone. I am worried. I have the inside view of a
murderer.
C. OK. This is T’s story of a dream. You watch.
It is clear that the teller’s narrative is not totally under his ‘control’. First, the
events emerge through the conductor’s questioning. For example, the con-
ductor asks such questions as ‘When did this story take place?’ or ‘Tell us
something about yourself at the time of the dream’. It is clear that the events
are evoked in dialogue with the conductor. Second, the plot is co-authored
between the conductor and teller. For example, the conductor’s question ‘Are
you wild?’ introduces the possibility that there is some mirroring between
the teller and ‘David’ and so plots into the narrative inter- and intra-psychic
dynamics that were not previously explicit. Therefore, as Bakhtin argues:
Meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in
the soul of the listener. Meaning is the effect of an interaction
between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular

sound complex. It is like an electric spark that occurs only when the
two terminals are hooked together. (Bakhtin 1994, p.35)
Bakhtin’s insights are important for us here since, for him, meaning does not
emerge in the ‘personalist’ sense that ‘I own meaning’ – a concept that is
‘deeply implicated in the Western humanist tradition’ (Clark and Holquist
1984, p.9) in which the individual can control and have ownership of the
meaning they wish to create. Bakhtin argues that meaning is created in
dialogue and so ‘I cannot own meaning, but only do so in dialogue with
others’. An acceptance of his ideas has a profound effect on the way that
playback theatre is conceptualized. It brings into question the notion of the
teller as an independent self-transparent originator of meaning and ques-
tions the possibility of the independence of their story. Instead of a story
‘owned’ by the teller, the playback theatre story becomes not only a jointly
created text but also a text that is created in relation to other texts – an
‘intertext’.
Following the work of Barthes (1967) on intertextuality, Kristeva’s
reading of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on the dialogic and the ‘languages
of heteroglossia’ led her to develop further the notion of intertextuality –
one that has proved enormously fruitful in literary studies. Bakhtin stressed
the dialogic nature of all human communication and had argued that ‘all
utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces prac-
tically impossible to recoup’ (Bakhtin 1981, p.428). Kristeva developed this
further, asserting that any text is ‘constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any
text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (Kristeva 1980, p.66).
A text therefore, may not be understood as a hermetically sealed unit
existing independently of other texts. Instead we must conceive of complex
fields of interrelationships in which texts always ‘refer’ to other texts. Roland
Barthes asserts that ‘the quotations from which a text is constructed are
anonymous, irrecoverable, and yet already read: they are quotations without
quotation marks’ (Barthes 1979, p.77). This ‘loosens up’ the notion of text to
such a degree that we must conceive of any text as an ‘open dynamic
playground’ (Cancalon and Spacagna 1994, p.1) in which allusion, unac-
knowledged quotation, pastiche and complex associations are at work.
This notion of intertextuality renders the position of the author (and
thus the playback teller) problematic. He or she can no longer be regarded as
having a single, unitary presence. The authority of the author and the
attempt to search for his or her intentions and motivations is considered by
Barthes to be a project not only condemned to impossibility but also
inclined to impose single, stable meanings to texts. As he famously writes:
We know now that a text is not a line of words, releasing a single

‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a
multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them
original, blend and clash. (1989, p.116)
The search for the author behind the work becomes a futile one and the
refusal to assign a single, ultimate meaning becomes, for Barthes, an
‘anti-theological activity’ and a ‘truly revolutionary one’ which refuses ‘God
and his hypostases – reason, science, law’ (Barthes 1989, p.116).
This clearly places the teller’s narrative in playback theatre in a different
light. We must now regard the teller’s narrative as a complex matrix of signi-
fiers and codes, which refers, quotes, and alludes to other texts. It follows
that the authority of the teller and the attempt to reveal ‘essences’ or ultimate
meanings becomes deeply problematic. Once we have relinquished the
notion that the narratives told in playback are independent entities owned
by their tellers and unaffected by the nature of their production, then we
may begin to see them as negotiated and contextual creations.
There seems to be a tension in playback discourse between an under-
standable and ethically driven wish to capture ‘the heart of the story’ and be
‘loyal to the teller’ on the one hand, and a recognition that stories are created
in performance contexts on the other. There is a paradox here: the right to
self-definition of the teller needs to be acknowledged and respected while
simultaneously recognizing that it is constantly being re-negotiated in rela-
tionship with conductor and audience. One could argue that such apparent
incommensurables dynamize the playback event. Few tellers would be
prepared to contribute their stories if they felt that they were just grist to the
mill of the conductor’s and actors’ playful interpretations, but neither would
it be so interesting if the teller’s narratives were so hermetically sealed that
they could not be prised open for negotiation within the playback process. It
is a tension that gives frisson to the playback event that is energized by the
telling personal stories in public places.
The performance of the playback narrative

The autobiographical narratives in playback emerge both as a performance
and within a performance. This is clear in The Dream of Murder. The levels of
reflexive awareness are complex. The teller tells of a dream; his response to
that dream; his memory of the last meeting with his friend; the impact this
particular dream on the ‘drama workshop’ and, perhaps, the impact the
telling is having on this audience.
The dream ‘shocked’ the teller and as he says, ‘It is with me now’. The
dream works in a complex relationship with the teller’s memory of his last
meeting with his friend that had ‘not ended on good terms’. Despite the
shock of the dream and the impact it had when he told it previously, he still
decides to tell it here. The teller is clearly aware of the impact this story of the
dream has had on others in the workshop and he may well be anticipating
the impact it will have on the present audience. Gergen writes ‘as narratives
are realized in the public arena, they become subject to social evaluation and
resultant moulding’ (Gergen 1993, p.222). If performance is always for
someone, as Carlson suggests (1996), then the teller is, in playback, per-
forming for those assembled, for him or herself and, perhaps, for those who
are absent but who, in some way, have a significant relationship to the story.
In The Dream of Murder, the teller begins with the dream and the effect
that that has upon the people in the drama workshop and with his worry that
this story might similarly terrify the audience. By doing this perhaps he
seeks to heighten our interest and raise our expectations. By doing so he cer-
tainly introduces a certain frisson. This is heightened when later he concludes
the story with the climactic: ‘It is with me now. I know what it is like to kill
someone. I am worried. I have the inside view of the murderer’. His state-
ment – ‘It is with me now’ – has the effect of collapsing the distance between
the dream and the present moment. If it is with him now, then he is suggest-
ing that perhaps it is ‘present’ to the whole audience. It is a rhetorical device
aimed at heightening the tension. In following this with ‘I know what it is
like to kill someone. I am worried’ he suggests that he may be struggling
now, again bringing the dream closer to the present moment of telling. And
then finally, ‘I have the inside view of the murderer’ might be considered
rather melodramatic. He has a keen appreciation of the effect he is having
upon the audience. The recounting of the story is a highly self-conscious
and reflexive act in which the teller has an acute awareness of the impact
upon the spectators and the performers.
We may not only see the telling as a performance but also something that
is taking place within a performance. That is it takes place within a perfor-
mance and is, crucially, directed towards performance. Because of the ways in
which the conventions of playback have been developed, the teller will
usually be aware that the telling of his story will be followed by a perfor-
mance. As is clear in The Dream of Murder, the casting of significant characters
in the story will interrupt the narration. It is clear also that, by and large, the
choices concerning whether to cast a character, or not, are ones made by the
conductor. In the following passage, Salas writes about the purpose of these
interruptions by the conductor in the course of the telling. In doing so she
reminds us again of the co-creational nature of the emergence of playback
stories:
Soon after Carolyn starts telling about her dream, I stop her.
‘Carolyn, hold on a moment. Can you pick one of the actors to play
you in the story?’
My interruption has at least two functions. One is that my request

immediately takes her story into the realm of co-creation with me and
with the actors. From now on, as she continues telling, she – and the
audience – will be picturing the action that is going to take place in a
minute or two. The other purpose of my interruption is to convey to
her that I am there to guide the telling of her story. It’s a gentle asser-
tion of the conductor’s authority – essential for both safety and aes-
thetics. (Salas 1993, pp.712–72)
It is clear from this passage that the role of the conductor in co-creating the
teller’s narrative is a crucial one. Salas suggests that it is the task of the con-
ductor to draw the story ‘into the realm of co-creation’ with the conductor
and with the actors. It is, therefore, in one important sense, no longer, as it
were, in the sole possession of the teller, but becomes ‘raw material’ (or more
accurately ‘cooked’) for a performance. The teller is required to relinquish
some control over her narrative in order that it may be shaped towards
performance.
Deborah Pearson, an experienced playback conductor from Australia,
takes the performative nature of the teller’s narration in another direction by
emphasizing the role of the audience. She encourages conductors to place
themselves so that they are as much in contact with the audience as with the
teller. She warns against entering into an intimate dialogue with the teller
that ‘excludes’ the audience. Speaking about the relationship between the
teller, conductor and audience, she worries about the ‘propensity [of the con-
ductor] to have intimacy only with the teller, so the audience is always on
the outside’. In an interview in Australia in 1998 she explained this
approach to me:
One of the things I have developed in my work…is to try and unravel
the story with the audience, so that when the conductor is working
with the teller, she is having an ongoing dialogue with the audience.
Not in a trite sort of way – like ‘Who else has been to York?’ – but real
meaningful dialogue so that the audience can start to get involved in
their own story rather than just be voyeuristic on the teller’s story.
(Pearson 1998)
Pearson’s recommendations suggest that she is concerned with creating a
transitive relationship between audience and narrator in which the teller’s nar-
rative will be inflected by the spectator’s own identifications and, vice versa;
the audience’s own stories will be being ‘rewritten’, as it were, in response to
the teller’s. Her wish that the audience should not be ‘voyeuristic on the
teller’s story’ calls for a level of dialogue which will, perhaps, permit multiple
perspectives to inflect the individual narrative.
Performed narratives
When personal stories are told in public places, perhaps it is inevitable that
narratives are inflected by the circumstances of their telling. Relinquishing
the notion of the original story may enable performers to
be ready to receive every moment of discourse in its sudden irruption;
in that punctuality in which it appears… Discourse must not be
referred to the distant presence of the origin, but treated as and when
it occurs. (Foucault 2002, p.125)
Adam Phillips proposes that the alternative to believing in an authoritative,
original version of the individual’s story is ‘that there are just an unknowable
series of translations of translations; preferred versions of ourselves, but not
true ones’ (Phillips 2002, p.143). He goes on to argue that in psychoanalysis
‘the only good translation is the one that invites retranslation; the one that
doesn’t want to be verified so much as altered’ (Phillips 2002, p.146). In psy-
choanalysis – and I would argue in playback theatre – one is not referring
back to some original, but forward to a new translation: a new, but never
final, version. The performative nature of telling in playback theatre opens
up gaps and excesses in the narrative that evade representation and provide
opportunities for the performers. Perhaps then the name ‘playback’ is mis-
leading; if it wasn’t such a clumsy title perhaps we should call it
‘play-forward’ instead.
The Red Coat revisited: concluding remarks

It is now eight years since my father died. What story would I tell now? My
argument in this chapter would suggest that any story would serve my
present needs and always be inflected by the circumstances of its telling. The
red coat is as Phil Mollon (1998) might say ‘an illusion’ designed to defend
me from the terrible finality of death. Recognizing this as I write today in the
spring of 2006 I make ‘hazy’ connections between ‘chain-stoking’ and
‘pipe-smoking’ and think of the cigarette I smoked with the neighbour
across the road. I wonder if my continuing desire to smoke is in some way
related to this – a means of filling the loss with smoke?
I think also of the smoke-blackened London of my father’s youth. I have
no direct memory of this London except through historical archives and
film, yet its images remain a potent means of accessing him. Cultural and
popular memory seems to play an important part in constituting personal
memory, as Annette Kuhn writes ‘as far as memory is concerned, private and
public turn out in practice less readily separable than conventional wisdom
would suggest’ (Kuhn 1995, p.4). Playback performers step into this process
of personal and collective memory work. It is likely that they too will possess
public memories of pre-war London. It may be that the image of smoky

London will also have personal resonances for them which they bring to
bear on an enactment of this current story. In enacting these they expand my
memory allowing me to find spaces beyond the particularity of my own
story. The silence of grief remains but, in some way, it finds its place in our
collective history and, as importantly, it is refigured in ways that change
memory, self and, perhaps, the spectator.
Like the red coat these images written over and over again – as in a
palimpsest – fill a gap that can never be filled. They constitute memory work
into which playback performers have intervened and added a new but never
final version. However as I shall argue in the next chapter they do so with an
abundance of means of representation. Narratives in playback theatre are
told primarily through language, but the performers can contribute acoustic,
visual, spatial and theatrical images that can significantly extend the teller’s
memory work.
Chapter 5
A Very Different Kind of Dialogue:

The Symbolic in Playback Theatre
Tell all the Truth but let it slant –

Success in Circuit lies.
Emily Dickinson, ‘1129’, The Complete Poems,

ed. Thomas Johnson (Faber and Faber, 1970), p.506
In order to mark the end of a conference of psychodramatists, Playback Theatre

York was asked to perform to an audience of about 80 delegates who recounted
their experience of the weekend. The following sequence describes the telling
and the early stages of one of the enactments and it will be used to exemplify
some of the discussion in this chapter.
Mary’s Story
The teller, ‘Mary’ (a pseudonym) described her feelings before she came to the
conference. She told us that often found these events anxiety-provoking and as
she packed her suitcase to go to the conference, she resolved to be less
anxious, less ‘defended’ and to try to take a full part in the conference. With this
resolve she attended her first workshop. As it began the leader told the partici-
pants that he had decided to do something different than previously advertised.
This change of plan shook Mary’s confidence and determination to be less
anxious. She went into the coffee break determined to put on what she called
her ‘armour’ before returning to the workshop. When she did return the leader
announced that he had decided to revert to his original plan.
When asked to do so by the conductor, Mary cast Viv to play herself saying,
‘I knew I wanted her to play me’. The conductor asked what it was about Viv that
made her choose her and the teller replied that it was ‘her stature, she looks
safe and strong and she’s a survivor. She looks like she has been through it
herself’.
[Viv said later to me that she knew that she would be chosen and she was
pleased. She said, ‘I felt like I grew in stature a bit by being chosen.’]
79
The enactment
‘Mary’ began the action, carrying a large number of cloths, centre stage. She
folded a piece of white cloth saying:
‘Yes, black and white, I will need these,’ and packed it into her case.
‘I know what I want to get out of this conference; I’m clear about that…’
‘Mary’ then picked up a bright blue cloth, looked at it closely and then
said,
‘No, I don’t think I’ll take that!’ She threw it aside. The audience laughed.
Later Viv told me the following: ‘I had an instinct around her not being
glittery. She chose me, and I knew she would choose me. When she spoke
about me, it was as if she knew me, and what I’ve been through. In my mind
was a line that I thought I might use at some point and that was, “a lot of sur-
viving but not much thriving”. I remember a few years ago reading a book,
which said something like “Yes you have survived but have you thrived?”
Because she chose me, this phrase was going through my mind and black
and white seemed to me to be more about surviving than thriving. I didn’t
think of this at the time, but I went through a time a few years ago when the
world seemed black and white and had no colour. I was chucking out the
bright glittery colours here because, for me, survival seemed about black
and white. She had a stark way of looking at the world. These cloths were
aspects of her and how she operated and how she looked at the world.’
I wonder why I was moved when Viv told me this. It was the integrity of her
description of course, but it was also my own recognition of the way playback
acting can be. There is no doubt that playback can be an encounter with
one’s own story through the teller’s. But to return to the story:
‘Mary’ picked up a roll of white elastic and wrapped it around her fist and
gestured as if she were wearing boxing gloves. The audience laughed loudly.
‘Mary’ looked up at the audience and said:
‘You think they’re boxing gloves, don’t you – they’re not!’
Viv told me:
‘I had not intended that they would be boxing gloves. She had talked
about armour and I thought the elastic would be useful, later – perhaps to
wrap around myself, like we do sometimes! It was difficult to manage
because it was all tangled up, so I wrapped it around my hands and then
became aware that the audience thought it was boxing gloves. They felt a bit
like that to me too and I began to punch with them. I felt that the audience
were close and involved with what I was doing and so I was telling them that
they may be wrong in their assumption and, as Mary, I was saying, “Yes, I may
have armour, but I’m not going to fight”.’
‘Mary’ continued to pack; she held up a piece gold cloth towards the
audience wondering aloud if she should take it to the conference. She then
turned it around revealing that on the other side it was black. She said ‘Yes,
I’ll take this; I can always wear it inside out’.
THE SYMBOLIC IN PLAYBACK THEATRE 81
Having clearly completed her packing, ‘Mary’ stood centre stage, alone
with a pile of material in her arms and waited. After some time one of the
uncast actors (Sarah) stepped forward saying:
‘Welcome to the workshop, for the first part could everyone get their blue
cloths’.
Sarah told me:
‘I had watched the cloths being packed or discarded earlier, there was a
dim thought, not a prepared thing, about things being thrown away. I was
aware that the blue cloth had been discarded and it was a “fragment” that I
held on to. I knew something would come of it. The blue cloth was like a seed
– this happens a lot in playback – someone throws out a seed, some grow
and some don’t. In speaking this line, I consciously wanted to imply through
my tone of voice that everyone would of course know about the blue cloth. In
bringing it in this way, I left a space for Viv to be with her “lack”. I knew she’d
step into it; that she’d accept the offer and make something more from its
moment.’
‘Mary’ looked down at the cloths she had brought to discover she did not
have a blue one. There was loud and sustained laughter from the audience.
For the remainder of the enactment the disparity between the fabric brought
by Mary and those required by the workshop leader was explored. This was
the master metaphor that carried the story forward. The vignette carries
some important insights into the process of playback performing – the use of
the actors’ own history, the emergence of an idea – and these will be consid-
ered in later chapters. For now however I want to concentrate on the use of
the fabric and more generally what I will loosely call ‘the symbolic in
playback theatre’.
In this sequence it is clear that the pieces of fabric carry multiple
meanings – they are polysemic. They ‘stand in for’ the clothes Mary is
packing for the conference; they are representative of her psychic prepara-
tion; and later the blue cloth accumulates significance as that for which the
teller had not prepared. ‘Blue’ comes to represent the gap between her prep-
aration and what actually happens in the workshop.
Before looking at the symbolic in more detail it will be helpful here to
consider the use of fabric in playback theatre performances. It is usual that
the playback stage will include a rail or ‘tree’ of fabric, ‘chosen for their
colours and textures’ (Salas 1993, p.58), although some companies have
decided to dispense with them altogether, because they feel that they clutter
the stage (Salas 1993, p.59). The fabric has an indeterminate quality and a
versatility that makes it useful for symbolic use. The range of movement,
shape, colours and textures that the fabric affords perhaps explains its
ubiquity on the playback stage. Salas writes:
we’ve found through experimentation that the less structured the

cloth props are, the more expressive and versatile they can be. With
the audience’s imagination already engaged, a piece of fabric can be a
convincing bride’s dress or an animal skin. Usually, the fabric pieces
are most useful as mood elements rather than as costumes… More
experienced actors use the fabric props very sparsely, usually for
mood or to concretize an element in the story. (Salas 1993, pp.58–9)
Returning to Mary’s Story: the sequence gives us an insight into the develop-
ment of the systems of codification in one particular playback theatre perfor-
mance. It is clear that the fabric is working as more than ‘mood elements’;
they are beginning to accrue a range of signifying properties. The actor is
playing with a distinction in her own mind between ‘black and white’ and
‘glittery’ – the former signifying ‘surviving’; the latter ‘thriving’. She does
not, however, inform the spectators of these developing codes. For the spec-
tator a range of possible ‘readings’ are available. There is, therefore, a certain
ambiguity and polysemy in the way that Viv’s work with the fabric develops
and this is particularly evident when she wraps the elastic around her hands
and makes as if to fight with them. The actor is, to some extent, playing with
the audience. She is taking advantage of the fact that the audience already
know the story and so are ‘reading’ the action in that knowledge. Salas rec-
ognizes this when she suggests that because the audience’s imagination is
already engaged a piece of fabric can become ‘a convincing bride’s dress or
an animal skin’. The knowledge of the story frames and contains the specta-
tors’ reading of what is happening on stage. Viv is teasing the audience with
these expectations. The audience was, as she says ‘close and involved’ with
what she was doing and so she revels with them in the play of possible
meanings that her actions might signify. Watching the enactment will be
more interesting if expectations are challenged and surprises are possible.
Gaston Bachelard writes that ‘the entire life of an image is in its dazzling
splendour’ (1995, p.xxxiii) and later: ‘At the level of the poetic image, the
duality of subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly active in
its imagination (p.xix). Viv is taking the audience to that point where the
image becomes ‘shimmering’ and ‘unceasingly active’. Ambiguity and lack
of certainty allow the images to puzzle, surprise and challenge. In this
example the fabric, far from ‘cluttering the stage’, plays a crucial role in
carrying ‘meaning’.
The literal and non-literal

The preference for ‘non-literal’ portrayal of the teller’s story is a dominant
theme in playback theatre discourse. For example, Playback Theatre York
stresses the importance of ‘not being literal’ and of playing the story
‘metaphorically’. Also a criterion for successful playback is often considered

to be the degree to which performers eschew a ‘literal’ performance. The late
Francis Batten, an experienced playback theatre teacher and practitioner,
told our company after watching us perform at the British Association of
Psychodramatists Conference in April 2001, that the company ‘were excel-
lent at doing the non-literal’ and went on to say that he encourages the
groups that he trains to ‘work metaphorically’. In another example, Jo Salas
writes of ‘serious mistakes’ in some playback acting. ‘Brand new actors in
their innocence do not think of anything but the literal, while sophisticated
actors know how to move fluently and clearly between the literal and
symbolic action on stage’ (Salas 1999, p.26).
Not surprisingly considering the difficulty of its definition, ‘literal’ is
being used here as shorthand for a complex of ideas that guide performers.
Stern (2000, p.43) suggests three uses of the term ‘literal’. First, as something
that is clear and unequivocal and lacks ambiguity. Second, as implying the
‘empirical’ and ‘factual’, and suggests a certain epistemology in which a
distinction may be made between ‘the literal truth’ and other, perhaps more
figurative or rhetorical, ways of speaking. Finally, it is common to use ‘literal’
to denote that which is precisely transcribed, copied or reproduced.
The distinction between the literal and its antonyms is difficult to
maintain. Even the ‘plainest’ speech often relies on hidden or unacknowl-
edged metaphor and metonymy. Richard Rorty tells us that the distinction
between the literal and the metaphorical is the distinction ‘between familiar
and unfamiliar uses of noises and marks’ (Rorty 1989, p.17). He goes on to
describe the ‘career’ of the metaphor:
it will gradually require a habitual use, a familiar place in the language
game. It will thereby have ceased to be a metaphor – or, if you like, it
will have become what most sentences of our language are, a dead
metaphor. (Rorty 1989, p.18)
Any stable definition of ‘literal’ is, therefore, clearly problematic: first,
because the term is used in very different ways; second, because it is very dif-
ficult to speak ‘literally’ without the use of trope; and finally, because its
synonyms – such as plain, unembellished or truthful – often carry ideologi-
cal and value-laden associations.
The use of the phrase ‘literal’ seems to be used as a shorthand in
playback discourse to describe an enactment that is factual, unambiguous,
lacking in symbolic or figurative devices and that may give a ‘word-
for-word’ or ‘event-by-event’ representation of events. As one member of
the York Company said, in a ‘literal’ playback enactment, ‘What you see is
what you get’: a certain ‘plainness’ and a lack of the twists, turns, displace-
ments and condensations of the figurative are implied. In playback the
injunction to work ‘non-literally’ may simply be an encouragement to

explore a range of theatrical and musical styles, genres and conventions. It is,
I would suggest, also about the wish for an excess or abundance of twists and
turns that is called for when actors seek to ‘portray the story non-literally’.
In this chapter I am using the symbolic loosely to refer to the process,
defined by The Collins Concise Dictionary (1988) as something that ‘represents
or stands for something else, usually by convention or association’. Of
course most theatre is symbolic since actors and objects ‘stand in for’ that
which they represent. However more precisely I am referring to the perform-
ers’ choice to substitute one set of signifiers with another, or to ‘condense’ a
number of complex ideas into one metaphor. Consider the use of the fabric
in Mary’s story, or this example taken from a performance of the Sydney
Playback Theatre Company in July 1998:
The story is told by a man who recounted when, in his youth, he regularly
drank too much, took illegal drugs, and got into fights. This period in his life
ended when he was arrested and beaten up by the police. The actor cast as
him began by taking centre stage and making the sounds and movements of
a crowing cockerel. The use of the cockerel continued through the enact-
ment as the police arrived outdoing the younger man with their louder and
more vigorous crowing.
In both these examples, a new signifier is chosen to stand in for ones used in
the teller’s story. In Mary’s Story the fabric works to convey Mary’s anxiety,
her preparation and her choices. In the Sydney example the cockerel stands
in for the young man’s ‘cockiness’. Why do the performers choose to effect
this substitution? A number of reasons may be suggested why playback
theatre practitioners wish to incorporate the figurative and symbolic into
their enactments. Each of these reasons emphasize the role the figurative
plays in creating performative openness.
1. In therapeutic discourse the most familiar argument for the

figurative and metaphorical is that such non-literal means allow
the representation of thoughts and feelings that may be
inexpressible or be too painful to communicate through more
straightforward means. ‘The metaphor’ Cox and Theilgaard
write, ‘offers a haven, an asylum for those whose experience is
too sharp to disclose – yet too painful to contain’ (1987, p.112).
In playback theatre, the use of the symbolic may sometimes
work to shield teller, audience and performers from the full
‘reality’ of the story.
2. Gaston Bachelard writes of the ‘poetic power’ of the image. A

power that can touch us deeply before thought intervenes. The
image, he tells us, ‘has touched the depths before it stirs the surface’
(Bachelard 1994, p.xxiii). And once received
It takes root in us. It has been given us by another, but we begin to
have the impression that we could have created it, that we should
have created it. It becomes a new being in our language, expressing
us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a
becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expres-
sion creates being. (Bachelard 1994, p.xxii)
3. The image, for Bachelard, is before cognition. It is not a

representation of something else, but emerges from the depths
of being intact as it were and ready, through its expression, to
create self. This perspective has implications for playback, since
it suggests images are not merely representative devices but have
iridescent being.
4. Individual experiences are of course unique; but they also have
collective meaning and relevance. It is likely that Mary’s Story, for
example, had elements with which many of the delegates could
identify. The use of the symbolic in playback enables the
performers to draw the teller’s story away from its particular and
idiosyncratic detail and so give the audience and the teller an
opportunity to enter into closer identification with it on the one
hand, and appreciate its wider contextual relationships on the
other. The symbolic in playback can loosen the story’s particularity
and enable the audience to recognize its shared features.
5. In relation to this, as I will argue in Chapter 9, the symbolic can
work to protect the actors and tellers from the dangers of
over-identification. It opens up a gap between character and actor
that enacts the inevitable ‘failure’ of all playing the other. This
stresses the ethical use of symbolic: the inability of the actor to
fully stand in for the teller who sits watching is made visible by
transposing the story into symbolic form.
6. The figurative and symbolic can often surprise. In doing so it can
cast the story in a more unfamiliar light. The actor’s choice of the
cockerel, for example, produced surprise and delight in the
audience and also may have led them to see the story a little
differently. Viv’s play with the audience around the ‘boxing gloves’
is another example. On this point Stern quotes Aristotle:
Liveliness is specially conveyed by metaphor, and by the
further power of surprising the hearer; because the hearer expected
something different his acquisition of the new idea impresses him all
the more. His mind seems to say ‘Yes, to be sure, I never thought of
that.’ (cited in Stern 2000, p.275)
7. It may be that by deploying a wide range of devices – metaphor,

symbolism, visual images, rhyme, rhythm, unfamiliar uses of
sound – playback can surprise and render the teller’s story less
familiar. I am arguing here that the symbolic works to promote
open performing.
8. Symbols are ‘pregnant’ with meaning and can bear multiple
interpretations. Umberto Eco expresses this clearly speaking of
‘their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to
express a final meaning’ (Eco 1984, p.130). As he goes on they
stand for ‘a nebula of alternative and nevertheless complementary
contents’ (p.161). They are suggestive and invite associations: the
fabric in ‘Mary’s’ enactment, for example, accrued a range of
different meanings as the piece developed.
9. The symbolic can emphasize the subjective aspects of the teller’s
story. Playback’s dramaturgy employs means of ‘symbolization’ that
bear some relation to dreams and unconscious processes. To some
extent it mimics the unconscious world; playback theatre
enactments seek to match, or resonate sympathetically with, the
processes of memory and the dream which both make active use of
the symbolic.
This list will require substantiation in the following pages; however, it is not
my intention to deal with each claim in turn – this would compound the
reductive problems that are always inherent in listing. One further comment
needs to be made with regard to the list. The reader may notice that there is
an apparent contradiction between the claim that the symbolic in playback
leads to both a heightening of the subjective and a step away from the partic-
ularity of the teller’s story (2 and 5 above). It may be that this apparent con-
tradiction holds an important insight concerning the playback process: that
it works around and across the borders between self and other.
The primacy of the signifier

We should imagine the spectators and the performers watching and listening
to ‘Mary’ and seeking to make sense of the emerging enactment. For each
person there is a gradual emergence of meanings as the piece develops.
Indeed these emergent meanings apply to the actor also; she probably has no
clear idea where the action will take her, and instead she ‘discovers’ the next
action through her interaction with the cloth and the audience response to
what she is doing. This is probably what Sarah means when she says that the
blue cloth becomes a ‘seed’. The seed was planted when Viv, as Mary,
rejected the blue cloth during her packing; Sarah then ‘allows’ it to grow as a
possible idea and sees her opportunity to use it when she decides to take of
the role of the workshop leader. Jacques Lacan’s notion of the primacy of the
signifier will provide a useful tool for understanding this process. I quote a
lengthy section to illustrate his argument.
As a rule, we always give precedence to the signified in our analyses,
because it’s certainly what is most seductive and what seems at first to
be the dimension appropriate to symbolic investigation in psycho-
analysis. But in misrecognizing the primary mediating role of the
signifier, in misrecognizing that it is the signifier that in reality is the
guiding element, not only do we throw the original understanding of
neurotic phenomena, the interpretation of dreams itself, out of
balance, but we make ourselves absolutely incapable of understand-
ing what is happening in psychosis. (Cited in Dor 1997, p.44)
In his analysis of Poe’s story The Purloined Letter, Lacan demonstrates his
argument for the primacy of the signified. The characters in Poe’s story are
‘made to act’ in response to a letter, received by the Queen. Each character
acts according to their desire to discover the content of the letter, devising
secret and complex plans to acquire it. Lacan suggests that the letter may be
considered the signifier and its contents, the signified. It is the letter, the
signifier, which mobilizes the characters – they are acting in response ‘to the
intolerable nature of the pressure constituted by the letter’ (Lacan 1988,
p.207). In the same way one may argue that the performers in the above
vignette are mobilized by the ‘signifier’ (the cloth) and follow where it leads.
I note, for example, that Sarah’s intervention as the workshop facilitator is
prompted by her observation of the blue cloth being discarded by ‘Mary’. It
became a ‘seed’, a ‘dim thought’ and ‘a fragment to hold on to’. Sarah put
this in another way, a way that seemed strange to me at first but now seems to
make sense. She said that the blue cloth ‘floated into my stomach’. Her
metaphor suggests that she ‘ingested’ the signifier. The properties and
possible significations of the blue cloth were working ‘inside’ her; she was
allowing the signifier to loosen from the signified, or to use Bachelard’s
language the image was allowed its full iridescence.
In my example, we can argue that it is the coloured cloths, as signifiers,
that begin to ‘govern the network of signifieds’; that they begin to become
the ‘guiding element’ of the enactment. This is illustrated, for example,
when Sarah talks about the blue cloth as a ‘seed’. In other words the actors
(and the spectators, as they follow the development of the piece) begin to
follow the logic demanded by their symbolic encounter with the cloth. This
counter-intuitive assertion complicates the straightforward assumption that

the actors are primarily concerned with the representation of the teller’s
story. It is my experience, as we shall see in later chapters, that performers
often respond as much to the symbolic associations that develop in the
course of the enactment as to the teller’s story: acting in playback theatre is
characterized by a tension between the act of representation of the teller’s
narrative and the performers’ ‘encounter’ with each other and with the
symbolic.
Time, place and dialogue on playback theatre

In order to exemplify the theoretical assertions I have made in the following
sections I will consider the ways in which time, place and dialogue are ‘per-
formed’ in playback enactments.
The representation of time in playback performances

