Summary
Theatre of the Oppressed is a family of methods in which the audience stops watching and steps in. The Brazilian director Augusto Boal developed it from the 1970s, after the military dictatorship banned his plays and arrested him, and named it in homage to Paulo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’. In forum theatre, its best-known form, actors play out a problem the audience shares, and the scene ends badly. They start again, and anyone may call stop, take the protagonist’s place and try something else. Boal called this “a rehearsal for transformation of reality”, and set it against plays that preach: “We don’t have the message, we have the questions.”
Rationale
One of Part 2’s prompts asks whether work gives people something to embody, beyond an idea. Forum theatre turns that into a method: nobody is told an answer; they get up and try one.