4 February
NO 1260
Drama
Drama was considered to be a very useful part of the evening work at Tyn-y-Pwll and although invariably during the first week or so of the course, most of the young people joined in diffidently or not at all, by the end of the course, the vast majority were participating in various forms of drama with great enthusiasm. The term drama is used loosely and might include taking part in a written piece of work such as `Under Milk Wood', in improvising drama from scripts which the young people wrote themselves, in dance drama and in various adaptations of games like charades, or impromptu concerts.
Whatever the activity it almost invariably provided opportunities for young people, not only to participate, but, in many cases, to include and work at some of their own problems. For example, with particularly aggressive children, violence somehow always had to creep into the script and if it was not already scripted, then they would find an excuse for putting it in. For others there had to be overtones of parental relationships in the drama and sometimes the ingenuity of the staff was considerably stretched by the demands that some young people were making.
Many visitors asked what exactly we hoped to achieve by using drama and this was, of course, a very difficult question to answer. The shortest answer was to provide a medium of enjoyment but then this would invariably lead on to the question of whether such enjoyment was useful and would be of any value to the child once he or she had left Tyn-yPwll. As far as the staff were concerned, drama helped them to see just what sort of child each member of the group was and where they had got to in life. It also assisted the staff themselves to be more sensitive and aware. For the young people, it provided them with two forms of play. From projected play they gained, to some extent, emotional and physical control, confidence, and an ability to observe, tolerate and consider others. Secondly, there was the opportunity to let off steam and to discover new realms of adventure and excitement.
Another factor of importance was that all the staff participated in the drama sessions and thus the young people were able to work alongside the total staff group in a way that was not always possible in most of the other activities.
Since it could be easily argued that every human being finds himself playing a variety of roles in any given week, then it clearly follows that the opportunities provided in drama for role experimentation and practice of communication can be extremely valuable.
We considered drama to be an absolutely essential part of all the courses and, indeed, one of the activities which helped to co-ordinate all the other work which was going on at Tyn-y-Pwll.
The other advantage of drama was that it did not, of course, have to be an indoor activity and very often a whole day was spent somewhere like the deserted village or in one of the quarries acting out a play which was based on real life. One of the plays which was always popular down at the deserted village was one which attempted to work out how life had been there a hundred years before and to provide extracts from life as it was in those days.
To sum up then, perhaps one could say that Tyn-y-Pwll drama was fun and the fun was both educational and therapeutic, and in this sense, as an activity it was more than justified.
EDWARD DONAHUE
Donahue, E. (1985). Echoes in the Hills. Surbiton. Social Care Association. pp. 69-70.