In everyday conversation we often make a distinction between the chrono-
logical and the subjective passage of time. We might say for example that an
event ‘only lasted five minutes, but seemed to go on forever’. Our experience
of the passage of time is one way through which we ‘measure’ the subjective
impact of an event upon us. For example, during a performance, a teller
described a car journey he made after hearing that his young daughter had
disappeared while playing at a friend’s house. The journey he told us
‘stretched out forever’. That gave clues to the actors about how to represent
that car journey. In common with other forms of theatre, playback perfor-
mances compress and stretch out the passage of time to represent our subjec-
tive experience of it and to point to the affective loading attached to the
events on stage.
COMPRESSION AND DILATION OF TIME

The French dramatist d’Aubignac wrote in 1657 that a ‘Dramatic Poem’ has
two sorts of time – ‘the true time of the Representation’, that is the
time of the performance itself, and the time of the ‘Action represented’
(in Brownstein and Daubert 1981, p.72). This simple division will be
helpful in analyzing how playback enactments deal with time. In terms of
d’Aubignac’s first division, playback enactments are often shorter than the
telling and usually no longer than seven or eight minutes – a period of time
largely dictated by the wish to hear a range of different individual’s stories. It
is almost always the case that playback enactments involve a considerable
compression or, to use the psychoanalytic term, a condensation of time.
The events represented are usually of much greater duration than play-
back’s enactment. Occasionally the opposite is the case and playback
performers will stretch or dilate time. A teller may recount, for example, a
moment of realization, or epiphany or terror, which in chronological time
was very brief but which the performers may draw out to explore its subjec-
tive/experiential texture.
This compression and dilation of time, although certainly not unique to
playback theatre, has important implications: it directs the spectator’s
attention to the subjective experience of time – how the passage of time is rep-
resented in memory and in dreams. Our memory of the passage of time is
notoriously unreliable. In memory, as in the dream, time does not elapse
evenly but jumps forward or dwells at length on a particular episode.
Memory compresses, elides or dilates time according to the interests and
preoccupations of the ‘rememberer’. Through the compression or dilation of
time, playback theatre enactments seek to match, or resonate sympatheti-
cally with, the processes of memory and the dream.
SEQUENCING
Not only does playback ‘play’ with the duration(s) of time and but it also
does so with its sequencing. In playback’s discourse, a ‘literal’ enactment
would be said to be one in which the performers follow closely the chrono-
logical sequence of the events in the teller’s narrative. It is interesting that for
Playback Theatre York, one of the most difficult types of story to enact is
those that follow a clear chronology. The Company often gives these stories
the generic name ‘travel’ or ‘action’ stories, stressing the linear nature of the
story’s narration. An example of this kind of story follows. It was told during
a performance to General Medical Practitioners. The audience had been
attending a conference entitled The Arts and GP Practice. The audience
members – between 30 and 40 in number – were largely unknown to each
other before the conference; however they had worked together throughout
the day using drama to explore professional experience and this may have
influenced the level of personal disclosure.
I have written this up from two perspectives: ‘the performer’ and ‘the
reflecting actor’. ‘The performer’ is written in the present tense and aims to
capture the performers’ experience inside the enactment. The ‘reflecting
actor’ is a kind of first draft of the reflections that pass through the actor’s
mind during and after the event.
ON THE EDGE
This vignette illustrates the way in which playback performers seek to avoid
the linear presentation of events (see Box 5.1). They leave out, for example,
the arrival of the aeroplane; they do not point clearly to the departure of the
boat or to the arrival in the harbour.
Box 5.1 Avoiding the linear presentation of events

The ‘performer’
The teller begins by reminding us that earlier in the performance, when the
audience had been invited to give titles to stories they might tell, he had called
out the title, ‘On the Edge’. He recounts how, a few years ago, he had flown
into Newfoundland. The plane needed to circle the airfield a number of times
because of thick fog before landing. As the weather ‘closed in’, he boarded a
boat with a group of fellow travellers intending to visit the ice floes. The
weather worsened steadily, it became increasingly cold and ice began to close in
on the boat. He tells us how they became progressively more frightened as it
became clear that the leader of the expedition could not find a way out of the
closing ice. With thick fog and the imminent threat of nightfall, they finally
found a way through the ice, returning, with huge relief, to the ‘haven’ of a
small harbour.
The performers confine the action to the boat, which is indicated to the
audience by a piece of elastic stretched into a triangular shape with the teller’s
actor placed downstage, at the apex of the triangle – suggesting the prow of the
boat. As the danger increases the apex is stretched forward toward the audience.
There is an increasing threat that the actors holding onto the other sides of the
triangle will not be able to hold on. The loosening of the elastic and the return
of the protagonist to the other actors, upstage, convey the arrival at the harbour.
The ‘reflecting actor’

The problem for the performers in this kind of narrative is how to
preserve the sense of progression in the story (from the anticipation
of adventure to danger to the safety of the harbour) without a linear
representation of the events.
Playback enactments do not have the burden of ‘telling the
story’, since that has already been accomplished by the teller. They
must add something or elaborate upon some aspect of the story.
The audience may also have experienced the ‘threat’. At this point it
is possible that they may be struck by the loosening elastic.
What is interesting is that this playback enactment, like most others, tends
toward loosening the narrative from what one might call its particularity.
This loosening of the story from its particular circumstances may be possible
in playback theatre for two reasons. First, the story has already been told and
so the performers are, to some extent, released from the task of representing
the events in order to tell the story. Second, playback narratives emerge
within the context of the performance as a whole. For example, the On the
Edge story followed a short story from another member of the audience
about the impact of listening to a reading of The Perfect Storm that afternoon.
In addition, these doctors were attending a course on ‘The Arts in GP Prac-

tice’ and some had spoken about how the proceedings had challenged them
and made them think about their practice. It is possible that they may have
felt, in some way, ‘on the edge’ and so this story may have been resonating
for them beyond its particularities? The ‘threat’ of the loosening elastic as it
was stretched out towards them may have contributed to a sense of being ‘on
the edge’. This loosening of the ‘literal’ signification of a particular story
seems to be a property of playback’s dramaturgy. Compressing or dilating
time as well as altering the sequencing of events may partly achieve such a
loosening.
SIMULTANEITY
One further characteristic of playback theatre’s treatment of time is that of
simultaneity. It is a relatively common feature of the genre that it will
present two time frames simultaneously. For example, a childhood episode
recounted by the teller may be presented alongside an adult commentary
upon it. The ‘adult actor’ may watch herself, for example, as a child playing
with her brother and comment in some way upon the action. This device
involves a considerable complexity of gaze for the viewer. Since the teller is
always visible to the audience in this simultaneity of time frames, the specta-
tor may view the teller re-viewing herself re-viewing her memory. This
complexity of simultaneously available time-frames draws the spectator’s
attention to act(s) of memory and the representation of experience. It
promotes a high degree of reflexivity. The spectators have available to them a
range of ‘points of view’, each of which allows insight into the act of repre-
senting the past. The spectator is offered a series of ‘meta’-positions but in
doing so is paradoxically reminded that there is no panoptic position from
which all may be omnisciently viewed. The importance of these multiple
viewpoints will be discussed in Chapter 10 when it is proposed that this
feature of playback is important in understanding its political purpose.
Playback’s tendency to compress or dilate the duration of time, alter
sequencing and present simultaneous time-frames, renders an unequivocal
reading of meaning in the performance problematic. The spectator becomes
aware of the choices made by the actors and of the processes of interpreta-
tion that inevitably are involved in the responses to a personal narrative. It
supports an argument that playback theatre is concerned with exploring and
playing with hermeneusis (the processes through which we make sense of
personal experience).
The representation of place in playback theatre

The improvised nature of playback as well as the relatively bare stage makes
it impossible for playback performers to achieve a verisimilitude of setting.
The ice floe off Newfoundland in On the Edge cannot be represented natural-
istically. Of course the task for the spectator is considerably eased because
they have already heard the story and know that the events took place in
Newfoundland. Nevertheless it is clear that the performers eschew naturalis-
tic means of indicating location. What is of interest here is the way in which
the particularities of the environment are drawn into symbolic relationship
with the story. Before I examine in detail this characteristic of playback
theatre, a brief comparison with psychodrama may be useful.
There are significant differences between playback theatre and psycho-
drama in the way that the stage is set. In psychodrama the director will
usually ask for a clear and detailed description of the environment in which
the protagonist’s story took place. Care will usually be taken to clarify this
for the protagonist, the other actors and the audience. Take, for example, this
vignette given as an example of psychodrama practice by Eva Roine:
Protagonist: I stood by the window watching my father walk along
the road toward the house. I knew he was angry and that I would have
to account for what I had done.
Director: Does your father come into the room where you are?
Protagonist: Yes, and when he does, I turn around and want to run
away.
Director: What does the room look like? Describe it in detail. Where
is the door, the window? Is there anyone else there? (Roine 1997,
p.127)
This careful geographical orientation is, by and large, absent in playback

theatre. The actors themselves make the decisions about how the stage space
will be used. This leads, in my experience with Playback Theatre York and in
my observations of other playback companies, to a more figurative use of
space and relationships within that space. To take Roine’s example, in
playback theatre the room into which the father walks may be denoted by a
single piece of cloth on the floor or the actors might create a shelter, which
then is invaded by the returning father. The actors may choose to locate the
action in a metaphorical space: a womb, an animal’s burrow or a child’s play-
house. These decisions would be arrived at, without discussion, in light of
the whole story given by the protagonist. If, for example, the teller describes
her relationship with her father as one of oppressive power, then this will
influence the staging decisions made by the actors.
The ways in which the location of the teller’s action is drawn into a
symbolic exploration of the story is a relatively common aspect of playback’s
dramaturgy. This is apparent in the On the Edge. All the action takes place on
what the spectators may suppose is the boat. However this boat, created by
elastic stretched into a triangular shape, is introduced in such a way that it

suggests a tension between the excitement and adventure of personal risk
and the opposite impulse toward personal safety. It may be that the actors
were led to this exploration by the stories that preceded On the Edge. One
member of the audience had, for example, spoken about the risk of perform-
ing in front of his fellow GPs at a workshop that immediately preceded the
performance. Additionally, it may be that the ‘risk’ to the audience, intro-
duced by the stretching elastic may have not only represented the particular
story, but also dramatized the sense of risk in the audience.
It seems, therefore, that in playback theatre the actors have a consider-
able degree of artistic freedom given to them by the form. They are more
likely to create a mise-en-scène illustrative of either their own interpretation of
the psychological and social dynamics of the event or, if provided by the pro-
tagonist, of her internal representation of it. This ‘symbolization’ of place is
also evident in On the Edge. The physical environment in which the action
takes place accumulates symbolic properties as the piece progresses. While
the ‘telling’ is primarily conducted through verbal means, the performers in
the ‘enactment’ have a far wider range of systems of symbolization available
to them. It will be interesting to consider this further through an analysis of
the verbal in playback enactments. It may be instructive to consider, for
example, what happens to the teller’s words as they reappear in the
enactment.
Dialogue in playback theatre

To a significant extent, drama in playback theatre is not conveyed
with words. In fact, the entire thrust of the performance is to take the
verbal rendition of experience and translate it into not-so-verbal
drama – the dramatic part of the performance is permeated with
non-linguistic elements – so much so that playback has often been
described as a kind of mime. The process of this particular kind of
story dramatization has a hypnotic effect on the audience; they are
taken away from their normal rational–intellectual responses. (Fox
1994, p.39)
It is not a question of eliminating spoken language but of giving
words something of the importance they have in dreams. (Artaud
1998, p.191)
There is a tendency, within playback discourse, to favour non-verbal com-
munication over verbal, and, in so doing, to suppose a link between the
verbal and the ‘rational–intellectual’. A criticism that members of Playback
Theatre York often make of their work is that ‘it was too verbal’ or that ‘we
talked too much’. We sometimes talk about a ‘flight into words’ and note that
this is often a sign that we are not ‘warmed up’. This injunction to avoid
words is more complex than it first appears. Playback does not, in its
practice, eschew words, rather it uses them in ways which contrast with the
usual narrative ‘rendition of experience’ that was evident in the ‘telling’ of
the story. In practice playback does indeed give words ‘something of the
importance they have in dreams’. The following examples will illustrate my
point and will recall Lacan’s notion of the primacy of the signifier, particu-
larly since the slippage of the signifier from the signified is especially evident
in dreams.
REPETITION AND THE PRIMACY OF THE SIGNIFIER

This vignette is drawn from a performance that took place to an audience of
professionals working in health and social care. The story concerned a
woman who was gradually deteriorating from the effects of Alzheimer’s
disease. The teller, who had been a very close friend of this woman,
described how distressed she was at seeing her friend’s deterioration. Only
two actors were cast – the teller’s actor and her friend with Alzheimer’s
disease. The rest of the actors formed a chorus and commented upon the
action. The chorus began to play with the word ‘lost’:
‘I’ve lost my…’

‘I have…’
‘I’ve lost…’
‘I’m lost.’
‘Lost’
‘I’m lost…’
‘I have lost my memory’
‘I have lost my…’
‘I have lost my friend’.
There are two important points to note here. First, that the chorus build up
the phrases, repeating them in different ways for emphasis. This type of rep-
etition is common in playback theatre enactments. Second, the chorus is
playing upon the word ‘lost’, exploring its different possible meanings to
progress the enactment. The word ‘lost’ has at least three meanings in this
extract – being lost, losing memory and losing a friend. The signifier ‘lost’
begins to slip and slide as the actors play with it and, for me, there is a poi-
gnancy in allowing the word ‘lost’ to encompass both the loss of memory
and the loss of a friend. The slippage of the signifier permits a dream-like
process of ‘condensation’ in which, as Freud wrote, ‘collective and compos-
ite figures and…strange composite structures’ (Freud 1995, p.61) are
created. This process of condensation is, as Lacan points out, analogous to
the metaphoric process of signifying substitution (Dor 1997). In an analo-

gous fashion to metaphor, in condensation:
the latent elements that present shared characteristics fuse together
[lost my friend and lost my memory], so that they are all represented
on the manifest level by a single element [lost]. This is how the com-
posite characters, collective figures, and neological composites that
inhabit our dreams are made. (Dor 1997, p.59)
EMERGING DIALOGUE
There is another aspect to the dialogue of playback theatre that gives it
‘something of the importance it has in dreams’ and that is the fact of its
improvised emergence. Lacan tells us that ‘the anchoring point’ in dialogue
operates so that the signifier is prevented from sliding away, as it were, from
the signified. For Lacan, in dreams and in psychotic experience, the anchor-
ing point is loosened or absent, so the signifiers gain primacy. I would
suggest that because playback dialogue is improvised within ensemble, there
is a certain loosening of the anchor between the signifier and the signified
because its direction is not under the control of one person – it is emerging
through polyphonic encounter. Consider this piece of dialogue taken from a
story in which ‘Mike’, now married and with young children meets an ‘old
flame’ and looks back, somewhat regretfully at ‘what might have been’. The
actor playing Mike is running a piece of long white cloth through his hands
as he contemplates the time that has passed.
Mike: So much stuff (running white cloth through his hands).

Laura: Show me (stepping downstage and directly addressing the audience).
I wonder what it would have been like?
Mike: O God, yes.
Laura: Is it a bit stupid then? It’s a long time ago.
Mike: One could have…
Laura: Life takes its turns and…
Mike: …and goes on this and that path.
Laura: If I’d turned another way.
Mike: But just supposing, just supposing, just supposing. You really turned
me on you know.
Laura: I know.
In this sequence the ‘usual forward-moving, speaker–listener/listener–

speaker, turn taking system’ (Aston and Savona 1991, p.64) of conversation
is subverted. Through a combination of dramatic asides (‘I wonder what it
would have been like’), repetition and short incomplete sentences, the actors
convey a sense of longing and regret. Their lines seem to drift off into wistful
yearning. Their reflections are interrupted when, after ‘Mike’ says, ‘You
really turn me on you know’, an uncast actor leads the wife, ‘Rachel’, across
the diagonal.
The actors are improvising this sequence together; they are picking up
on each other’s cues:
Laura: Life takes its turns and…

Mike: …and goes on this and that path.
They are also making their own ‘offers’, initiating ideas to develop the ‘con-
versation’. The above has not been pre-planned or rehearsed, and this has, at
least, two important implications for an understanding of dialogue in
playback theatre. First, one might ask the question: if these lines do not come
from a text, how are they created? Or to ask a question often posed by
audience members after a performance: how did you know what to say? This
is a complex question and I will consider it in more detail in later chapters.
The performers, one would suppose, draw from personal experience, from an
understanding of the teller’s story and from a cultural storehouse of similar
kinds of stories. They ‘accept offers’ (Johnstone 1981) given by other actors
and respond to cues given them by fellow performers. They do so with suffi-
cient openness and spontaneous engagement to allow the enactment to
‘emerge’ rather than to be determined by a pre-existing plan.
Second, dialogue in playback theatre is generated as the performers
respond to the ‘here and now’ exigencies of the stage environment. Instead
of ignoring the ‘extra-textual’ problems that performers often face on stage it
is relatively common for playback performers to make use of them. To some
extent, dialogue in a playback theatre enactment is ‘discovered’ or ‘encoun-
tered’ in relationship. It requires the actors to maintain a high level of
awareness in the here and now and to be able to respond spontaneously to
the changing circumstances of the performance. As there has been no oppor-
tunity for the actors to explore what impact the text may have on the
audience or on other performers, as there would be for actors working from a
dramatic text, the actors are discovering the impact of their words only as
they speak them. They discover this from the reaction of the other actors, the
audience and from the impact the words have on the developing action.
But, as playback actors often say, words can be a kind of avoidance, a dis-
traction or a refusal to enter into the teller’s story. Enactments are sometimes
criticized for relying too heavily on words. Words are ubiquitous; they may
easily lose their currency. A descent into cliché and stereotype is a constant
possibility in improvised dialogue, since the paradox remains that in impro-
vising speech it is difficult to avoid stock phrases and formulaic routines: in
responding spontaneously it is difficult to be fresh. Cliché might be seen as

language that has lost its vibrancy and texture through repetition. Dialogue
in successful playback maintains that vibrancy and texture through a will-
ingness of the performers to play with the signifiers and to allow verbal
sequences to emerge through relationship and encounter.
Ethical concerns: getting lost in the symbolic

There can be a danger in going too far in the direction of abstract rep-
resentation. Above all we need to see the story. If the actors launch
themselves into the stratosphere of symbolic action, the essential par-
ticularities of the teller’s story can get lost. The meaning of the experi-
ence can only express itself in the actual events of the story, where it
happened, when, who was there, what did they do and say. (Salas
1993, p.61)
Salas’ warning is a wise one for playback performers. The performers can get
lost in the ‘stratosphere of symbolic action’ and lose touch with the teller’s
story. This happens in playback performances sometimes, usually when the
actors have not listened to the story or the story is unclear or it is not
‘grounded’ in real life events. This danger is surely behind the experienced
playback performer Peter Hall’s statement that effective playback maintains
‘a tension between literal truth and poetic truth’, as he explained to me
during a meeting in Australia.
Performers need to freely enter into play on stage in order to explore the
possible meanings, associations and references suggested by the story, but
this can raise significant ethical issues. Are playback actors just messing
around with the teller’s story, throwing the pieces of the jigsaw in the air,
scrambling its pieces, holding up one piece to the light for close inspection,
totally ignoring other pieces – placing pieces together in ways that were not
suggested by the original? There is a steady space to which the performers
need to return: it is the teller’s story, to which they must remain ‘loyal’. That is
the ‘original’ that will prevent the performers ‘drowning’ or being lost in the
‘stratosphere of symbolic action’. Despite the fact, as we have seen in
Chapter 4, that the teller’s story is dependent upon associations, references
to other texts, unreliable memories and the particular context of its telling, it
remains the solid ground on which the teller’s need to maintain a foothold.
Concluding remarks
In this chapter I have explored the use of the symbolic in playback
theatre enactments. My suggestions point toward the conclusion that the
substitution on one set of signifiers by another, the play with signifiers and
the consequent surprise and ambiguity that are produced contribute to

openness of performing and telling. This openness, as I will continue to
propose through this book, is designed to open up new horizons – to open
up new ways of making sense of our experience. Playback is far more than
the replay of the past it is the re-figuring of the past to release us from its
power to control the present and future.
Chapter 6
On ‘The Narrow Ridge’:

The Performers’ Response
to the Story
From The Playback Theatre Rehearsal: A Short Story

(Please see Appendix 1 for the full story.)
Bruno felt he was bursting. His heart was thumping hard and he had a sick
feeling. He knew Rona would choose him and he knew what he would do. Well
no, that wasn’t quite true. It would be more accurate to say that he had no
worries about what he would do. An insistent energy would carry him.
Amanda’s music was feeding that energy, viscerally changing Bruno, and he
used it to find his place on the stage. He dragged one of the chairs into the
centre of the stage, and drawing himself in as tightly as he could manage, he sat
on the chair and waited. He knew that the other actors would be forming a
tableau around him but he couldn’t see anything; they must all be behind him.
He could hear, but not see, movement. It went silent and, it seemed to Bruno,
rather dark. They too were waiting, he guessed.
There is a directional instruction that the company had often spoken about.
It was that if, as an actor, you do not know what to say it is often effective to say
how you are feeling at that moment because it is probably related to the charac-
ter you are playing. Remembering this, Bruno said,
‘I can’t see you, it’s dark here. Where are you?’
Enclosed tightly, as he was by his arms and by the hardness of the chair,
Bruno waited. It seemed to him that his words were spreading a cold darkness
across the stage and, he guessed, were freezing the actors. He felt a moment of
panic. ‘They don’t know what to do with this,’ he thought.
However, he was determined to stay with it, to wait. He could hear
movement in the darkness, a quick movement across the stage to somewhere in
front and to the left of him. There was silence and then a sound, he wasn’t sure,
but it was as if someone’s lips were moving, mouthing sounds with no words.
99
There was something terrible about this sound and, in the darkness, he felt,
for a fleeting moment, a terrible emptiness. The sound had a nightmarish
quality, like a child calling for help through sheets of impenetrable glass. He
could hear some movement too and he imagined grotesque, spastic
movements.
He called out, ‘I can hear you! Do you need help?’ The sound continued,
oblivious to his call. He repeated, ‘I can hear you! Do you need help?’ There
was no response.
A voice whispered in his ear, ‘Can you not hear her? She needs your
help.’ Bruno experienced a shock; he had been so caught up in that sound in
the darkness that he had totally forgotten about the other actors.
‘Open your eyes; look at her,’ continued the voice.
Bruno couldn’t open his eyes. If he did everyone would see him, and he
couldn’t bear the thought of that.
‘I can’t, she’ll see me,’ he found himself saying.
‘What will she see?’ asked the voice which he now identified as
Lawrence. Bruno didn’t know, or at least, he couldn’t find the words for it. He
felt exposed and suddenly aware of Rona and Laura watching him. He felt he
was holding things up, he worried he was boring everyone. It seemed all of a
sudden, rather boring, self-indulgent and not very good theatre. He had for-
gotten Rona’s story and was now somehow playing out his own. Almost
unbearably the face of his daughter formed in his mind – that terrible look of
accusing pain that she had given him when she first went into hospital.
With a massive effort of will Bruno said, ‘I’ve been to the hospital today,
I’ve had some tests.’
He opened his eyes. What surprised him first was the light. The harsh light
of the church hall seemed so merciless, so terribly everyday. It hid nothing
and so showed nothing. He then saw the source of those strange mouthing
sounds: it was Bridget. Of course, he knew it would be her, but nevertheless
he was surprised. He was surprised by the presence of her – a vulnerable
presence, looking at him, present, sensual, alert.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before, Dad?’ said Bridget.
‘I didn’t want to worry you, it may be nothing – and there’s no point
worrying about things that may never happen,’ and warming to a theme
which suddenly occurred to him and struck him as characteristic of Rona’s
father, he continued:
‘Don’t worry! Smile, it may never happen! You’ve got to keep going, no
point in worrying, you’ll make yourself ill.’
For the first time Bruno was aware of Rona. He heard a sound like a sigh
or a stifled laugh. He then realized that Bridget was angry with him.
‘Smile…that’s what you always do…so much talking and smiling, you
never listen, do you? You never listen…’
‘Whoa, hold your horses. Wait one doggone minute.’ Where this came
from Bruno had no idea, clichés were piling up, one upon the other, and
Bruno seemed to have no control over them. He was still in the chair, but was
now leaning forward, his hand reaching out towards Bridget to silence her.
THE PERFORMERS’ RESPONSE TO THE STORY 101
He wondered if he should go over to her but he rejected the idea. There had
to be that space between them. It was filled with tension, longing and fear.
Then Bridget turned toward the audience.
‘He always does this, he silences me, not by force but by a kind of tender-
ness…’ She searches for the words. ‘Everything is so fragile…the fear that if I
speak I will break him, destroy him – destroy us.’ She emphasizes the ‘us’ sur-
prised by the power of this idea.
For the first time Bruno is aware of Amanda. She has been playing a
steady insistent beat throughout, but it is only now that he really hears her, she
sings with a plaintive, resonant voice,
A kind of tenderness
He destroys me
With a kind of tenderness.
Bridget turns to Bruno and across the space, which seems, at this minute, vast
to Bruno, she says:
‘You couldn’t hear me could you? When it was getting darker and colder,
when you were so far away and it seemed so long until Christmas, you
couldn’t hear me. And now Dad, I don’t know how to hear you.’
Bridget turns to Rona, the singing stops and there is silence. Bruno sees
the tears on Rona’s cheeks and realizes he is shivering.
Laura reaches into her pocket, finds a tissue and hands it to Rona,
‘Well, Rona…’
Rona hated this bit; she always felt that she had to say something. She
really wanted to let it settle, take it in, hold onto it and not share it with anyone
else. The actors were looking at her expectantly.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said wiping her eyes and blowing her
nose. ‘It was when Bridget said “a kind of tenderness”…that broke my heart.
There is a tenderness there…but there’s no…’ She searched for the word.
‘That’s it…there’s no robustness. I wish we could shout at each other a bit
more…and Bruno, when you said, “smile, it may never happen” it was so like
him!’ Everyone laughed.
‘I was worried I had gone over the top,’ said Bridget, ‘I just felt so angry
when he said that bit about smiling, I want to hit him’…she growled and hit
Bruno on the arm.
‘Ow!’ He cried, ‘I just couldn’t bear you to be worried…it was like I was
talking to Sally…’ he suddenly broke off and there was a pause.
‘Of course! I hadn’t thought of that… I knew I had to choose you to be my
dad.’
‘I knew you would,’ Bruno smiled and Rona returned his smile.
Lawrence looked miserable. Laura asked, ‘what’s wrong, Lawrence?’
‘I don’t know, I feel so out of it…probably to do with not having a role.’
‘Have you a story?’
‘Yes,’ said Lawrence.
Rona, Bruno, Bridget and Fran sat on the actors’ chairs and Amanda
returned to her music.
On ‘the narrow ridge’: the performers’ response

A row of three to four actors are seated on the stage facing the audience, to
their right a ‘teller’ recounts her story. Soon they will have to improvise that
story for the teller and the audience. What is going on in the minds and
bodies of the performers as they prepare for the enactment that will follow?
What thoughts, impulses, images and ideas motivate the performers toward
dramatic action? As they listen to the autobiographical narrative, what are
they listening out for and what are the principles that inform their reception
of the story? An investigation into the performers’ response may provide
insights into both the often hidden processes at work when we listen to auto-
biographical narratives and the strategies of representation used to dramatize
them. It certainly will give some indication of what is happening in the
minds and bodies of the performers as they begin the dramatization. Our
response to a personal story is always more than a cognitive one. Emotion,
image, memory and the body intervene to influence how we read and
respond to the story.
This chapter will consider what is happening as the performers listen to
the story. Analysis therefore will extend only to the point at which the actors
begin to improvise together. Once the improvisation begins the complexity
of the process increases exponentially. As one of the interviewees stated,
‘This is where the fun begins’ – when actors begin the complex negotiation
and interaction that takes place in an improvisation. Up to this point, per-
formers have developed, what one interviewee called, a ‘template’ for action
which they will need to modify, assert or relinquish in the course of the
interaction.
The following analysis will draw on a number of sources including
personal experience and playback literature. However it will be structured
around interviews conducted during the spring of 2005 with eight perform-
ing members of Playback Theatre York. These interviews took place either
on the telephone or face-to-face; they were largely unstructured improvised
conversations which began with my expression of interest: ‘I am interested
in what happens and what you are looking out for as you listen to the teller’s
story’. As the series of interviews progressed, the content of previous
sessions sometimes prompted questions and opened up new areas of enquiry.
Subsequently a number of themes have been developed, which although
expressed differently by different performers, ran through all the interviews;
these will help in structuring the chapter.
On the narrow ridge

In talking to actors, what is striking is the sense in which they seem to be
working across a number of tensions; they seek to maintain a position
between seeming opposites. Here are three examples of this as they have
emerged through the interviews:
1. The actors need, in the words of one performer, to ‘yield to the
story’ and allow themselves to be ‘penetrated’ by it, while
simultaneously making use of their understanding of narrative
structures and theatrical conventions to represent it.
2. They need to search in their memories for identification and
empathy, while at the same time preserving some ‘distance’ to ensure
the ethical and aesthetic representation of what they have heard.
3. They need to allow the enactment to emerge through improvisation
with other performers, while ensuring that they continue to tell the
story they have heard.
It may be that the capacity of the actors to maintain the tension between
these apparent contradictions is a key constituent of ‘open performing’. In
other words, for a sense of ambiguity, indeterminacy and possibility to be
maintained the performers need to stay on the ‘narrow ridge’ between
attending to the self and telling the story; and between live performance on
one hand and the representation of the story on the other. These tensions
will emerge with more clarity through this and the subsequent chapter.
In order for this theoretical formulation to make sense, it is necessary to
look in more detail at what performers experience as they listen to the story.
Although, in this chapter, I have separated out some of the influences on the
listening performers, it is important to appreciate these as intricately
interactional and interleaved. Playback performing is a complex activity and
one that is impossible to reduce into a closed, neatly articulated structure.
‘The Story stuff ’

It is striking that all of the interviewees began their answer to the question
about what was going on as they listened to the story by saying that they
attend first to what one interviewee called the ‘story stuff ’. Not surprisingly
they all stressed the importance of remembering the sequence of events, the
names of the main characters (especially that of the teller), and they looked
out for ‘crucial phrases’ that they might subsequently use in the enactment.
The performers attributed great importance to remembering these details
accurately; this was not only because they would need to represent the story,
but also because remembering the details was an indication of attentiveness,
acknowledgement and care. As one performer put it, the story is ‘precious
cargo’ that needs to be handled carefully. Although as many interviewees
told me, stories have ‘universal’ and ‘archetypal’ elements it is their ‘particu-
larity’ (names, places, particular expressions etc.) that makes them unique. To
remember these details is to preserve the dignity of the individual story.
Remembering the chronology of events may also maintain the psycho-

logical safety of narrative order. Robert Musil expresses this clearly in The
Man Without Qualities:
[W]hen one is overburdened…the basic law of this life, the law one
yearns for, is nothing other than that of narrative order… Terrible
things may have happened to him, he may have writhed in pain, but
as soon as he call tell what happened in chronological order, he feels
contented as if the sun is warming his belly. (Cited in Abbott 2002,
p.81)
It may be important for performers to remember events and details in their
order to build the kind of trust between performers and audience members
that is necessary for the handling of this precious cargo. As Musil’s passage
indicates, personal narratives – and perhaps a sense of identity – are held
together by the ‘cement’ of chronology and factual detail.
In contrast to this, many of the performers also spoke about listening out
for the ‘sub-text’ or for ‘what the teller does not say’ or ‘what lies behind the
story’. One person said about her particular response to a story that ‘it was
there hidden in the folds, in the gaps, of her story’. What can we make of this
desire amongst performers to attend to the unsaid? Does this not raise ethical
issues concerning the performers’ right to reveal aspects of the story that had
not consciously been intended? The danger of ‘imposing’ psychological
interpretations is recognized by Jo Salas:
Interpretation in the psychological sense means imposing one’s ther-
apeutic insight on the story; it is distinct from artistic interpretation,
the filtering of the story through one’s artistic sensibility, a process
which is integral in playback. (Salas 1999, p.29)
Despite this necessary warning, narratives are, as Paul Cobley tells us, shot
though with indeterminacies such that ‘readings’ will always involve imagi-
native speculations. When we listen to a story we add our own perspectives
and colour it with our own experience. Wolfgang Iser expresses this suc-
cinctly in respect of the literary text: ‘The stars in a literary text are fixed; the
lines that join them are variable’ (in Cobley 2001, p.137). As we shall see in
the remainder of this chapter, there is no doubt that the performers while lis-
tening to the story are also starting to draw lines between the fixed ‘stars’ of
the teller’s account.
The self and the playback performer

