GAMES IN EDUCATION AND THEATRE

(New Theatre Quarterly Volume V. Number 19. 1989)

The taking-over of concepts from children's play and games into the training of actors and the
structuring of theatre performances in recent years has been complemented by a reverse process in
which concepts and practices taken from the theatre have been introduced and used in the
educational field. In addition to this, concepts taken from both theatre and children's games have
been taken over to constitute diagnostic and remedial practices in various fields of therapy and social
conditioning. In this paper I want to introduce some of the more important aspects of this field and
look at the work of some leading practitioners.

In general terms, the worlds of children's games and the theatre have always been associated. In
English the noun 'play' refers to the free-form activities of children and to a dramatic work. 'Players'
can be the participants in a game or a cast of actors. The therapeutic and hygienic values of children's
play were known to the ancients and since the seventeenth century, with Comenius, there has been a
body of philosophical and theoretical writing on the ways that play stimulates the mind and leads to
the acquisition of motor skills.(1) However far they may seem to stray from their stated ideals, the
thought behind the Olympic Games, ancient and modern, is that participation and competition can
lead individuals and nations out of conflict and into rapport and harmony.

Institutionalizing Play - and Plays

The contradictory philosophies of the nineteenth century recognized the need for exercise and
relaxation for those trapped in the factory system. As the industrial revolution gathered momentum
and the industrial nations accumulated wealth, so time and money were expended in shortening
working hours and encouraging sporting activities. At the same time, the forces of the law, throughout
the century, sought to restrain areas of free play, which often seemed to constitute a threat to public
order. So street football was suppressed and football leagues were formed.

During the 1860s and 1870s all the controlling bodies of the major organized sports in Britain were
formed - the Football Association, the Amateur Athletics Association, and the like. Similar dialectics
applied in education. The second half of the century saw a rapid increase in educational opportunities
and, in making education institutionalized, a restriction of the individual imagination and exploration
through the imposition of restricted curricula and mechanistic methods of learning.

With such a general movement in society at large, it would not be surprising to find something similar
happening in the theatre. Under the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen and his enthusiastic followers, the
individual genius and idiosyncratic fireworks of the individual actor came to be suppressed in the
interests of the ensemble and the integrating will of the director.(2)

The early years of this century gave rise to a series of counter or moderating impulses against the
general trend. Caldwell Cook was an early advocate of the use of drama in schools as an enlivening
force across the range of subjects, based on the following principles: 1. proficiency and learning come
not from reading and listening but from action, from doing, and from experience; 2. good work is more
often the result of spontaneous effort and free interest than of compulsion and forced application; and
3. the natural means of study in youth is play.(3)

After Cook, others built upon his ideas and practice and a steady growth in drama and education was
maintained until the early 1960s - when the stream became a flood and drama almost assumed the
character of a panacea for all educational ills. The euphoria of this period of rapid and wide advance
has evaporated for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was a lack of integrity in the institutions
training teachers.

Drama in Education is in a state of crisis in Britain. As with any process-based activity, it has always
been notoriously difficult to establish the precise values a child derives from participating in drama
activities. Although it would be wrong to suggest that the leading theorists did not know the value of
their work, there has been a crisis of confidence in drama teaching at large. Concrete arguments for
the value of the activity have been postulated but these have tended to reduce the scope of the
activity in defining it.

In the interests of structuring dramatic activity, there has been a retreat from spontaneity and
individual expression.(4) In the face of a lack of cohesion among practitioners, the educational
establishment, backed by a government determined to judge everything in concrete and numerical
terms, has imposed an examination system on drama in education. Whereas improvisation was seen
as a process of experimentation, it has now become a subject for examination. Internal exploration of
an area of experience has now been replaced by a fixed-time manipulation of an external object.(5)

Patterns and Problems of Play

The aims of institutionalized sport received a savage blow in 1914, when it was revealed that the
general level of health and physical fitness among adult males in Britain was dangerously low. A
development of social reform arose to cope with this and there was an extension of physical training
in schools.

Commercial interests have ensured the dominance of organized sport. Rigid thinking has kept
physical training in the repetitive patterns derived from Swedish drill. Only in enlightened areas has
the movement-based influence of such pioneers as Duncan, Laban, and Dalcroze flourished. Of
course, organized sports are only appropriate after a certain age and they depend on basic skills
which are either innate in the individual or are acquired and learned in play activities in childhood: and
until the 1960s, the consideration which was given to these activities diminished because of the
greater importance accorded to organized activities.

