The Arts in Psychotherapy, Vol. 24, No. 4, 391-393, 1997 pp. Copyright 0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd

Pergamon Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0197-4556/97 $17.00 + .OO

PI1 SO197-4556(97)00033-6

BOOK REVIEW

The Play’s the Thing: Exploring Text in Drama and Therapy

Marina Jenkyns

(London & New York: Routledge, 1996, 256 pages, f14.99, $18.95, paper)

At first view, the quotation from Hamlet The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.

(Hamlet Act II, Scene 2:616-7)

seems almost too familiar to provide the title for a book that establishes a new “stage” in the theoretical study of drama-for that is what I suggest this book, written by a practicing drama therapist, has achieved. When, however, we address Marina Jenkyns’ trans- parent but rich text, such doubts soon exit, pursued by a triumphant bear (The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Scene 3, stage direction)!

“We have hardly begun to look at the play and yet already it can help us to focus on drama therapy and on the social and psychological function of drama” (p. 8). This comment on what the text of another play (Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker) can reveal to us, guided by Jenkyns’ interpretations, could equally be applied to her own book. She at once engages with the psychological and social and dra- matic function of the play-within-a-play, as exempli- fied in Hamlet. The familiar is newly minted as she establishes the absolute centrality of this playwright’s device to her agenda: that of “exploring text in drama and therapy.”

Jenkyns draws our attention to the way that, in Hamlet, the personal meaning of the murder he has committed is brought home to Claudius by seeing a similar murder performed in a play. She further stresses that it is when a key speech, deliberately in- serted by Hamlet, is spoken by the player-king,

“when the words are suited to the action and the action to the words,” that Claudius rises and inter- rupts the performance, the force of his personal in- volvement making his guilt manifest. As Jenkyns writes, “Claudius experiences the power of the drama both to mirror his life to him and in doing so to present him with alternatives for his future action” (p. 3).

This is the power of drama that the drama therapist seeks to make available, in a benign context, to the client, who is enabled to engage both as actor and as audience and also as reflective “critic”. Jenkyns goes on to elucidate the ways in which this process may be transacted with clients in the course of working with and being “worked on by” plays. Her originality lies not in the concepts and processes themselves (these are also familiar to drama therapists), but in the intri- cate accuracy of reflective scrutiny that she directs upon them through play texts. She readily acknowl- edges that a drama therapist need not use the text of a play in any given session. The content of performance often originates in the client’s material, in a shared story or in informed suggestions from the therapist. A play, however, (and Jenkyns’ witnesses to this point range from Aristotle to prisoners presently in Broad- moor) tends to offer universal human experience, stored and ready to be realized in a specific dramatic form. In addition, working with a gifted play allows actors to move from the basic ritual enactment of “I’m the king of the castle!” to “I’m Oedipus” or “I’m Lady Macbeth,” with all the emotional range, complexity and creative energy lent by the play- wright’s text.

391

392 BOOK REVIEW

Bruce Wilshire (1982) has enjoined drama theo- rists to understand more deeply some of Shake- speare’s familiar statements about drama, whose meaning we tend to skim with a complacent eye. Tak- ing up the challenge in a text shot through with Shakespeare’s ligtning, Jenkyns offers a sophisticated twentieth century focus on the nature of drama and theatre. It is a view influenced by the concepts of psychotherapy, of anthropology and by her social and political experience as a teacher, stage director and therapist. She undertakes this through the lens of play texts and, therefore (importantly for drama therapy) clarifies her material in the language of drama and theatre.

As Jenkyns points out, the language in which a new concept is defined contributes to its actual devel- opment. Drama therapists have lately been recogniz- ing the value of defining their practice in terms of its essential component, drama. Jenkyns ensures that she does this by giving virtually all her theoretical points “a local habitation” in examples from chosen plays. The plays through which she demonstrates theory and practice include Saved by Edward Bond, Roots by Arnold Wesker, Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill, Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, and Riders to the Sea by J. M. Synge. In addition to incidental references to a wide variety of plays, Jenkyns presents six main texts, each of which brought particular themes (“begin- nings,” “ oppression, ” “death and acceptance”) to workshops in which she explored them with clients and colleagues.

Before devoting six chapters to workshops, each based on a play of significance and stature, Jenkyns sets up her stage by using plays as the means to ex- amine theory. In Chapter 1, Our Country’s Good is brilliantly deployed to illustrate the working processes of drama therapy itself. Chapter 2 sets forth theoret- ical material that has been drawn into use in drama therapy from related disciplines. This includes an eclectic borrowing from psychology and psycho- therapy. In addition to her interpretations of such con- cepts as “potential space,” “the transitional object,” “projection and introjection” and “object relations,” Jenkyns also discusses some therapists whose work has influenced her own “walk” and whose ideas are germane to her practice, notably Klein, Winnicott and Bion. I shall not soon forget her illustration of Klein’s “paranoid-schizoid position”: “the infant’s worst fantasy’ ’ is illuminated by a nightmarish quotation from Webster’s The Duchess of Ma&.