Perhaps the most demanding role of all is one that
traditional actors are not usually called
upon to master – being oneself. (Salas 1993, p.47)
I want to yield to the teller’s story. (A playback actor)
On the surface the positions represented by these two quotes seem contra-
dictory. The first stresses the importance of the actor’s self; the second
emphasizes the desire to relinquish the self in order to yield to the story.
There seems to be an apparent paradox with regards to the use of the self in
the discourse of playback performing. On the one hand, practitioners will
maintain that actors must be ‘authentic’ or be themselves. On the other hand,
they will talk about ‘letting go’ of the self in order fully to play the teller’s
story. It seems that actors need to use the self and simultaneously relinquish
the self.
What is important about these apparent paradoxes is that they make us
re-examine our reasoning. The seemingly contradictory statements made
regarding playback acting may offer us the opportunity to re-consider the
self in performance. A consideration of each ‘side’ in this apparent contradic-
tion will therefore be helpful.
Being oneself
In Chapter 5 I wrote of being moved by Viv’s description of listening and
empathizing with the teller’s story. A description which I considered clearly
demonstrated how playback can be an encounter with one’s own story through
the teller’s. Performers inevitably filter the teller’s story through their own
experience. For example at one performance held soon after the death of my
mother, a man told of the loss of his own mother and cast me to play him. It
was inevitable that I would draw on my own experience to perform his story.
There is no doubt that this enriched and energized the performance. But
there is also no doubt that it endangered it, in the sense that it heightened the
risk that my own experience would eclipse the teller’s. These are discussions
that I will consider in more detail in Chapter 9. For now I want to confine
myself to exploring the self in performance.
The privileging of self-revelation of the actor is not new. Jacob Moreno
requires that the protagonist/actor is
asked to be himself on the stage, to portray his own private world. He
is not an actor compelled to sacrifice his own private self to the role
imposed upon him by the playwright. (Moreno 1987, p.140)
In a similar vein, the theatre director Constantine Stanislavski writes that the
actor should not submit himself solely to the wishes of the director or the
playwright but, in order to enter his role, ‘he must use his own living desires,
engendered and worked over by himself, and he must exercise his own will
and not that of another’ (Stanislavski 1995, p.254).
There has been a thread running through dramatic theory and practice,
certainly since Stanislavski, which Richard Drain (1985), in his anthology of
20th century theatre theory, terms the ‘Inner Dimension’. The demand for
the revelation of the actor’s self on stage can be seen in the work of Artaud,
Grotowski, Copeau, Brook and Julian Beck for example. In different ways
these practitioners and theorists have sought to establish theatre practice
which is wholly or largely based on the self-exploration of the performers.
They have often contrasted their work, as do Salas and Fox, with what they
perceive to be a traditional or conventional theatre practice characterized by
artifice, the subjection of the actor to the playwright or director, and the dis-
appearance of the actor’s self behind the role. Consider the words of Jerzy
Grotowski, one of the most rigorous exponents of ‘self revelation’ in acting
who writes:
When I say that the action must engage the whole personality of the
actor […] it is a question of the very essence of the actor’s calling, of a
reaction on his part allowing him to reveal one after the other the dif-
ferent layers of his personality, from the biological-instinctive source
via the channel of consciousness and thought, to that summit which
is so difficult to define and in which all becomes unity. (Grotowski
1995, pp.279–80)
Grotowski seems to be saying that there is, at the ‘summit’, a unified founda-
tional self – a ‘soul’, perhaps, that becomes a ‘gift’ and a ‘provocation’.
According to Philip Auslander, the problem with these ways of conceptual-
izing acting is that, without considerable nuance, they
designate the actor’s self as the logos of performance…and assume
that the actor’s self precedes and grounds her performance and that it
is the presence of the self in performance that provides the audience
with access to human truths. (Auslander 1995, p.60)
It presupposes in some way that the actor has a stable, authoritative reference
point beyond mediation. It suggests that there can be a ‘true’ self beyond
culture, language and context. Can we trust the ‘self ’ as a source of ‘truth’
when playing the other? Does not the ineffable ‘otherness of the other’
always escape the inevitable limitations of the ‘authentic actor’? It is the
distrust of the self that gives currency to the seemingly contradictory
position with regard to playback acting.
Yielding
Describing what she tries to do as she listens to the story, one playback actor
told me that she wants to ‘open up to the story’. The actor, she says, needs to
‘yield’ and be ‘penetrated by the story’. Although not using this language,
many of the performers speak of letting go of the self in order that they can
‘hear the story deeply’. Phrases like ‘making yourself defenceless’ or ‘letting
go of the ego’ were used to convey a particular attitude that is required for
effective listening. The notion that the actor should in some way relinquish
the self was regularly stated by playback actors.
It is possible to trace this desire to ‘yield’ to the other through a number
of influential 20th century sources. The place to begin is, as Jonathan Fox
does, with the theologian Martin Buber’s analysis of the relationship
between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’. This has proved to be influential in conceptualizing
an experiential and person-centred ‘encounter’ between the self and the
other. He calls for a relationship characterized by the deep and present
sensing of the other in which ‘All real living is meeting [sometimes translated
as encounter]’ (Buber 1958, p.25). He goes on to write:
The relation to the Thou is direct. No system of ideas, no foreknow-
ledge, and no fancy intervene between I and Thou… No aim, no lust,
and no anticipation intervene between I and Thou. Desire itself is
transformed as it plunges out of its dream into appearance. Every
means is an obstacle. Only when every means had collapsed does the
meeting come about. (Buber 1958, p.25)
What Buber is calling for is a profound openness between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ so
they the other may be fully apprehended. This aspiration is recognizable in
the psychotherapist Carl Rogers’ notion of ‘person-centeredness’ which is
characterized by qualities of unconditional positive regard, empathy and
‘congruence’ (genuineness and honesty). Inspired as he was by Buber,
Rogers calls for a change in the therapeutic relationship which is neatly sum-
marized by Peter Schmid as ‘a shift of paradigms from the object to the
person, from observation to encounter, and from interpretation to empathy’
(Schmid 1998, p.50).
It seems that to ‘yield’ to the other is an act of empathy in which the self
is suspended in order to ‘walk in the shoes’ of another. Perhaps it is Rowan
and Jacob’s notion of ‘empathic resonance’ that is most useful in helping to
conceptualize the simultaneous desire of the playback performer to ‘be
oneself ’ and to ‘yield’ to the teller. These writers talk of acoustic resonance.
They write:
When two violins are located in the same room and a string is plucked
on one, the string tuned to the same frequency on the other will also
vibrate […] This is not merely imagining, extrapolating or

interpreting cues; the epistemic process is more direct. Subjectivity is
suspended to attune to the other. (Rowan and Jacobs 2002, p.80)
Between being yourself and yielding

A closer examination of the responses of playback performers suggests that
they are not wishing so much to relinquish the self as to open themselves up
to ‘deeper’, somatic and subconscious promptings. For example Di said that
she tries to, ‘concentrate on listening, and let the story, my body, mind and
heart go with it – then something will come.’ Many of the interviewees men-
tioned that ‘ego stuff ’ was a significant obstacle to listening: ‘I try to let go of
my ego stuff – my need to be seen as wonderful. If I am worried about how
people see me I block myself.’
What is suggested here is not so much a relinquishing of self implied by
the language of yielding and penetrating, but rather allowing the self to
resonate with the other. Steve, one of the performers, uses this metaphor
when he speaks of ‘attuning to the emotional tone of the teller’. Sarah talks
of ‘drinking in the story’ and in my own practice the idiosyncratic technique
I employ is to ‘breathe in’ the story – as if ‘inspiring’ will lead me to
inspiration.
This notion of ‘yielding’ raises significant issues that are not settled
amongst playback performers. To what extent is it possible for them to relin-
quish their own subjectivity in this way? Is it not the case that as Josselson,
with respect to writing ethnography, warns ‘No matter how gentle and sen-
sitive our touch, we still entangle ourselves in others’ intricately woven
tapestries’ (Josselson 1996, p.70)? Furthermore if this yielding is possible is
it desirable? As many of the performers pointed out to me, they need to listen
beyond what the teller is saying. Claire, for example, drawing on her
training with Jonathan Fox, talked of listening for three dimensions in the
story:
· the personal: ‘what does this story mean to me?’
· the communal: ‘what is the story saying to the people in the

audience?’
· the global: ‘what implications does this story have beyond this
performance?’
For her, the notion of ‘yielding’ is too passive and she preferred a more recip-
rocal relationship between listener and teller in which the former was more
actively involved in making sense of the story. From this perspective, the risk
is that ideas of ‘yielding’ deny the interpretive activity of the listener.
The notion of empathy has for some time been out of fashion –
no doubt because of the radical recognition of difference called for in post-
structuralist thought. From that standpoint the possibility of suspending

subjectivity seems a fantasy and a pipedream; how can we ever apprehend
the other free of culture and desire? But just because we recognize the inevi-
table dangers of empathizing with the other, there is no need to abandon it
as a possibility and an aspiration. It may be that an aspiration to ‘attune’ our-
selves to the other is crucial in a contemporary world in which the dangerous
tendency to wilfully misunderstand others threatens civic life (Arnold
2005).
With respect to the use of the self in playback acting, it seems that per-
formers need to maintain a tension between ‘being oneself ’ and ‘relinquish-
ing’ the self. To employ Buber’s language, actors need to hold a position on
‘the narrow ridge where I and Thou meet’ – a place he terms the realm of ‘be-
tween’ (1949, p.32). They need to listen carefully to the self, but also to be
very cautious of the self ’s desire. While recognizing that they will inevitably
‘contaminate’ the teller’s story with their own subjectivity, they need to
bring the self into ‘acoustic resonance’ with the teller – and later, of course,
with the other performers.
‘Whatever in me is jangling’
Describing what happens to her as she listens to the teller’s story, Viv told me
that she tries to notice ‘whatever in me is jangling’. This metaphor suggests at
least three areas for attentiveness on the part of the performer:
1. The first may be thought of as what ‘rings a bell’ for the actor – in
other words, what personal memories are activated by the story.
The performer is listening out for opportunities to identify with the
teller’s experience.
2. In some way, the story will ‘jangle’ in the performer’s body and
suggest possible directions for action and movement.
3. The jangling metaphor also suggests that there may be promptings
on the part of the actor of which she is only vaguely aware – what
may be called ‘subconscious promptings’ which suggest movement,
dramatic action or narrative structuring.
I will consider these inter-related aspects of the actors’ experience in turn.
Identification and the activation of personal memory

Personal memory can be a key source in response to the teller’s story.
Playback theatre can be an encounter with one’s own story through the
tellers. Consider this example which took place during a performance for
people involved in a voluntary agency, which offered support to users of
health services and professionals wanting to change the current provision.
I was the actor in this example:
The teller described a period in his life in which he was ‘desperate’ and in a
state of ‘terror’. He chose me to play him. I stood up. He said that during his
period of ‘depression’ his mother had died. It was a time in which he was
overwhelmed and distressed by persecutory thoughts. He spent days in his
room, afraid to come out. He described how, after his mother’s death, he
moved back to the North East and gradually began to improve with the help
of family and friends. The conductor asked him for a title, he suggests ‘Deliv-
erance’.
I felt a strong identification with the teller – I recognized the obsession
with persecutory thoughts, the wish to hide and I thought I knew what he
meant by the word ‘deliverance’. I was reminded of a period in my twenties
when I had had similar experiences. I noticed my breathing was becoming
heavier and there are ‘churning’ feelings in my stomach. I concentrated on
these feelings, knowing that I could make use them in the enactment.
For Louise, the process of identification began at the beginning of the per-
formance event and continued as the actor was chosen to be the protagonist.
In the pre-performance ‘mingling’, I was drawn to a group of young people

sitting in the front row and talked to them about what had brought them to the
performance. One of the young women, in particular, drew my attention. I
had the experience of looking in the mirror and the face that looked back at
me was one I know well. During the performance I found my eyes inadver-
tently meeting hers and a warm glance passed between us. This young
woman came forward to tell the last story of the performance. I knew that she
would probably choose me to be her and I was delighted when she did.
Their descriptions clearly exemplify the complex processes of identification

at work as the actor listens to the story. This capacity for identification was
stressed in different ways by all the performers I spoke to. As is evident in the
example above, this can occur when the actor directly remembers an episode
in their own life which is in some way analogous to that of the teller. It can
also occur less consciously, as we shall see later, when the actor is aware of
somatic and, what I will call, ‘subconscious promptings’.
It is not necessarily the case however that the performers’ personal iden-
tification derives from specific incidents in their life history. Consider this
example provided by Di:
I remember a story in which the teller talked of ‘the ghosts outside the
window’. The image produced a strong reaction in me and it became the
centre of my performance. It produced a physical spine-chilling sensation. I

identified with it in some way – although now I have some idea what I was
identifying with, at the time I didn’t. I didn’t try and analyze, I just went with it to
see what would happen.
This search for identification with the teller is always risky. Marie, in
common with many of those I spoke to, warned of the dangers of what she
called over-identification: ‘I used to identify too much – I don’t do that as
much now – it feels like it is robbing them a bit – like taking the story away
from them’. This is a key point that will be considered more thoroughly in
Chapter 9. For now however it is important to note the anxiety that actors
have about identifying with the teller’s story.
John Rowan conceptualizes identification along a continuum
between over-identification in which the listener (in his case the thera-
pist)‘…becomes overly enmeshed’ (Rowan and Jacobs 2002, p.52) and
‘disidentification’ where the listener fails to identify sufficiently. In
playback theatre there is, as Marie and other interviewees told me, a risk of
over-identification, in which the idiosyncrasy and ineffability of the other is
erased by a naive assumption of ‘sameness’ between the listener’s and the
teller’s experience. Disidentification may occur when the performer is
anxious about self-performance and technique, or when external concerns
are interrupting their capacity to empathize. In these cases the listener finds
no connection to the teller’s story. Both over-identification and
disidentification are significant barriers to effective playback performing.
The useful body

It is through my body that I understand other people. (Merleau-
Ponty 1962, p.186)
Stanislavski writes the following:
An actor on the stage need only sense the smallest modicum of
organic physical truth in his action or general state and instantly his
emotions will respond to his inner faith in the genuineness of what
his body is doing. (Stanislavski 1983, p.150)
Most improvising performers must rely heavily on the body. With no written
text to guide them they often find impetus through somatic impulses. An
awareness of, and relinquishing to, the body seems to be important for the
improvising performer (Marshall 2001; Pisk 1990; Zinder 2002). In a
rather intimidating passage, for example, Lorna Marshall writes:
you must be able to bring your body into free and easy contact with
the emotions, other performers, the language of the text, style of pre-
sentation and, eventually, the audience. It must be fully alive, in
dialogue with your inner life, and able to vividly express a chosen
human reality. (Marshall 2001, p.9)
Her language, at this point, is full of imperatives, yet she does express what,
in my experience of playback theatre, is relatively common: for the actor to
make use of the physical experiences that occur both during the telling of
the story and in the performance. It is clear from talking to playback per-
formers that the process of identification engages at the somatic as well as at a
cognitive/emotional level; autobiographical stories produce changes in the
body of the listener.
For example, Sarah described a ‘scream’ that seemed to begin some-
where in her gut:
…I remember a scream coming from my gut. In the deepest part I was listen-
ing from there was a scream. It was like a dark cavern. I couldn’t put words to
it – an ache in me. The scream started as I listened to the story – I felt it in the
pauses – it was not something that was said exactly, but it was there hidden in
the folds in the gaps of her story. It started in my body. I don’t know – it
touched an old, pre-verbal, place of knowing. I felt connected to this, to her,
and – in that moment – imagined I felt all our connection to it: her, me,
the company , the audience, our collective humanity; where the edges of our
unconscious selves touched hands and made a whole.
Another performer summarized her thoughts about the use of the body in
playback acting by saying: ‘I am trying to notice what parts of the body I am
feeling the story in’. This use of somatic response amongst playback actors
seems to be common. They are not alone in this: Robert Shaw remarks on the
increasing importance given by therapists to their own somatic responses to
the client. He writes:
By being aware of what our bodies are saying to us while working
therapeutically, and with the ability to use this information in an overt
manner, it is possible to contribute to the intersubjective nature of
therapy. Our embodied sense is a means of contributing to a thera-
peutic story that is co-constructed by client and therapist. (Shaw
2003, p.156)
There are two warnings that need to be made here. First, it is risky to regard
the body as a primary and unproblematic source of ‘truth’. The ‘arrival’ of
these bodily sensations does not come, as it were, ‘out of the blue’; they are
located in an immanent network of associations triggered by the teller’s story

and the style of its telling. Sensations that are present in the actor’s body are
always mediated through its representations. The body cannot simply be
conceived of as an originary source; the body is ideological. As Bordo
writes: ‘The body…is a medium of culture’ (Forte 1999, p.249) and as some
feminist scholars (Bordo 1998; Forte 1999) have indicated, the presumption
of an authoritative, corporeal source for the performer’s inspiration denies
the cultural representations of the body, which will inflect the direction of
any enactment. To maintain the body as an arbiter of truth in theatrical
exchange is, as Auslander proposes, to hold ‘a metaphysical even mystical
concept; it is asocial, undifferentiated, raceless, genderless and therefore
neutralized and quietist’ (Auslander 1992, p.92).
Second, the listening performer needs to be aware that even though the
performer may have a somatic experience of the other, it does not follow, as
Zahavi notes, ‘that I can experience the other in the same way as she herself
does, nor that the other’s consciousness is accessible to me in the same way as
my own is’ (cited in Shaw 2003, p.46). In relation to this point and to the
dangers of identification, it would be well to bear in mind the French philos-
opher, Emmanuel Lévinas’ stress on maintaining the ‘unknowable’ and
ungraspable nature of the other (see Erikson 1999). He suggests that this
ineffability calls us to responsibility toward the other.
Despite the problems of considering the body as a primary, unmediated
source of action for the performer, somatic material remains key in providing
direction to playback enactments. Indeed, I would argue that the ‘receptor
task’, in which ‘we must be in the moment, animal-like’ (Fox 1994, p.101) is
crucial to successful playback. The performer engages in a somatic encounter
with the teller’s narrative – the body serves as both source and as a key means
of representation.
Subconscious promptings
It is a remarkable thing that the unconscious of one human being can
react upon that of another, without passing through the conscious.
(Freud cited in Field 1989, p.512).
In the responses of playback performers there seems to a fairly consistent
reference to what I will loosely call ‘subconscious promptings’. By subcon-
scious I mean here those psychophysical phenomena existing in the mind
that are not immediately available to consciousness and which exist just
below the threshold of consciousness.
In their descriptions of listening to the story, performers often refer to
some sort of ‘unconscious’ or ‘non-cognitive’ apperceptions that can signifi-
cantly guide their work. Indeed, for one performer, Sarah, this is the kind of
listening which requires more courage and is likely to lead to a ‘deeper’

reception of the story: ‘I struggle between latching on to some idea and
having ambition for that and emptying myself, drinking in the story. The
latter takes more courage. [In this state of mind] images will fleet in and
out…’
Whilst recognizing her uncertainty with ‘the technical use of the term’,
she calls this listening from ‘an id place’. She contrasts this with an ‘ego’
place, which she conceives of as more cognitive, problem-solving and
self-conscious. She told me:
I mean by ‘drinking in the story’ a more ‘id’ place (if that is the right word)
than an ‘ego’ one. For me the ‘id’ place is an unconscious, deeper place
where I am not making cognitive connections, but am letting the story
emerge by itself. It’s a place where I let go of my need to know what I’m
doing. The images that come out are more spontaneous – me, the teller and
the story all combine in this place. I yield to its formation, letting it create
itself beyond my conscious capacity to control it. I am just a piece in its
co-creation along with all the other parts – the actors, the musician, the way
a piece of cloth might land upon the stage, the free-floating ideas that inter-
lock with another one to form a third. As an actor in this place I feel
vulnerable; not fully formed. I have lost myself a little to something greater
than myself. But out of this nothingness, if I can be courageous enough to
stay there long enough, I believe the best and most beautiful work emerges.
We obviously have to hang it on the form we’re doing, which keeps it
anchored in the story; grounded in reality. It means that we can drape
our unconscious co-creations upon a frame that we know will support them.
And that this will give them enough shape and structure to give back to the
teller in their service.
Nevertheless, for me it’s always an act of great courage to surrender
completely to not-knowing what will happen in each next second of an entire
performance, and to take my place in that. Every step outwards into the
enactment is a reminder to myself that I am stepping into this unformed void
– into the trust that something truthful will emerge. Sometimes I feel more
willing to do this than others.
While many of the performers choose the unconscious as the site from which
such inchoate promptings emerge, one interviewee, Susanna, thought it may
involve the performer paying attention to the ‘ancient part of the brain – the
amygdala’. The amygdala which lies in the temporal lobe of the brain is gen-
erally thought to have a role in the experience of emotion, particularly in the
‘neurobiology of anxiety and fear’ (Bear, Connors et al. 2002, p.597). What
is of interest is its use as a kind of metaphor by the performer to convey a
kind of pre-cognitive, emotional and ancient human response that she
wishes to draw on in her work. In that respect it operates in the roughly the
same way as the reference to the ‘id’ above. Both performers are trying to
conceptualize non-cognitive, perhaps ancient, psychophysical processes
that are at work as they listen to the story. There is some support for this
notion in the psychoanalytic tradition. For example Nathan Field writes in
arguing that therapists should pay attention to what he calls ‘embodied
counter-transference’:
it may well be that where very primitive emotions need to be commu-
nicated decent human rapport will not serve. Some states of fear, rage,
longing and hunger may date back to a time when no words were
available and psychic trauma could not be distinguished from
physical injury. In these cases bodily symptoms in the therapist may
provide the first clue to understanding. (Field 1989, p.519)
The theatre director Constantine Stanislavski talks about an unconscious
objective ‘which immediately, emotionally, takes possession of an actor’s
feeling and carries him intuitively along…’ (cited in Drain 1995, p.255).
The Polish director Jerzy Grotowski urges actors to ‘reveal one after the
other the different layers of his personality, from the biological-instinctive
source via the channel of consciousness and thought, to that summit which is
so difficult to define and in which all becomes unity.’ (Grotowski 1995,
pp.279–80).
Both theatre practitioners in their different ways have encouraged
their actors to utilize what we have loosely called here ‘subconscious
promptings’, however, it would be wise to sound a notion of caution from
two different directions. First, as Sarah points out above, these apperceptions
needed to be ‘grounded and anchored’ – there is the always the possibility
that they will bear no relation to the experience of the teller and are merely
the singular responses of the performer; an observation that raises significant
ethical considerations for the listener. Second, we should be cautious of
claiming authority for such self-promptings. As Judith Butler might say, we
should be careful of an ‘epistemological paradigm that presumes the priority
of the doer to the deed’ (Butler 1990, p.148) – one that presumes a self
which exists prior to, and stands behind discourse (Butler 1993, p.70).
Despite these warnings, however, it seems that performers value these kind
of experiences as being potentially indicative of the teller’s experience.
In relation to this is seems important to mention ‘trance’ at this juncture.
Sarah speaks of a ‘trance-like’ state as a relatively common feature and
describes it thus: ‘The rest of the world falls away. You forget you are in the
theatre. Like crossing the liminal threshold… Duende.’
While Marie recognizes the danger of ‘trancing’: ‘I have trouble with
trancing, it feels like springing off a diving board, diving into the water,
swimming deeply, coming out of the water, shaking my hair and saying
“What happened?”’
Trance acting, as Richard Schechner points out, is very widespread
across cultures and contexts and involves the performer enacting actions ‘not
of their own devising’ (Schechner 2002, pp.163–4) and, as is suggested by
Marie’s comments and by the striking difficulty performers often have in
remembering, ‘after the trance is over, an actor may or may not remember
what she said and did’ (Schechner 2002, p.164). It seems that performers
can enter a state in some ways like trance as they listen to the teller. Perhaps
however, as Claire, another performer, suggests, a better word for this may be
a state of ‘heightened concentration’. She told me that actors need to ‘step
into the world of the story – leave the world behind and lose yourself in
embodying the story’ [my emphasis].
Re-thinking the ‘self ’

How can we conceptualize the self of the performer in playback theatre?
This is an important question because performers often call on the self as
inspiration for their performances. What is inspiring them? The problems of
regarding the self as autonomous and a stable source of ‘truth’ for the per-
former have already been noted. The self is always in flux; it is inflected by
culture, context and desire. There is no point beyond contingency that can
provide an authoritative source of truth for the performer.
Perhaps we need to see the self not as an irreducible entity, capable of
self-knowledge and autonomy, but as a ‘a flux of contextualized identities’
(Hutcheon 1989, p.59). Or, as Lyotard puts it, a site or a ‘post through which
various kinds of messages pass’ (Lyotard 1984, p.15).
In terms of performance, the self, as Auslander has maintained ‘…is
produced by the performance it supposedly grounds’ (Auslander 1995,
p.60). In other words, selves are made and improvised within performance –
rather like the protoselves created through autobiographical remembering
(see Chapter 4 and Barclay 1994). Butler writes of the paradigmatic
‘presentist’ conceit that there is an ‘I’ that arrives in the world of discourse
without a history.
there is no ‘I’ that stands behind discourse and executes its volition or
will through discourse. On the contrary, the only ‘I’ comes into being
through being called, named, interpellated, to use the Althusserian
term, and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the ‘I’; it is
the transitive invocation of the ‘I’. (Butler 1993, p.70)
In light of the deconstruction of the ‘presentist’ self, we might instead regard
the actor as a kind of ‘intertext’ situated in a network of influences or
impulses, which cannot be seen as separate from the context in which they
arise. However, the choice of the trope ‘intertext’ limits the performative
nature of the process. What is more correct perhaps is that the self is being
created in performance. Duranti and Burrell suggest that jazz musicians are
on ‘a quest that is not only aesthetic but also existential’ (Duranti and Burrell
2004, p.92).
In searching for a metaphor to conceptualize the self of the actor in
relation to the story the Japanese playback practitioner, Makoto Tange’s
conception of a ‘tube’ may help: ‘The actor is simply a tube on stage. His Ego,
intention, personality can all vanish – a totally ‘selfless’ being. The lines of
the play just pass through his/her body’ (Tange 2002, p.12). The use of
‘tube’ was a translation from the Japanese and a ‘conduit’ may be preferable.
However, the notion of effacing the self is a problematic one, as Benjamin
noted in relation to storytelling: ‘traces of the storyteller cling to the story
the way that handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’ (Benjamin
1970, p.92). Nevertheless, the sense of the transitive that is suggested by a
‘tube’ renders it preferable to ‘being oneself ’ as a trope for the playback
actor. It may be worth considering other possible metaphors for the
playback performer (see Box 6.1).
This exercise is useful; however it is likely that the complexity of
playback performing will make the search for a suitable metaphor a futile
one. Each metaphor provides an insight into the process but none fully
encapsulate it.
Box 6.1 Possible metaphors for the playback performer

A sponge: but a sponge that alters the water that is absorbed by it – too
passive.
The performer breathes in and then exhales the story: in doing so, through
complex chemical reactions, she changes it. This seems to lack a sense
of agency; it seems too automatic.
A music producer at a mixing desk who blends the sound ‘channels’ together into a
desired effect: useful for conveying the multiple ‘channels’, but mislead-
ing since it suggests a director capable of controlling the precise config-
uration of the piece. Performers do not have that level of control.
An alchemist: gives a sense of ‘transformation’ but seems too much of a
mystical fantasy.
A resonating violin: this is a hopeful possibility since it enables us to
appreciate the processes of ‘attunement, decentring […] and introspec-
tion’ that Arnold (2005, p.23) believes constitutes empathic intelli-
gence. However it does not allow for the imaginative and conjectural
aspect.
Concluding reflections
One of my interviewees talked of the particular listening she aspires to: ‘I am
entering this other world half-way between self and character – a no-man’s
land, a half-way place’. In this liminal place, moment-by-moment, the per-
formers’ attention focuses and shifts: personal, representational, mnemonic,
somatic, affective and imagistic perspectives collide, cohere and interact to
inform the performer. In order to perform effectively they need to attend to
these perspectives and resist what Abbott calls the desire for ‘interpretive
closure’ (Abbott 2002, p.81) – the ‘channels’ need to remain open as the per-
formers move toward dramatizing the complexity of their response to the
teller’s narrative. It is a state of mind which bears resemblance to Freud’s
free-floating attention or to what Balint called a ‘harmonious, interpenetrat-
ing mix-up’ (cited in Rowan and Jacobs 2002, p.52).
To return to Buber’s notion of the ‘the narrow ridge between I and Thou’,
there is a paradox in the listener’s aspiration: as they allow this interpersonal
merger to occur they must also be careful not to dissolve the tension between
self and other – to do so would risk erasing the ‘otherness of the other’. The
performers wish to enter into the story with a receptive body and mind while
maintaining their separateness – both empathy and distance need to be
simultaneously at work as the actors listen to the story. In the next chapter I
will be looking further at improvisation and importance of the performer
holding a place on this narrow ridge.
Chapter 7
The Exploration of Occasion:

Improvisation and Playback Theatre
Performing Michael’s Story

This episode took place within a playback theatre performance at a community
mental health venue.
Michael [pseudonym] comes forward onto the stage in response to a general

invitation to audience members to tell their story. His story is set in Australia
about ten years previously. He had been travelling through the continent on
what he thought of as a ‘voyage of discovery’. The excitement, sense of
achievement and adventure made him feel happy and ‘good about myself for
the first time’. He told us that he felt that he had ‘found his feet’ and they were
‘firmly planted on the ground’ and he felt ‘rooted’ for the first time. As the only
male actor, I thought it likely that he would choose me to play him. I hoped he
would do so, as I was drawn to him and was beginning to get an idea of how to
play the part. He told us that, as he reached the heart of the Australian continent
and was visiting Ayers Rock, he began to lose his ‘footing’. He began to
‘over-reach’ himself. He said,
‘I began to believe unrealistic things about myself. I began to believe that I
could be a model or an actor, that I could do anything I wanted.’
These feelings grew in intensity and became what he later (after psychiatric
intervention) called ‘manic’. The feelings gradually gave way to depression and
he was hospitalized and eventually flown home to be re-united with his worried
and concerned family. At home, surrounded by his friends and family he began
to improve and he told us:
‘What I have learned is that I need people around me to help me feel
grounded.’
119
As Michael told his story the actors listened. They took the story into their
bodies, through the half-forgotten passages of their memory; they let the
story float through their minds searching for some image with which to
express it. They hoped that maybe a metaphor or another cultural narrative
would enable them to represent this story. They looked at the stage floor, the
coloured fabric, the chairs, the other actors, hoping that they might find
some resonance with the story there. They noticed how their bodies were
responding to the story. But still, as is often the case, as they entered the stage
they had very little idea of what to do – maybe just a movement or a word
that has come to their minds, or maybe nothing. It is now that the other per-
formers can help; perhaps one has an idea that they can all pick up, or
perhaps through their interaction a direction will emerge. The important
thing is that they listen and respond to the teller, to their own promptings, and
to each other. Once they stop doing that the performance is lost; actors start
talking over each other, they lose sensitivity to the aesthetics of space, they
lose contact with the teller’s story and they try to save themselves from the
humiliation and shame of a poor performance.
Surprise and danger