The stress placed on adult, organized sport relegated play to a simple, childish activity. The growth of
physical training on rigid, mechanistic lines relegated play to a set of indulgent pastimes, and its
significance in the development of motor skills was ignored. The development of 'the play way' for
drama in education seemed to imply that play contained the potentiality for personal growth and
development, but that some other activity was necessary to exploit this. (6)

It would be foolish for me to present a picture of children's play threatened by the changing
circumstances of modern living - although a very good case can be made out for saying that the
extension of that play into adulthood has been seriously truncated. Similarly, it would be foolish to
ignore the fact that certain features of children's play have been subjected to changing patterns of
social behaviour and to competing counter-interests. The post-1945 rebuilding of European cities and
the increased and increasing presence of the motor car has put out-of-bounds many areas in which
children traditionally played games - the street being the most important of these. The loss of these
areas has been recognized, as has the need to provide alternative spaces, but these have often been
in the form of adventure playgrounds which provide facilities but also structure the forms of activity
which can happen in them.(7)

Ecological factors combined with affluence in parts of the population have switched the nature of
activities from urban-based to rural-based, and from simple patterns of play to those which require a
high investment in equipment. (8) The consumerist society has built the making of toys into a major
industry, flooding the market with series after series of intricate artefacts, doomed to early
obsolescence and to be replaced by others.

It is almost axiomatic to say that the simpler the toy-object the more investment there has to be in the
use of the imagination, the more complex, the more restricted the range of play. Television competes
for time, and the record and video industries compete for time and money.

Rediscovering 'Free-Form' Theatre

The followers of Saxe-Meiningen, of whom K. S. Stanislavski was the most talented and assiduous,
found that they enforced discipline in the ensemble at the expense of creating other problems. Firstly,
as Stanislavski learned from experience, the imposition of autocratic directorial control could create
stage pictures of verisimilitude to real life, but this external cohesion counted for little if it was not
matched by some (re-)awakening of the actor's internal creative technique.

Unable to trust a simple return to letting the actor follow his or her own instincts (which Stanislavski
experienced in the case of his own performances as entirely unreliable), Stanislavski embarked on
experimentation to establish the systematic means by which the actor trained or prepared for
performance. He established the necessity for using improvisation in the theatre to breathe life into
the actor's characterization. This has largely been the basis on which succeeding actor-teachers and
directors have used improvisation.(9)

The second problem was perceived by Stanislavski's best pupil Vakhtangov, who saw that
Stanislavski had 'been so concerned with creating truth to life that he had lost contact with truth to
theatre'.(10) To be fair to Stanislavski, in his work he is always conscious that whatever truth the actor
seeks and finds it must always be expressed within the theatrical structures of the play. His work
produced a method applicable to a range of theatrical styles and was not a style in itself.

In the first chapter of An Actor Prepares, he sets out the dangers of embarking on free-improvisation,
removed from the structures of the play. The student Kostya induces in himself the sensation of being
Othello, but finds in rehearsal that the words are not only of no use to him but are a positive hindrance
to sustaining his role.(11)

Lesser teachers than Stanislavski have found trouble in structuring improvisation. The free-form work
produces exciting results which are then difficult to take back into the structured scene, except in the
form of generalized feelings. At worst the failure to find a bridge from improvisation to scene results in
deep frustration, and sometimes reinforces feelings of inadequacy.

Paradoxically, directors, exasperated by the inability of actors to create any reality below the literary
meaning of the text, have been driven to improvisation. The problem could be defined: the actors cling
to the text for support; in order to move beyond the literary into the active and sensory, improvisation
is called for; this relieves the pressure on the actor, but can work negatively if no way exists of
structuring the improvisation to marry up with the textual scene.

