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Reviewed by:
  • The Applied Theatre Reader
  • Georg Schuttler
The Applied Theatre Reader. Edited by Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston. London: Routledge, 2009; pp. xvi + 380. $113.00 cloth, $34.00 paper.

According to its cover, The Applied Theatre Reader is "the first book to bring together new case studies of [applied theatre] practice by leading practitioners and academics in the field and beyond." The book is the response to the desire for such a compilation from the editors' undergraduate and graduate students at Central School of Speech and Drama and Winchester University in England. As a "reader," the book takes an expansive approach, containing fifty-one chapters divided into eight major parts written primarily by British theatre professors and applied theatre practitioners commissioned by the editors to write short articles—none exceeding nine pages in length. Because the articles were written by the practitioners themselves, they reveal realities and nuances that only a participant could know. The brevity of the chapters is both the strength and weakness of the collection: short accounts allow a huge amount of territory to be covered, though excerpts from classic source texts by giants such as Noam Chomsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Augusto Boal, which are also included, are largely abbreviated. Editor Tim Prentki's chapter introductions guide the reader with focus and lucidity. No photos (other than the two on the paperback cover) are provided, though more would have added a documentary visual complement.

Occasionally the chapters seem oddly ordered, not building on what preceeded, and at times they appear to be randomly juxtaposed. For example, in part 3, in the space of the thirty pages that comprise chapters 10–14, Edward Bond's "Commentary on War Plays," Chantel Mouffe's "agonistic confrontation," bell hooks's "Choosing the Margin as Space of Radical Openness," Sue Wilkenson and Celia Kitzinger's feminist perspectives on negotiating problems of "Othering," and Joe Winston's experience with a health-education program addressing proper nutrition for children follow one another. While this arrangement sometimes seems disjointed, helpful bibliographies and author's notes are provided at the end of each chapter for those wishing further information.

As Tim Prentki states: "Applied theatre . . . is the agency of intervention forcing its way into closed worlds (schools, prisons, African villages, old people's homes, aboriginal communities) in order to provoke changes" (181). The book's major value is the firsthand documentation via interviews, essays, excerpts, and reflections on applied theatre activity by leading practitioners the world over. By any measure, it is eye-opening and astonishing. Few of us in traditional American university theatre departments devote much, if any, attention to these extraordinary applied theatre efforts, which aim to provoke real change toward the betterment of the human condition. This ambitious book covers a broad spectrum of examples of artists, teachers, and directors who work passionately to improve life for many people.

Illuminating distinctions between indigenous performance and colonial-influenced Theatre for Development are noted in the applied theatre projects conducted under the auspices of diverse agencies. David Kerr describes a long-term health project in Malawi funded by the Norwegian Centre for Cooperation in Higher Education; James Thompson describes an applied theatre project in a child-soldier rehabilitation center in Sri Lanka; and Ananda Breed tells about her efforts to address Rwandan genocide and reconciliation, where "[t]he rate of confessions was higher where theatre was used for sensitization and mobilization" (153). Paul Moclair writes about a child-rights theatre in Sudan; Jonathan Fox, the founder of playback theatre and director of the Center for Playback Theatre in New York, describes playback theatre in Burundi; and Josie Anger and Jane Heather describe mobilizing rural populations in Canada around issues of HIV. Other chapters feature accounts of applied theatre projects dealing with anti-terrorist laws in Portland, Maine, which became, in effect, anti-immigrant; a Canadian project teaching safer sex through interactive theatre; performance and self-advocacy for people with [End Page 225] learning disabilities in London; also in London, Clean Break, a project exclusively for female ex-offenders who commit themselves to break cleanly, safely, and freely from their troubled pasts to gain a second chance at a constructive life; and Michael Etherton...

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