If the actor is spontaneous a ‘miracle can take place’. If she is uninhibited by
the blocks of anxiety and self-consciousness ‘the actor can intuit untold parts
of the teller’s story; use the cloth in such a way as to create a deep metaphor
for the story’s meanings; move the body in a way more expressive than
words; or be still’ (Fox 1994, p.84). For Jonathan Fox, spontaneity is ‘juicy’
and ‘hot’; it loosens ‘the grip of rationality’ (pp.86–7); it is ‘a kind of ecstasy,
an attunement which encapsulates thought’ (p.81). He is clear that spontane-
ity and improvisation of the teller’s story add something extra – something
that may not be so readily available to the performers if the enactment was
planned beforehand. He would perhaps agree with Susan Leigh Foster when
she speaks of ‘the suspense-filled plenitude of the not-quite-known’ that
gives improvised performance its ‘special brilliance’ (Foster 2003, p.4).
There is something Dionysian about improvisation. It can unsettle
accepted forms and bring an earthly vitality to the theatre. It can enliven the
rehearsal process and the quality of scripted work. I have heard that in Mike
Leigh’s film Vera Drake for example, in order to maximize the shock of Vera’s
arrest for carrying out illegal abortions, Leigh kept the actors in the dark
until the moment the truth was revealed to them on the set. He was looking
to capture their immediate responses on film. Playback theatre looks for a
similar kind of immediate reaction from the performers; it brings the
immediate physical and emotional responses of the actors to the story.
Improvisation takes us by surprise and so can offer new perspectives. Impro-
visation can revitalize the story. It can bring the past into the present
IMPROVISATION AND PLAYBACK THEATRE 121
moment. The emergence and vitality of the enactment through improvisa-

tion can bring the then and there of the story (told by the teller) into the here
and now of the performance (explored by the performers). Rather like the
notion of therapeutic ‘transference’, in which the patient’s past is revivified
in the here-and-now relationship with the therapist, improvisation in
playback can ‘loosen the grip’ of the story, take the teller, audience and per-
formers by surprise and provide an opportunity for them to see the teller’s
narrative in a different way.
Spontaneity is however a dangerous horse to ride: improvisers work on
the edge of ‘success’ and ‘failure’; cliché and stereotype are only a breath
away. In a second the ‘flow’ that all improvisers experience can slip into
actions that seem contrived and forced. One minute actors are responding to
each other as if they were one mind and body; the next they are clumsily
getting into each other’s way. Roddy Maude-Roxby is right when he says
that ‘the most important moment in improvisation is when you don’t know
what will happen next’ (cited in Frost and Yarrow 1990, p.55), but those
moments can be the most terrifying and disturbing – the possibility for per-
formers to feel ashamed and humiliated by their failure ‘to come up with
something’ is always there. In playback theatre there is always the risk that
the performers will get lost and, leaving the teller’s story far behind,
abandon themselves to improvisation’s intoxicating play. There is always the
danger that actors will be carried away by their improvisational skills and the
enactment will become a vehicle for their flair – the integrity of the story lost
to spectacle and ostentation. Improvisation and spontaneity are full of
potential and surprise; they also hold risk for performers.
In between
Perhaps it is this fragility of improvisation that is behind one of the most
striking features of the literature on the subject: the references many of the
writers make to contradictions (Zapora 1995), polarities (Fox 1994) or
‘tacking between’ opposites (Foster 2003). There is a sense in much of the
literature that the improviser is working within and across tensions and that
success lies in maintaining the tension between positions along a continuum
or across polarities. Susan Leigh Foster (2003) talks of the dancer tacking
between the known and the unknown. Tufnell and Crickmay speak of a ‘di-
alogue’ between ‘wildness and order’ (1990) while Fox, in a similar kind of
way, speaks of the actor oscillating between ‘structure and freedom’ (1994,
p.94). Duranti and Burrell speak of an ‘aesthetics of tension’ present in jazz
improvisation. They could as well be talking about playback theatre:
the tension between what is known and what is unknown, what
is possible and what is impossible, what is acceptable and what is
unacceptable, what is expected and what is unexpected, what is right

and what is wrong. (Duranti and Burrell 2004, p.85)
These references suggest a ‘balancing act’ in improvisation between the
familiar and the new, between abandonment and control, and between
freedom and structure. They indicate the delicacy of improvisation and the
constant need for reflexive awareness on the part of the performer: aware-
ness significantly heightened in playback theatre because the form deals in
autobiographical narratives. The performers need to maintain deep respect
and care for the story they have heard while at the same time expanding on
its possibilities and associations. Rather like the ‘narrow ridge’ of the last
chapter, improvisers find themselves in between. In this chapter I want to look
at the quality of this position of ‘in-betweenness’ that seems so characteristic
of the descriptions of improvisation.
It is perhaps inevitable that when speaking of such a fleeting and intan-
gible process there is a need to draw on metaphor and allusion. Such
ephemeral phenomena as dramatic and musical improvisation are difficult to
convey through literal and linear language. Let’s begin then with the
metaphor of the threshold (the boundary between two spaces) implied by the
term liminality.
Performers at the threshold…

Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and
between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, conven-
tion, and the ceremonial… (Turner 1969, p.95)
No one has been cast; no one yet knows who will play whom. Everyone has
heard the story but the direction the performers will take is as yet unknown.
In Performing Michael’s Story, which opens this chapter, the performers have
only hazy ideas of what will happen next. This is a moment before the char-
acters are created, the signs developed and the meanings read. There is
potential and energy here – it has intensity and it is often one of the times of
greatest uncertainty in a performance. This moment is a kind of ‘primordial
soup’ full of affect, memory, signifiers and images.
We improvise the moment we cease to know what is going to happen.
Setting the mind loose from the ongoingness of everyday life
To find what lies at the edge,
Behind our thinking, seeing. (Tufnell and Crickmay 1990, p.46)
This ‘at the edge’, ‘threshold moment’ is one of the most fragile ones for the
performers – it is now that they are often most vulnerable. It is important that
this moment of uncertainty is maintained and so the performers must, to
some extent, resist ‘easy’ resolution of the problems that face them. They
need to allow the enactment to emerge through the dynamic tension
between the task of representing the teller’s story and their encounter with
each other in the here-and-now: a task which requires risk and trust on
the part of the performers. This uncertainty increases the level of vulnerabil-
ity and the sense of exposure for the performers. The need for them to
maintain a high level of awareness of the moment potentially increases their
self-consciousness and may heighten their feelings of vulnerability and
exposure. At the threshold of performance the players need to remain open
and ready to respond to each other and to the emerging enactment.
Maria Elena Garavelli, the Argentinean psychodramatist and playback
practitioner, puts the notion of being at a threshold in the following way. She
terms playback theatre ‘teatro espontaneo’:
‘teatro espontaneo’ is an archipelago with bridges and crossings
where boundaries are erased.
Between narrative and theatre
Between the private and public
Between the artistic and the therapeutic
Between the personal and the social
Between the spontaneous and the theatrical. (Garavelli 2003, p.127)
At this threshold, where Bachelard tells us the ‘poet speaks’ (1994, p.xvi),
the performer and the teller’s narrative are potentially at a place of openness:
of offering new perspectives on the story. I qualify my statement by using the
word ‘potentially’, because the level of risk for the performers and, to
a certain extent, the teller continually acts as a counterweight to the
freedom to explore the occasion. Indeed, Jonathan Fox writes that playback
actors often fail because they fear ‘liminality’ (Fox 1994, p.101). At the
threshold – at the ‘entrance’ where we may perhaps be ‘entranced’ – there is
certainly possibility, uncertainty and unpredictability. There is a sense of the
‘provisionality’ to which Schechner (1993) refers in relation to playing –
there is ‘unsteadiness, slipperiness, porosity, unreliability, and ontological
riskiness’ (Schechner 1993, p.39).
Of course it is evident from the last paragraph that as I write I find myself
wanting to say two incommensurable things simultaneously. The actor is free
to improvise at the threshold but yet she is not. She is constrained by the
other performers, playback’s dramatic conventions, the task of representa-
tion and her own state of mind in the moment. There is a paradox here. The
paradox is that she is both constrained and liberated. Those things that con-
strain – the context; the ensemble; the ‘rules and conventions’ of playback;
the presence of the teller – are also those things that animate.
Being in the moment

Fox asks playback performers to ‘be brave enough to enter the moment with
a mind free from all protective considerations’ (Fox 1994, p.171). Of course,
the extent to which the ‘mind’ can ever be free from all protective considerations
is debatable. The notion of the spontaneous ‘happening’, unfettered by psy-
chological, social and historical constraints, is always a rhetorical one. It is
the rhetoric of a particular type of ideological yearning. It is a yearning for
the live and the unmediated – for ‘actuals’ as Schechner terms it (1988, p.51).
Despite the careful caveats we must place on the notion of entering the
moment, playback theatre is nevertheless an improvised form – one that
requires a heightened awareness of, and openness to, the moment.
The paradox of Zeno’s arrow points to the impossibility of conceiving of
the present moment, since the arrow, in motion, can never be said to be in the
present since that moment is infinitesimally small. Nevertheless, most
writers on improvisation regard being present in the moment as crucial, for
example, Johnstone (1999, p.171) encourages his students to keep their
attention on ‘what actually is happening’. Spolin maintains that ‘the intuitive
can only respond in immediacy – right now’ (1999, p.26) and David
Warrilow tells us, ‘Improvisation only means that which is not foreseen, that
which appears in the moment. Something is always appearing in the
moment. The point is how much attention you pay to it’ (cited in Lassiter
1995, p.317).
This absorption in the moment, characterized by Csikszentmihalyi
(1988) as ‘flow’, or by the playback trainer, Deborah Pearson, as ‘allowing
the story to emerge’ is one which seems crucial to effective improvisational
acting, as indeed it is in the psychodramatic tradition. The emphasis on
here-and-now awareness is clear, for example, in the work of Jacob Moreno.
He writes that his first conflict with the work of Freud concerned the
‘dynamics of the moment’:
The experiences which take place continuously in the context of the
Here and Now have been overlooked, distorted or entirely forgotten
[in Freudian theory]. Therefore, early in my writings…I began to
emphasize the moment, the dynamics of the moment, the warming
up to the moment, the dynamics of the present, the Here and Now,
and all its immediate personal, social and cultural implications.
(Moreno 1987, p.4)
He goes on to say that he is not writing from a purely philosophical perspec-
tive but from a therapeutic one. He draws attention to the here-and-now
reciprocal ‘encounter’ (Moreno 1987, p.4) between participants in the
therapy group. Moreno’s emphasis points toward an intense awareness of
others in encounter. It bears similarity to Buber’s ‘narrow ridge’ and points
to the central importance of the ensemble in playback theatre: a subject I will

address in the next chapter.
In a section reminiscent of Moreno, Fox clearly expresses the importance
of spontaneity in playback theatre:
spontaneity first requires that the senses be open to information from
the environment. To accomplish this receptor task, we must be in the
moment, animal-like. Second, we must be able to stand outside the
moment to make sense of what is occurring. We can then take action –
that is, perform a conscious act – which is no small achievement. This
action will in turn create a new environmental condition. Thus spon-
taneity is the ability to maintain a free-flowing constantly self-adjust-
ing cycle of sensory input, evaluation and action. (Fox 1994, p.101)
Fox gives a vivid picture here of the task of the performer seeking to find a
place between absorption inside the enactment and the cooler detachment
that is needed to ensure that the teller’s story is represented effectively. It is a
tension between the performative and representative which I will consider in
the next section.
Before continuing, it is important to sound a note of warning. Despite
this emphasis on the awareness of the moment in playback performing, per-
formers cannot achieve a state of ahistorical awareness of the present. We
must be careful of fetishizing the present moment in a desire to recover the
real from the ‘mediatized’ (Auslander 1999) and conclude that it is possible
to obtain ahistorical contact with the moment. I agree with Auslander when
he writes:
It is not realistic to propose that live performance can remain onto-
logically pristine or that it operates in a cultural economy separate
from that of the mass media. (Auslander 1999, p.40)
Performers are deeply influenced by memories and past performances that
intervene in the phenomenologically experienced moment. If we cannot
speak of being ‘in the moment’ directly without, in some way, fetishizing or
reifying it, then we can only point to what may be the signs that an actor is
‘in the moment’. These seem to be characterized by flexibility, responsive-
ness and openness. I present my own list drawn from experience and
discussion with other playback performers:
· Flexibility to the changing circumstances on stage.
· A high level of physical and verbal responsiveness to the other

performers.
· An ability to relinquish a planned direction in response to

changing circumstances.
· Openness to personal memory, identification, emotion,
physicality and sensation.
Karin Gisler, a Swiss playback practitioner, has summarized the characteris-
tics of effective playback improvisers. Her list bears much similarity to my
own:
the ability to translate thoughts into physical shapes and images
quickly and clearly; to say yes to what develops during a scene; to
support your partner; to move the story forward; to be sensitive to
the unfolding meaning of a story and to carry it further. (Gisler
2002, p.7)
Playback acting requires that performers allow the enactment to unfold or
emerge. To do this they need to be open to the moment-by-moment changes
onstage. In order to understand this more fully I want to return now to the
notion of performers working within – or between – energizing tensions. In
the following section I will consider three sources of tension: between the
referential and the performative; between the known and the unknown; and
between empathy and distance.
Tensions and the playback performer

Between reference and performance
In defining improvisation as ‘the exploration of occasion’, the poet Peter
Riley (cited in Dean 1989) neatly conveys the quality of here-and-now
encounter that is characteristic of improvisational acting in general, and
playback acting in particular. The performers are exploring the occasion of
the enactment – the moment-by-moment interaction with each other and
with the environment. This is a key element of playback; it brings life to the
enactment. By itself however it is not enough. The playback performers are
not only ‘exploring the occasion’: they are also responding to the teller’s nar-
rative. We could say that playback enactments develop out of a tension
between an encounter with here-and-now circumstances on stage and the task of
representing the teller’s story. To put this differently, I am referring to a
tension between the referential and the performative functions of theatre
(Fischer-Lichte 1997) or the ‘performance structure and processual flow’
(Lassiter 1995). Or, to use Parker and Sedgewick’s colourful language, I am
referring to ‘the torsion, the mutual perversion, as one might say, of reference
and performativity’ (1995, p.3). In playback theatre the performers need to
maintain the tension between representing the teller’s story and exploring
the occasion of the performance: if they represent the story without the
vivacity of improvisation the piece will lack interest and life; if they lose
contact with the story in their improvisations it will be, at best,
self-indulgent and, at worse, unethical and exploitative.
This tension between the referential and the performative is most clearly
evident in those remarkable moments during improvisation when what
happens in the live encounter onstage corresponds, seemingly accidentally,
to the story being enacted. When, by some wonderful synchronicity, what
happens between the performers tells the story. Consider this example taken
from a Playback Theatre York performance to gay and lesbian young people.
It was the first ‘full story’ to be told in the performance. The teller had
recently broken up with her female partner after the partner had been per-
suaded by her family to end the relationship. She felt angry and hurt. At one
point she said ‘I can’t be who she wants me to be – I can’t be a man’. This
account is written from the point of view of the teller’s actor.
THE PERFORMER
Across the space facing me stand three actors in a line; they are my lover’s
family. With words and gesture they beckon my lover toward them. She and I
are connected by a thin piece of white elastic, which stretches across the
stage as she moves away from me toward her family. I feel the increasing
tension in my hands as she does so. The elastic is doubled up so that I hold
two pieces. By the time she reaches her family it is fully stretched and I wonder
what will happen if I let go…
I let go of one of the connections. There is a rapid succession of
snapping, cracking sounds that shock me. The elastic is releasing its energy,
unpredictably striking the performers as it does so. I say, ‘I have to let go –
I can’t be what you want me to be’.
I still hold on to one piece of elastic. I am not sure whether to release it.
The teller had said that she was still in love with her partner and so maybe I
should hold on. But I do let go – perhaps because I want to repeat the shock
that it produces, or perhaps because I want to say that this relationship is
over.
I am left standing alone across the stage from my lover and her family. I
look outwards towards the audience – not towards my lover and her family –
and as clearly and assertively as I can say:
‘I can only be who I am’.
I repeat it – perhaps they didn’t hear it clearly and anyway, I can’t think of
anything else to say.
I bow my head; a trumpet plays mournfully.
The performers improvise with the elastic: with its physical, symbolic and
referential qualities. Its properties – explored through moments of, what
Smith and Dean (1997) call ‘non-referent’ improvisation – inform the ‘refer-
ent’ improvisation. In what is a ‘happy accident’ (and these often occur in
playback improvisations) the snapping elastic stands in for the snapping
relationship. Of course, crucially, the performers are able to exploit these
moments because the story has already been told. The suspense for the spec-
tators lies not in the development of the plot since they already know the
outcome of the story; it lies in what the performers do with it. The actor can
therefore, ‘play’ with the echoes and resonances that exist between the story
requiring representation and the embodied discoveries that emerge in the
encounter. The tension that is felt in the elastic and the shock of its release
across the stage is, in itself, both phenomenologically engaging and capable
of representing the separation contained in the story. If the elastic is a
metaphor, then the actors give space for it to ‘live’ so that they may explore
its own properties, while still being aware of its referential function.
The surprise is important for both the audience and the tellers. The
shock of the released elastic surprises the actors. They respond to the
surprise of the snapping elastic while simultaneously maintaining awareness
of established performance sequences (the use of elastic as a figurative device
to explore relationship is familiar to the York Company) and of their repre-
sentational ‘responsibility’.
I would propose that explorations of the phenomenologically experi-
enced moment such as this provide opportunities to, as Viola Spolin claims
for improvisation, topple ‘old frames of reference’ (1999, p.24). This opens
up a space for play on the meanings that may be attributed to the teller’s nar-
rative. For these brief moments the performers are led, not so much by the
characters they are playing, nor by the narrative they are representing, but by
the actions they are performing/experiencing.
In these moments there is a temporary disjuncture or rupture in the
fabric of the narrative. The ‘major building blocks of the apparatus of
Western theatrical representation’ (Lampe 1995, p.297) – ‘acting’, ‘charac-
ter’ and ‘narrative’ – are disrupted. This allows new ‘takes’ on the teller’s
story; ones that are not totally circumscribed by the limitations of an autono-
mous controlling ego or the demands of narrative. It may be that these
moments in playback undermine the limiting determinism of character and
narrative and thus present the teller’s experience in a Brechtian sense as ‘not
just taken for granted, not just natural’ (Brecht 1964, p.47). In so doing they
have the potential to expose the processes of narrative structuring and
unsettle the teller’s story because they dislodge it from the structures of
psychologism and narrative construction.
The tension between the performative and the referential is a key one
in playback theatre. My argument suggests that a seed of change is
made possible in the heightened awareness of here and now. If personal,
stable, fixed meanings are reinforced over time, in, what we might call, the
‘executive boardrooms of the ego’, then it is possible that the playback enact-
ment unsettles these and exposes them to the effects of the performative.
This can only happen when, to some extent, the performers can remain
‘betwixt and between’ the referential and the performative.
Between the known and the unknown

In her wonderful essay on improvisation Susan Leigh Foster proposes that
the ‘improvising dancer tacks back and forth between the known and the
unknown, between the familiar/reliable and the unanticipated/unpredict-
able’ (Foster 2003, p.3). For her there is a paradox here: the improviser can
never accomplish an ‘encounter with the unknown without engaging the
known’ (p.4). The etymological root of improvisation is from the Latin
improvisus, which may be translated as ‘unforeseen’ (Montuori 2003, p.239),
yet, as Foster argues, in order to reach the unpredictable, the unusual and the
unforeseen, improvisers need to work with what is familiar. Improvisation is
not the generation of the completely unpredictable, but rather may better be
understood as the working and re-working of the familiar – a process of
defamiliarization.
Specifically in playback theatre the performers are working with a
tension between that which is already known and that which is unknown or
is unforeseen. Indeed the effectiveness of playback enactments derives partly
from the degree to which the performers exploit the tension between the unfore-
seen and the familiar. There is much that performers do that is already familiar.
Their work does not escape the complex process of intertextuality as
explained by Roland Barthes: ‘Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits
of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social language’ (2000,
p.183). In rehearsal and in previous performances it is likely that they will
have enacted stories that bear similarity to the one they are currently per-
forming. They will have developed sequences that can be adapted for certain
types of stories and their personal and cultural histories will provide familiar
points from which to work with the story. Improvisations are not brand new
creations free from history or culture – they are also deeply influenced by
what has already been and this is especially the case in relation to previous
performance sequences.
Perhaps because the performers are under pressure to respond quickly,
there are gestural patterns or ‘past performance sequences’ that are fairly reg-
ularly employed by the York Company for example. These are not con-
sciously codified and discussed but they certainly are present in the
company’s repertoire. One may draw a parallel here with the practice
of commedia dell’arte. In commedia improvisations the ‘lazzo’ and ‘burle’
were tried and tested sequences which actors would introduce when they
considered it fitting. David Griffiths writes:
The main aspect of these lazzis and burles is that they would be most
thoroughly prepared and rehearsed and honed, so that in perfor-
mance they could almost certainly guarantee a favourable response
from the audience. Such a ‘stockpile’ would take years to learn and
assemble, and would most certainly be jealously guarded from plagia-
rist rivals. (Griffiths 1998, p.19)
The role of what Keith Sawyer calls these ‘ready-mades’ (2000) is well rec-
ognized in jazz improvisation. Charlie Parker, for example, is said to have
made use of a personal repertoire of 100 motifs, each of them between four
and ten notes in length (Sawyer 2000). Playback improvisers are no differ-
ent. Playback performers also have these ready-mades. These are not
playback ‘forms’: they are not explicitly codified, named or rehearsed by the
performers like lazzo, but rather constitute part of the implicit ‘language’ of
the company. The use of space to explore distance and intimacy in relation-
ships is one example of these ‘ready-mades’. As in the love rejected example
above, once the actors are in relationship across space they have created a
structure within which they can work. There no detailed plans for what will
happen next, but performers may well feel more confident now that, to use a
musical analogy, they are playing in the same key.
Like lazzo, these sequences are often used and adapted; they suggest the
risk of over-simplification and caricature. Under the pressure of the improvi-
sation there is always the danger that the performers will draw on tired and
oft-used ideas and not permit the fearfulness of the unknown to enter their
performance. Maintaining a state of not-knowing is a key ingredient of
effective playback performing, yet often it is the most terrifying experience
for the performers. Not knowing what will happen next and stifling the
desire to just ‘do something’ while being watched by an audience is one of
the most difficult aspects of improvisation. Additionally the pressure on the
performers is heightened by the presence of the teller to whom they have
responsibility.
Between empathy and distance

I do not intend to go over the points made in the previous chapter with
regard to the use of empathy, personal memory, the self and the body in per-
formance. It was clear from the performers’ reports that they are aware of the
dangers of over-identification. They recognize the distortion possible when
a performer assumes that their own experience bears close similarity to that
of another. Effective playback requires that the performers maintain a
tension between ‘using the self ’ to inform the enactment and employing
enough detachment to recognize the limitations of identification and
empathy. This is a crucial element of effective and ethical performance and

will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 9.
A paradox on the threshold: being alive in the moment

requires an acceptance of death
There is, it seems to me, an intimate relationship between improvisation and
death. The improvised disappears as soon as it is created; indeed its creation
partly depends on relinquishing the self. Ruth Quinn (2003) argues that
the improvising, ‘performative self ’ is released from the deadly hand of
self-judgement and self-aggrandizement by ‘an old close friend with arche-
typal significance. This is Death’. She goes on to argue that:
A strong umbilical attachment to death means that we can move
forwards into a new ‘awake self ’, an alive self who is prepared to
work with the unknown and court true spontaneity and improvisa-
tion. (Quinn 2003, p.18)
Victor Turner recognized that ‘liminality is frequently likened to death’
(Turner 1969, p.95) and, in the literature of improvisation, there certainly
seems to be a sense of transience. For example, to Johnstone, ‘Theatresports
is disposable theatre’ (1999, p.63); or to Dario Fo, the aim is to create ‘a
throwaway theatre, a theatre which won’t go down in bourgeois history, but
which is useful, like a newspaper article, a debate or a political action’ (cited
in Frost and Yarrow 1990, p.74). As Read tells us ‘theatre is the transient art
par excellence’ (Read 1993, p.12); improvised theatre dies as soon as it is born.
Memory of it fades quickly – in my experience more quickly than other
kinds of experiences. Unless the enactment is regularly recalled or recorded
in some way, it is lost. As Phelan writes: ‘it may be that theatre and perfor-
mance respond to a psychic need to rehearse for loss, and especially for
death’ (Phelan 1997, p.3). Sometimes I find this painful. For someone
brought up to over-value recognition and who secretly – and not so secretly
– harbours the need for accolades, the transience of playback can be a frus-
tration. Perhaps this is why I write this book. It is a kind of monument.
There is paradox in Quinn’s proposal: to live in the moment means to
acknowledge and embrace death. This is what Fred Harris is referring to
when he writes to fellow playback practitioners:
the more we face the limitations that constrain us in life, the more
fully we experience the courage to live. I refer to this state into which
classical tragedy wakes us as ‘mortal awareness’ because it is about
being mindfully mortal: vulnerable to fate and destined to die, yet
committed to life and its strivings. (Harris 2002, p.8)
Benjamin (1970) believed that oral storytelling was dying out because our
sense of the ‘epic side of truth, wisdom’ (1970, p.87) was being lost,
presumably through the reductionism of science and the privileging of
‘information’. He goes on to say that the loss of this wisdom leads to a weak-
ening of our idea of eternity and, by implication, death. The storyteller he
writes: ‘is the man (sic) who could let the wick of his life be consumed com-
pletely by the gentle flame of his story’ (Benjamin 1970, p.108).
Perhaps that partly explains our fear of ‘entering the moment’ and the
‘fear of liminality’. Perhaps that is one reason why audiences often seem a
little frightened by the storytelling and enactments in playback perfor-
mances. Perhaps we know that it will play with and disrupt our own
monuments against death – our autobiographical narratives. For whatever
reason to remain ‘in the moment’ – to ‘explore the occasion’ – can produce a
sense of vulnerability in the performers and in the audience. This idea that a
sense of mortality is crucial to the improvising performer will be picked up
later in Chapter 9 when the characteristics of ethical performance are
considered.
Concluding comments
Despite the risks of caricature, formulaic acting or over-identification,
the improvisation of the teller’s story is central to playback’s approach.
Although rehearsal and preparation of the enactment may lead to a more
carefully crafted and thought-through response, playback’s founders and
practitioners have preferred the immediacy of improvisation. The reason for
this may be that improvisation can challenge predictable and settled versions
of personal and cultural narratives; it loosens established cognitive schemas.
Of course it can also confirm stereotypes and repeat tired and worn
formulations, however I would support the claim of Viola Spolin that, in
improvisation the
combination of individuals mutually focusing and mutually involved
creates a true relation, a sharing of fresh experience. Here old frames of
reference topple over as the new structure pushes its way upwards, allowing
freedom of individual response and contribution. (Spolin 1999,
p.24) [my emphasis]
Improvised works allow new structures to emerge not only because of their
unpredictability but also because, Barron claims, they unsettle the ‘the rule of
law and regularity in the mind’ (Barron 1990, p.249). It may be playback
enactments are improvised in order to maximize the possibility of this
destabilizing dynamic – and so create openness. The tensions within which
performers work are crucial in unsettling the story while at the same time
maintaining its integrity. Playback actors have a great deal of freedom to
play with the story, but to do so ethically and responsibly they need ongoing
awareness of when the integrity of the story is sacrificed to the spectacle of
the enactment, or the familiar (is sacrificed) to the exotic. They need to be
hyperaware of how immediate action can affect the overall shape of the
piece and of when the familiar slips into cliché. It is a state of mind and body
that Foster calls ‘vigilant porousness’ (2003, p.7). As we have seen, it is a
risky position to take and the ensemble has a crucial role in both safeguard-
ing the performer and maintaining the necessary vulnerability and exposure.
Chapter 8
The Ensemble
The days following the death of my mother were a kind of ‘confinement’.

Removed from the everyday demands of my work I took time, as an Australian
playback friend had advised me, to ‘let it in’. Rather like the arrival of a baby in
the household, the curtains were metaphorically drawn; the usual circadian
rhythms of day and night were disrupted. The house was decorated with cards
of condolence and people took the opportunity to write or say words of tender-
ness and intimacy that were both welcome and out of the ordinary. It was a time
of separation… Some – mainly those at the edges of my social network, but not
exclusively – were fearful of me, as if I was dangerous or fragile and likely to
shatter if they spoke a clumsy word.
I had lost both parents. I was now, as some friends told me, an orphan. In
the middle of the night as I made my way to the toilet, I would become aware of
a silence. It was as if the sound of my parents had been extinguished. Paradoxi-
cally I was aware of their presence by their complete irrevocable absence.
It seemed to me, as it had done when my father had died three years
previously, that those characteristics of the lost parent that, in some way, I
acknowledged as my own, came to the fore. The death of my mother provoked
feelings that seemed to lie beyond words – in the pre-verbal pre-cognitive world
of the small infant.
I found myself wanting to reach for the ineffable – the fall of light on a leaf – I
wanted to meditate, pray, reach for the spiritual. Early in the morning following
her death, unable to sleep, I walked into York and took photographs of the
Minster (the cathedral).
I had to return to the ‘world’. One way in which that return was marked was
the first playback rehearsal. As I left the house for the rehearsal on a Sunday
morning following her death in late January, I could faintly smell the spring. I
recalled the feelings of freedom that always accompanied going away with the
company – like the trip to Poland in 1997. These feelings were tantalizing; they
disappeared almost as soon as I became aware of them.
I knew what story I wanted to tell at the rehearsal – it was about the silence in
the middle of the night. When I had the opportunity I told it. The conductor
asked me what the voices of my parents sounded like. Later she told me she had
135
wanted to hear their voices and then to have them silenced. I found it very dif-
ficult to answer the question. I said ‘Loving and mildly critical,’ but I wasn’t
very happy with that.
As the enactment began I found myself longing for silence. I wanted the
actors to listen to the silence. All I wanted was that they would hear the silence
with me – perhaps in respect of my mum and dad, but more profoundly, in
solidarity with me. What I wanted was a kind of ritual – like those two minute
silences ‘for the dead of both wars’ – in which I could ‘mark’ their absence
together with the company.
When the enactment finished I told everyone about my wish for silence
and we discussed the problems of conveying the quality of silence through
theatre. What I did not say – perhaps because it seemed mawkish or too
indulgent – was that what I wanted was simply to be silent with them –
together to mark the absence and my loss.
There is something special about a company. It is something I can feel

in the air the minute I walk in the room. There’s an energy, an urgency
to make the most out of the moment. (Fox 1994, p.160)
Most playback theatre performances are staged by a company of players who
have worked together for a significant length of time (in some cases over 20
years) and who meet regularly to rehearse. Each company is different in the
way it balances performance and rehearsal, in its styles of conducting and
performing, in its decision-making processes, and in the way it marks its
separate identity; nevertheless there are significant similarities amongst
them all. They all work within the recognizable structures of playback
theatre and all tell their own personal stories during rehearsals. The fact that
companies base their rehearsals around their own stories means that a signif-
icant amount of trust and intimacy is possible within the companies; it is
often the case that company members will have told stories in rehearsal of
many of the personal and professional triumphs and disasters that mark
adult life. These are not therapy groups yet in some ways they do function as
such – providing support and validation for their members. For example, my
accounts of the death of both my father and mother were told to the
company and these episodes have made their mark in the course of my
grieving. For many playback practitioners, the intimacy and familiarity of
‘company life’ is an important factor in their continuing involvement in
playback theatre – for many it is as important as performance.
It is my proposal that the ensemble is essential to both effective and
ethical playback theatre and that a company that work together regularly
and have reasonably honest and open relationships with each other are more
likely to provide the necessary conditions for risk-taking and openness in
performance. I will also propose that because they have worked regularly
THE ENSEMBLE 137
with each other’s stories, they are more likely to have the necessary sensitiv-
ity to ‘play the other’. I will conclude by considering the role the ensemble
has to play in the providing the conditions for ‘collaborative emergence’, a
key feature of effective playback.
Protecting the performers: providing psychic safety

Playback performing can be disorientating and stressful; without planning
or preparation players step forward onto the stage to enact a story that they
have just heard. They do not know what the other actors will do, they often
don’t know what they will do; they are always at risk of exposure and humil-
iation. Performers need to rely on each other during these moments of
uncertainty. They need to trust the others sufficiently to be able to take risks,
make ‘offers’ and wait for the enactment to develop. This can be vertiginous
and psychologically disorientating. Ensemble, with its disciplines, may
engender the conditions for openness of performance, but may also operate
to contain and support its more disruptive and disturbing aspects.
Later in this chapter I propose that ‘not-knowing’ is an important quality
in the playback performer. It is often the case that ‘not knowing what to do’
or what exactly is happening onstage can produce more lively and truthful
performances. For that to be psychically possible the performer must be able
to trust the others and know that if they are lost others will step in to support
them. In my experience this is often the problem with working with
impromptu companies that are, for example, formed at conferences; per-
formers tend to force the direction of an enactment and avoid a state of
‘not-knowing’ because they do not have the trust or knowledge of each
other’s work and fear that they will be left exposed. Consequently the per-
formance can lack the vivacity of working in the present moment.
It would be wise to avoid an over-simplistic formulation here however;
the connection between the quality of relationships within an ensemble and
the quality of their performances is a complex one. There is no guarantee
that a company of players who get on well with each other will produce
quality theatre. It is perfectly possible that a close company will be compla-
cent, inward-looking, and self-congratulatory, ‘shutting out’ the audience
from the dialogue between stage and auditorium that is crucial to playback’s
success. As Schechner writes:
There is, unfortunately, no easy relationship between the quality of
life in the group and the quality of the group’s work… At some level
the life of the group determines the life of the work. But it is necessary
to be delicate and discriminating before announcing what the rela-
tionship is between group life and work life. (Schnechner 1994,
pp.271–2)
There is always the possibility that groups will ‘turn inward’ and pay more
attention to their internal life than to the requirements of performance. Yet if
‘close companies’ do not necessarily lead to good quality work, the reverse is
perhaps more likely to be true: that good quality playback theatre is not
possible without relatively clear and honest communication between the
performers. Performers need to respond quickly to each other on stage, they
need to take risks and trust that other actors will support them; they need to
maintain a high level of here-and-now awareness, and they need to relin-
quish their own ideas and quickly assume those of another performer
without too much resentment. These are requirements best fulfilled in an
ensemble that, over time, has built up fairly robust relationships with each
other.
Protecting the tellers

