Living Through Extremes in Process Drama

by Ádám Bethlenfalvy

Reviewed by Chris Cooper

This is a very useful, challenging and to my mind, timely book; a refreshing change from drama cookbooks packed with recipes.

As I write, a victorious Taliban are in control of Afghanistan once more, after a catastrophic 20 year, UK backed, US ‘war on terror’ designed (publicly at least) to defeat them. My emotions swing somewhere between rage, despair, shame, and disgust and when I listen to Tory government ministers, feelings of all four at once.

The emergency debate (if it could be called that) in Parliament was as delusional as it was poverty stricken. There was talk of ‘Global Britain’ acting independently without the Americans (where have they been for the last fifty years?) when the reality is Post-Brexit Britain is alone and without friends and needs its armed forces to deliver food to supermarkets. No one even bothered to mention the fact that the UK had already withdrawn its troops from Helmand province in 2014. I have heard the betrayal of Afghanistan described as the greatest foreign policy disaster since Suez. This of course is self-serving nonsense. You only have to look at Iraq, amongst many other places, to recognise that. But as Charlotte Lydia Riley so eloquently put it:

“Invoking Suez is not really about learning new lessons. Rather, it is about signalling a particular idea of what it means to be British in the world, and constructing a history of British foreign policy in which the nation has made one, single mistake, which no event since has ever beaten in disaster or ignominy. It’s a comforting fiction.” (The Guardian, 4 September, 2021) 

We live in extreme times, described sometimes as a post-truth age, in which comforting fiction abounds. The fiction of English exceptionalism is fed by delusional narratives like the one about Suez. This is what Bond has identified as Site A, our epoch. It’s hard to make sense of it all. How do we find centre ourselves in this chaos?  In Ádám Bethlenfalvy’s book, extremes and the narratives we construct, or are ideologically constructed for us, to negotiate our way through this crisis are central concerns for drama praxis. It’s about drama for living. Living through Extremes in Process Drama, based on his PhD research, is about exploring the connection between ‘living through drama’ and Edward Bond’s approach to theatre or, as Bond refers to the work that he is doing, ‘drama’.