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Dateline: 3rd May, 2009
Augusto Boal (1931 - 2009) Brazilian director, writer and political activist Augusto Boal has died of respiratory failure following a long battle with leukemia at the age of 78. He was in the Hospital Samaritano in Rio de Janeiro. He is best known as the discoverer/inventor of Theatre of the Oppressed, also known as Forum Theatre, a way of establishing a dialogue between audience, playwright, director and actors. In it a play is acted out in front of an audience to whom the central theme of some kind of injustice or oppression is relevant, and then the audience is invited to suggest what could be done to change the outcome. The story is that, on one occasion, an audience member became so frustrated by an actor's innability to understand what he was suggest, that he went on stage and did the part himself, which led to the development of what Boal called the "spect-actor". Boal was was seen as a threat by the Brazilian military regime in his early years an in 1971 was arrested and tortured, after which he was exiled to Argentina where he wrote his first book, Theatre of the Oppressed. He left South America for Europe, eventually settling in Paris. After the fall of Brazil’s military dictatorship, he returned home and set up a major Theatre of the Oppressed centre and over a dozen theatre companies. His work was extremely influential, with many companies internationally being influenced. In Britain Cardboard Citizens is the UK's only homeless people's professional theatre company and the leading practitioner of Forum Theatre in the country.
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