The relative safety of rehearsal can provide the opportunity for performers to
develop the necessary sensitivity to each other and to each other’s stories.
Being able to ‘practise’ with each other’s stories is crucial in this respect. It
sensitizes performers to the impact dramatizing personal stories can have, it
gives the actors the opportunity to find the ‘narrow ridge’ between self and
other. Being able to enact the stories of others in the rehearsal room gives the
actors the chance to take risks and explore the limits of their risk-taking.
Of course there is no guarantee that an established company
will necessarily provide ethical protection for tellers. Over-confidence,
over-zealousness, discord or an imbalance of power-relations in the group
can blind the company to the sensitivities of tellers. In performance actors
and musicians have a great deal of power. To paraphrase Marx, in their hands
they have the means of representation and interpretation. The openness and
playfulness of effective playback performing can lead performers to be
exhilarated by this power and so be at risk of abusing the teller’s trust. The
ensemble, in rehearsal and in performance, can steady the performer and
obviate some of the risks of playing the other.
The ensemble acts as a brake on the performers’ ‘exhibitionism’ and it
can encourage actors to be less timid and tentative. The rehearsal room is
often the place where performers take responsibility for their work and
where they discover the limitations of their emotional and theatrical range.
In performances it is rare for tellers to directly challenge the work of an actor
– in rehearsals it is not. For this reason the work of a company in rehearsal is
essential for both the aesthetic and the ethical quality of playback theatre.
Collaborative emergence
Usually improvisation emerges out of the interaction of the players; no one
performer provides the dominant voice or can impose the direction of an
THE ENSEMBLE 139
enactment. Not even the teller’s actor is given authoritative control of the
direction of the piece. To use Keith Sawyer’s phrase, the enactment develops
through a process of ‘collaborative emergence’. Although Sawyer’s analysis
relates to children’s play, a brief adapted survey of his work will support my
point. Collaborative emergence is characterized by the following qualities: it
is unpredictable and contingent; ‘it emerges from the successive actions of all
the participants’ (Sawyer 2002, p.340), and so is not the conscious creation
of any one person, and, crucially,
the emergent narrative cannot be analyzed solely in terms of the
child’s [actor’s] goal in an individual turn, because in many cases a
child [actor] does not know the meaning of her own turn until the
other children [performers] have responded. (Sawyer 2002, p.340–1)
[my additions in square brackets]
Narrative and meaning are created not through the authoritative control of
one perspective or voice, but through the multiple consciousnesses of the
performers. Meaning is not so much immanent but is emergent, discovered
through the response of others, and, one might add, by the interpretive work
of the audience.
Consider this example of a Playback Theatre York performance which
took place in a town in Northern England near Christmas time. It was to an
audience of users of mental health services and the professionals who work
with them. In providing this vignette I am trying to convey how the enact-
ment emerges through the collaboration of the performers. No one quite
knows how it will develop – they are taking cues from each other as the
piece unfolds. It is also evidence of the complex processes of identification
between the teller and the actor that shape the work. The actor describes his
experience thus:
Early in the performance a man in his mid-forties referred to a story I had told
at the outset of the performance concerning the illness of my mother. He
spoke about this with some emotion. He glanced at me a few times as he
spoke and I was aware of him nodding in recognition as he did so.
He comes onto the stage to tell his story. I know he will choose me. He
tells us about the death of his own mother 11 years previously. He had been
in hospital for depression and he tells us that his mother had visited him regu-
larly. When he was discharged he received a phone call to say that she was
very ill and he should visit her soon. He describes being in two minds. It was
his ‘pay day’ and he had to collect his money. However he decided to visit his
mother. This was the last time he saw her, she died a short time after his visit.
He chooses me to play him and Greta to be his mother.
I stand waiting for the others. Remembering my own mother, I am trem-
bling and feel close to tears. When the music stops I walk out to stage right
and face the audience. I see Greta/Mother to my right. She is smiling. I

cannot look at her.
I say, ‘It is December 1999 and it is very close to Christmas. Now I want to
remember my mother and to tell you about her’.
Voices from uncast actors behind whisper ‘She’s here to see you, look at
her’. I don’t know what to say, my mind is blank, Greta/Mother is smiling, I
walk toward her dazed. The voices behind me call out ‘She has a gift’.
She is holding a yellow cloth. Everything seems very slow, very deliberate.
I worry that everyone will know that I don’t know what to do. I feel foolish. I
look into her eyes. I still can’t think of much to say except ‘I’m glad I have seen
you’.
Greta/Mother says ‘Here, son,’ and hands me the yellow fabric. I hear
my own mother’s voice in hers.
The other actors move in front of her. They draw her away stage left. She
is disappearing. I plead, ‘Mum, Mum! Please don’t go. I’ve got more I want
to say to you’.
I am left on my own. I have closed my eyes. It is silent. I am holding this
piece of yellow cloth. The music plays, it sounds plaintive. I open my eyes, it
feels different – more definite somehow. The other actors have draped
Mother in a purple cloth. They surround her. I try to approach, but they hold
up their hands to indicate that I should come no closer.
I look at the yellow fabric in my hands and caress it. Voices from the other
actors call out, ‘Remember her,’ and ‘Tell us’. They repeat this. Finally, after
what seems like a long time, I look to the audience and say ‘It is now a long
time since my mother died. I still remember her. I will not forget her’. Indicat-
ing the yellow fabric, I say ‘I still have this. She gave it to me. I will always have
it. There are still things I want to say to her. I want to say thank you to her. I
want to tell her that I love her’.
We all turn to the teller.
As I face the teller I am aware of a deep sense of connection and recogni-
tion between us. He stumbles to thank me.
I hope the reader can get a sense of the actor stumbling through this piece.
He has very little idea what to say or to do next, and it seems he is being
moved forward by two related impulses: his identification with a dying
mother and by what the company are doing around him. It appears that the
actor does not know what to do from moment to moment and is dependent
on the other performers for the development of the piece. From after the
moment that the actor spoke those brief opening words about remembering
his mother he is led forward through interaction with the other performers –
who themselves have very little idea of how the enactment will progress.
Everyone is in the dark; no one really knows what will happen next. The
not-knowing is crucial to playback’s effectiveness. It is crucial because
allowing the enactment to emerge – or ‘to become’ – through the interaction
THE ENSEMBLE 141
of multiple ‘voices’ opens up the possibility for what Mikhail Bakhtin calls
‘event potential’. Bakhtin proposes that:
It is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that
requires a plurality of consciousnesses, one that in principle cannot be
fitted within the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to
speak, by its very nature full of event potential and is born at a point of
contact among various consciousnesses. (Bakhtin 1984, p.81)
I am using Bakhtin here to suggest that in course of a playback improvisa-
tion, ‘truths’ will emerge through the contact of ‘various consciousnesses’ –
truths that possess the vivacity of ‘event potential’. Bakhtin searches for a
‘dialogic sense of truth’ that does not transcribe away the ‘eventness of the
event’ and does not exclude the particular, the unfinalizable and the unfore-
seen. Morson and Emerson explain:
The dialogic sense of truth manifests unfinalizability by existing on
the ‘threshold’ (porog) of several interacting consciousnesses, a ‘plu-
rality’ of ‘unmerged’ voices. Crucial here is the modifier unmerged.
These voices cannot be contained within a single consciousness, as in
monologism; rather their separateness is essential to the dialogue.
Even when they agree, as they may, they do so from different perspec-
tives and different senses of the world. (Morson and Emerson 1990,
pp.236–7)
Bakhtin was describing the novel, not the theatre. In fact he argues that
drama is ‘a monolithic genre’ in which the focus on the character, the author-
ity of the director, and the drive toward the final resolution of differences in
classic tragedy, reduce the possibilities of polyphony (Carlson 1999, p.314).
Despite this Carlson proposes that because of the ‘multiple voices of enact-
ment’, Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism and polyphony ‘should provide a rich
area for the study of the creation of meaning and of psychic relationships’
(Carlson 1999, p.322).
It is the potential for capturing the complexity of reflexive voices in
playback enactments and the stress Bakhtin places on the threshold event
that makes his ideas so fruitful for conceptualizing playback theatre. The
actor, moved by memories of the death of his own mother, enters the enact-
ment. There he reacts to, and interacts with, what is happening on the stage.
He does not know what will develop and so he depends upon the other
performers to provide him with ideas and with something to respond to. In
these circumstances what can develop is work enlivened by freshness and
surprise. In some ways like the shaman, the actor enters into or relives the
teller’s experience. The performer, with memories of his own loss in mind
and body, responds to what is happening before him in order to represent
the teller; to do this he is, in many cases, reliant upon what the other actors
and musicians offer. The requirement on Greta and me to represent the
teller’s story and to play their parts never disappears, but rather is inflected,
moment-by-moment, by phenomenological experience. I would suggest
that it is the task of the ensemble to create the conditions where moments of
collaborative emergence can be shaped into theatre capable of responding to
the teller’s narrative.
My reference to the shaman may ring alarm bells in the reader. I am
cautious of drawing parallels to practices such as shamanism which are
deeply embedded in their own culture. The tendency to borrow from other
cultures in this way is fraught with danger: the indiscriminate use of ‘ritual’
in playback discourse for example tends to mask the cultural contingency of
ritual practices. Despite this warning, as we have seen in Chapter 6, there
often is a desire amongst playback actors to enter into, or allow themselves to
be penetrated by, the teller’s story; in that sense, like the shaman, the actor
performs the person’s ‘affliction’. But, as Dwight Conquergood points out in
his essay on the Hmong shamans, such ‘intimacy leads to vulnerability on
the part of the shaman as much as the patient’ (Conquergood 1999, p.45). In
playback theatre performers often become vulnerable as they emotionally
and somatically identify with the teller’s story; it is the presence of the
ensemble that allows them to take that risk. As importantly for an ethical
performance, the ensemble provides a brake to over-identification and its
attendant risks.
Concluding remarks
I have argued in this chapter that ensemble work is crucial for both effective
and ethical playback theatre. The rehearsal constrains and liberates playback
performers; it also provides some protection for its tellers. Allowing the
enactment to emerge through the collaboration of the performers has its
risks, but it is, nevertheless, the means by which the story can be opened up
and new, surprising and fresh perspectives introduced.
Chapter 9
The Ethical Limitations

of Playback Performing
In Barry Unsworth’s novel Morality Play, a group of medieval travelling players

arrive in a small town in Northern England to perform their Play of Adam and
Eve. Finding that the townspeople are more concerned with the recent murder
of a young boy, one of the players proposes to the troupe that they ‘play the
murder’ instead. Initially shocked by the proposal, it prompts the company to
debate the ethical and epistemological questions raised by the suggestion. Is it
morally acceptable to play someone who is still alive? What authority do they
have to represent events that have recently taken place? Their discussion has
direct relevance to playback theatre:
‘Play the murder?’ he said. On his face was an expression of bewilder-
ment. ‘What do you mean? Do you mean the murder of the boy? Who
plays things that are done in the world?’
‘It was finished when it was done,’ Straw said. He paused for a
moment or two, glancing round into the barn with his prominent and
excitable eyes. ‘It is madness,’ he said. ‘How can men play a thing that is
done only once? Where are the words for it?’ And he raised both hands
and fluttered his fingers in chaos.
‘The woman who did it [the murder] is still living,’ Margaret said. ‘If
she is still living, she is in the part herself, it is hers, no one else can have
it.’ (Unsworth 1996, pp.63–4)
To these medieval performers, the idea of playing something that has only been
done once and for which there is no authoritative words seemed strange and
somehow blasphemous. What ‘authority’ did they have to enact and interpret
real events? Surely, they argued, it is only God who can give things meaning. As
one actor remarks, ‘Players are like other men, they must use God’s meanings,
143
they cannot make meanings of their own, that is heresy’ (Unsworth

1996, p.64).
There is, as Margaret makes clear, one further anxiety for the actors
which goes to the heart of my concerns in this chapter: how can they play
someone who is ‘still living’? Surely ‘she is in the part herself, it is hers, no
one else can have it.’ Margaret’s concerns are ontological ones (how is it
possible to take a part of another when they already have it?) rather than
ethical ones; nevertheless she does raise the crucial question for those
involved in the dramatization of autobiographical narratives: how can we
presume to take on (or ‘take over’ perhaps) the persona of another? For these
actors, playing the murder involves two transgressions from their under-
standing of what can properly be played: they become involved in making
meaning, which they consider a divine task and they presume to take on
another’s identity – a seemingly impossible one.
They do go on to ‘play the murder’ and, like the players in Hamlet,
expose the real culprit through their dramatic exploration. What are of
interest for the purpose of this book are the ethical issues these passages raise
for playback theatre. Performers risk ‘heresy’ by making ‘meanings of their
own’ from the real events of people’s lives and they presume to take on the
identity of another. Is this ethically acceptable and, if it is, what are the prin-
ciples that should guide the performers? This chapter will debate these
issues.
Before getting into the substantive arguments however, a consideration
of some questions I have asked myself as ‘a white, heterosexual, English,
middle-class, male performer’ will locate the issues raised by Unsworth’s
book within contemporary playback theatre practice:
I have asked myself what I would do if, as a white, heterosexual, English,

middle-class man, I was cast as the teller’s actor when the teller was, say, a
black New York rapper, or a man into and identified with the London gay
scene, or for that matter a woman who is openly expressive around sexuality.
Would it be possible for me to do justice to their stories? Of course it is imme-
diately obvious that my choice of tellers exposes my cultural limitations,
assumptions and even ‘hang-ups’. Why did I choose those tellers in particu-
lar? I am sure that my choices tell you far more about me that they do about
them. Nevertheless my dilemma does raise some issues that are critical for
me as a playback actor.
If cast in these roles how should I react? I could, of course, refuse saying
that I am unable to play such a role convincingly…
In this chapter I will attempt to address my dilemma. The questions raised

go to the heart of the playback and bring into question the ethical
THE ETHICAL LIMITATIONS OF PLAYBACK PERFORMING 145
responsibilities of the performer: what are the limitations of the playback

actor? Can we play a teller no matter how culturally unfamiliar to us? If we
accept that our performances are always influenced by our culture and
ideology then is it ethically acceptable to represent another? Can the per-
former ethically assume the power of interpretation over another’s story? We
should not kid ourselves here, the mediaeval players were correct; playback
enactments are always adding meaning to the teller’s story. If all of this is
ethically acceptable, then what might be some of the principles that would
guide performances?
These issues and questions are not new to the playback community. The
March 1996 issue of Interplay (the newsletter of the International Playback
Theatre Network) was a key one in marking a significant change in the
development of playback with respect to issues of cultural diversity. With the
subtitle ‘What special education will white companies and actors need?’ the
movement seemed to formally recognize for the first time the cultural limita-
tions of the performer. More specifically Johnson asks, ‘where will white
conductors get training in decoding the African-American schema and story
so that actors can playback these stories with integrity?’ (Johnson 1996,
p.4).
It appears that, at least in this publication, the playback community was,
for the first time, confronting the cultural limitations of the playback
movement. The notion of the ‘authentic’ actor able to respond to any story,
no matter how culturally ‘strange’ was being brought into question. This is
an important moment in the development of playback theatre. For the first
time they were asking: what are the limitations of playback acting? Can we
assume that with good will and ‘authenticity’ an actor can take on any role
no matter how culturally unfamiliar? Can there ever be such a thing as the
‘universal performer’?
In order to get this question into focus, it will be helpful to look at
opposite sides of the debate. This will enable a clear view of the arguments
for and against what we might call the possibility of the ‘universal per-
former’. The debate might be said to lie between the ‘organic approach’ to
acting on one side and, what I will call the ‘radical difference approach’ on
the other. In other words, between those who consider that the performer
can discover organic truths through her authentic encounter onstage, and
those who would argue that whatever is produced by the actor is always
inflected by culture and ideology. Although to create this oppositional
binary may prove a useful strategy, it has its dangers. Few would take up a
trenchant position on either side of this debate; most would respond by
saying, ‘It depends’ – on the context of the performance, the nature of the
audience, the experience and cultural sensitivity of the performers and so on.
The ‘organic approach’

I have already considered this approach under the heading of ‘being oneself ’
in Chapter 6, and so will not rehearse the arguments at length here. Briefly, it
is an approach to acting which would hold that if the actor is authentic and
fully reveals herself on the stage then she can transcend difference and find
universal truths. It is an attitude to performing which emphasizes the power of
empathy to close the difference between self and other. It stresses the truthful-
ness of the performer’s identification with the teller.
As an apologist and enthusiast of playback theatre, this concept of
authenticity is one for which I have a great deal of sympathy. I am aware of
many times in which I have felt that I have revealed something of myself in
portraying the teller’s story. Or at least, I have made use, for example, of my
own experiences of depression, neurotic anxiety, loss or the joys of parent-
hood. I find myself in an uncomfortable position, since questioning these
ideas of authenticity and self-revelation expose me to the risk of ‘losing my
footing’ as a playback performer. I confess to a fear that such an examination
may lead me to destroy the beliefs that sustain me as an actor and make
playback theatre such an important part of my personal and professional life.
Nevertheless the question remains: can we trust the actor’s self to that
degree, especially when it comes to playing another who is significantly dif-
ferent? Can we trust in the performers’ authenticity? Or do we conclude that
to do so is to rely on a true, universal self beyond culture and language, a
position that is difficult to sustain given the impact of the post-structuralist
rejection of single truth and stable meaning?
The ‘radical difference approach’

This ‘approach’ comes from two main directions in order to critique the
notion of the authentic actor who can depend on the ‘truth’ of the actors’
experience. The first direction stresses the radical, idiosyncratic and ineffa-
ble difference of the ‘other’. The second emphasizes the inevitable cultural
and ideological influences on all acting; this may be especially the case for
improvised acting where, under pressure to do ‘something’, the dangers of
slipping into cliché and stereotype are so present. I will look at each in turn.
The first critique of the ‘organic’ approach focuses on the risks of eradicat-
ing the other through representation. The feminist Hélène Cixous warns of the
delights and dangers of identification. Elin Diamond explains:
Cixous is describing the mimetic pleasures of identification –
becoming or inhabiting the other on the stage or in spectatorial
fantasy; I stand in for her, act in his place. Such acts are distinctly
imperialistic and narcissistic: I lose nothing – there is no loss of self –
rather I appropriate you, amplifying my ‘I’ into an authoritative ‘we’.

(Diamond 1999, p.390)
Cixous’s concern is that the consequences of identification are the denial of
difference and distance. I force myself into the teller, engulfing the subtleties
of his experience, erasing his identity and replacing it with my own. I
possess him. My empathy precludes his otherness. Because the processes of
identification are so intense in playback, this danger is always present. The
presence of the teller and the need for the actor to improvise may potentially
collapse the psychic distance between performer and character and between
teller and actor. Far from offering a viewpoint on the idiosyncrasy of the
other, empathy may occlude it. Differences of gender, ethnicity and sexuality
may be erased in this process of identification.
Cixous is not alone in her concerns; the point is compellingly made by
bel hooks in a passage which could be read as a forceful and rather sarcastic
critique of playback.
No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to
know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell
it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Rewrit-
ing you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still the
colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now in the centre of my
talk. (hooks 1990, p.152)
A recent playback performance to delegates at a conference exemplifies
these concerns. During the enactment of a story concerning the problems
encountered by a man travelling by train with a disabled friend, an actor rep-
resented the disabled man as passive, and suggested through his speech and
movement that he may also have a learning disability. In his feedback the
teller said, ‘That was great, except my friend was much more capable than
you portrayed; he was, in fact, a lawyer’. This was a gross example of the
dangers of playing the other. It highlighted the risk that through stereotyp-
ing and presumption the idiosyncrasy of the other is appropriated and
erased.
Second, the organic approach can be criticized for ignoring culture and
ideology. If we cannot escape ideology and culture then we cannot rely on the
personal experience of the actor as a source of incontestable ‘truth’ (Love
puts it this way: ‘representation is inextricably embedded in dominant ideol-
ogy’, 1995, p.276). She encourages actors to resist acting practices which
trust in the ‘truth of the actor’s experience’ – the most well-known of these
being, of course, the ‘Method’ and asks the question: ‘Whose experiences
can reflect any truths other than those of the culture in which they were
raised?’ (Love 1995, p.277). From this position then, playback performers
can do no other than reveal their cultural and ideological position in perfor-
mances – the notion of the ‘universal performer’ is a fiction.
Brecht takes a slightly different tack and warns that identification will
mask the socio-political circumstances of the drama. He writes:
In order to produce A-effects, the actor has to discard whatever means
he has learnt of getting the audience to identify itself with the charac-
ters which he plays. Aiming not to put his audience into a trance, he
must not go into a trance himself… Even if he plays a man possessed
he must not seem to be possessed himself, for how is the spectator to
discover what possessed him if he does? (Brecht 1964, p.49) [my emphasis]
In this sense identification risks a mystifying ‘naturalness’ potentially sug-
gesting that the circumstances of the protagonist could be no other, that they
are immutable. As Brecht writes in his prologue to The Exception and the Rule,
‘We ask you expressly to discover/That what happens all the time is not
natural’ (Brecht 1930, p.110). The processes of identification and empathy
which are so revered in the ‘organic approach’ are rejected here because they
either eradicate the idiosyncrasy of the other, or mask the socio-political
forces at work in all identification.
Performance as a way of deeply sensing the other

Should these concerns leave us pessimistic about the possibilities of repre-
senting the other in playback? Must we see it always as a form of
colonization or possession? These issues have been considered by Dwight
Conquergood in relation to his practice as an ethnographer of performance
– a researcher and performer of cultural practices. While recognizing that
performances cannot take place in ‘ideological innocence’ (Conquergood
1985, p.2), he wonders if they have the epistemological potential of ‘deeply
sensing the other’ (a hopeful possibility for playback practitioners). In the
remainder of this chapter I want to introduce Conquergood’s mapping of
different ‘performative stances toward the other’ and propose some ethical
strategies that may reduce the dangers and worst excesses of ‘playing the
other’.
Conquergood identifies four performative stances toward the other
which he considers ‘immoral’ (it is important, I think, that Conquergood is
not afraid to use the unfashionable language of ethics here).
1. The custodian’s rip-off. This is characterized by detachment and

the plundering the experience of the other. In playback terms it
could be considered as treating the stories of the other as
trinkets to be collected and taken home. For Conquergood the
immorality of such performances ‘can be compared to theft and

rape’ (Conquergood 1985, p.6).
2. The enthusiast’s infatuation. This leads to facile and over-eager
identification with the other. It assumes that goodwill and
enthusiasm are sufficient. Conquergood quotes Tzvetan Todorov to
illustrate his point:
Can we really love someone if we know little or nothing of their
identity, if we see, in place of that identity, a projection of ourselves or
ideals. (cited in Conquergood 1985, p.6)
The ‘enthusiast’ makes the assumption that their feelings of
goodwill toward the other will overcome the problems of
representing him. In playback terms it may be the belief that
because I have experienced, say, bullying at school I can understand
the systematic oppression of black people in the UK. As Walter
Benjamin argues, if we do so we will fail ‘to touch the strangeness
and the resistance of a reality genuinely different from our own’ (in
Conquergood 1985, p.7). This position is, for Conquergood
immoral because it trivializes the other.
3. The curator’s exhibitionism. Here Conquergood identifies the danger
of making the culturally different exotic – of romanticizing the
other in order to astonish the audience. He writes that the ‘manifest
sin…is Sensationalism, and it is an immoral stance because it
dehumanizes the other’ (Conquergood 1985, p.7). In playback
theatre the danger is that the performer will use the teller’s story to
shock, astonish or excite the audience.
4. The sceptic’s cop-out. Finally, the sceptic concludes that the chasm
between the self and the other is so deep that there is no possibility
of closing it. To Conquergood this is a morally reprehensible
position because it ‘forecloses dialogue’. As I have argued
throughout this book, in playback theatre the performers respond
to the story out of their subjectivity, their sense of the theatrical,
and in response to the rest of the ensemble. This is what playback
can offer; the teller and the audience understand this and give the
performers their permission to show their response. The ‘sceptic’
relinquishes this possibility and, in the face of the impossibility of
fully playing the other, leaves the stage.
Towards and ethics of playback theatre

The teller is not asking that the actor get the story ‘right’, for this is
impossible, and implicitly understood by the teller. Rather, they are
asking that the actor meet the spirit with which they themselves told
their story. ‘The actor’s attempt here is what is crucial – not the outcome.’
(Penny 2002, p.4) [my emphasis]
As an antidote to the pessimism of these ‘immoral’ performative stances,
Dwight Conquergood writes the following:
One path to genuine understanding of others, and out of this moral
morass and ethical minefield of performative plunder, superficial silli-
ness, curiosity-seeking and nihilism, is dialogical performance…
[T]he aim of dialogical performance is to bring self and other
together so that they can question, debate and challenge one another.
(Conquergood 1985, p.9)
Never has a sense of the other seemed more crucial for our own humanity.
When there seems so much wilful misunderstanding of the other, it may well
be that playback theatre can offer a forum where the self and other can be
brought together: a space as Jonathan Fox puts it for ‘radical social encoun-
ter’ (1995, p.4). In Conquergood’s words it can ‘bring self and other
together so that they can question, debate and challenge one another.’ There
is no doubt in my mind that playback theatre can offer such an opportunity
largely because audience members dare to tell their stories and actors dare to
embody them.
However, as we have already seen, there is always a risk that we
will eradicate the difference of the other in our performances – that
well-intentioned empathy becomes oppressive colonization of the other. I
would like to offer some suggestions toward an ‘ethical disposition’ in
relation to the other that may work against this. I have deliberately chosen
the word ‘disposition’ rather than ‘principle’ because it more accurately
conveys the relational, active nature of the playback experience. I whole-
heartedly support the words of John Caputo: ‘On their best day principles
are the faded copies of the singularity of concrete situations… Principles fall
before the demands of concretely situated responsibility’ (Caputo 2003,
p.179). He then goes on to say that in real life situations, principles give
way to:
the insight, the acumen, the nimble skill, the adroit light-footedness,
and the heartfelt love that holds sway in the multiple settings of
ethical life, settings so diverse and unpredictable, too polymorphic
and unprecedented, to be gathered up and codified. (Caputo 2003,
p.179)
The vivacity of the living experience is lost in codes of conduct and so is the
relational. I would support Richard Kearney when he proposes that the
question of ethics concerns the face-to-face ‘disposition’ toward the other.
Ethics concerns how we are ‘disposed’ to the other, not a ‘position’ which is
closed and non-relational.
It is clear that this notion of the ethical subject as a dis-position before
the face of the other is radically social and political in its implications.
(cited in Read 1993, p.91)
As playback performers, we cannot escape from ideology or from our own
partiality. However, in my view, this is morally acceptable as long as we don’t
claim to be doing more that is humanly possible and that we recognize our
agency and accountability. Christian Penny’s (2002) statement that it is the
‘actor’s attempt that is crucial – not the outcome’ seems to express clearly the
point I am making. As a rule of thumb perhaps we should accept Anna Livia’s
advice when it comes to playing the other: ‘conjecture good, appropriation
bad’ (1996).
One might ask why we need an ethics of playback theatre. Maybe we
should do what comes ‘naturally’ to us. Maybe as we have sometimes said in
Playback Theatre York: we just need to ‘be ourselves’. But, as we have seen,
what is natural is always ideological and anyway, as Richard Kearney has
pointed out, ‘Ethics is against nature because it forbids the murderousness of
my natural will to put my existence first’ (cited in Read 1993, p.94). I would
concur with Alan Read:
An ethics of performance is an essential feature of any philosophy and
practice of theatre. Without it a set of cultural practices which derive
from a very specific arrangement of power relations between people
are unhinged from responsibility to those people. (Read 1993, p.6)
What then might an ethical disposition toward playback performing look
like? To consider this I would like to return the reader to the dilemma I posed
at the opening of this chapter: am I able to play a teller whose cultural experi-
ence is significantly different from my own? My thinking continues in the
following way:
If I was to improvise one of these tellers I would have little to go on except for
cultural stereotypes which, given the tellers’ social position, would most likely
be oppressive and insulting. So what am I to do? Well, of course, the first
thing is that I would avoid the immediately obvious characterizations – just as
I hope an actor would if he were to play a middle-class Englishman. But then
what?
There is no point in denying difference: being black, from New York and
into rap music, or being into the London gay scene is part of personal identity
and to deny its importance would surely be a renunciation of the person’s
identity.
My conclusion is that the answer to my dilemma must lie in two direc-

tions. First, I must acknowledge and, as best as I can, represent the experi-
ence of the teller. There will be much of his or her experience with which I will
be able to identify. My own life experiences will to some extent be a guide. For
the teller it will be important that I make an attempt and that I show him that I
have listened to and understood his story.
But there will always be a gap – or perhaps a chasm – between my por-
trayal and his experience. So what I need to do, I think, is keep the gap
between me as the ‘actor’ and me as the ‘character’ open and represented.
In other words, I must allow the limitations of my acting to be visible.
My first recommendation for an ethical playing of the other could therefore

be expressed as:
1. Make the process of representation visible

If we, as playback actors, dispense with the idea of authentic acting, then we
need to make the gap between self and other visible onstage. Our responsi-
bility is to convey that the enactment is not the authoritative version of the
story – that it is work in progress, that it is one interpretation of many that are
possible. We have a responsibility to expose the processes of representation
at work in the performance. In other words we accept, along with Brecht and
then Boal (Boal 1979), that the theatrical illusion must be punctured so that
the spectators are aware of the provisional and mutable nature of reality.
To some extent I am arguing for the kind of acting that Brecht (1964)
recommends in The Street Scene. The actor is not totally absorbed in empathic
identification with the character but, to some extent, she is a ‘demonstrator’
who tells the story but maintains a visible gap between herself as performer
and the character she is demonstrating. An example may illustrate the issues
facing the performer in these circumstances:
I was asked to play an angry and disturbed 13-year-old boy. I am in my 50s.

