Boal’s Theoretical History

Abstract

Augusto Boal is probably the most influential of contemporary theoretical practitioners, and his books have become essential reading for a new theatre of commitment, whether in aspiration or in practice. Boal advocates what is in many respects a blameless theatre, in which all are participants rather than practitioners and receptors and are involved in an effort of social progress. The promise entailed is that of an absence of futility, which is a sense that may all too easily accompany many initiatives in performance or in other arts, and there is a comforting geniality to much of his writing which suggests that the theatre has the potential always to be kind, no matter what the circumstances. This in itself poses an interesting contrast to the definitions advanced by Artaud and Grotowski, discussed in the last two chapters, and Boal’s popular theatre games convey a world of inclusion notably absent from the philosophies of these two practitioners. Similarly, Games for Actors and Non-actors is hardly a title which conjures up the systematic world of Stanislavski, with its assumptions of an institutional professionalism for actors in specialized schools, and neither mise-en-scène nor the arts of the director are apparently of the slightest concern to Boal. His initiative, then, may be thought to be timely, not just in the context of Latin American deprivation, but also in those contexts which have been found for the theatre of the oppressed in North America and in Europe, which demand a focus for activity and a purpose fundamentally separate from aesthetic aspirations.