One 'dark theatre' that can make a difference to drama education during COVID-19

In the wake of the Coronavirus, hundreds, if not thousands, of theatre across the globe are currently dark. Social distancing is the antithesis of what theatre makers believe in. Coming together as a community is at the centre of live performance. However, there is currently one ‘dark theatre’ that offers a different route to creativity that lockdown measures cannot prevent.

The Dark Theatre is an interactive comic book created by Prospero’s curators, C&T theatre company, and it is now free and available for anyone to use in a digital form. Created before the internet was a feature of everyday life, the Dark Theatre was shaped by the same desire to create quality distancing learning that guides so many drama teachers today. Which is why today we’re announcing the comic’s return, but in a new, digitally energised form, free for anyone to use.

Back then, C&T was a Theatre-in-Education company touring TIE programmes to small rural schools across Herefordshire and Worcestershire, in the West Midlands of England. Touring these isolated schools, posed many logistical and creative challenges. C&T recognised that rare visits from a TIE company were not what these schools primarily needed. They told us they needed some form of sustainable drama provision, not one-off performances. Long-term involvement would enable these schools to ‘scaffold’ drama teaching for themselves, enabling them to embed creativity across the curriculum.

The result was The Dark Theatre : a termly comic book that repurposed media storyboarding techniques used in film and TV production for drama education purposes. We started by adapting TIE methods for this innovative approach and then shaped a fictional context in which our drama could take place within. We recruited a professional comic book artists, Roberto Corona (ironic name at the moment), who had worked regularly for DC and Marvel Comics. He taught us about comics, we taught him about drama.

The story was devised using classic TIE methods, but was equally invested with many of storytelling techniques that make comics so engaging. In a sleepy rural town, local playwright Nathan Page dies in suspicious circumstances. As his son and daughter investigate, suspects and motives emerge. Finally, late at night, on the stage of his now closed theatre, scenes from his lost last play appear as apparitions, revealing even more cryptic clues.

What made the approach particularly distinctive was our method of plotting the story. In writing the first issue of this Whodunit I had no idea Who Did It. Embedded in the narrative were drama activities and creative tasks that served as starting points for classroom activities. Readers were initially framed as Detectives, examining the text of the comic book for clues. Precision and forensic analysis were emphasised as vital. No mark, no brush stroke, no line of dialogue was there by accident. Everything was deliberate and therefore potentially a clue. Only by using drama as a method of analysis would the narrative begin to reveal its mysteries.

As schools completed the tasks they documented their findings and fed their ideas back to C&T. This work then informed the writing of the next issue of the comic. The children were both readers and authors of the comic, collaboratively creating their own narrative from their dramatic investigation, working simultaneously alongside other schools. Sometimes the democratic nature of this process of authorship, with dozens of schools contributing, illuminated new possibilities I had never anticipated, taking the story in new directions. At other points, consensus seemed to make things too easy, requiring me to throw in red herrings, or contrive sudden plot twists that injected tension. Pre-internet, this process of collaboration was often slow. Photos were developed and posted, VHS tapes of drama packaged up and delivered. We were just waiting for the internet to be invented! Over two years, eight issues of The Dark Theatre were published, with over seventy schools simultaneously contributing.

The Dark Theatre was a hybrid mix of drama techniques. Part Process Drama, part Rolling Role, the project was heavily influenced by Roland Barthes’ Death Of The Author, Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search of An Author and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. There’s a bit of Hamlet in there too. All this was designed for brave KS2 children and KS3. Children were engrossed in the psychedelic quality of the mystery and the sense of paranoia it induced.

For years we have been planning to re-create The Dark Theatre online. Now seems the right time. Our Prospero tech works brilliantly with the comic book form, turning a young person’s smartphone or tablet into an interactive graphic novel. It works perfectly as a solitary read and although the tasks have had to be adapted for home use, they still aim to engage the imagination in the same way the original group tasks did. We have simplified some of the activities, so young readers can engage without getting too bogged down in lengthy exposition, but we hope the narrative and the form still hold your attention. When we first used it, teachers often commented that it did a great job of engaging reluctant readers, with its use of visuals to draw people into the narrative.

Over the next four weeks we will release one by one each of the first four issues of the original Dark Theatre story arc. Of course, this time round, your students are not authoring the next issue in the cycle, but if we capture enough new readers this time round, who knows what might happen in the next few months? It would be great to bring new, digital life to our long-dark theatre.

Paul Sutton, author of The Dark Theatre