How can it be possible for me to play someone whose experience is to far
from my own? Clearly the audience were aware and probably a little amused
by the problem I faced. I did not want to pretend to be 13 – that might cause
some laughter if I did it well, but would be disrespectful to the boy I had been
chosen to play. It would only ever have been a caricature. So all I could think
to begin with was a rather twisted posture, an arm covering my face (I had a
vague image of Anthony Sher playing Richard III here) and the opening line:
‘I am 13 and I don’t want anyone to see me’. This piece of dialogue seemed
more like reportage than the natural speech of a 13-year-old boy, and as
such may have worked to represent the gap between performer and charac-
ter.
I stayed with this twisted and closed posture throughout, occasionally

jabbing at those who came too close while reaching out with my small finger
feebly trying to make some contact. It was not a convincing performance –
but perhaps it did offer the teller (the boy’s sister) an image on stage with
which to think and wonder.
What else could I have done? The following are some strategies that may
help the performers ‘enact’ the inevitable gap between the actor and the
character:
· Use, like Brecht, the narrator role and so comment on the action
from a rather more distanced position.
· The teller’s actor can briefly express – as a performer – the
problems of representation she faces. I have seen this done
occasionally by Playback Theatre York, it has the virtue of
drawing attention to the gap between actor and character.
· The performers may choose to work with an extended metaphor
which allows exploration of the story, but avoids the problems
of naturalistic portrayal.
· The teller’s actor is careful not to give herself up to strong
emotional identification. The tension between the performative and
the representational needs to be maintained.
However the teller’s actor and the company do this, the key point is that the
gap needs to be visible and represented. Of course a black teller who casts a
white person from a very different cultural background to play him will be
aware of the disparities and will make allowances for that. The spectator has
a choice about how far they enter into the ‘as if ’ of the theatre event; it would
be a mistake to underestimate the active involvement of the audience
member. Nevertheless the maintenance of the gap between the actor and the
character is an acknowledgement on the part of the actor of the inevitable
‘failure’ of their work. It is an acceptance that their playing of the other will
always be partial and ‘inaccurate’. At a political level it is also a refusal of – or
a resistance to – the idea that ‘we are all the same really’. From the point of
view of ‘radical difference’ the notion of universality always eradicates dif-
ference and usually replaces it with the images and discourse of the
dominant ideology.
2. Vulnerability: body awareness and mortality

In the conversations of Playback Theatre York there is one piece of advice
which, like the wisdom of the tribe, is regularly repeated. It is that when you
are feeling vulnerable and uncertain of yourself you are most likely to give a
good performance. The company recognizes, as I am sure many playback
practitioners do, that the vulnerability of the performer is one of the factors
that permit lively and committed work. Vulnerability can permit the per-
former to be open to the teller’s story as well as to be closer to their own
emotional world. It can of course work in the other direction: the performer,
haunted by fearful vulnerability, can close off and be defensive. In that
case their work is likely to be formulaic and lacking in responsiveness;
nevertheless in order for the performer to work sensitively and, I would
argue, ethically, he needs to remain vulnerable and a little uncertain. The
proverb pride comes before a fall is never truer than in playback theatre where
the risks of exhibitionism are so great. Without a certain level of vulnerabil-
ity the performer is in danger of sacrificing the teller’s story to their own
desire to be seen.
How can we conceptualize this vulnerability without slipping into
self-abnegation and self-serving, false humility? One answer I would suggest
lies in the body. Accepting that we need to search for an ethics that is ‘rela-
tional’ and is based on our ‘disposition’ toward other, I am drawn to Terry
Eagleton’s work. He argues, in his search for what he calls a ‘material moral-
ity’, that it ‘is the mortal, fragile, suffering, ecstatic, needy, dependent,
desirous, compassionate body which furnishes the basis of all moral
thought’ (Eagleton 2003, p.155). For him it is in the vulnerability and
exposure of the body that a relational ethics may lie. He argues for what he
calls a ‘materialist morality’ located in the ‘moral body’ (2003, p.157).
Taking Lear as his example, he writes:
In the course of the drama, Lear will learn that it is preferable to be a
modestly determinate ‘something’ than a vacuously global ‘all’…
[This is because] he is forced up against the brute recalcitrance of
Nature, which reminds him pitilessly of what all absolute power is
likely to forget, namely that he has a body. Nature terrorizes him into
finally embracing his own finitude. (Eagleton 2003, p.182)
Relinquishing the ‘fantasy of disembodiment’, Lear finally comes to recog-
nize that when his subjects told him, ‘I was everything; ’tis a lie – I am not
ague-proof ’ (Act 4, Scene 6). Eagleton goes on to argue that, not only does
the recognition of mortality allow us ‘fellow-feeling’; it also acts as a brake to
power. Wonderfully pithily he writes: ‘If power had a body, it would be
forced to abdicate’ (Eagleton 2003, p.183).
An ethics of playback developed out of being ‘before the face of the
other’ may best be found in the body. It is the body that stands before the
other. It is in the vulnerability and exposure of the body that a relational
ethics lies. I am not suggesting here however that the body provides a final
and authoritative source for an ethics of playback. It would be wise not to

fall back into the trap of recreating an ‘essential’ body. However, the
material, mortal body may be a useful trope to construct such an ethics.
Fred Harris, a playback practitioner from the United States, proposes in a
similar vein to Eagleton that, what he calls ‘mortal awareness’, is a key char-
acteristic of effective playback performing. For Harris it is about being
‘mindfully mortal: vulnerable to fate and destined to die, yet committed to
life and its strivings.’ He suggests that a performer who possesses such
awareness helps ‘us remember that our lives are limited and final, the actor
helps us feel a renewed connection to life energy’ (Harris 2002). Readers
may also be reminded of the links between improvisation and death I drew
in Chapter 7.
3. Standing before the teller

The performer stands in for the teller; she also stands before the teller. The
teller watching on stage is never more than a few feet away from the per-
former playing her. There is no opportunity for the teller to directly
influence the enactment except by her presence. If audiences are called to
suspend willingly disbelief in the theatre, then in playback theatre the teller
is called to suspend willingly and temporarily control over how her personal
story is represented. This is a tremendous gift on the part of the teller and a
huge responsibility of the part of the performers. Jo Salas writes that the per-
former draws her work from ‘an empathic sense of an actual, present human
being’ (1999, p.25). She contrasts this with what she calls ‘traditional actors’
whose technique may distance them from the teller. I am not sure I fully
accept Salas’ contrast; nevertheless her call for an acute awareness of the
teller is surely important in maintaining ethical performance.
4. Sensitivity to and keen awareness of difference: the ‘otherness

of the other’
In searching for a contemporary ethics and politics of playback beyond ‘the
illusion of a universally binding ethic’, Jutta Heppekausen writes:
Playback theatre is one of those practices that enable the complex
possibility of real contact, real meeting to take place between people.
In this, it represents a form of moral learning… The meetings, which
occur between people, happen face to face; there is an emotional rela-
tionship. (Heppekausen 2003, p.3) [my emphasis]
She finds an ethics of playback in the acceptance and recognition of differ-
ence; the ‘opening of a dialogue’ through the recognition of the ‘other’; and
the acceptance of ambiguity and uncertainty. Her approach to playback
eschews organized or codified formulations of ethical positions, instead pre-

ferring to stress the ethics that are called for in relationships with others.
This notion of the ‘face-to-face’ encounter as the ground of ethics is found in
the work of the French philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas (see Erickson 1999).
Lévinas considered the other to be ‘unknowable’ and ungraspable. He
suggests that this fact calls us to responsibility toward the other. Jon Erickson
writes of Lévinas:
Lévinas continually states the importance of the maintenance of sepa-
ration between self and the Other as essential for maintaining the
ethical relation; in particular he marks the separation that prevents
one from seeking reciprocity with the Other, which could as some
point easily dissolve into an illusion of a complete identification
between the two parties. (Erickson 1999, p.10)
Over- and easy-identification with the other (Llewelyn 1995) is, as we have
already seen, one of the dangers of representation in playback theatre.
Lévinas calls for a sustained awareness of the irreducible otherness of the other.
It is an attitude essential in playback performing.
5. The role of the ‘citizen actor’

Most playback practitioners are not professionally employed in that role.
Most are employed in other fields and only perform in their spare time.
Jonathan Fox believes this to be one of its virtues. He asserts his belief in the
‘citizen actor’ who performs as needed and ‘melts back into the social fabric’,
who ‘voluntarily absorb[s] the pain and problems of others’ and who offers
‘Service without security, without fanfare, without adulation’ (Fox 1994,
p.214). This together with the disciplines of the ensemble discussed in the
previous chapter may work as brakes on the worst excesses of playing the
other.
6. Making the everyday extraordinary

Alan Read, in his consideration of the ethics of theatre, argues that theatre is
‘a domain beyond everyday tyrannies to take better notice of the real plea-
sures of everyday life’ (Read 1993, p.36). As Conquergood did, he warns of
the dangers of sensationalizing the life and practices of the other. In an
argument, which I think we can adopt for playback theatre, Read says, ‘the
critical task might not be to domesticate the exotic but to exoticise the
domestic’ (Read 1993, p.7). We should be wary of looking for the sensa-
tional in conducting and performing and celebrate the astonishing nature of
the everyday.
Concluding remarks
The mediaeval actors in Unsworth’s Morality Play were right to question the
ethics of playing the lives of others. They recognized the responsibilities
attendant to this act. Playback theatre is, from one viewpoint, an act of
astonishing hubris. How can performers with no detailed understanding of
the complexity of the life of the teller enact his story? Yet they do and often
the tellers are very pleased that they have taken this risk. In this chapter I
have tried to explore some of the questions their work raises and to suggest
some recommendations that may allow ethical performing.
The worst temptation for the playback performer is to be intoxicated
with his own skill – to believe that what he is doing is some sort of ‘magic’
and that it somehow affords special insight for the teller. Humility is always a
problematic word – it so often seems to mean a kind of false self-abnegation;
nevertheless humility is the performer’s friend. It protects him and the teller
from the dangers of being seduced by the spectacle; it provides a defence
against the presumption and arrogance of psychological interpretation.
Chapter 10
Reflexivity and the Personal Story:

Playback Theatre
as Social Intervention
Oh wad some power the Giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
Rober Burns, ‘To a Louse’, The Poems of Robert Burns

(Oxford University Press, 1904), p.139
In January 2000, Playback Theatre York performed to a group of users and pro-
fessionals of mental health services. In the course of the performance a man
told of his first admission to an acute psychiatric ward. On his first evening there
he told us how he watched the charge nurse punch another young man in the
chest and force him to take medication. He described his fear and concluded by
saying ‘I have never really been able to trust a mental health professional since
that night’.
After the enactment the ‘conductor’ invited comments from the audience.
The teller’s community psychiatric nurse raised her hand and talked about her
reaction to his story. She said she felt very ‘angry and ashamed’ about what had
happened to him. She went on to describe her feelings as she watched him tell.
She wondered if she should have ‘brought’ him to the performance and worried
that it might make him upset and ‘ill’. She then recognized that she was being
over-protective and he could make a decision about whether he attended or
not. She concluded by saying that she was pleased she had heard his story.
From his seat in the audience, the teller reassured her that he felt ‘OK’. This was
followed by a professional in adolescent psychiatry coming onstage to describe
her feelings of ‘inadequacy’ when working with young people with acute
mental health problems.
159
Jonathan Fox argues that playback ‘has the capacity to broker between
worlds’ and goes on to say that the ‘ultimate purpose of playback’ is to
promote a ‘radical social encounter’ (Fox 1995, p.4). The dialogue between
the mental health user and the nurse in Dundee might be seen as such a
‘radical social encounter’. It exposed the operation of power in psychiatry
and enabled people with very different experiences of those power relations
to speak to each other. The ‘teller’ recounted an episode of the gross misuse
of power; he told a story that challenged and produced a response from
mental health professionals who saw themselves, in some way, as complicit
with this exercise of power. It is an indication that playback can allow a
dialogue amongst groups with very different power and status relations.
In this chapter, I will analyze the claim that playback can be a tool of
social intervention. This claim for playback is certainly present amongst its
practitioners and it generally seems to take three interrelated forms: that
playback theatre gives an opportunity for radical social encounter and for
opposing voices to be heard, that it provides a space for building what
Feldhendler calls ‘a culture of remembrance’ (2001, p.8) in which the politi-
cal and collective importance of remembering is emphasized, and third, that
playback theatre provides a forum for marginalized and oppressed groups to
tell their story. In the course of this chapter and in order to consider these
claims I will briefly look at work in Fiji, India, Argentina, Germany and
Britain.
With respect to its role as a tool of social intervention, however,
playback theatre has its critics. The form does not develop strategies to
counter oppression in the manner of the theatre of the oppressed, nor does it
usually explicitly dramatize the social and political forces acting upon the
lives of individuals and communities. Indeed, attempts to dramatize the
social and political circumstances of the teller have sometimes been criti-
cized by members of the playback community as dismissing the teller’s
unique story. The criticism is that playback lacks the social and cultural per-
spectives that frame individual experience – it can be seen as being
over-individualistic.
Additionally and somewhat paradoxically, however, playback has been
criticized for not attempting to resolve personal issues invoked by the teller,
as would be the case, for example, in the psychodramatic or dramatherapy
process. Some feel that the telling of personal stories in public places
over-exposes the teller while allowing him no real opportunity for resolu-
tion and closure. As we saw in Chapter 2, this has sometimes been the
critique when York Playback Theatre Company has performed to groups of
people with mental health problems.
The form, therefore, finds itself in a difficult position, vulnerable to
critique from two different standpoints – from those (usually therapists) who
would criticize it for opening up personal issues that cannot be resolved in a
PLAYBACK THEATRE AS SOCIAL INTERVENTION 161
public arena, and from those who would argue that its concentration on the
individual narrative may be a bourgeois indulgence which misses a political
analysis. It may be that being neither in the ‘individualistic’ therapy camp,
nor in the ‘political theatre’ camp has meant that playback has found it hard
to be accepted in either world. Of course one needs to be careful of polariz-
ing these ‘camps’ – in reality they are not tightly drawn – nevertheless there
is a sense in which playback does not have a place within culturally accepted
categories.
In this uncomfortable position, what claims can playback theatre make?
In this chapter I will provide examples that support the claims of playback
practitioners for its political and social efficacy. I will give examples of how
playback can provide the opportunity for social and political encounter
through recollection and storytelling. I will then go on to examine in some
detail two challenges to playback theatre that come implicitly from the
practice of psychodrama and the theatre of the oppressed. I will go on to
address these challenges and, in doing so, establish one further proposal
regarding playback’s political and social purpose: that the form allows indi-
vidual stories to be opened up to multiple perspectives that allows tellers,
spectators and performers insight into the provisional – and thus changeable
– ways in which we ‘story’ our experience. To put this another way, it will be
proposed that the multiple levels of reflexivity opened up by the playback
process challenge what one might call the tyranny of the closed, fixed viewpoint;
they present alternatives to the point-of-view that does not recognize the
contingency of all points-of-view.
Building a culture of remembrance

Milan Kundera tells us out of his experience of Soviet-controlled Czechoslo-
vakia that ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory
against forgetting’ (1982, p.3). For him, remembering is an act of resistance.
Richard Kearney makes the same point when he writes that ‘the horror
of moral evil must be retrieved from oblivion by means of narrative
remembering’ (Kearney 2002, p.48). It is memory – and particularly
public remembering – that can provide a resistance to the powerful. I
want to explore here the claim that playback provides a space for what
Kearney calls the ‘little narratives of the vanquished’ (p.61), narratives he
opposes to the ‘Grand Narratives’ of the victor.1 Playback can, and often
does, provide a forum for those who have been silent or silenced. As Fox
writes:
1 Of course Kearney’s binary is problematic; since it places both the ‘oppressed’ and the ‘oppressor’ in
seemingly immutable positions in relation to each other, and, therefore, masks the nuances and
subtleties of their circumstances (the ‘victors’ may also have ‘little narratives’ to tell).
I believe that the forces for whitewashing history are very strong –
often the rich and powerful write it to their advantage – and that
therefore it is necessary to make a place for the ‘unofficial history’ of
those who suffer or are not heard. (Fox and Dauber 1999, p.196)
Although certainly not exclusively, playback theatre has often been per-
formed to audiences whose stories comprise ‘unofficial history’: children
who suffered in the political violence in Fiji; lesbian, gay and transgender
people in the United States; the relatives and friends of ‘the disappeared
ones’ in Argentina; stories from Germany’s Nazi past; refugees in France;
playback in prisons and, of course, with users of mental health services in
Britain.
The following account by Maria Elena Garavelli in Interplay in 2001
illustrates the point. She describes a performance that took place in La Plata,
Argentina, in March 2000. Her playback theatre company, ‘El Pasaje’, was
invited to perform at the first ‘Conference on the Construction of Collective
Memory’. The event was organized to acknowledge and record the experi-
ences of the relatives of those who had ‘disappeared’ during the Argentinean
dictatorship. The disturbing stories told at that performance convey the
terror of the dictatorship and the inability and unwillingness of many to
forget. Garavelli writes about the ‘collective amnesia’ that accompanied that
period and the potential of playback theatre to aid in the process of ‘the
collective construction of memory’:
The silence and amnesia which veil the years of repression and the
military dictatorship…create black holes produced by state terrorism
among communities, and leave us alone and isolated – rendering us
impotent against the unbridled power of those who thrive through
the complicity of our skepticism, or our failure to take part in acts of
solidarity.
The Playback Theatre Company offers a space to patch up
around these holes, to restore a fabric ravaged by hate, corruption,
abuse and the merciless struggle for power. An empty stage to be
filled with stories that people are ready to tell about their experiences,
and which need to be passed on to the community – a space where
trust allows these stories to be told; stories that bear witness to other
truths about what is happening. [playback provides] A space to build
this alternative reality, to register opposing accounts, to look for the truth in
other versions and voices…to make the truth apparent through the accounts of
witnesses. (Garavelli 2001, p.3) [my emphasis]
In this last sentence, Garavelli eloquently describes a vision of playback
theatre to which most of its practitioners would subscribe. For example,
the German playback practitioner, Daniel Feldhendler, in the same issue of
Interplay (perhaps significantly the first to appear after the September 11

attacks), develops this notion of the role of playback theatre in the ‘collective
construction of memory’ in relation to the experience of the German people.
He summarizes it as the ‘culture of remembrance’ in the following way:
‘Playback theatre is an instrument of the culture of remembrance, where the
personal stories of many people may come together, and where they can be
connected to the wider history’ (Feldhendler 2001, p.8).
Maria Elena Garavelli claims that playback theatre provides a space in
which to bear witness; register opposing accounts; and look for the ‘truth’ in
different voices (presumably those of tellers and performers). In my view
these claims are borne out by the work done in many different places of
conflict throughout the world. It would take too long to list them, however
these examples will suffice: Aviva Apel-Rosenthal and Nurit Shoshan in Tel
Aviv, who bring together Palestinians and Israelis for performances; or Cyril
Alexander and his company Sterling Playback Theatre, based in Chennai,
Southern India (Garavelli 2003, p.18) who work with audiences of different
castes; or, by way of contrast, the Hudson River Playback Theatre Company
in New York State who staged a series of performances before the 2004
Presidential election with the aim of encouraging reflection and to ‘help
bring back a meaningful democracy’ (Salas 2004b, p.7).
There are many accounts in the playback theatre literature of personal
and political oppression told in performances and it is clear that the telling
and witnessing of such stories is considered by its practitioners to be one of
the key reasons for the work. Sometimes, however, members of the audience
do not welcome these stories. Peni Moore (2002) has written about
playback theatre with children in Fiji who suffered in the recent coup d’etat.
She recounts one story, told during a performance, of a young Muslim girl
made to watch as the women in her family were forced by ‘the rebels’ to strip
and cook their food. Later during a performance interval one of the teachers
came up to Moore and angrily asked why the company ‘brought up these
sort of stories when we are all just trying to forget and carry on with our
lives’. Moore replied that it was important that the story had been told and
had been ‘accepted so that she would be able to get on with her life’. She
went on to observe that this ‘attitude of hiding the truth and talk of forget-
ting’ is very common amongst ‘male members of the oppressed community’
(Moore 2002, p .8).
Heather Robb (1995), a New Zealander practising playback in France,
described a similar episode in which attempts were made to ‘silence’ the
voices of children in a performance held within a UNESCO event entitled
Charter for Children’s Rights. Her company had worked with a group of 30
to 40 children to prepare them to tell their stories at a forthcoming perfor-
mance. The children had told many stories of physical abuse. When it came
to the main event at which in the audience, together with the children, there
were ‘municipal officials and other official people who had been invited to
speak on a panel after the performance’, the children continued to tell their
stories of abuse. As the conductor, Heather Robb, wrote ‘I couldn’t get them
off the subject’:
I now get to the point where something totally unexpected
happened: some adults suddenly interrupted to say how ‘shocked’
they were to see what they considered to be an abuse of these chil-
dren’s rights to intimacy. And the ‘shocked’ adults turned out to be
those invited on the panel to talk about children’s rights. (Robb
1995, p.1)
Robb continues by questioning the way that she handled the performance
and noted ‘the tremendous political implications that playback can have’
and that she enjoyed the ‘role of a political stirrer up and provocateur’. It was
in response to this performance that Fox commented on the ‘ultimate
purpose of playback’ being to promote a ‘radical social encounter’ (Fox
1995, p.4).
Closer to my home, it has been the experience of Playback Theatre York
that, during their performances to users of mental health services, profes-
sionals have occasionally criticized the company for opening up a ‘can of
worms’ which, they claim, may exacerbate the problems of individual
members of the audience. I have looked at some of the important criticisms
some have made in Chapter 2. Not surprisingly where playback has
provided a forum for opposing accounts to be heard or for ‘unofficial histo-
ries’ to be told, it has produced some controversy.
The claims for playback theatre as a form of social intervention need to
be considered alongside the challenges to its practice that come implicitly
from the practice of the theatre of the oppressed and psychodrama in partic-
ular and it is to this I now wish to turn.
Two challenges to playback theatre

Who speaks? Who listens? Who is silent? Who is making meaning? These
questions are always political ones. They are of course highly relevant to
playback theatre, but also to qualitative research where the writer needs to
be explicit about how subjectivity and ideology may influence the produc-
tion of their work. This attempt to be ‘explicit’ about the provenance of the
writing is recognition of the power inherent in interpreting the world and so
in making knowledge; it is an attempt to reveal the dynamics at work in the
production of any research. Usually termed reflexivity this process, Helen
Callaway suggests, opens ‘the way to a more radical consciousness of self in
facing the political dimensions of fieldwork and constructing knowledge’
(cited in Hertz 1997, p.viii). It is an attempt to be more aware of how
ideology, culture, and politics are at work in any interpretive process. In this
chapter I will propose that playback can work reflexively by increasing

awareness of the interpretive processes at work in creating autobiographical
narrative. But initially I will also consider two key challenges to playback
practice: first, that because the teller of the autobiographical narrative
remains a witness – not an active contributor – to the production of the
drama this limits the reflexive and mutative possibilities of playback.
Second, I will consider the criticism that because there is no explicit attempt
to reveal the subjectivity and ideology of the performers the reflexive poten-
tial of the form is limited; as spectators we can only guess on what grounds
the performers make their interpretive decisions.
The position of the teller in playback theatre

In playback theatre the teller is not involved in the enactment, he remains a
spectator – albeit a spectated upon one. From the tradition of psychodrama
and the theatre of the oppressed, this constitutes a significant and problem-
atic difference. In his analysis of the history of catharsis, the founder of
psychodrama Jacob Moreno identifies two kinds of catharsis, one primary
and active, the other secondary and passive. He proposes an ‘avenue’ which
led, on the one hand, ‘from Greek drama to the conventional drama of
today’ (Moreno 1987, p.49) in which ‘the process of mental catharsis was
conceived as being localized in the spectator – a passive catharsis’ (p.49). On
the other hand, he proposes another avenue, which emerged from the reli-
gions of the East and the Near East in which ‘the process of realization took
place in the subject – the living person who was seeking the catharsis’ (p.49).
Moreno goes on to argue that psychodrama has performed a synthesis of
these two avenues, yet he is very clear that passive catharsis is ‘secondary’
(p.50) to what he calls ‘active catharsis’. He argues for the ‘central, axiomatic
and universal’ (p.12) importance of embodiment in psychodrama and believes
in the mutative power that derives from the active protagonist, empowered
by his or her embodiment upon the stage. He might then comment unfa-
vourably on playback’s practice in regard to the teller.
Augusto Boal’s analysis of the importance of the active involvement of
the spectator (or spect-actor) comes from a different source than Moreno’s.
Boal’s inspiration is Marxist in the sense that one might say that he argues for
the protagonist ‘seizing the means of representation’; and Brechtian, in his
rejection of Aristotelian catharsis (Boal 1979). For Boal the ‘mainstream
theatre juxtaposes two worlds, the world of the audience and that of the
stage’ (Boal 1995, p.41). What happens on stage is ‘autonomous’ in the sense
that the audience do not have the opportunity to change what is happening.
‘The conventional theatre ritual’ he argues ‘is conservative, immobiliste,
opposed to progress’ (p.41). Although he does not deny that such theatre can
transmit ideas, which are ‘mobilizing’, nevertheless, for him ‘the ritual
remains immobilizing’ (p.42). Boal argues that the theatre of the oppressed
activates theatre, creating a ‘totally transitive’ relationship between the stage
and the audience. In this transitive relationship (later to be termed ‘transitive
democracy’ in legislative theatre in Boal 1998) the spectator becomes the
artist creating a ‘world of images of his own reality’ (Boal 1995, p.44).
For Boal, the oppressed must ‘create their own world of images of their
own oppressions’ (p.42). Instead of being ‘penetrated by the emotions of
others’, the ‘oppressed becomes the artist’ (p.43). Moreno’s assertions come
from the liberation of the individual through spontaneity, embodiment and
the re-enactment of the traumatic, whereas Boal’s emerge out of a political
analysis of power in the theatre. Nevertheless both, from their own posi-
tions, pose a serious challenge to the relative passivity of the teller in
playback theatre practice. Denying the protagonist the opportunity to
perform seems, from the standpoint of Boal and Moreno, to be dis-
empowering and, perhaps, even elitist since it emphasizes the interpretive
authority of the actor.
The power of the performer

Bertold Brecht was famously critical of bourgeois theatre for hiding the
ideology of the performance behind the representative illusion. Spectators
left the theatre politically unchanged, because the play did not reveal the
processes at work in the act of representation. Swept away by the illusion the
audience did not have the opportunity to analyze how it was created; in his
theatre he wanted the process of representation to be visible.
In light of this should it be of concern to playback practitioners that
audience members, having seen the form for the first time, often say that it
seems like ‘magic’? Are the performers concealing ideological, interpretive
processes behind the spectacle of improvisation? Does the sometimes aston-
ishing versatility of the improvising performers obscure their cultural and
personal blind spots? This is a challenging and difficult question for
playback theatre practice and it is not one that allows an easy rebuttal.
Playback is set up in such a way that there is no systematic means by which
the performers can reveal their a priori assumptions to the audience. The
actor is in a powerful position, they have as Barthes puts it ‘the ownership of
the means of enunciation’ (cited in Richardson 1994, p.27). They must
therefore accept responsibility for their interpretative roles.
These are two significant critiques of playback theatre and in the
remainder of this chapter I want to address these challenges to its practice. I
fully accept the power of the critique and do not wish to offer an apologetic
or shy away from that. While accepting their validity I will argue that the
form can provide a particular kind of space for building ‘a culture of remem-
brance’. I will argue that this space is characterized by:
1. The exposure of the teller’s story to multiple levels of reflexivity.

2. The ‘dramatization’ of the often contested relationship between the
personal and public. Playback theatre implicitly and explicitly
always raises the politically loaded question: ‘What personal stories
can be revealed in a public place?’
3. The improvised and polyphonous response of the performers.
4. The importance of the visibility of a gap between the actor and
character.
1. Multiple levels of reflexivity

Stories can, as Ben Okri writes, ‘drive you mad’ (Okri 1996, p.25). They can
‘be either bacteria or light: they can infect a system, or illuminate a world’
(p.33). Stories can imprison us as much as they can validate and provide the
‘container’ for inchoate experience. Although the stories we tell often seem
to be immutable versions of the events that happen to us, they are always
only partial (see Clifford 1986) in both senses of the word; they represent
only ‘part of ’ any experience and they are inevitably inflected by our ‘pre-
ferred’ perspectives on what has happened. It is my proposal that playback
theatre provides a space in which the story can be ‘loosened from its bind-
ings’ in order that the teller and the other spectators can see that what
happened to the teller may be represented (re-presented) in other ways. To
put this another way I am suggesting that playback opens the story up to
multiple levels of reflexivity.
As we have seen, from the perspective of Moreno and Boal, the fact that
the teller does not act in their own story presents a serious challenge to the
credentials of playback theatre as a tool for social intervention. However I
would argue that the non-involvement of the teller is not just a key differ-
ence; it is also a crucial constituent aspect of playback’s dramaturgy – an
aspect which builds complex levels of reflexive awareness into the perfor-
mance. My argument goes like this: in full view of the audience, the teller
recounts her story, casts the actors, as invited by the conductor, and, when
the conductor says, ‘Let’s watch’, turns to observe the ensuing enactment.
She has become a spectator and, most importantly to my argument, a
spectated-upon spectator. It is, I think, immediately clear that the spectatorship
of the teller is very different from that of the audience member. She is, first, in
view of the audience and, second, she is watching her own story being
enacted – a fact that will profoundly effect the spectators’ reception. Cru-
cially, the fact that the audience are aware that they are watching the teller
watching her own story will add a certain reflexive complexity to their
viewing. Such complex viewing will surely bring a particular reflexive
dynamic to the playback mise-en-scène. ‘By most accounts’, writes David

MacBeth:
reflexivity is a deconstructive exercise for locating the intersections of
author, other, text, and world, and for penetrating the representation
exercise itself. (MacBeth 2001, p.35)
The audience have, at least, two ‘objects’ in view: the teller-as-spectator and
the performers’ enactment. Moreover, the fact that the story has already been
told in a playback performance may mean that the audience is more likely to
pay greater attention to the means of representation employed by the per-
formers. Through being a kind of ‘exemplar of spectatorhood’ the presence
of the teller-as-spectator is likely to draw our attention to the ‘representation
exercise’ and so remind the spectator of the contingency of what is taking
place. The complex gaze of the spectator is likely to undermine the possibil-
ity of one, authoritative position from which to view, interpret or understand
our personal experience. It may be that in this way playback expresses its
‘political purpose’: to reveal the processes through which humans make
meaning out of their experience and so reveal these processes to be mutable
and contingent: the ‘cops in the head’ (Boal 1995), those internalized
figures of oppression, are divested of their totalizing authority.
2. Dramatizing the tension between the public and the personal:

a border transgression?
Susan Bennett writes that theatre audiences’ ‘receptive processes are
pre-activated by their anticipation of a particular kind of event’ (Bennett
1997, p.112). For audience members unfamiliar with playback theatre, there
may be some ambiguity in their anticipation. The practice invites spectators
to share autobiographical material publicly in what resembles and is desig-
nated by the performers as a theatrical event. This expectation, conveyed by
either pre-show publicity or by the performers, is likely to produce a degree
of uncertainty since most theatre performances do not ask audience
members to participate in this way. Since, as Bennett goes on to propose, a
crucial determinant of audience involvement is ‘the degree to which a per-
formance is accessible through the codes audiences are accustomed to
utililizing’ (Bennett 1997, p.112), this uncertainty is likely to be an impor-
tant factor in the decisions spectators make concerning the nature of the
performance and therefore their involvement in it.
In what may be an unfamiliar event, spectators need to make decisions
concerning their level of personal disclosure. Playback theatre, as some of its
critics point out, does not offer the carefully constructed boundaries of the
therapy space, yet it invites participants to tell personal experiences; this
produces a tension in audiences that heightens awareness of what may or

may not be revealed in particular types of public space.
Mary Douglas (1966), in her anthropological study of the categoriza-
tion of the sacred and the profane, stresses the dangers cultures attribute to
that which falls outside established categories. Perhaps that is the ‘danger’
that some critics detect in playback theatre – it is an event difficult to charac-
terize: is it a ‘performance’ or a ‘therapeutic’ occasion of some kind?
Playback theatre is haunted by this confusion. The fact that autobiographi-
cal experiences are called for and that the actors in their opening often tell
personally revealing stories, together with the fact that a dialogue takes
place between conductor and teller, suggests a therapeutic event of some
kind. Yet the event is billed as ‘theatre’, actors perform, audiences applaud
and laugh and the relationship between auditorium and stage suggests a rela-
tively conventional theatre event. We might argue that playback theatre is, as
Bill Nichols might put it, a ‘deliberate border violation’, which serves ‘to
announce a contestation of forms and purposes’ (Nichols 1994, p.x). Viola-
tion is a strong word and I would prefer to use the phrase ‘border transgres-
sion’. What is being contested or transgressed here? It is, among other things
the relationship between the personal/private and the public. Playback
invites and dramatizes this transgression.
It serves as a site for the negotiation and exploration of ethical concerns
concerning the relationship between the personal and the public. Each time
a teller steps forward to recount their own story they dramatize, in the deci-
sions they make about what and how much to tell, that debate. Each time a
spectator vicariously watches the telling and the enactment, questions are
raised about what should and should not be told in public places. The telling
of personal stories in public places seems to raise questions in the minds of
the participants, not only about the specific issues that the stories evoke – the
treatment of those with mental health problems or the ‘disappearances’ in
Argentina, for example – but the telling also potentially invites a debate
about speaking out or staying silent. This question is always a political one.
Consider this example taken from the experience of Playback Theatre
York. During a performance to people with mental health problems, a
woman came forward to tell of her suicidal thoughts. She described voices
which called her to the sea to drown herself and the support friends gave her
to resist their call. In the subsequent enactment some of the performers
embodied those voices to present the terrifying sense of the story. It was per-
formed, not as an ‘illness story’ but as an acknowledgment and validation of
a distressing experience. However to some of the mental health professionals
it was considered to be potentially disturbing for the teller and even, in some
way, an exoneration of her ‘illness behaviour’. It may be that this episode
demonstrates, together with the incidents in Fiji and at the UNESCO event,
that by inviting personal stories to be told in public places, playback theatre
raises questions about the conditions necessary for the beneficial disclosure
of autobiographical material. Implicit in the playback performance are the
politically weighted questions: ‘Is it acceptable to tell my story here?’ or
‘What status does my story have here?’ and ‘What effect will my story have?’
3. The improvised and polyphonous response of the performers

