LETTERS OF COMFORT FOR ALL?

Look, here's a letter from him: the state hath


another, his wife another; and, I

think, there's one 
at home for you.

The First Minister of Northern Ireland in Belfast (54 degrees North, 5 degrees West) threatens to resign over letters to people termed 'on the runs'. MPs in Westminster (51 degrees North, 0 degrees West) roar and shout. Journalists say 'I told you so'. Lawyers wax knowledgeable and rub their palms together in expectation of future windfalls.

A letter for me! it gives me an estate of seven


years' health;

in which time I will make a lip at 
the physician

All over a letter. Or almost 200 of them. Letters sent on the authority of various British Governments, including the current one. Some of them include pardons from the Queen of England.

Madam, a noble gentleman of Rome,


Comes from my lord with letters.

The putative criminals receiving these

pardons/amnesties/exemptions/letters of comfort are all alleged to have been involved in armed activity against the British State as part of militant Irish Republican campaigns.

Of this my letters


Before did satisfy you. If you'll patch a quarrel,


As matter whole you have not to make it with,


It must not be with this.

No letter falls through the letterbox of family members of the dead, killed by State or paramilitary forces, in the civil conflict in Ireland. No letter for the woman whose son was killed; for the woman whose her husband was killed; for the man whose sister was killed. No letter of comfort, explanation, acknowledgement, regret or justice. No letter saying 'sorry' and 'it won't happen again'.

Welcome hither:


Your letters did withhold our breaking forth

Patience herself would startle at this letter,


And play the swaggerer

Armies look after themselves first.

the letters too


Of many of our contriving friends in Rome


Petition us at home

http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org

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READING RAINBOW OF DESIRE BY AUGUSTO BOAL

Augusto Boal is a global theatre guru. His Theatre of the Oppressed and associated methods are used in mainstream and alternative theatre work, in political and social emancipation work and in therapeutic settings.

The reader is wary of gurus and approaches this wondrous book cautiously.

Theatre is the first human invention and also the invention that paves the way for all other inventions and discoveries.

The reader considers this sentence good enough for a t-shirt. The book is full of startlingly delicious one-liners.

The human being not only 'makes' theatre: it 'is' theatre.

So we think light and we talk matter.

The book is divided into two sections: theory and practice. It is laid out in a welcoming, readable fashion. The reader enjoys the occasional arcane term, often usefully glossed in the wide margins: oneiric; aesthetic; concretisation; ascesis; osmosis; metataxis; agora; polysemies.

The reader has never met Augusto Boal, but feels sure that he is a fine man. The book passes the Holden Caulfield test as presented in The Catcher in The Rye by J.D. Salinger. You have enjoyed the book if, after reading it, you want to talk to the person who wrote it.

The book cites four forms of catharsis, all of which are forms of purgation or purification. Catharsis in Theatre of The Oppressed is a route to disequilibrium, which prepares the way for action.

The rehearsal of an action is in itself an action, the practice of an action then to be practised in real life.

In Forum Theatre an intervention is said to be magic when, in order for it to succeed, it changes the given of the reality.

At times, in the case studies written up throughout, the reader senses Augusto Boal seeking to lead/direct/explain in the direction of reading actions and behaviour so that they are 'true'.

In theatre, the problem is not one of knowing whether someone is lying or telling the truth: the problem is seeing that someone is in the process of doing something, of acting. For even if the protagonist is lying, the action is always true.

The reader notes that the protagonist, the human, is always lying, in the sense of storying the world in order to make sense, not truth, of it.

Here the task is not to ask why; here, things are as they are, quite simply because they are as they are – but they might also be different.

Is it possible to gain entertainment from such theatre work? The reader reads that Augusto Boal seems critical of a man who simply wants to put on a show. This connects with the long tradition of treating play-actors, show-people and theatre makers with suspicion, for they are false and untrustworthy.

Because of the slowness, each gesture appears magnified; by their secretive tone, the words reveal their true content.

The reader wonders at the aggrandisement of play-acting techniques into prescribed, almost ritual, forms, no matter how much emphasis is placed on openness.

A rite is a conscious spectacle designed to be seen.

Even if Augusto Boal does not want to be a guru, do such language and theatre acts, as this book and the techniques within it, draw acolytes to them, who may use the knowledge 'over' others rather than 'with' others?

Is Shakespeare the reader's guru?

the purpose of playing,

whose end, both at the first and now, was and is,

to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature;

to show Virtue her own feature, 


Scorn her own image,

and the very age and body of the time

his 
form and pressure.

The reader wonders if the book could be presented less grandly as a work-sheet of a few pages of double-sided A4.

The methods cited are useful to mainstream theatre makers, whether the work is process-orientated or production-orientated. Or both.

The reader enjoys the book and will take its wisdom into the future.

The Rainbow of Desire: Augusto Boal; book; Routledge; London; 1995

Hamlet: William Shakespeare; Act 3, Scene 2; stage-play; London; 1600

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