Mind Moves:The theatre is a therapeutic space. It provides unique access to our emotions. It identifies them and names them. It displays them. It expands their repertoire. Theatre incarnates our fears and our fantasies. It polarises good and evil in pantomime. It nuances it in drama. It invites us into our internal lives.
Theatre allows us to be present in intense drama at a safe physical distance or at close emotional proximity. It prepares us for this emotional experience: the lights dim, the curtain parts, the stage is lit, characters appear, they reveal themselves, their complexities unfold, exchanges take place, and actors and audience enter as co-conspirators into an emotional experience together and for each other.
Drama casts a spell. Profound silence is shared. There is intake of breath as new realisations emerge about the strength and vulnerability of ordinary people or extraordinary characters from the present or from the past.
We learn that what is felt today was felt before: plays from the past are relevant in the present, the essential human experience persists from generation to generation: plus change pertains.
To be human is to experience core emotions: happiness, sadness, anxiety, angst and anger, the "weeping and the laughter, love desire and hate". To be human is to feel. Not to feel, to be unable to feel, to be unaware of, desensitised to, or incapable of tolerating emotion is to be in a psychologically arid domain.
That is why we expose ourselves to the psychological passion theatre provides: we enter into a deeper understanding of ourselves, of other people and of life when we are there.
The love that many psychologists and psychotherapists have for the arts is not coincidental. Theatre is a professional resource.
The famous therapist Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt Therapy, worked as an actor and brought an understanding of life as an ongoing creative process, the importance of role play, of psychodrama, of "the empty chair" and the power of non-verbal communication. Many therapeutic interventions are based upon the play.
Theatre provides extended understanding of existence. It is allied to psychologists' profound wish to know the essentiality of human emotional experience, the face it wears, the movements it makes, the expression it takes, the words it uses, the times it is silent and how the individual is created in the role chosen or given.
It allows abstract analysis of passion, performed upon the stage, without any requirement that you rescue the victim, destroy the perpetrator, separate those in conflict or comfort those in pain. Emotions are continued on stage to the end, to the last act, to the final silence in a way that one could not witness in any other context and not intervene.
In this way psychologists learn the art of listening, of allowing expression and of being present to others. In this unique way they are provided with an opportunity to participate in more aspects of life than would otherwise be available to them.
What do we learn from Ibsen's Peer Gynt of the life choices made and opportunities lost? How large are the passions in little lives in Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman and the importance of maintaining dignity at any cost? Could one watch Vintberg, Rukov and Hansen's Festen and not shudder or see Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author and not ask who authors our lives?
How is life's absurdity portrayed by the plays of Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco? And can any psychotherapist hear our own Brian Friel's Faith Healer ask "was it all chance, or skill, or illusion, or delusion? Precisely what power did I possess? Could I summon it? When and how? Was I its servant? Did it reside in my ability to invest someone with faith in me or did I evoke from him a healing faith in himself and not ask these questions of one's own professional work?
The therapist in her time plays many professional parts. As to our Irish identity, think of the extent to which it was invented in our rich dramatic heritage, the unsayable said for us by Samuel Beckett in a long line of dramatists who articulated who we were or might be.
This is what makes Cork theatre company Corcodorca's imaginative expansion of drama into the real life settings in which they occur- Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice around Cork City's Courthouse, The Tempest in Fitzgerald's Park and its new production of George Büchner's Woyzeck which will take place this week at Ireland's Naval Base on Haubowline Island, Co Cork - so intriguing.
This is another dimension to audience participation, theatre therapy carried to new heights. For what is it like to engage in a psychological promenade, to be part of the audience and part of the play in this intense drama about a sailor struggling to maintain his humanity and sanity as his life spirals out of control? The play will begin at the water's edge as darkness falls and move with the drama around the Naval Base. Is there a therapist alive who will resist experiencing that?
Woyzeck by George Büchner presented by Corcodorca Theatre Company opens June 20th. For details see www.corkfestival.com and info at www.corcadorca.com or tel: 021-4215142.
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is director of the student counselling services at University College Dublin.