Games in Actor Training

The first published work which incorporated games into actor training in a comprehensive way
attempted to deal with this problem. The book was Viola Spolin's "Improvisation for the Theatre",
published in the US in 1963.(12) Spolin's use of games is largely prescriptive, and derives directly
from Stanislavski's approach to actor training, which it extends almost into a schematic, parallel
process of rehearsal where the sub-textual units are explored in tandem with the units of the play.(13)

Taking a lead from those parts of "An Actor Prepares" where Stanislavski utilizes play structures in a
free way - the search for the pin in the curtain, the saving of the baby from the flames - Spolin pins
down the precise purpose of the exercises and games around the single-word titles, 'Where', 'Who',
'What'. The rules of Spolin's games are helpful in that they define that area of the actor's work which is
literally sub-text. Negatively, they limit the area of exploration and discovery by defining the area of
enquiry so rigidly.

John Hodgson and Ernest Richards, whose book Improvisation followed in 1966,(14) loosen the ties
surrounding improvisation. Although as prescriptive as Spolin in their approach, they do not attempt to
construct such rigid rules. They base their philosophy upon the Stanislavski method, 'to gain insight
into social and political problems, ... also into ourselves and how we react and feel', and they proceed
from the assumption that these aims are achieved in the free play of children. To this end they
construct loose situations in which actors can improvise aspects of the play.

Less rigid than Spolin, they allow more spontaneous exploration, but in the process they lose the tight,
economic focus of Spolin's work and expose themselves to the difficulties I discussed earlier of
relating the improvisation to the textual scene. Hodgson and Richards also discuss improvisation,
using free play methods, as the base for constructing the text as a collective creation. Spolin,
Hodgson, and Richards made important contributions to the use of improvisation in the theatre and
their ideas have been widely utilized. However, at the heart of this approach there seems to me to be
a contradiction. Children's play and games provide the justification for the work, but the work itself
moves away from the real processes of children's play and games into a discipline of its own making.

Hodgson and Richards argue for an extension of drama in education on the basis of the
developmental processes of children's play. But the processes of drama in education are taken not
from play and games but from Stanislavski. Children's games justify the activities, but the activities
devalue children's games as a process of learning.

The Work of Keith Johnstone

The ultimate development of the Stanislavski line comes with Keith Johnstone's Impro, published in
1979.(15) Johnstone attacks head-on the preceding paradox. He sees his work as involving the
correction of the effects of what he sees as a destructive education which inhibits spontaneity. He tries
to reinstate spontaneous play in the face of a fear of originality, which he finds in adults. As Irving
Wardle's introduction puts if 'All his work has been to encourage the rediscovery of the imaginative
response in the adult, the refinding of the power of the child's creativity.'(16)

Johnstone's work is based on non-competitive group work. He does not deal with the self-absorbed
areas of children's private play, but with the areas of interactive play. He begins the process of play
without defining where the game is going. He invents rules as he goes along constantly to throw the
players off-balance and to make them respond instantaneously to a new situation.

Underlying this play is a sophisticated use of the Via Negativa. Johnstone's rules constantly question
the mental and social conditioning of the players, who respond according to concepts of what they
think is 'right', 'effective', 'original', 'creative', or 'funny'. Johnstone's classes are full of joy and energy,
and they brilliantly expose all the strategies by which actors protect themselves against risk and
prevent their imaginations from coming into play.

He constructs the link between play and theatre through particular focuses in his work. In addition to
arousing the spontaneous use of the imagination, his work revolves round questions of personal and
social status and the development of narrative skills - which are also significant concerns within
children's interactive play.

A significant new form of theatre has arisen out of his work, theatre sports, which is widely practised in
North America and Australasia. This takes two forms - a competitive use of improvisatory skills
between companies, and improvisatory performances in which actors are required to respond
spontaneously to suggestions thrown from the audience.

The atmosphere in these performances is electric and joyful. Theatre becomes an interactive game.
The major limitation is that (as in children's play) delight is the reward for playing, and the actor, given
a choice, usually takes the comic path rather than the tragic. This makes the performances very
enjoyable but limits the area of articulation of the human condition.

