Playing with Pain: the Need for Guardianship in Group Work

Chrissie Poulter read Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University from 1973 to 1976, and was taught by Clive Barker during her first year there. Now a Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, her specialism is theatre games, so their paths continued to cross over the years. As a theatre director, deviser, and trainer her work centres on the use of play within and without the theatre world, with a particular focus on inter- and intra-cultural exchange. Her book Playing the Game (Palgrave-Macmillan, 1987) is a widely used manual of theatre games. Her most recent creative projects have been as one of the directors of The Bus Project – a site-specific project on a moving Dublin bus – for Performance Lab in the Dublin Fringe Festival in September 2007, and Metamorphoses with Prey Trio, a site-specific production with three musicians for the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Co Wicklow, described in the preceding article by Lizbeth Goodman. Here, Chrissie Poulter takes theatre games as a springboard to discuss and define the need for ‘guardianship’ in game playing, online or in the studio workship.