How Drama Opens Spaces for Honesty

The National Arts Festival in Grahamstown is always full of surprising drama delights, secular and also sacred.

Among the latter this year, I was pleased to encounter an a capella gospel group from a coloured church in Port Elizabeth; a Sunday liturgy at the Anglican cathedral which set Latin Mass texts to jazz music; and a brilliant reworking of Molière’s play Tartuffe, which is in effect a 400-year-old theological debate between Jesuits and Jansenists.

But I was especially surprised to encounter a compelling play from a boys’ high school; even more surprised that it was a Catholic school, and yet more surprised that the play dealt honestly and sensitively with taboo subjects.

St Benedicts and Sisazabalaza

The play was called Sisazabalaza (“We are still struggling”) and came from St Benedict’s College in Johannesburg.

This is a school that I confess to associating more with rugby and rowing than with the creative arts, and yet here was a group of 15 okeish young men, aged 16-18, presenting a play that they had written themselves and dealing with themes that they had selected.

And the themes were not easy: a successful student on the edge of depression, a drunken and corrupt father, a role model older brother throwing his life away, a bullying teacher, economic inequality among teens, the rape of a girlfriend caught up in the crossfire.

Two teachers, Brittany Craze and Karen McAnda, had coached the actors in developing the script. But, they assured me, the themes and the characters were the boys’ own choices.

It was during conversations in drama workshops about the issues that troubled them that the boys themselves identified these themes and then created the realistic characters who portrayed them.

Inevitably, some of the characters were heavily drawn from the boys’ own lives or from people they knew. But they were also not afraid to be more subversive in their character development.

For example, a note of humour was introduced through a white cop who wanted to be black and a black cop who wanted to be white. And there was a young man who played the character of the girlfriend, not in caricature or jokeyness but with great sensitivity and restraint.

Parents and educators often worry about the EQ, the emotional intelligence quotient of young men today. They are locked away in their rooms with their Playstations or lost in music played through their ear buds; we don’t know what they are thinking and we worry.

The work of the St Benedict’s group showed that drama can give young men the tools they need to have hard conversations with their peers, with their parents and, in fact, with themselves.

Schools forge social honesty

Catholic schools, rightly or wrongly, have not always had a reputation for radical social honesty. Certainly, they produce great results and excellent discipline. But are they seen as places where there are authentic conversations about hard topics? This group showed that they can be and set a bar for other schools to follow.

In Sisazabalaza the topics were alcohol, depression, rape, untimely death, bullying and poverty. Another time they might have chosen drugs, contraception, sexual orientation, relationships or cheating. We know that these subjects are preoccupying many of our young people.

Faced by this, parents and schools have three possible responses: denial, dictation and dialogue. The first attitude is what prevailed when I was at school: if difficult things are not spoken about then they do not exist or will magically go away. Of course, we know that does not work.

A second approach, dictation, is when an adult decides what the young person needs to know or think — about drugs or Aids or life — and then keeps telling them over and over again. The student ends up able to repeat what they have been told. Whether it actually changes their behaviour remains unproven.

Dialogue is the approach that demands most work but, in the long run, is the most effective. This recognises that it is best to start with the young person—his or her life, experiences, values, concerns — and build from there.

It still allows space for the young person to be challenged — by adults and also by other young people – but it gives space for the voices of the young people themselves.

Drama is an excellent way to provide that space and allows a safer context in which to discuss “hard topics”.

One line in the Sisazabalaza play really sticks with me. The boy who has raped his girlfriend is asked by his abusive father why he did it. “I don’t know how to love because you never taught me. But I know how to hurt, papa, because you taught me that.”

Space for Dialogue

I also saw the power of this last year with a play about street-dwelling drug users developed at the Denis Hurley Centre by the Big Brotherhood Theatre Company.

It was performed to an audience of Grade 11 learners from Holy Family School Durban, and a hundred priests and deacons (plus a bishop, a cardinal and a papal nuncio!). Watching the play together with adults opened up a space in which the young people could talk frankly about the reality of drugs and temptation, and it allowed the clerics the space to listen before they started to speak.

I wonder why this approach seems so unusual to us. After all, its roots are in the Gospels.

Jesus knew about the hard topics of his day — political oppression, self-righteous leaders, poverty, stigmatisation. His approach was certainly not one of denial.

And while he did spend some time “dictating” through preaching, he also spent a lot of time in dialogue with those who were most troubled, giving them space to tell their own stories.

Furthermore, parables were his form of drama, helping people to see their own stories and receive lessons that were hard to hear.

It would be a wonderful contribution to South African society — a true example of community serving humanity — if our Catholic schools developed a reputation for being places which were not unafraid to deal with hard topics and trusted their learners enough to give them their voice.

The Church has a tradition for being a voice for the voiceless. Sometimes that might mean speaking on behalf of someone. But it can also mean making sure that voices that need to be heard are given a platform; drama can provide that.

As one of the young men explained when I asked whether his parents were happy about the play portraying such a cruel father. “Oh they’re used to it,” he replied. “They expect us to tell the truth.”

‘Sisazabalaza’ will be performed at St Benedict’s on July 28. And the group still needs to raise R32000 of the R72000 it cost them to take the play to Grahamstown. For more information or to assist, contact Karen McAnda at