As discussed in Chapter 8, there is no authoritative playwright in playback
theatre; the enactment develops out of the interplay of many ‘voices’; each
performer brings different perspectives to the enactment. There is no
authoritative version of the story; it is brought together by the collaboration
and interaction of multiple points of view: a process inherent in Sawyer’s
notion of ‘collaborative emergence’ . Although, as we have recognized, the
interpretive power of the performer is relatively unchallenged by the
audience in playback theatre – it certainly is challenged by the other
performers.
The polyphony built into the design of playback theatre allows the
teller’s story to be opened up to many voices; no single person can control
what will emerge during the performance; and in interacting with each other
these voices ‘discover’ new perspectives on the story. Their interaction
creates something new, and something that may challenge the unexamined
and taken-for-granted. Of course the risk is that, under the pressure to
‘produce’ something, the performers may rely on stereotype, cliché and
unconsidered assumption. The particularity of individual experience may be
erased by the partiality (in both senses of the word) of the performers’
response. This risk is always present, nevertheless the improvised nature of
the form does allow the potential for registering multiple and reflexive
voices.
4. Maintaining the gap

In Chapter 9 I stressed the importance of performers maintaining a gap
between actor and character in order to reduce the risks of playing the other.
I went on to suggest some ways in which that could be done. For the
purposes of this discussion such strategies are equally important. The politi-
cal and oppressive risk in playback theatre is that teller, performers and
audience will be seduced by the spectacle and so lose their critical edge –
that they will lose sight of the fact that any dramatization is an exercise in
interpretation and meaning-making and thus always partial and contingent.
Strategies which puncture the ‘illusion’ of the theatrical spectacle and
maintain the gap between the teller’s story and its representation will work
to permit the kind of reflexivity that is necessary for playback to be effective.
Concluding remarks
If theatre changes the world, nothing could be better, but also let us
admit that it has not happened so far. It would be wiser (and less
euphoric) if we accepted that it is possible to change our own lives
through theatre. (Bharucha 1993, p.10)
Playback theatre, I have argued, does offer an opportunity for marginalized
voices to be heard and acknowledged and for opposing accounts to be regis-
tered. That is certainly the claim of the playback community, and it is one
that can be readily exemplified. However, what is perhaps more interesting
about the form is the way in which it provides a space in which the processes
of representing experience can be made visible and thus seen to be contin-
gent and provisional. The multiple levels of reflexivity apparent in a
playback theatre performance can reveal and question the assumptions we
make as we construct the stories we tell of ourselves. It is in this way, I think,
that playback theatre expresses its political purpose: by disclosing the muta-
bility of ‘storied’ selves. To paraphrase what Mary Douglas says of the joke:
an effective playback enactment ‘is a play upon form that affords an oppor-
tunity for realizing that an accepted pattern has no necessity’ (1975, p.96).
Chapter 11
Concluding Thoughts
Throughout this book I have suggested ways in which players can avoid the
worst dangers of playing the other. It has been proposed that working within
an ensemble; allowing the limitations of the actors work to be visible; keeping a
sense of vulnerability in the face of the teller and the audience; maintaining a
keen awareness of difference; being cautious of presuming a ‘sameness’
between our experience and that of the teller; and seeking to preserve a
position in between exploration in the performance and the representation of the
teller’s story, are all important in reducing the risks of improvising personal
stories. In the discussion on an ethics of playback I have largely avoided the call
for ‘authenticity’ in the performer largely because such a term is so difficult to
define, is easily misunderstood and can, if misused, conceal the motivations and
limitations of the performer. As this book draws to a close I want to reclaim this
term. Doing so will enable me to draw together some of the lines of argument
that have been developed.
Authenticity reconsidered
‘I have always taken the tips of my fingers for the beginning of her hair’ writes
Jarbés (in Hughes and Brecht, 1978). In this book I have pointed to the
complex slippage of identities, the projections and identifications that are inev-
itable in the improvisation of personal stories. It is not surprising, therefore,
given the ethical sensitivity of playing the other’s story that the playback com-
munity have sought to find solid ground for their work through the notion of
authenticity. In this book I have questioned the notion of ‘authentic acting’ by
arguing that the complexity of influence and impulse at work within and
between the performers and their audience make the idea of authentically
‘being yourself ’ as an actor a highly problematic one. The desire for the solid
ground of a trustworthy authentic self on which the ethics of playing the other
can lie is understandable but unsustainable. Despite this critique however the
173
concept of authenticity is far too important to be abandoned all together. In

this section I want to reconsider it and retrieve it.
For Adorno the ‘jargon of authenticity’ forestalled critical thought and
provided a smokescreen for intolerance. This jargon, he wrote, ascends
‘beyond the realm of the actual, conditioned, and contestable’ (Adorno
2003, p.7). He is not alone in a concern about contemporary perspectives on
authenticity. The philosopher Charles Taylor laments what he calls the ‘de-
graded, absurd or trivialized forms’ (1991, p.29) of authenticity which have
come to dominate contemporary thought. These emphasize the individual
search for self-knowledge and self-discovery, without recourse to the social
and cultural influences on identity. They use such phrases as ‘find the real self
within’ or ‘discover who you really are’ without recognizing the crucial role
played by culture and relationship. In fact these approaches often distrust
society and culture as forces that deflect and seduce the individual on his or
her path to self-discovery. Taylor (1991, p.25) suggests that this modern take
on authenticity is ‘a child of the Romantic period’ which lamented the loss of
the individual to the forces of industrialization.
Charles Guignon (2004) in his valuable overview of the history of the
authenticity also writes of this contemporary view of authenticity which
emphasizes the inner personal journey to find the true self within. Guignon
writes that from this distinctively modern outlook:
the self is experienced as a nuclear self, something self-defining and
self-contained, rather than as the extended self of earlier times.
Understood as a knowing subject, the self is a centre of experience,
with no definite relations to anything outside itself ’. (Guignon 2004,
p.43)
To be authentic in the contemporary formulation is to be autonomous. The
aim is to discover the self; there is no need necessarily to look beyond the self
to do that. The social is to be distrusted as a force which will delude the true
self into serving inauthentic ends.
Both Taylor and Guignon are critical of this search for authenticity,
which they suggest fails to recognize an individual’s dependency on others.
They are concerned about the loss of social solidarity that results from this
desire for self-discovery. In their different ways they argue for a view of
authenticity which is ‘a social virtue’ (Guignon 2004, p.161) rather than a
personal one. Taylor writes that we can only define our identity ‘against the
background of things that matter’ and that to ‘bracket out history, nature,
society, the demands of solidarity’ would be to eliminate all those things that
could matter to us. Authenticity, he proposes ‘is not the enemy of demands
that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands’ (Taylor 1991,
p.41). In other words, our identity is found in relation to others, not through
an isolating internal search. Guignon puts this nicely when he calls for a
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 175
stance on authenticity that ‘is motivated less by a concern with making than
with finding, less by calling forth than being called’ (Guignon 2004, p.167).
What implications do these arguments have for the practice of playback
theatre? As we have already noted, there are significant ethical demands on
performers because of the immediacy and intimacy of the dramatization of
personal stories in public places. It may be that a reworking of the notion of
authenticity along the lines suggested by Taylor and Guignon will provide a
more robust concept in developing an ethics of playback theatre. Along with
them I want to argue for a social and relational notion of authenticity. That if
it is possible to talk of authenticity at all then we look to authenticity in and
through relationships with tellers, spectators, and performers.
In this book, I have stressed the importance of the ensemble as providing
the necessary conditions for risk-taking and openness in performance and
that a company who have worked together regularly are more likely to have
the necessary sensitivity to ‘play the other’. The ensemble is both the
defender and protector of the teller and of the performer. I have stressed
the relational nature of playback performing through such concepts as
‘empathic resonance’, ‘collaborative emergence’, ‘dialogic truth’, and the
vulnerability of the performer in the face of the audience.
To be more specific, we might identify the following characteristics of
relational authenticity in respect to the playback performer:
1. Openness: particularly the characteristics of the open performer

stressed in Chapter 2. The open performer allows the action to
emerge or be discovered through the act of performing; the
performers work closely together; there is a sense of risk on the
part of the actors and musicians which is ‘held’ by the ensemble;
and the performers leave interpretive space for the teller and the
audience to attribute their own meanings.
2. A willingness, as a performer, to stay in a place of uncertainty between
awareness of the self and awareness of the other. Guignon (2004)
talks of two basic life-orientations: the first, ‘enownment’ refers to
our desire and ability to know the self, to be self-reflective and to
be aware of the impact one is having on others. The second he
terms ‘releasement’, here he refers to our capacity for giving
ourselves over to the flow of events, of suspending the ego in order
to contribute to whatever is emerging. He argues that both
capacities are necessary for the ‘good life’. As we have seen, they
are both recognized as important in playback. Self-knowledge and
reflection are important to ethical performance since an actor who
does not know the impact of his work, or the personal ‘ghosts’ that
may haunt it, takes risks with others’ stories. But the performer
must also have the capacity to give way to others, to allow himself
to ‘yield’ and be ‘penetrated’, and to allow enactments to emerge.

As I stressed in Chapter 6 ethical performers are on a ‘narrow
ridge’ between these two orientations.
3. The sensitivity of the performer to the impact they are having in the
audience. I am referring to the performers taking responsibility for
their interpretations and the meanings they inevitably create. I have
stressed the dangers of over-identification and caricature. Under the
pressure to ‘do something’, or in a desire to create a spectacle for
the audience, there is always the risk that actors will lose their
sense of the teller’s narrative and the effect their work is having on
the audience. The sensitivity of the performer is a mark of
relational authenticity in playback performing.
4. The vulnerability of the performer. In Chapter 9 I stressed the
importance of the actor maintaining a sense of vulnerability in their
work. I suggested that it can produce lively and committed work
and permit the performer to be open to the teller’s story as well as
be closer to their own emotional world.
5. A commitment to the ensemble. As I have stressed in Chapter 8 the
company can both support and protect. It supports actors to take
risks and, through work in rehearsal, protects tellers from the worst
dangers of playing the other.
I am proposing these criteria as characteristic of relational authenticity in

playback performing. They are proposals which point to our ethical disposi-
tion as playback performers and so can be read alongside the suggestions
made in Chapter 9 for an ethical playing of the other.
Playback theatre has its critics. It is always in a difficult position, lying as
it does between the theatrical and the therapeutic. It rarely satisfies those
dedicated to the craft of theatre or to the carefully contained work of
group and individual therapy. It can be criticized by those who feel it
over-emphasizes the individual story and misses a political analysis and by
those who consider that the telling of personal stories in public places is
potentially risky and exploitative. These criticisms have weight and should
not be dismissed lightly. As I have argued in Chapter 10, playback theatre
expresses its political purpose by first providing a space for the stories of
those who have been silenced or marginalized and, second, by introducing a
complex level of reflexivity to the telling and dramatization of personal
stories in order that tellers and spectators are aware of the provisional and
mutative nature of those stories. In this final chapter I wish to turn again to
the criticism that playback lacks the boundaries necessary to protect tellers.
Readers will recall the criticisms made in this regard in Chapter 2. Play-
back’s critics had two main concerns: the first that a public performance is an
inappropriate place to ask for personal stories to be told, and the second that
the tellers are being manipulated for entertainment and spectacle. It is clear
that these critics felt that they had attended an event that did not possess the
‘boundaries’ they believed to be important when personal stories are told,
more than that they felt that the tellers, at best, were not fully informed about
the nature of the event and, at worse, manipulated into providing personal
stories for ‘entertainment’.
In dramatherapy, psychodrama, psychotherapy and counselling, bound-
aries mark out a space. They are considered to provide defence and
protection for those inside, defining what lies within and what is excluded
(Clarkson 1995, p.48). In these disciplines the notion of the boundary seems
to be employed both literally and metaphorically. Literally, it denotes the
physical space within which the consultation occurs. Don Feasey, for
example, stresses that attending to the place where the therapy occurs helps
to create a therapeutic relationship. He writes ‘It is the secret and confidential
world in which the therapist and the client can come together’ (Feasey 2000,
p.13). Boundaries are also used metaphorically to suggest the delineation of
a period within which certain relationships and levels of exposure are
possible. It is common for therapists to have very clearly defined sessions –
the 50-minute hour, for example.
Boundaries are also employed to establish the relationship between
therapist and client. They are maintained in order to suggest the level of
possible personal intimacy, to mark the limits of any personal disclosure by
the therapist, and to control communication outside the sessions. A practice
in which personal exposure is desirable and in which complex transferential
relationships take place, requires robust attention to its boundaries. The
process of transference, for example, involves the loosening of the bound-
aries between self and other as the client (or therapist) symbolically recreates
in the therapist (or client) qualities that are repressed or that belong to a sig-
nificant other (Brooks 1994; Clarkson 1995). It is a process which involves
a certain ‘slippage’ of identity. Clarkson defines it thus: ‘The transferential/
countertransferential relationship is the experience of unconscious wishes
and fears transferred on to or into the therapeutic partnership’ (Clarkson
1995, p.62).
It is axiomatic of psychotherapeutic practice that, in order for that
‘slippage’ of identities across the ‘therapeutic partnership’ to take place, it is
necessary to create and maintain well-defined outer ‘frames’ (Clarkson
1995; Langs 1976). Critics see, in terms of what the teller is being asked to
do, similar processes to the therapeutic encounter. The teller is encouraged to
reveal personal experience within a space that is unprotected by the
usual therapeutic protocols, within relationships that have not been clearly
defined, and witness an enactment in which it is likely that processes of iden-
tification and transference will occur. It is not surprising that some find this
disturbing.
In the light of this how can playback practitioners respond? I want to

offer two responses here, mindful of the fact that these will be coloured by
my enthusiasm for, and support of, playback practice. The first response to
the risk of telling personal stories in public places is to argue that there are
protective boundaries in playback; the second is that the ‘confusion’ of cate-
gories between theatre and therapy is an important and definitive feature of
the practice.
First response: there are ‘boundaries’ in playback

practice
In her introduction to dramatherapy, Sue Jennings writes of the ‘distancing
mechanisms’ of theatre, which ‘paradoxically…serve to bring us closer
to ourselves’ (Jennings 1998, p.36). For her, and for many theorists in
dramatherapy (Jones 1996; Landy 1993), theatrical conventions which
clearly define the fictional and dramatic from the everyday, such as clearly
defined stage areas or the use of costume, provide psychic distance from the
events onstage at the same time as paradoxically allowing intense identifica-
tion with them. This theory has proved important in countering the
arguments of those concerned with the danger of introducing drama to
vulnerable client groups and has proved useful in shaping therapeutic deci-
sions concerning the level of engagement. Phil Jones (1996, p.104), for
example, shows how, according to the client’s needs, the therapist can devise
dramatic structures in order to promote close empathic identification with
the material or allow distance and perspective upon it. In dramatherapy the
‘dramatic paradox’ (Landy 1993, p.15) – we come closer to ourselves
through the distance that theatre provides – has proved a key concept in
establishing and understanding the therapeutic possibilities of drama.
The boundary between the telling and the enactment is clearly drawn in
playback theatre. For example, clear ‘rules’ exist concerning the relationship
between the actors and the teller. The actors are discouraged from talking to
the teller during the telling; at this stage their role is confined to listening.
The actors will stand when cast by the teller, but will only move into enact-
ment when the conductor calls ‘Let’s watch’ and the musician begins to play.
These ‘rules’ are designed to give the performers the necessary ‘permission’
to improvise; they clarify the boundary between the telling and the enact-
ment for tellers, spectators and actors.
The playback form is a relatively simple and stable one and, by and large,
performing companies do not veer too far from the standard playback con-
ventions. For Fox these conventions constitute rules, which invest playback
with a ritual quality:
The teller must come to the chair; the teller must stay in the chair
during the enactment; the teller must tell a personal story. The actors
stand when picked for a role; the actors do not talk during the inter-
view. The conductor does not interrupt the enactment; the conductor
checks in with the teller after the enactment; the conductor dismisses
the teller from the chair. These are some of them. Without the clear
framework provided by the rules, spontaneity can quickly turn into
chaos, creativity to confusion. With it, the members of the audience
feel safe enough to let themselves go into trance, allowing unforeseen
breakthroughs. (Fox and Dauber 1999, p.128)
Throughout his essay, entitled ‘A Ritual for our Time’, Fox is making the
point that what he calls the ‘ritual’ elements of playback hold (p.124) or
contain the vulnerabilities of both the performers and the audience. In this
book I prefer not to use the term ritual,1 preferring to think of playback’s
formal conventions.
Playback theatre practitioners often do seem to attend carefully to
boundaries. There is, in the practice of Playback Theatre York for example,
an at times obsessional attention to ‘edges’ or to the ‘margins’. The company
will spend considerable time in pre-performance rehearsals working out the
precise order of the opening sequence or they will rehearse and re-rehearse
the conventions used at the beginning of each enactment. Members of the
company will enjoin others to turn to the teller at the conclusion of each dra-
matization or remind each other to stay still until the teller has finished
speaking and only then ‘tidy up’ the stage. Of course, this may be due to a
certain performance anxiety; after all in improvisation there is little one can
control except these conventions. However, its purpose is almost certainly
also related to a recognition of the importance of attending to the edges that
create boundaries between the ‘telling’ and the ‘enactment’.
Schechner’s ‘axiom of frames’ may be important here. He proposes ‘an
axiom of frames which generally applies in the theatre: the looser an outer
frame, the tighter the inner, and conversely, the looser the inner, the more
important the outer’ (1988, p.14). The attention to the rules and boundaries
in playback theatre may well be an attempt to tighten the outer frame so that
the inner one can be loose enough for improvisation and openness of telling
and performing.
1 It seems to be that ritual is not, by virtue of its cultural contingency, easily transferable across cultures.
Rituals carry canonical messages that are embedded in their practice and culture. Playback does not,
or should not, carry canonical messages. The danger of conceiving of playback as ritual lies in the
implicit assumption that it, therefore, carries some sort of truth, or ideology or system of belief. Once
we conceive of a playback performance as a kind of ritual, we seem to implicate the spectator in an
event that they most likely did not sign up for. The individual member of the audience becomes an
unknowing celebrant. Rappaport, R. (1999) Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Second response: the blurring of categories is a key

characteristic of playback theatre
In Chapter 10 I considered the anomalous nature of the playback event and
the fact that, for some, it sets up a confusion of categories. The event is billed
as ‘theatre’, actors perform, audiences applaud and laugh and the relation-
ship between auditorium and stage suggests a relatively conventional theatre
event. Yet personal stories are invited in an atmosphere that, for some, can
seem like therapy. This ‘confusion’ is a definitive feature of playback and a
characteristic that challenges and brings into question the proper and appro-
priate conditions for the telling of personal stories in public places.
The sine qua non of therapy is privacy. The client rightly expects that the
consultation will be confidential and the therapist is bound to accept the
ethical principles concerning the privacy of the patient (Rowson 2001). By
inviting personal stories to be told in public places, however, playback
queries assumptions about the conditions necessary for the beneficial disclo-
sure of autobiographical material. As ‘apologists’ for the form, Steve Nash
and I wrote the following in response to the criticism that playback was an
‘up-market Oprah Winfrey Show’:
It is our contention that playback theatre challenges the ‘privatization
of the personal’ – a characteristic of modern Western European
culture. Ours is a culture in which stories of personal distress have
been increasingly colonized by the expert, the counsellor and the
therapist. The experience of distress is thus not only segregated from
the everyday, but it is also separated from the collective by the over-
whelming emphasis on the necessity for individual personal growth.
Together with the privatization of the railways has arrived the privat-
ization of personal pain and distress. (Nash and Rowe 2000/2001,
p.17)
The ‘apologist’ for playback may go on to argue that the desire to expose
more of the personal and autobiographical through such programmes as, for
example, The Jerry Springer Show and Big Brother does not contradict the
argument but rather reinforces it. As Laura Mulvey (1975) writes
scopophilia – the pleasure that derives from looking – turns the other into an
object for sexual gratification. The desire to expose and be exposed in con-
temporary culture may be a sign of repression, a sign that ‘real’ contact is
denied. Nash and Rowe continue:
are these [reality TV programmes] not the signs of the very privatiza-
tion that we are suggesting? Are they not the visible signs of repres-
sion? The personal has become pornographic precisely because it has
gone underground. Are we not titillated by TV’s seedy revelations
because we no longer have the real thing? The sentimental and the
voyeuristic are replacing emotion and intimacy and in their place we
have an ersatz experience. (Nash and Rowe 2000/2001, p.17)
Despite the problems of arguing that playback might offer a return to the
‘real thing’, it does raise questions about the proper place of the personal
within the public domain and thus poses, albeit implicitly, a challenge to
therapy. If playback is a ‘border transgression’ then it presents a challenge to
the individualized, privatized and de-politicized nature of therapy. Playback
is not alone in doing so. What is loosely called the ‘anti-psychiatry
movement’ also challenges the privatization – and therefore the apparent
apolitical nature – of therapy (Masson 1990; Spinelli 1994; Tottin 2000).
Critics have noted the sequestration of personal distress by the therapy
services, the mystification of the means of offering help and, in Masson’s
(1990) view, its conspiratorial professionalization. The sternest critics of
therapy have aimed their fire at its inability to engage with issues of social
justice. Jeffrey Masson, for example, writes that every therapy he has
examined ‘displays a lack of interest in social injustice… Each shows an
implicit acceptance of the status quo. In brief, almost every therapy shows a
certain lack of interest in the world’ (Masson 1990, p.283).
The confusion of categories that characterizes playback unsettles
cultural conventions concerning the telling of personal stories in public
places and thus poses a challenge to therapeutic orthodoxy. The question:
‘Can I tell my story in this place and in front of these people?’ is, in part,
always a political one. Playback theatre always raises this and other ques-
tions; in doing so challenges the status quo that exists around the telling of
personal stories in public places.
The risks of playback are many: the performers can become dazzled by
their desire to create a spectacle; they can use the freedom they have to show
off their skills to the expense of the teller’s story. The performers can be so
convinced that their own experience matches the tellers that they become
lost in self-delusion. They can eradicate the difference and individuality of
the teller’s story by assuming too much correspondence with their own.
They can over-interpret and impose meanings that are a step to far.
But there are also opposite kinds of risks too. Out of their desire to be
‘loyal to the teller’ the performers can play it too safe and not engage in the
exploration with their fellow players that, as I have proposed in this book,
gives playback its energy. Viola Spolin is right when she maintains that
improvisation can ‘topple old frames of reference’; playback performers
need to be prepared to risk adding something new to the story as it was told.
Otherwise the endeavour becomes a rather stale and uninteresting exercise.
Final comments
The following words from Georges Bataille capture my desire to rethink
playback theatre in such a way that its humanness comes into the fore-
ground. He writes: ‘My wish is that in any love of the unknown…we can, by
ousting transcendence, attain such great simplicity as to relate that love to
an earthly love, echoing it to infinity’ (1997, p.97). In this book I have
proposed that playback performers offer a response: one that is never more
than fully human, always partial and inevitably shot through with subjectiv-
ity and omission. Playback theatre can be tender, sad, exquisitely funny,
enlightening, and terrifying. It can also be crude, over-psychological and
poorly performed; with improvised theatre failure and caricature is only ever
a breath away. In whatever way playback is performed, its humanness is its
greatest strength and its greatest weakness. In this book I have tried to bring
this humanness to the fore and to explore the opportunities and risks when
performers play the other and tellers recount personal stories in public
places.
Jonathan Fox finishes Acts of Service with the following words: ‘For me,
what is most important is to create a theatre that is neither sentimental nor
demonic, hermetic not confrontational, but ultimately a theatre of love’
(1994, p.216). In light of my reconsideration of authenticity, ‘love’ needs to
be characterized as a consciousness of contingency – a realization of our
vulnerability and finitude. In this book I have sought to find ways of
conceptualizing playback theatre that recognize the inevitably incomplete,
fallible and vulnerable nature of the performer’s response to the teller’s story,
in doing so I have questioned some of the current discourse that has
developed to explain the practice.
In Bataille’s words, I have been keen to ‘oust transcendence’ and reject
suggestions that some sort of magic is taking place (Bataille 1997). That is
never the case; to conceive of playback as some sort of ‘magic’ is always dan-
gerous because it suggests a process that detaches the teller and the audience
from the performers. It gives the performers some sort of power and
supposed privileged insight that they do not in reality possess. For me the
most effective playback takes place when everyone knows that they are
taking part in a theatrical event in which the performers are given the space
and opportunity to respond, through their skill, experience and personal
history, to the story of the teller. For tellers, spectators and performers
alike this can become a fascinating process which exposes the ways in
which personal stories can be represented and potentially opens up new
perspectives for tellers and spectators. This takes place when there is the
quality of what I have called ‘openness’ in telling and performing.
As I write this at the end of eight years of researching and practising
playback theatre, I am drawn to some lines taken from a poem entitled
Happiness by Jane Hirschfield: ‘for what else might happiness be/than to be

porous, opened, rinsed through/by the beings and things?’ (Hirschfield
2005). Her lines convey, for me, the openness that I have referred to
throughout this book. At its best the playback event can permit this kind of
porousness and opening up. Tellers have the courage to tell their personal
stories in public places and to give room for the performers to explore their
story; the performers for their part respond to this out of their skills, desires
and histories. They try to find a way to match the gift of the teller’s story. In
effective playback the story becomes ‘porous, opened, rinsed through’ as it is
exposed to the improvising performers in relation with each other and with
the audience. For me, the most interesting playback is that which is a little
irreverent, which plays, sometimes almost parodies, the meanings that may
be attributed to the teller’s story. It is axiomatic of the current interest in ‘nar-
rative therapy’ that we can be trapped, as well as validated, by our own
stories. Effective playback, through the processes of openness, loosens the
‘ties’ of the story, opens up other possible interpretations and reveals the
means through which we make sense of our experience.
Appendix 1
Playback Theatre: A Short Story
Below is the full text, and background to Rona’s story, which is discussed in
Chapters 1 and 6.
Rona had arrived half an hour early to put the heater on, but still the room felt
cold. It was the kind of damp cold you get in English church halls in November.
The heater only served to create the promise of warmth, a promise which Rona
knew would never be realized before the others arrived. She sighed and began
to fill the hot water boiler.
‘I’m going to make sure I tell a story tonight,’ she thought to herself as she
gathered the chipped and stained coffee mugs together.
She began to wonder what story she would tell. It was never easy to decide.
There was the one about Helen, her work colleague, who had argued with her
over the meaning of the word ‘spirituality’, the row had been a flaming one, and
in retrospect, Rona was sure that it was about something far more important
than they were acknowledging. Perhaps the company would help her to work
it out.
Or perhaps she should tell the one about her father phoning earlier in the
week. He never phoned, well only for discussions about money or travel direc-
tion, so when Rona heard him say, ‘Hello love, it’s Dad,’ she was both surprised
and a little anxious.
‘I thought I’d phone for a chat. Your mother is out and there’s nothing on
the TV, so I thought why not phone my daughter. How are things?’
‘Fine,’ replied Rona and began to tell him about the changes in work that
had been concerning her so much recently. This was the usual pattern of their
conversations, Rona would talk of her work and he would interject with stories
from his own working life which were intended as advice, but which only irri-
tated Rona. As she launched into a detailed explanation of management
reorganizations, Rona was aware that something was different, usually her
father would have interrupted by now, usually he would have begun one of his
stories intended as an illustration of what she was saying. But today there was a
silence. A demanding, blackening silence was expanding into the space
between them. Rona’s monologue was beginning to lose its energy and
purpose, as this silence sucked the strength from her. She stopped abruptly.
There was a silence, then her father said: ‘I’ve been to the hospital today.’
‘Yes, I could tell that story’ she thought as she sat by the heater trying to
gather the warmth into her thin body. Usually Rona was pleased with her body.
185
She had been something of a dancer in her twenties and still, in her
mid-forties, and after two children, she had a poise and a freedom of
movement which marked her out. But at this moment, sitting in front of a
single heater in a damp English church hall in November, she did not feel
pleased with her body at all.
Rona’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the outside door being
opened, and as she rose to her feet, Bruno entered opening his arms to invite
Rona into one of his big warm embraces. Rona and Bruno had known each
other for nearly five years, and over that time, through all the rehearsals and
performances, a physical easiness had grown between them. As Bruno drew
her to him, she enjoyed the soft roundness of his body and exhilarating smell
of the outside world he had brought with him.
‘How’s your daughter?’ asked Rona. Bruno’s 14-year-old daughter had
been seriously ill recently and this had put enormous stress on the whole
family. As Bruno said at the last rehearsal, ‘Her illness has made us all
question what we are doing together…we don’t use the word family any
more.’
‘She’s much better,’ said Bruno, and he went on to tell her of the endless
visits to hospital and the sleepless nights they had spent sitting by her
bedside. As Bruno spoke Rona’s mind drifted to her father’s phone call…
‘Yes, I must tell a story tonight,’ she thought to herself.
Rona squeezed Bruno’s hand.
By now other members of the company had arrived. Bridget, Laura,
Amanda, Fran and Lawrence were standing in a circle laughing about some-
thing.
As Rona caught sight of the gathering company, she felt a small knot of
dread that usually accompanied her on these occasions. There was little real
sense to it; she’d known these people for years and they were, she knew, glad
to see her. Every group of people finds its own way of handling those difficult
moments of meeting. The tricky questions about whether to hug, kiss, shake
hands or merely nod to each other, are answered, or at least eased by estab-
lishing patterns of behaviour that suit the group and its aims. This group had
evolved a style of meeting which comprised of hugging and kissing accom-
panied by shouting, screaming and laughing. It was a very noisy affair which,
to the outsider, would confirm whatever prejudices they had about ‘theatre’
people as being rather insincere and over-demonstrative.
It was not so much the hugging which caused Rona that small sense of
dread, but the moments in between. Having hugged and exchanged greet-
ings with Bridget and established that they were both ‘Fine’, she found
herself, for a moment, alone. It was this she found so difficult. Watching
uncertainly as others greeted each other with far more fulsomeness than she
felt she could muster, it seemed to her that they were far more at ease than
she was, far more able to receive warmth from each other. In her worst
moments these thoughts would burrow into her, subtly affecting all her rela-
tions with others in the company.
But there was another feeling that always seemed to be present during
the only moments of each rehearsal. This was a kind of excitement and
PLAYBACK THEATRE: A SHORT STORY 187
anticipation, which could not quite find an object and so was always accom-
panied by mild disappointment. It reminded her of when she was a child and
her father, returning home from work, would play with her for a few minutes
before turning his attention to the newspaper or a discussion with her mother
and she was left stranded with feelings of that had no outlet.
By now Bridget, Amanda and Lawrence had got their coffees and formed
a smoking group outside in the cold November air. Rona joined them.
‘Can I scrounge a cigarette off someone?’
‘I thought you’d given up,’ said Amanda as she passed a packet of ciga-
rettes to Rona.
‘I have. It’s great to be a non-smoker!’ She said that as she watched the
blue smoke swirling in the night air. Everyone laughed and joined in one of
the greatest pleasures of smokers: its delicious conspiracy.
‘Let’s get started!’ shouted Laura from inside and the smokers took their
last drags and made their way into the hall.
A group of seven people stood in a circle. Rona began her customary
series of stretches which were so familiar they required no thought. Bruno
slapped his belly letting out deep roaring sounds. Amanda and Lawrence
leant against each other back to back, while Bridget sang, trying to match the
rhythm of Bruno’s belly slapping. It was the usual beginning for this group.
‘Let’s do some warming up,’ said Laura. ‘Does anyone want to lead us in
something?’
Amanda suggested this game in which each person close their eyes and
tried to find their partner by calling out a pre-agreed signal, and the
rehearsal began.
* * *
‘I’ve got a story!’ shouted Rona as she moved toward the storyteller’s chair.
She had to move quickly, otherwise someone would get there before her. She
was determined to tell a story this week since, over the last few rehearsals, she
had missed out. Either she did not think of one, or one of the others got there
before her, but tonight she was going to make sure. She landed on the chair,
skidding as she did so from the speed of arrival, and waited for one of the
company to sit on the chair next to her.
Laura joined her and said, ‘So what your story, Rona?’
The truth was that Rona had been in such a rush to get to the chair that
she hadn’t totally decided. She hoped that when she got there it would be
clear what she wanted to say, and now, with Laura and the whole group
waiting, she experienced a moment of panic. ‘I’m wasting people’s time’ she
thought to herself.
‘It’s about my father,’ she said finally.
‘OK,’ said Laura. ‘Choose someone to be you.’
Rona looked at the line of four actors sitting on chairs in front of a rack of
coloured cloth. Who would she choose to play her? As her eyes moved along
the group she was drawn to Bridget. It was something about the way she was
sitting in the chair, slightly slumped as if pressed down by some force, a
tension in her face and, unlike some of the others, not looking at Rona. It was
likely, Rona thought, that Bridget did not want to be chosen, but there was
something about her vulnerability, her reluctance, that drew Rona to say
‘Bridget’. Bridget stood up.
‘OK, so tell me about your story,’ said Laura putting her hand on Rona’s
knee. Rona spoke of the phone call from her father telling her that he was
going into hospital. She spoke of the darkening silence that had seemed to
push out everything between them, filling the space with its demanding
presence.
‘It made me feel cold,’ said Rona, suddenly feeling cold herself. ‘I can
feel it now.’
‘Describe it to us,’ said Laura.
‘It’s kind of bleak and very, very empty…well, empty yes, but also lonely,
bereft, like…’ Rona paused for a minute. ‘It’s like Sunday evenings at
boarding school, in November, it’s getting darker and colder and there are
weeks and weeks before Christmas. Dark, cold, Victorian, cheerless build-
ings. That’s what it was like.’
Rona hadn’t expected to say the last bit, but having done so she felt a little
leap of excitement, an almost sexual excitement.
‘OK,’ said Laura. ‘So what happened next?’
‘My father said that he had been to the hospital and he’d had some tests
and was waiting for the results – something to do with pains in his stomach.
He’d never told me about that before.’
‘Choose someone to be your father,’ said Laura.
Again Rona looked at the actors. This time she had no doubt. ‘Bruno,’
she said, and Bruno sprang to his feet as if he had always known he would be
chosen.
‘Give Bruno some words to describe your father in this story.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, I think he was a little nervous, a little irritated by me
going on about work…it was so strange for him to phone and he seemed ill
at ease.’
Laura patted Rona’s hand as she said, looking toward the actors, ‘This is
Rona’s story of a phone call with her father. Let’s watch.’
* * *
Bruno felt he was bursting. His heart was thumping hard and he had a sick
feeling. He knew Rona would choose him and he knew what he would do.
Well no, that wasn’t quite true. It would be more accurate to say that he had
no worries about what he would do. An insistent energy would carry him.
Amanda’s music was feeding that energy, viscerally changing Bruno, and he
used it to find his place on the stage. He dragged one of the chairs into the
centre of the stage, and drawing himself in as tightly as he could manage, he
sat on the chair and waited. He knew that the other actors would be forming
a tableau around him but he couldn’t see anything; they must all be behind
him. He could hear, but not see, movement. It went silent and, it seemed to
Bruno, rather dark. They too were waiting, he guessed.
There is a directional instruction that the company had often spoken
about. It was that if, as an actor, you do not know what to say it is often effec-
tive to say how you are feeling at that moment because it is probably related
to the character you are playing. Remembering this, Bruno said,
‘I can’t see you, it’s dark here. Where are you?’
Enclosed tightly, as he was by his arms and by the hardness of the chair,
Bruno waited. It seemed to him that his words were spreading a cold
darkness across the stage and, he guessed, were freezing the actors. He felt a
moment of panic. ‘They don’t know what to do with this,’ he thought.
However, he was determined to stay with it, to wait. He could hear
movement in the darkness, a quick movement across the stage to some-
where in front and to the left of him. There was silence and then a sound, he
wasn’t sure, but it was as if someone’s lips were moving, mouthing sounds
with no words. There was something terrible about this sound and, in the
darkness, he felt, for a fleeting moment, a terrible emptiness. The sound
had a nightmarish quality, like a child calling for help through sheets of
impenetrable glass. He could hear some movement too and he imagined
grotesque, spastic movements.
He called out, ‘I can hear you! Do you need help?’ The sound continued,
oblivious to his call. He repeated, ‘I can hear you! Do you need help?’ There
was no response.
A voice whispered in his ear, ‘Can you not hear her? She needs your
help.’ Bruno experienced a shock; he had been so caught up in that sound in
the darkness that he had totally forgotten about the other actors.
‘Open your eyes, look at her,’ continued the voice.
Bruno couldn’t open his eyes. If he did everyone would see him, and he
couldn’t bear the thought of that.
‘I can’t, she’ll see me,’ he found himself saying.
‘What will she see?’ asked the voice which he now identified as
Lawrence. Bruno didn’t know, or at least, he couldn’t find the words for it. He
felt exposed and suddenly aware of Rona and Laura watching him. He felt he
was holding things up, he worried he was boring everyone. It seemed, all of a
sudden, rather boring, self-indulgent and not very good theatre. He had for-
gotten Rona’s story and was now somehow playing out his own. Almost
unbearably the face of his daughter formed in his mind – that terrible look of
accusing pain that she had given him when she first went into hospital.
With a massive effort of will Bruno said, ‘I’ve been to the hospital today,
I’ve had some tests.’
He opened his eyes. What surprised him first was the light. The harsh light
of the church hall seemed so merciless, so terribly everyday. It hid nothing
and so showed nothing. He then saw the source of those strange mouthing
sounds: it was Bridget. Of course, he knew it would be her, but nevertheless
he was surprised. He was surprised by the presence of her – a vulnerable

