Hamlet and the Baker's Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics (review)

An autobiography serves a variety of functions. The author as apologist can reveal personal information and counter slander or misinformation, or the work can serve to elevate the author as historically important. A reader's interest in an autobiography depends on at least some prior knowledge of the author's achievements or place in history. Augusto Boal's name has become synonymous with Theatre of the Oppressed, the style of political theatre he originated in Brazil, and with the methods for actor training that he continues to offer eager students around the world. His personal life is far less familiar, and this book fills that gap.

Boal's life is still a work in progress, and he begins his story with the disclaimer that he had no intention of writing a tell-all exposé: "I sought to tell only that which had to do with my theatre and its genesis: no intimacies" (xv). He then goes on to say that he does not swear that what he writes is the whole truth: "Memory and imagination are inseparable" (xv). Fortunately for the reader, the result of the application of imagination to memory is an engaging tale that swerves away from the stated purpose of theatrical history on enough occasions to keep the book from becoming dry and didactic. It must be remembered, however, that while Boal himself is known internationally, his roots are in a country and culture still relatively unknown elsewhere. In this book, Boal seems to write for his compaheiros, his fellow Brazilians, referencing people and events little known outside his own country. This is understandable, but the result is a story that is less accessible to a wider readership.

Boal's descriptions of his Portuguese forebears verge on the picaresque (see the tale of Uncle Miguel) as his father (an émigré baker in Rio in the early 1900s) and mother (descended from a questionably noble Portuguese family) are embedded in sketches of other relatives whose colorful lives are limned with apocryphal detail. The first two sections of the book are long on anecdotal material and short on dates or historical reference, with the result that they have the feel of entertaining fiction. The neighborhood is sharply observed and recorded by the boy who "watched the world" (79) from his front gate or the counter of his father's bakery, absorbing the unique character of the Brazilian people. The author pays particular attention to those experiences he deems seminal in shaping his future theatrical philosophy and career. Inspired by a Brazilian radio drama at age 10, he and his brothers launched a series of staged retellings of classic romances for which audiences were dragooned and which were the product of much vigorous debate. Later political plays were drawn from the raw materials of his observation of working men and women of his youth.

The identification with Hamlet that informs the title of his book arose from Boal's close study of Shakespeare and Cervantes while a student of John Gassner's at Columbia University in the early 1950s. Boal had completed a university course in chemistry in Brazil in accordance with his father's wishes, but throughout that period had led a double life, becoming involved with other students and artists exploring the world of professional theatre. "Hamlet is the synthesis of the world in transformation, two worlds co-existing. . . . [Hamlet] does not recognise [sic] in himself his other" (130). Preferring to call the condition "dichotomy" (52) rather than ambivalence, Boal identifies with Hamlet in what he considers a central theme of his life as outsider-observer/director-creator.

Returning home after two stimulating years on the New York theatre scene, Boal quickly engaged with Brazilian theatre at the Arena in São Paulo. From this point on, for an American reader unfamiliar with the history or...