Sociologists on Play

Johnstone's work is one example of a wide range of books published in the 1970s and 1980s dealing
with children's play and games, either in their own right, as a basis for certain forms of therapy, or as
an approach to training actors and making theatre.
It would be difficult to prove but foolish to ignore the basis provided for much of this work by the
publication of the collections of games made by lona and Peter Opie.(17) These scholarly works not
only serve to remind us of the games we played as children and to introduce us to new games and
different variants, but also reconstruct critically the literature which had previously dealt with games
and began to explore the history and philosophy behind certain areas of play - with some comparative
consideration of games in other cultures.
The Opies distinguish clearly between play, which is unrestricted, and games, which have rules. They
are unwilling to find any direct utilitarian purpose in games:

A true game is one that frees the spirit. It allows of no cares but those fictitious ones engendered by
the game itself. When the players commit themselves to the rhythm and incident of 'Underground Tig'
or 'Witches in the Gluepots', they opt out of the ordinary world. ...It might even be argued that the
value of the game as recreation depends on its inconsequence to daily life.(18)

To some extent I will argue against this view later, but we should also note here the moderating
opinion of the Opies, that children explore areas of anxiety in their play:

It appears to us when a child plays a game he creates a situation which is under control and yet is
one of which he does not know the outcome. In the confines of the game there can be all the
excitement and uncertainty of an adventure, yet the young player can comprehend the whole, can
recognize his place in the scheme, and, in contrast to the confusion of real life, can tell what is the
right action. He can, too, extend his environment, or feel that he is doing so, and gain knowledge of
sensations beyond ordinary experience. ...In the security of a game he makes acquaintance with
insecurity, he is able to rationalize absurdities, reconcile himself to not getting his own way, 'assimilate
reality' (Piaget), act heroically without being in danger.(19)

There is a contradiction between this and an earlier reference in which the Opies note that children do
not seem worried if a game is not finished. The philosophy seems to me to be built on concepts of
'illusion' and 'reality' which concur with reductive critical approaches to theatre as an illusive
representation of 'reality'. (Their thought also looks back to the Recapitulation Theory of G. Stanley
Hall and Bertrand Russell, which I don't find helpful.)(20)

The French sociologist, Roger Caillois, in Les Jeux et les hommes (21) consciously extending the
earlier theory of play propounded by Johan Huizinga,(22) puts forward a case for games as being as
important a clue to the cultural values of any society, present or past. The patterns or basic themes of
culture should be deducible from the study of play and games no less than from the study of
economic, political, religious, or familial institutions.

It is impossible to produce any synopsis of a work which concludes, 'Play is total activity. It involves a
totality of human behaviour and interests.' (23) For the brief purposes of my survey here I want only to
note the fact that Caillois raises games (he, or his translator, do not make the distinction, which I will
make later, between play and games) to the level of a major cultural activity, neither limited to children
nor to illusory explorations of 'reality'.

For Caillois, as for many complex theatre analysts, play (theatre) is the reality. The anxiety which the
Opies find the boy exploring safely in the game Caillois elevates to being one of the four categories of
game - Vertigo (24). He traces a worldwide pattern of games - from simple spinning games, through
roller-coasters, to the religious dances and ceremonies of the Dervishes and the inhabitants of New
Caledonia - which explore vertigo, the edges of loss-of-control of what Caillois calls 'the desire for
voluptuous panic'.(25)

Under Simulation, Caillois includes theatre as a form of play. He also distinguishes clearly the
paradoxical features of games which will be important in looking at other writers and game-players:
games are an institutionalized form of play and as such need rules, yet they cannot be played without
the basic joy and energy released in play. There is thus a dialectic in games between the release of
energy and the definition imposed by the rules.(26)

'Play' in Everyday Life

A third major contribution to the development of game-playing in education and theatre came from
Erving Goffman, the American sociologist. In his books, beginning with The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life (27) Goffman examined social behaviour as a series of dramatic fictional structures.
I shall consider the way in which the individual in ordinary work situations presents himself and his
activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impression they form of him, and the
kind of things he may and may not do while sustaining his performance before them.(28)

In exposing the implicit rules which govern various forms of social behaviour and interaction, Goffman
went beyond Caillois's establishment of play as an important aspect of cultural life in its own right,
extending the field of play to everyday life itself. The illusory attempt to explore anxiety and control
situations which the Opies found in children's play, Goffman showed to be symptomatic of the social
behaviour of adults. In taking his terminology from theatrical performance and deriving his principles
from dramaturgy, Goffman effectively established a middle ground in which games, theatre, and social
behaviour all meet and interweave. (29)

The common ground between games, theatre and social strategy, which Goffman establishes, is
clearly at the basis of Christine Poulter's work.