presence, looking at him, present, sensual, alert.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before, Dad?’ said Bridget.
‘I didn’t want to worry you, it may be nothing – and there’s no point
worrying about things that may never happen,’ and warming to a theme
which suddenly occurred to him and struck him as characteristic of Rona’s
father, he continued:
‘Don’t worry! Smile, it may never happen! You’ve got to keep going, no
point in worrying, you’ll make yourself ill.’
For the first time Bruno was aware of Rona. He heard a sound like a sigh
or a stifled laugh. He then realized that Bridget was angry with him.
‘Smile…that’s what you always do…so much talking and smiling, you
never listen, do you? You never listen…’
‘Whoa, hold your horses. Wait one doggone minute.’ Where this came
from Bruno had no idea, clichés were piling up, one upon the other, and
Bruno seemed to have no control over them. He was still in the chair but was
now leaning forward, his hand reaching out towards Bridget to silence her.
He wondered if he should go over to her but he rejected the idea. There had
to be that space between them. It was filled with tension, longing and fear.
Then Bridget turned toward the audience.
‘He always does this, he silences me, not by force but by a kind of tender-
ness…’ She searches for the words. ‘Everything is so fragile…the fear that if I
speak I will break him, destroy him – destroy us.’ She emphasizes the ‘us’ sur-
prised by the power of this idea.
For the first time Bruno is aware of Amanda. She has been playing a
steady insistent beat throughout, but it is only now that he really hears her, she
sings with a plaintive, resonant voice,
A kind of tenderness
He destroys me
With a kind of tenderness.
Bridget turns to Bruno and across the space, which seems, at this minute, vast
to Bruno, she says, ‘You couldn’t hear me could you? When it was getting
darker and colder, When you were so far away and it seemed so long until
Christmas, you couldn’t hear me. And now Dad, I don’t know how to hear
you.’
Bridget turns to Rona, the singing stops and there is silence. Bruno sees
the tears on Rona’s cheeks and realizes he is shivering.
Laura reaches into her pocket, finds a tissue and hands it to Rona,
‘Well, Rona…’
Rona hated this bit; she always felt that she had to say something. She
really wanted to let it settle, take it in, hold onto it and not share it with anyone
else. The actors were looking at her expectantly.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said wiping her eyes and blowing her
nose. ‘It was when Bridget said ‘a kind of tenderness’…that broke my heart.
There is a tenderness there…but there’s no…’ She searched for the word.
‘That’s it…there’s no robustness. I wish we could shout at each other a bit
more…and Bruno, when you said, “smile, it may never happen” it was so like
him!’ Everyone laughed.
‘I was worried I had gone over the top,’ said Bridget, ‘I just felt so angry
when he said that bit about smiling, I want to hit him’…she growled and hit
Bruno on the arm.
‘Ow!’ He cried, ‘I couldn’t just bear you to be worried…it was like I was
talking to Sally…’ he suddenly broke off and there was a pause.
‘Of course! I hadn’t thought of that… I knew I had to choose you to be my
dad.’
‘I knew you would,’ Bruno smiled and Rona returned his smile.
Lawrence looked miserable. Laura asked, ‘What’s wrong Lawrence?’
‘I don’t know I feel so out of it…probably to do with not having a role.’
‘Have you a story?’
‘Yes,’ said Lawrence.
Rona, Bruno, Bridget and Fran sat on the actors’ chairs and Amanda
returned to her music.
* * *
Appendix 2
‘Short Forms’ Used in Playback Theatre
The opening contributions – ‘moments’ in the York Company – are usually

enacted through ‘the short forms’. Although ‘fluid sculpts or sculptures’ and ‘pairs’ or
‘conflicts’ seem to be common throughout, these short forms do vary a little from
company to company. Although short forms provide a structure for the action, it is
not uncommon for performers to ‘break the rules’ if they feel it will benefit the
enactment.
The choice of which short form to use is made by the conductor, she will say
something like ‘Let’s see this in a fluid sculpt’. Playback Theatre York have devel-
oped, as far as I can tell, an unusually large number of these short forms. These are
set out below. It is important to stress that this is not an exhaustive list, and no
doubt other practitioners will be able to add others developed in their own compa-
nies.
Short forms used by Playback Theatre York

1. Fluid sculpt
Upon hearing a moment or a short story, any one of the actors moves forward and
produces a movement with sound or words. They do this as, one by one, other
actors join the developing sculpt. The piece concludes when the first actor freezes.
Usually actors maintain their movement and sound throughout the piece, however,
occasionally they will change in response to what the other actors are doing.
2. Three Solos (Soli)

Three actors move forward and form a line. Beginning stage-right, Actor 1 begins
and moves with sounds and or words perhaps playing off Actors 2 and 3 (who do
not generally respond). At some point and in any position, Actor 1 freezes and this
is the cue for Actor 2 to begin. The general idea is that the three actors will show
different and contrasting aspects of the story. The piece finishes with Actor 3.
3. Three voices
In this ‘short form’ the idea is to build up a melody (or cacophony) of sounds that
represent the teller’s story. As in ‘Three Solos’, three actors move forward into a
line. This form has three stages:
193
· Actor 1 gives a voice and sound without movement or significant

expression. When this actor concludes she is followed by Actor 2
and when she is finished by Actor 3.
· All three actors then make their sounds simultaneously.
· The three actors now vary their own sound, respond to each other
and pick up and repeat the sounds of others. They improvise
together around the sounds that have been developed.
4. Three stops
As many actors as wish to, come forward; the story is then played in three short
scenes, each concluded by a freeze in the action. This is used only rarely by
Playback Theatre York because, I think, of the difficulties of finding the freeze
points together.
5. Free impro
All actors step forward into the space and an improvisation commences.
6. Poetry and music

One of the actors volunteers to be the ‘poet’. The ‘poet’ sits on a chair centre
stage and a musician sits either on the floor or in a chair next to him. The poet
creates a poem in response to the teller’s story and the musician accompanies or
takes the lead accordingly. This form is occasionally used in performance but
regularly used in rehearsal.
7. Pairs
This short form is used to work with conflicting emotions, wishes or motiva-
tions. The actors are in pairs; one actor stands behind the other. Having heard
the conflict, the partners take on the two ‘sides’. Then, either back to back and
revolving, or facing the front, they play out the two sides of the stated conflict.
There are three variations to pairs in the York Company:
· B quickly tells A which side of the conflict they are going to be
playing, and whether it will be played back to back or facing the
front. This is now no longer used. Members of the Company prefer
the next variation.
· No discussion takes place and the first partner to start defines the
action.
· If we are working with an odd number of actors, then one may
embody both sides of the conflict.
‘SHORT FORMS’ USED IN PLAYBACK THEATRE 195
8. Chorus
In ‘chorus’ the actors work together, usually in close physical proximity and
with few words. Generally the aim is to produce synchronized sounds and
movements. This is also incorporated in the ‘full story’ when, usually uncast,
actors form a chorus to comment on or add to the enactment.
9. Tableau
This form is usually used when the conductor or the teller feels that the actors
have missed an element from the enactment or when the conductor wishes to
quickly summarize a moment, story or a feeling in the audience. The actors
simply form a tableau and hold it for a short time.
10. Chorus ‘interruptus’

This form was developed with the Amsterdam Playback Theatre Company. A
chorus begins and, at a point of their choosing, the musicians ‘interrupt’ it with
music. When they do, the actors freeze into a tableau. The actors choose when to
interrupt the musicians with movement and sound.
Short forms used by other companies

Other forms used by other companies of which I am aware are:
11. Transformations
This is used when the story involves a clear transformation from one state to
another. The actors usually work together as in a chorus and move from one
state to another, charting the passage through the ‘transformation’.
12. The wise being

In this form, usually used at the end of a performance, a teller is told that the
actors will answer any question put to them by the audience through a choric
enactment. The audience is directed to non-prophetic, quasi-philosophical
questions. I have seen this form performed only once by an all-male company –
Playback Jack based in Perth, Australia. I asked the ‘wise being’ ‘What is the
spirit of Australia?’ having newly arrived in the continent. It is not a form used
by Playback Theatre York. We experimented with the form some time ago (in
Autumn 1999) but found it difficult to do without giggling or lapsing into
oracular declamation.
13. Tableau stories

The Melbourne Company developed this short form. The conductor divides a
story into a series of titles and as he or she calls them out, the actors form a still
tableau to portray each title.
14. Action Haiku

This short form is described by Jo Salas (1993, p.41) as a form suitable for use at
the conclusion of a performance. The audience call out themes that they are
aware of from the performance. One actor stands centre stage and makes a state-
ment derived from one of those themes. For example ‘There is a gaping hole
inside me,’ might be a statement derived from the theme of ‘Loss’. Another actor
then sculpts that actor’s body in a way that is expressive of loss. This continues
with other statements.
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Subject Index
actors see performers Conference on the Construction public performances 32, 40–2,
affirmation 14–15 of Collective Memory, 2000 168–70
Alexander, Cyril 25, 163 162 symbolism 97
Alzheimer’s disease 94 conferences 12, 20, 49, 52, 54 ethnic issues 21–2
Amsterdam Playback Theatre British Airways 59–60 Europe 20, 21
Company 201 General Medical Practitioners
anger 25 (GPs) 56–7, 89–91 fabric 81–2
Apel-Rosenthal, Aviva 24, 163 conflict 24 fiction 23
Argentina 15, 160, 162 consequentialism 21 Fiji 22, 160, 162, 163, 169
audiences 12, 16, 24, 75 consumerism 23 Finland 18, 20, 21
audience participation 40–1 counselling 177 forgiveness 24, 25
horizon of expectations 47 cultural factors 47–8, 144–5, Fox, Jonathan 12, 18, 21
sense of place 60 147–8, 164 France 18, 162, 163–4
size and composition 52 Cunningham, Susanna 21 frankness 35
Australia 18, 20, 21, 22, 201, 202 free association 39–40
authenticity 146–8, 173–5 death 131–2 Freudianism 22
democratization 23 funding 48
Batten, Francis 20, 21, 83 dialogue 93–4
Big Brother 42, 180 emerging dialogue 95–7 General Medical Practitioners
birthdays 12 repetition 94–5 (GPs) 56–7, 89–91
Boal, Augusto 19 Drama Action Centre, Sydney 21 Germany 18, 20, 21, 160, 162,
body 111–13, 154–5 dramatherapy 16–17, 41, 69, 163
Botswana 22 160, 177, 178 Good, Mary 21
Brandon, Bridget 21 dramaturgy 20, 27–8, 91, 167
Brazil 48 Hagelthorn, Christina 20, 21
Brecht, Bertolt 166 Ecole Jacques Lecoq 21 Hall, Peter 97
Britain 21, 40, 48, 160, 162 El Pasaje 162 Henne, Annette 20
British Airways 48, 59–60 elastic 127–8 Holland 18, 201
British Association of emotion 36 honesty 35
Psychodramatists empathy 107–8, 108–9, 130–1, Hong Kong 18
Conference, 2001 83 146 Hudson River Playback Theatre
England 18 Company 163
caste 25, 163 ensemble 28–9, 133, 135–7, Hudson Valley Company Stories of
catharsis 165 137–8, 175, 176 a Changed World 24
Chennai, India 25–6, 163 collaborative emergence Hungary 18
children 20, 25, 162, 163–4 138–42
cliché 96–7, 121, 133, 146, 170 ethics 13, 15–16, 26, 29, 138, ideology 147–8, 151, 164
clowning 21 142, 149–52 imagery 27–8, 85
collective remembrance 15, 160, awareness of other 155–6 immediate theatre 18
161–4 celebrating the everyday 156 Improbable Theatre Company 27
commedia dell’arte 21, 129–30 performative stances 148–9 improvisation 16, 18, 21, 28,
communications 23 performers’ representation 120–2, 124, 129–30,
community-based theatre 21 152–3 132–3, 170
conductors 12, 30 performers’ vulnerability death 131–2
tellers 70, 71, 74–5 153–5, 175–6 India 22, 25–6, 160, 163
individualism 23
203
International Playback Theatre Rats 43–4, 44–5, 46, 47, 49, play 39–40
Conference 41 57, 60 Playback Jack 201
International Playback Theatre Red Coat 61–2, 66–7, 68, 76–7 playback theatre 12, 13,
Network 19, 21 reparative reconstruction 65–6 182–3
Interplay 21, 145, 162 Rona’s Story 11–12, 99–101, audience size and
intertextuality 72–3 191–7 composition 52
Israel 24–5, 163 self 63–5 authenticity 146–8, 173–5
It’s All Grace 18 Sisters 33, 34 blurring of categories
Italy 18 Nepal 18 180–2
New Zealand 20, 21 company relationships
Japan 18, 20, 21 North Central Washington 136–7, 137–8
jazz 117, 121, 130 Playback Theatre Company contemporary 22–3
Jerry Springer Show 180 23–4 criticisms 40–2
cultural factors 47–8,
Lear 154 openness 26, 28, 31–2, 42, 98, 144–5, 147–8
learning disabilities 20 132, 175 dialogue 93–7
Leigh, Mike 120 open performing 38–9, 86 ethics 149–52
Lifegame 27 open stories 32–3, 34–6 gathering 51
literalism 82–4 Oprah Winfrey 42 grief 23–4
oral storytelling 132 history 17–22
MacIsaac, Paul 24 Original Company 20 limitations 16, 30, 176–7
Marx, Karl 138 negotiation with hosts 48
Marxism 22 Palestine 24, 163 non-literal performances
meaning 71–2 past 98 82–4
Melbourne Company 202 Pearson, Deborah 21 performance time and place
memory 67–8, 76–7 Perfect Storm, The 90 48–50, 60
collective remembrance 15, performers 12, 13, 21, 27, 28, 30, personal and public
160, 161–4 31, 37, 69, 118, 120, 138, boundaries 45, 53–4,
reparative reconstruction 65–6 156 168–9, 177–8,
time 89 audiences 16, 24 178–80
mental health centres 12, 20, 49, awareness of the moment pre-show advertisement
54, 57–9, 159, 164, 169 124–6 ’citizen actor’ 156 50–1
metaphor 36, 83, 84, 85–6 ethical responsibilities 143–5, reflexivity 165–6, 167–8,
metaphors for performers 117 148–9, 157 170, 171
primacy of the signifier 86–8, interpretive responsibilities 15, representation of place
94–5 44–5, 132–3, 166 91–3
Moreno Institute 19 metaphors 117 representation of time 88–9
Moreno, Jacob 17 open performing 38–9, 86 short forms 201–2
Moreno, Zerka 18 personal involvement 81, 82, space 46, 49, 52–4
multi-nationals 23 86–8, 93, 102–3 tellers’ involvement 16–17,
musicians 12, 30, 31, 37, 138 protection 137–8 73, 165–6
response to teller 14, 28–9, terrorism 24–5
narratives 12, 13, 26–7, 62–3, 36–40, 102–3, 109–11, therapy without boundaries
103–4, 167 130–1, 132–3, 146 31, 32
Dream of Murder 70–1, 73–4 self 105–6, 108–9, 116–17 use of narratives 62–3, 70,
Gift at Christmas 13–14, 15, 16 sense of place 26, 60 73–5
Glass Door 33–4 sensitivity 176 Playback Theatre New York
limitations 68–9 subconscious promptings City 24
Mary’s Story 79–82, 84, 85 113–16 Playback Theatre Schweiz 20
memory 67–8 tension 126–9, 129–30, 130–1 Playback Theatre York 12, 13,
Mother 139–40 threshold of performance 17–18, 20, 49, 93
On the Edge 89–91, 92–3 122–3 company brochure 50–1
open stories 32–3, 34–6 trance acting 115–16 criticisms 41
Performer 127 use of body 111–13, 154–5 formation 21
Performing Michael’s Story 119 yielding to story 107–8, 108–9 Gift at Christmas 13–14, 15,
public performance 16, 26, Perth Conference, 1997 21 16
44–6, 76 place 26, 48–50, 60 Mary’s Story 79–82, 84, 85
SUBJECT INDEX 205
Mother 139–40 teller as spectator 167–8, weddings 12

On the Edge 89–91 168–70 Weir, Robyn, 21
performance at mental health spontaneity 28, 120–1, 125
centre 57–9, 159, 160, stereotype 96–7, 121, 132, 146, Zeno’s arrow 124
164, 169 147, 170
performance to large conference Sterling Playback Theatre 25–6,
59–60 163
performances to small audiences stories see narratives
56–7 subjectivity 37, 164
Performer 127 Sweden 20
Poland 37 Switzerland 20
Rats 43–4, 44–5, 46, 47, 49, Sydney Playback Theatre
57, 60 Company 50, 84
rehearsals 54–6 symbolism 27–8, 36, 84, 85–6,
short forms 199–201 93, 97–8
Poe, Edgar Allan 87 primacy of the signifier 86–8,
Poland 37 94–5
political issues 29, 160, 161–4,
171, 181 Taiwan 18
polyphony 38, 141, 1700 teachers 21
Powley, David 21, 65 Tel Aviv 24–5
prisoners 20, 25 Tel-Aviv Playback Theatre 24
privacy 180 tellers 12, 26–7, 31, 69, 155
psychoanalysis 67, 68, 76 audiences 16
psychodrama 16–17, 18, 19–20, conductors 70, 71, 74–5
21, 22, 160, 164, 165–6, involvement 16–17, 73, 165–6
177 Lifegame 27
public performances 16, 26, 44–6 protection 138
ethics 32, 40–2, 168–70 public spectacle 41–2, 177–8
tellers as spectacle 41–2, sense of place 26
177–8 teller as spectator 167–8,
Purloined Letter 87 168–70
validation 14–15
reality TV 23 tension 126–9, 129–30, 130–1
reconciliation 24, 25 terrorism 24–5
rehearsals 54–6, 138 Theatre of Spontaneity
religion 25 International 20, 21
representation 13 theatre of the oppressed 16, 19,
retirements 12 160, 164, 165–6
therapeutic boundaries 41–2,
Salas, Jo 12, 18, 19 53–4, 168, 177–8
Sao Paolo Playback Company 48 therapists 21
self 63–5 therapy 177, 180, 181
performers 105–6, 108–9, time 88–9
116–17 trauma 23–4, 68, 69
sequencing 89 truth 141, 146
shamanism 141, 142
Shoshan, Nurit 24, 25, 163 UNESCO Charter for Children’s
simultaneity 91 Rights 163–4, 169
social care 12 United States 15, 17, 18, 20, 21,
social intervention 29, 159–61 162
space 46, 49 Unsworth, Barry Morality Play
boundaries 53–4 143–4, 157
entering 52–3
viewing 53 validation 14–15
Vera Drake 120
spectators 31, 40–1
Author Index
Abbott, N. 68, 104, 118 Callaway, Helen 164 Foster, Susan Leigh 120, 121,
Adorno, T. 174 Cancalon, E. D. 72 129, 133
Alexander, Cyril 25, 163 Caputo, John 150 Foucault, M. 76
Aristotle 85–6, 165 Carlson, M. 141 Fox, Jonathan 12, 17, 18, 19, 20,
Arnold, R. 109, 117 Carson, Ciaran 63 21, 24, 29, 30, 38, 50, 106,
Artaud, Antonin 106 Cixous, Hélène 146–7 107, 108, 113, 120, 121,
Aston, E. 95 Clark, K. 72 123, 124, 125, 136, 150,
Atwell, Robert 23 Clarkson, P. 54, 177 156, 159–60, 161–2, 164,
Auslander, Philip 106, 113, 116, Clifford, James 30, 37, 167 179, 182
125 Cobley, Paul 104 Freeman, Mark 66, 67
Collins Concise Dictionary 84 Freud, Sigmund 39, 94, 113, 118,
Bachelard, Gaston 60, 82, 85, Connors, B. 114 124
123 Conquergood, Dwight 142, Frost, A. 121, 131
Bakhtin, Mikhail 71–2, 141 148–9, 150, 156
Balint, Michael 118 Copeau, Jacques 106 Garavelli, Maria Elena 15, 123,
Barclay, C. 64, 116 Cox, Murray 65, 66, 84 162, 163
Barron, F. 132 Crickmay, C. 121, 122 Gergen, K. 74
Barthes, Roland 28, 72–3, 129, Csikzentmihalyi, M. and S. 124 Gisler, Karin 126
166 Cunningham, Susanna 21 Greimas, A. 64
Bataille, Georges 182 Griffiths, David 129–30
Baudrillard, J. 65 d’Aubignac, abbé 88 Grotowski, Jerzy 106, 115
Bear, M. 114 Dauber, H. 12, 18, 30, 50, 161–2, Gubrium, J. 65
Beck, Julian 106 179 Guignon, Charles 174, 175
Benjamin, Walter 36, 37, 117, Daubert, D. 88
132, 149 Day, Fe 19 Harris, Fred 131, 155
Bennett, Susan 47, 48, 50, 52, 57, Dean, R. 126, 128 Heppekausen, Jutta 155–6
168 Diamond, Elin 146–7 Hermans, H. 63
Berliner, Lucy 69 Dickinson, Emily 79 Hermans-Jansen, E. 63
Bharucha, R. 171 Dor, J. 87, 95 Hertz, R. 164
Blanchot, Maurice 69 Douglas, Mary 169, 171 Hillman, J. 67
Boal, Augusto 19, 152, 165–6, Drain, Richard 106 Hirschfield, Jane 183
167, 168 Duranti, A. 117, 121–2 Holquist, M. 72
Bollas, Christopher 39–40 Holstein, J. 65
Bordo, S. 113 Eagleton, Terry 154 hooks, bel 147
Brecht, Bertolt 128, 148, 152, Eco, Umberto 32, 35, 86 Hughes, P. 173
153, 165, 166 El Guindi, Fadwa 47 Hutcheon, L. 116
Brecht, G. 173 Emerson, C. 141
Briere, John 69 Erickson, Jon 113, 156 Isenberg, Arnold 68
Brook, Peter 106 Evans, Susan 15, 23–4 Iser, Wolfgang 104
Brooks, Peter 36–7, 63, 68, 177
Brownstein, O. 88 Feasey, Don 177 Jacobs, M. 107–8, 118
Bruner, J. 53, 63, 64, 67 Feldhendler, Daniel 15, 160, Jarbés 173
Buber, Martin 107, 118, 124 162–3 Jennings, S. 178
Burns, Robert 159 Field, Nathan 113, 115 Johnson, J. 145
Burrell, K. 117, 121–2 Fischer-Lichte, E. 126 Johnstone, Keith 27, 96, 124, 131
Butler, Judith 115, 116 Fo, Dario 131 Jones, Phil 69, 178
Forte, J. 113 Josselson, R. 108
207
Kearney, R. 63, 150–1, 161 Quinn, Ruth 131 Wyatt, F. 66

Kristeva, J. 72
Kuhn, Annette 63, 65, 67, 76 Rappaport, R. 179 Yarrow, R. 121, 131
Kundera, Milan 161 Read, Alan 131, 151, 156
Rennie, D. 63 Zahavi, Dan 113
Lacan, Jacques 87, 94, 95 Richardson, L. 166 Zapora, R. 121
Lampe, E. 128 Riley, Peter 126 Zinder, D. 111
Landy, R. 178 Robb, Heather 163–4
Langs, R. 177 Rogers, Carl 107
Lassiter, L. 124, 126 Roine, Eva 92
Layman, William 15, 23–4 Rorty, Richard 83
Lefebvre, Henri 46 Rowan, John 107–8, 111, 118
Leigh, Mike 120 Rowe, Nick 180, 181
Lévinas, Emmanuel 113, 156 Rowson, R. 180
Livia, Anna 151
Llewelyn, J. 156 Salas, Jo 12, 17, 18, 19, 30, 74–5,
Love, L. 147 81–2, 83, 97, 104, 105,
Lyotard, François 22, 64–5, 116 106, 155, 163, 202
Samuel, Raphael 67
MacBeth, David 168 Sarbin, T. 63
MacIntyre, Alisdair 63–4 Sartre, Jean-Paul 61, 64
Marshall, Lorna 111–12 Savona, G. 95
Marx, Karl 138, 165 Sawyer, Keith 38, 130, 139
Massey, Doreen 46 Schechner, Richard 46, 48, 50,
Masson, J. 181 52, 53, 116, 123, 124, 137,
Maude-Roxby, Roddy 121 179–80
McConkey, J. 61 Schmid, Peter 107
Mcleod, J. 63 Sedgwick, E. 126
Merleau-Ponty, M. 111 Shaw, Robert 112
Mollon, Phil 76 Smith, H. 128
Montuori, A. 129 Spacagna, A. 72
Moore, Peni 163 Spence, Donald 67–8
Moreno, Jacob 17, 20, 22, 105, Spinelli, E. 181
124–5, 165, 166, 167 Spolin, Viola 124, 128, 132, 182
Moreno, Zerka 18 Stanislavski, Constantine 106,
Morgan, Maggie 41–2 111, 115
Morson, G. 141 Stern, J. 83, 85–6
Mulvey, Laura 180 Swallow, Judy 22
Musil, Robert 104
Tange, Makoto 117
Nabokov, Vladimir 61 Taylor, Charles 174–55
Nash, Steve 180, 181 Theilgaard, A. 65, 84
Nichols, Bill 169 Todorov, Tzvetan 149
Tottin, N. 181
Okri, Ben 167 Toukmanian, S. 63
Tufnell, M. 121, 122
Parker, A. 126 Turner, Victor 122, 131
Parker, Charlie 130
Pearson, Deborah 21, 75, 124 Unsworth, Barry 143–4, 157
Penny, Christian 150, 151
Phelan, Peggy 68, 69, 131 Ventura, Michael 67
Phillips, Adam 76 Vettriano, Elinor 41–2
Pisk, L. 111
Poe, Edgar Allan 87 Warrilow, David 124
Polkinghorne, D. 63 Wilde, Oscar 173
Williams, Raymond 48

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What publisher is mentioned as having published some of the books?

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Playing the Other

Rebels with a Cause

Trust and Power

Essays in Drama Therapy: The Double Life

Jessica Kingsley Publishers

Copyright © Nick Rowe 2007

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN: 978 1 84310 421 6

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Chapter 1 Setting the Scene 11

Chapter 2 Openness and Ethics 31

Chapter 3 Personal Stories in Public Places 43

Chapter 4 Narratives and Memory Work 61

Chapter 5 A Very Different Kind of Dialogue:

Chapter 6 On ‘The Narrow Ridge’:

Chapter 7 The Exploration of Occasion:

Chapter 8 The Ensemble 135

Chapter 9 The Ethical Limitations of Playback Performing 143

Chapter 10 Reflexivity and the Personal Story:

Chapter 11 Concluding Thoughts 173

APPENDIX 1 PLAYBACK THEATRE: A SHORT STORY 185

Playback Theatre York

Setting the Scene

From The Playback Theatre Rehearsal: A Short Story

Playback theatre is a form of improvised drama in which members of an

Setting the Scene

Playback theatre: history and scope

psychodrama community in, for example, Germany and Finland. Jonathan

In 1986 the original playback theatre company disbanded, exhausted

educated communities of the Western world and, to a large extent, devel-

Playback in the contemporary world

1. The growing distrust of ‘grand narratives’ such as Marxism and

These features of the Western world are counter-balanced by other trends,

Three examples of current playback practice

1. Playback theatre at a time of grieving

2. Playback theatre in Tel Aviv

3. Mixing castes: a playback company in Chennai, India

in local institutions. In light of this they have adapted existing playback

that it is a stable entity uninflected by historical and performative contin-

Openness and Ethics

In the evening following what we felt was a particularly successful performance,

Openness: open stories

2. The Glass Door

C. How long ago did this story happen?

problems by focusing on the impact on the possibilities available to the perform-

1. Open stories tend to have a looser narrative structure and seem

4. Open stories are not necessarily ones in which there is a high

The performers’ response

We say it with smiles, we say it with tears.

In his discussion of Walter Benjamin, Peter Brooks tells us that an autobio-

Second, the performers’ response will always be profoundly influenced by

1. When the actor is performing openly, she tends to allow the

3. In open performing the actor or musician often have a high level of

The response of the performers in playback theatre is always and only a