Augusto Boal
Brazilian director and dramatist who believed theatre should be a force for radical change
Aleks Sierz
The Guardian, Wednesday 6 May 2009
Augusto Boal, the visionary Brazilian theatre director and dramatist, who has died aged 78, spent his life proving that you didn’t have to wait until “after the revolution” for worthwhile social improvements – you could use theatre to make radical changes in the here and now. Best known as the author of the 1974 classic Theatre of the Oppressed, which had grown out of his theatre movement of the same name, Boal was an inspirational and internationally recognised theatre guru.
Boal was born and grew up in Rio de Janeiro and trained as an industrial chemist, first graduating in 1952 and then researching at New York’s Columbia University. Fascinated by theatre, he spent his time in the United States studying drama as well as chemical engineering. In 1955, he wrote and directed his first play – The House Across the Street – in New York.
When Boal returned to Brazil, he was invited to work at the tiny Arena theatre in São Paulo, and was its director between 1956 and 1971. At first, he ran writers’ and actors’ workshops, then – influenced by the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s – he took agitprop shows into the countryside and pioneered a radical kind of “living newspaper” in which the audience helped decide the subject of the play.
At one point, when Boal’s agitprop group was preaching the necessity of taking up arms, a peasant in the audience stood up and suggested an armed raid on a local landlord. Embarrassed, the actors backed down. But the incident taught them to listen to the people.
Abandoning crude agitprop, Boal developed the idea of the “Theatre of the Oppressed”. At first, this involved asking audience members for ideas for alternative endings to plays about oppression. Then, after an angry woman was so dissatisfied with how his actors interpreted her suggestions that she came on stage and showed them what she meant, he developed shows with more audience participation.
Drama entered his life in a more dangerous way when, in 1971, Boal’s activities came to the notice of Brazil’s military junta. He was arrested and tortured, then released after three months. Exiled to Argentina, he continued to practise his ideas, developing for example a new form of theatre, image theatre – which uses physical theatre instead of the spoken word – during a literacy campaign in Peru in 1973.
In 1974, he published his first book, Theatre of the Oppressed, which argued that mainstream theatre was an instrument of ruling-class control, aimed at sedating the audience, but which also showed how the dramatic arts could be a weapon, turning the spectator into an actor, the oppressed into revolutionaries. The British playwright John Arden once said it was a book that “should be read by everyone in the world of theatre who has any pretensions at all to political commitment”.
Based on the radical teaching of Paulo Freire, whose book Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a direct influence, Boal’s ideas aimed to wake up the passive spectator, inviting members of the audience on to the stage to act out their real-life problems, turning them into what he called “spect-actors”, and empowering them to find strategies for personal and social change.
He also developed other kinds of participatory drama, including forum theatre, which aims to generate solutions to real-life problems. Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed was translated into 25 languages and his techniques were adapted in places as diverse as Estonia, India, Puerto Rico and Sweden. There has been a torrent of scholarly articles and books about him in French, Spanish and Portuguese, although he is less known in the English-speaking world.
In 1976, he settled in Lisbon before being appointed professor at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1978. There he taught his radical approach to theatre, setting up a Theatre of the Oppressed centre, and organising international Theatre of the Oppressed festivals from 1981 to 1985. In Europe, Boal became more aware of the subjective aspects of oppression, so in Paris he started workshops – with his psychoanalyst wife Cecilia – designed to tackle what he called “the cop in the head”.
After the downfall of the military junta, Boal returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1986. He set up a major Theatre of the Oppressed centre and formed more than a dozen companies to develop community-based performances. He also experimented with other kinds of intervention, such as invisible theatre, where actors set up a situation in a public place to stimulate debate among onlookers, or culture theatre, which involves members of one ethnic group performing a play from a culture antagonistic to their own – for example, Palestinians putting on a Jewish play.
In 1993-96, Boal was elected as a member of Rio de Janeiro’s city council, and turned techniques first devised to encourage audience participation into a way of making popular laws, calling this technique legislative theatre.
“Unlike the dogmatic political theatre of the 1960s, which told people what to do,” Boal said, when I met him in 1995, “we now ask them what they want.” What excited him, he said, was the unexpected creativity of the process. “Many times we came up with a simple idea no one had thought of before.”
More books followed, including Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1989), The Rainbow of Desire (1995) and Legislative Theatre (1998). In 2001, his autobiography, Hamlet and the Baker’s Son, was published. In 1994 he was awarded Unesco’s Pablo Picasso medal, and he had countless honorary doctorates, including from London University, Worcester College, Oxford, and the University of Nebraska.
He was slight of build, modest, but always full of energy and quiet hope; Boal’s terrific energy came from his faith in the creativity, spontaneity and ability of all people, however underprivileged, to change their situation. In London, for example, he often worked with Cardboard Citizens, a homeless people’s theatre company, and he continued until recently working on projects both in the developing world and in the US, which he visited every year.
Boal was married twice. He is survived by his wife and collaborator, Cecilia, and two children, Fabian and Julian.
• Augusto Boal, writer, director and teacher, born 16 March 1931; died 2 May 2009