Actors preparing for a role need to use their powers of observation and creativity. When performing
the role on stage in front of an audience they need a whole range of presentation skills and plenty of
self-confidence. Directors and drama teachers often use games and exercises in the
rehearsal/workshop situation to develop such skills, which are not only relevant to the drama and
theatre world.... Everyone, at some time, is faced with situations which call for self-confidence and
effective presentation. (30)

Poulter lists a hundred children's games which can be used to develop skills in observation, the use of
the imagination, and the presentation of self in social interaction and self-confidence. In this, her work
is in line with other developments in adult education which have utilized the same game processes to
develop the public personae and behaviour of business managers, public speakers, and politicians.

The work of Ed Berman, who has successfully developed a games method to work with juvenile
delinquents, school truants and disrupters, and in mental hospitals,(31) is important in this area.
Berman's work is not prescriptive, and he acknowledges that the playing of games must be, in the first
instance, enjoyable in itself.

Goals must be superimposed on activity through rules. A game for Berman is not a fixed entity but a
set of rules which are changeable. By changing the names and rules of children's games, you
remove the childish stigma from the games and can extend them into other age groups. By
restructuring the games, through changing the rules, problematic areas of social behaviour and
interaction can be approached obliquely and sensitively, and players led to examine alternative
choices and to work through the consequences of those choices in a 'safe' situation.

Berman sees the strength of the games method not only in its flexibility but in its universality:
Locked within all of us is a social language learned in childhood. This is a language of behaviour
based on the rules of children's games. These games are usually abandoned as an active pursuit in
early adolescence. The language remains within us, however, as a major formative influence and
touchstone in our adult intellectual, social, and emotional relationships and as one of the filters
through which we sift the world. (32)

'Learning' through Play and Games

Dorothy Einon in "Creative Play" distinguishes between direct learning and indirect learning. Under
indirect learning, Einon groups processes by which the individual receives knowledge through others
as intermediaries, such as parents or schoolteachers.

Direct learning, on the other hand, comes without the benefit of other people's experience. One simply
discovers for oneself. Much of what one learns as a child, has, because of its nature, to be learnt
directly, often enough by trial and error.

The motor skills, those involving muscle movement ...are typical examples of skills that can be
acquired only by direct learning.... Vision, perception, language and social behaviour all come largely
by the same process, particularly in the first year of life.(33)
Recent work, particularly in the field of anthropology, has turned to focus upon the early months of life
- the pre-expressive phase - and perhaps some justification for Berman's thesis may be discovered
here. As Einon points out, a lot of indirect learning, or education, implies that one has already learned
the basic skills, and this strikes at the established concept that the child is a blank page upon which
the educationalists write. To avoid the dichotomy, which Keith Johnstone struggles against, of an
education which destroys spontaneity and creativity, we need to examine ways in which we can
establish continuity between the direct processes of learning and the derived, indirect ones.

It is not surprising that the examination of the learning functions of play and games should be taken
over into pathological areas to provide a natural and holistic basis for therapy. Nickerson and
O'Laughlin outline a rationale for incorporating play and game media in therapy work with children:

1. Play and games are a child's natural medium for self-expression, experimentation, and learning in
general.
2. The child feels 'at home' in a play setting and can readily relate to toys and 'play out' concerns with
them.
3. A game medium facilitates communication and expression.
4. A game medium also allows for a cathartic release of feelings, frustrations, anxieties (i.e. an
opportunity to ventilate and put concerns into perspective).
5. Game-playing experiences can be renewing, wholesome, and constructive.
6. An adult can more fully and naturally understand the world of children by observing them playing
games. The adult can more readily relate to the child via play activities than by trying to induce
entirely verbal discussions of their lives.(34)

If, as Einon suggests, 'Vision, perception, language, and social behaviour all come largely by the
same process (direct learning)', along with the motor skills, then the play processes can be brought
into use to help those deficient in whatever areas of this learning. So it is not surprising to find play
therapy used with the blind and the deaf and with those recovering from traumatic deprivation of
faculties. In the work of Berman, and also of Sue Jennings, the deficiency tackled is social rather than
physical or mental - role deprivation.(35)

My own work with games arose out of a need to find a method of actor training that did not make the
actor self-conscious, as technical physical exercises seemed to do.(36) I discovered that in many
children's games the 'rules' constitute a resistance against which the players struggle to raise their
skill to a higher level.(37)

It has been possible to devise a comprehensive system of motor skills training using this method. The
attention is focused on the purpose of the game, be it an object like a ball, an opponent, or some
action performed in competition. The adrenalin flows, and, in play, the skill is exercised
unselfconsciously. This way of working appeals to an area of memory which is pleasurable and
anxiety free. When the blocks appear, adult powers can be used to overcome them.

