Page 42 - NAMAH-Oct-2020

All the world’s a stage: on drama therapy

Lopa Mukherjee

Abstract
This article discusses the many personalities each individual possesses that makes him act as
though he were many actors, switching roles seamlessly during the course of the day. When
this acting is done consciously and for the purpose of healing, it is called drama therapy.
It is a form of expressive arts therapy that draws out repressed emotions to the surface for
cleansing purposes. A repressed affect causes pathology in other layers of the being and
can be an invisible drag on the person’s well-being. The process of expressing it releases the
repressed emotion’s hold on the psyche. Trauma victims enact the scenes of their trauma and
socialise the crime to heal their own wounding. Those in the audience who may have suffered
a similar fate also find solace. In the safe container created by the therapist the drama can be
acted out, repeatedly if needed, with new and positive endings. Many festivals and rituals in
pre-modern cultures addressed this need to dramatise, to play-act, to externalise, to transcend
one’s ordinary reality.

These are ponderings of a philosopher
in Shakespeare’s play, As You Like It.
Like so many of Shakespeare’s profound
observations, spread all over his prodigious
writings, these lines stand out, outside the
scheme of the story, as a universal fact.
When we step back as witness and look
at our life as a cinema, we find many sub-
personalities within us, each one a distinct
entity.

Thus, we play many parts. Some of them
appear chronologically. Many are present the day and the indulgent father at night. On
simultaneously. The solemn husband in the some days, he is his wife’s playmate; some
morning is the strict manager at work during other times he is the lover, the taskmaster,

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