This theoretical groundwork brings out the way in

which metaphors from drama have, in fact, often been implicit in the thinking of psychotherapists. We are brought to see afresh how Winnicott’s “potential space” (the shared space in which therapist and client can meet and work) overlaps with the “wooden 0,” the space Shakespeare shared with his audience as inviting the all-licensed potency of theatrical imagi- nation. These recall Peter Brook’s (1968) “empty space’ ’ and, centrally, the safe space that the drama therapist seeks to provide for the individual client or group and within which an acting area may be given reliable boundaries. It is on this inner acting space that the members of the drama therapy session may per- form their own play-within-a-play.

When techniques and concepts have been taken on from earlier disciplines their development as ex- pressed in the language of drama becomes crucial to understanding drama therapy practice. “Contain- ment” and “distancing” are two considered in depth. Drama gives a pragmatic interpretation to their origi- nal use by psychotherapists, sociologists and drama theorists. A play can be selected by the drama thera- pist because the style, content and form are appropri- ate to particular clients’ stages of health, personal growth and concerns. The drama therapist works through the play to make containment and aesthetic distancing attainable. The dramatic form, consisting of scenes and acts that add up to a complete, discrete work, offers structural advantages to clients; they may be able to increase their autonomy in response to the boundaries that these forms maintain. In the roles, or characters, of a play, we may find aspects of ourselves to be recognized and strengthened or moderated. We do not have to own those play roles as our proper selves. The roles are containers or masks, in the ani- mation of which our emotions and ideas can play creatively and, with appropriate help, therapeutically. Engaging with a play as actor or audience can effect psychological change because “reflecting while in ac- tion is the essence of the dynamic of theatre” (p. 22).

Jenkyns is quick to acknowledge her debt to other drama therapists, in this instance Landy (1993) in re- lation to roles and aesthetic distance. The wealth of her own contribution is generated in her illustrations from practice and play texts. How sharply she makes us feel the character Mary’s struggle to find healing and grow through taking on a role in Farquhar’s The Recruiting OfJicer, within the play Our Country’s Good. Elsewhere, she is adept at allowing us to hear the real-life performers speak for themselves. A bonus throughout is the increase in our enjoyment and un-

BOOK REVIEW 393

derstanding of the plays. Paradoxically, through her consideration of Shakespeare’s epilogues: “The place interoretation of how a nlav allows us to relate to where the worlds of illusion and reality both meet and diffiiult experience, Jenkyni has enabled me to re- address the text of Saved by Edward Bond-a play I have never dared to see on stage.

Among Shakespeare’s plays, Jenkyns notes how appropriately psychotherapists have drawn on the text of The Tempest for the psychological force of its metaphors. In The Play’s the Thing, such insights are complemented by perceptions of the function and pro- cess-of theatrical performance, for this play is particu- larly rich in the dramatist’s enacted reflections on the “rough magic” of his art. Cox and Theilgaard (1994) have shown how spontaneous associations to Shakespeare’s works can enlarge the understanding of clients’ material in the course of therapy. The drama therapist can additionally look to Shakespeare for promptings on dramatic process, the central tech- niques of their trade. Jenkyns cites Prospero’s reflec- tions on a masque, beginning “Our revels now are ended” (The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1, lines 14% 158), which enshrines a poetic meditation on the re- lationship between theatre and life. Consistent with the literary acumen shown throughout, Jenkyns ap- proaches the closing stages of her work through a

part company in a single dramatic form” (p. 227). In this way, a dramatic form is used not only to comment on endings in drama therapy but also to prompt the reader to find their conscious balance as they prepare to close an engrossing book. Can we hope that a se- quel will address the application of play texts in a range of clinical, rather than research or project set- tings? Equally, this can be left to the variety of thera- pists who, after reading Jenkyns’ text, will interpret its theoretical insights in their individual practice.

Jennifer McMahon, MA in Dramatherapy Member of the British Association for

Dramatherapists

References

Brook, P. (1968). The empty space. London: McGibbon & Kee. Cox, M., & Theilgaard, A. (1994). Shakespeare as prompter. Lon-

don & Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley. Landy, R. J. (1993). Persona and performance. London & Bristol,

PA: Jessica Kingsley. Wilshire, B. (1982). Role piaying and identity: The limifs oftheater

as metaphor. Bloomi&&, IN: Indiana University Press.