I have accepted Caillois' thesis that theatre is simulation play, and developed a method of
improvisation which begins with children's games and proceeds through rule-changes to structures
which approximate to the scripted scene. In this I recognize that some areas of what we might
observe as free play in children are, in fact, highly structured, involving incident, narrative, and
characterization. In carrying out this work, I perceive two different types of rules. One set of rules,
which might be called the socializing rules, exists to define the field of action, to shape some order
and to prevent chaos. We all know the game we are playing. The second set of rules, which I would
call the liberating rules, is not so much concerned with what is being played but how it is played.(38)

Albert Hunt has made a feature in his educational work of large-scale games structures. Through a
very complex range of activities, he has rejected normal pedagogical methods in favour of working
with students to explore areas of investigation through games. In this work he follows Paolo Freire in
rejecting top-down educational practices, in favour of creating structures through which people come
to understand the world they live in and are aware of the forces acting on them. (39)

Hunt is not alone in this. The 'Theatre of the Oppressed' of Augusto Boal, and of many other people
inspired by his example, utilizes games and play structures in the cause of conscientization.(40) This
work is facilitated by the fact that games constitute to some extent a 'lingua franca', yet have a
specificity in whatever social context they arise and are played. The general principles of Boal's work
can be applied with local gestus. The use of games in education is now world-wide and manifests
itself in a rich variety of educational fields.

Notes and References

1 A compressed account of the main features of this writing appears in Richard Courtney, "Play,
Drama, and Thought" (London: Cassell, 1968), p. 7-39.

2 It is not possible to detail all the directions this process took, but one significant manifestation in
popular entertainment can be seen in Dan Leno. Leno, working at the end of the nineteenth century,
as much as anybody established the present form of popular solo comedy. In his career he worked
successively for two major managements, Collins and Harris. The story goes that Collins said to him 'I
pay you £40 a week go out there and be funny'. Harris said to him 'I pay you £60 a week. I can't risk
you going your own way. Go out there and do as I tell you, in your own inimitable way.'

3. Caldwell Cook, "The Play Way" (London: Heinemann, 1917).

4. McGregor, Tate, and Robinson, "Learning Through Drama" (London: Heinemann, 1977), comes
with the backing of the educational establishment and is extremely limiting in the principles it
propounds. The authors assert in their introduction that there is, in fact, only one way in which drama
in education can be practised. Ignoring many important theorists and practitioners whose ideas
contradict their own, they set out a reductive version of Stanislavski as the only way. Pupils learn only
by putting themselves into role. There has also recently been a return to the performance of scripted
plays rather than improvisation as the main drama activity.

5. The recent re-organization of the examination system in schools has established the GCSE
examination for 16-year-olds. In the drama exam, students are required to 'improvise' in front of a
board of examiners, using an external object, or letter, or poem to inspire them.

6. Some years ago I was involved with another actor in a project which tried to discover, through
experimentation, what the role in education could be for an actor, beyond performing plays and
without simply taking on the role of another drama teacher. Three teachers were assigned to help with
this project. The project was marked by extreme conflict as the actors tried to move more and more to
playing with the children in an interactive way and the teachers tried to structure elaborate games
which seemed always to set up power hierarchies in which they ruled the world and the children were
messengers, helpers, and general servants.

7. The contradictions of the adventure playgrounds gave cause to great anxiety, which was reflected
in a rash of television and theatre plays during the late-1970s in which the central character was a
youth leader in charge of such a playground.

8. Football pitches have diminished in numbers, having been taken over for housing schemes.
Quarries and other industrial sites have been developed as marinas or skin-diving pools.

9. J. L. Moreno, as early as 1921, established the contradictory nature of a theatre which tried to face
both ways - to be structured and to be improvisatory. During the early 1920s he ran a purely
improvisatory theatre in Vienna, working with such actors as Elizabeth Bergner and Peter Lorre. The
principles are set out in J. L. Moreno, "The Theatre of Spontaneity" (New York: Beacon House, 1947).

10. See E. Vakhtangov, "Vakhtangov" (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982), p. 151-8.

11. K. S. Stanislavski, "An Actor Prepares" (London: Bles, 1937), p. 1-11.

12. Viola Spolin, "Improvisations for the Theatre" (London: Pitman, 1973).
13. Spolin extends Stanislavski's work from the studio to full productions. Stanislavski experienced
opposition in getting his methods adopted by the acting company of the Moscow Art Theatre and most
of his work was developed and used with young actors in training in the studio. Spolin does not
question whether her extension is viable in the world of professional theatre.

14. J. Hodgson and E. Richards, "Improvisation" (London: Methuen, 1966).

15. Keith Johnstone, "Impro" (London: Faber, 1979).

16. Irving Wardle, preface to Impro.

17. I. and P. Opie, "The Lore and language of Schoolchildren" (Clarendon Press, 1950); "Children's
Games in Street and Playground" (Clarendon Press, 1969); "The Singing Game" (Clarendon Press,
1985).

18. "Children's Games in Street and Playground", p. 1.

19. Ibid., p. 3-4.

20. Recapitulation theory seeks to find in children's play ;1 recapitulation of all the stages of human
evolution. I find this too schematic and mechanistic.

21. Roger Caillois, "Les ]eux et les hommes" (Paris: Gallimard, 1958); in English as "Man, Play, and
Games" (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962).

22. See Johan Huizinga, "Homo Ludens" (New York: Roy, 1950).

23. "Man, Play, and Games", p. 175.

24. The four categories are competition, chance, simulation, and vertigo. Combinations of these
elements produce mixed categories.

25. "Man, Play, and Games", p. 65.

26. Ibid., p. 27.

27. Erving Goffman, "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" (New York: Doubleday, 1959). See
also his "Asylums, Frame Analysis, Interaction Ritual".

28. "The Presentation of Self", p. xi.

29. Goffman's view of theatre is surprisingly reductive and old-fashioned. He draws his language and
dramaturgical structure from the realist, well-made play. Surprisingly, what makes it possible for me to
discuss games as a theatrical phenomenon is due to a shift from theatre studies to performance
studies, inside which theatre is a subsection of the wider study of human behaviour. Goffman, as
much as anybody, prepared the way for this shift.

30. Christine Poulter, "Playing the Game" (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), p. vii.

31. Berman has been director of Inter-Action, a community-arts project based in London since 1968.

32. Taken from an unpublished document on the Inter-Action Games method, written by Berman.

33. "Creative Play", p. 12-13.

34. Nickerson and O'Laughlin, 'The Therapeutic Use of Games', in Schaefer and O'Connor, eds.,
"Play Therapy" (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1983), p. 174-87.
35. Sue Jennings is an anthropologist and dramatherapist. Her books include "Remedial Drama"
(London: Pitman, 1973) and "Creative Therapy" (London: Pitman, 1975). The use of games has now
been incorporated into rehabilitation work in prisons by Geese Theatre in the US and UK.

36. My work is fully set out in Clive Barker, "Theatre Games" (London: Methuen, 1977).

37. The simplest game is catching a ball, which coordinates hand and eye. When the ball can be
caught proficiently, the player throws the ball and claps his/her hands behind the back before making
the catch. The number of claps multiply. The catcher throws the ball against the wall and turns round,
reducing the time in which he/she can see the ball before making the catch.

38. In a football match, what we understand as the rules fall into the first category. All football matches
conform to the same rules. But football is a game and the skills have to be learned and developed. In
training and in practice there is a whole range of subsidiary play activities dealing with fitness, speed
of reaction, skill at controlling the ball, and tactical set-pieces. In these activities rules are applied so
that when the game is played the player's ability is greater and he can respond freely and
instantaneously to the demands of the situation. This example also serves for a range of theatrical
situations.

39. See Albert Hunt, "Hopes for Great Happenings" (London: Methuen, 1976).

40. Augusto Boal, "Le Théâtre de l'Opprimé" (Paris: Maspero, 1977). The use of games has spread
into many areas of non-formal education and consciousness-raising in the developing countries.