While some may think teaching teenagers drama is torture enough, the sad fact is the news is periodically full of torture, abuse, questioning victims. Whether it’s countries in the west or discoveries in the 'Arab spring' regime-changes of current times, there’s plenty of material, film evidence, verbatim reports and witnesses to draw upon.
From history, there is a rich supply of similar material from two world wars and subsequent conflicts, from dictators and tyrants who brooked no dissent and what was done in the name of religion. Killing fields, internment camps, dungeons, torture racks, mass horrors litter the pages of history, including The Bible.
From the fantasies of fiction in book and on film, equally, there are caseloads of scenarios that can inspire and inform work on interrogation for teenagers. What follows is but one suggestion for UK Key Stage 4 (14-16 yrs).
Warm Ups
These are general ideas, to get students used to dramatising questioning. In pairs: a teacher questions a lying teenager, or police officer an awkward suspect. Then redo the one they liked better, so each character shares private thoughts aloud. This prepares later opportunities to share real suffering with an audience.
Still paired, any quick scene in which A lies to B, and gets away with it; and B tells the truth to A and regrets it. What are outcomes and consequences? Again, redo one to get a character to share thoughts aloud.
A short extract from Pinter’s The Birthday Party is useful. Goldberg questioning (and confusing) Stanley is a good taster. This can be expanded for the more able through improvisation into an imaginary psychiatrist scene: questioning somebody about what is deep within. If anything.
Still with Pinter, Mountain Language shows the terror of invading soldiers brutalising surviving women. The short scene where the old woman has had her thumb bitten nearly off by a dog and is asked to ‘name the dog, and I’ll have him shot’ is both comic and unbearably sad, simultaneously.
Later on, for more advanced students, a study of Pinter's play One for the Road is repaid by a chilling study into physical and psychological torture.
Developing Ideas
Say to the class: ‘Here’s a photo of a middle-aged, gentle-looking man who is granddad, kind to animals and gives to charity’. When they’ve looked, say: ‘and here’s one of a drug man, who has teams of people giving drugs to kids at school gates to hook them...’ Pass round the same photo, demonstrating that people have many faces.
Written extracts from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1948) or the movie (1984) show the rat torture in Room 101. The interrogation of Winston Smith on the rack is graphic without being too upsetting. ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ Four’ ‘And if the party says they are five...?’ It encapsulates brain-washing regimes perfectly.
Try developing characters who are believable in their torture work, still in pairs. Torturers out for a social drink, talking about their work; a torturer and friend who doesn’t know the job the other does; two victims of torture comparing notes (danger of comedy with exaggerated claims, but worth running); old torturer and victim on a healing and reconciliation programme.
It’s possible to research interrogation instructions used by the Nazis, Stasi, Japanese in the war, Russians, CIA, Serbs, Mafia, Saddam Hussein, the Gaddafi regime... things like, ‘come in the middle of the night, no sleeping/eating patterns allowed, exposure to heat/cold, slapping, shoving, standing hours on end, drip on the head, bag on head, play on victim's fears for his/her family’ all serve to fire dramatic ideas.
If further stimulus is needed, try Kafka. In the Penal Colony: the torture implement of needles slowly printing the crime on the victim’s back being demonstrated; and for the more squeamish, from The Trial, the futility of waiting for years (torture) for a door to open for someone to find salvation, but it's closed before he realises he was to go through.
Discuss the Issues
The beauty of this controversial topic is the discussion it enables in understanding (minority) views of others, the effects of mental and physical violence, bullying and aggression and the benefits of tolerance and democracy. The actual violence does not have to be shown; students can simulate it, do it in 'slo-mo' or have it reported by other characters, which is particularly effective.
If there’s an opportunity to work with history and/or art staff, Goya is compelling. Nicholas Pioch of WebMuseum, Paris explained that Goya (1746-1828), first of the 19th century realists, was a Spanish painter whose work ‘reflected contemporary historical upheavals. He was known for his scenes of violence’. He could also paint charming portraits.
In 1792, a serious illness left him deaf and isolated. Pioch said he became increasingly occupied with ‘fantasies and inventions of his imagination and with critical and satirical observations of mankind’. Get as far as this, and most teenagers will be hooked.
The film Goya’s Ghosts (2006) had an interesting pedigree, explained by executive producer, Saul Zaentz in 2010. Director Milos Forman had wanted to make a film about Goya fifty years earlier, as a student in Communist Czechoslovakia, when he also was taken by a book about the Spanish Inquisition (and noted parallels with communism) and ‘an incident when someone was falsely accused of a crime’.
Having worked together in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (1975), they visited Madrid’s Prado Museum to see Bosch and Goya works, and so the movie was envisioned. The ‘moral and religious guardianship’ of the Inquisition was equally fascinating, with the damage it inflicted in keeping people 'pure for God'. The young girl (played by Natalie Portman) accused of heresy was the third element. The Inquisitor became her only hope of fighting the accusation. ‘And then the horrors began’.
To any who doubt that this is too realistic, violent or inappropriate for teenagers, it does work. Just as almost anything, from death to the Olympic Games and from practitioners to history itself can inspire devising drama, so will this.
But if all else fails, comedy can be called up in the Monty Python Flying Circus (1970) sketch. In this, the real Inquisition was parodied with the repeating punchline: ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’.
Sources:
- Saul Zaentz Company, 2010. Goya’s Ghosts. Web 8 September 2011.
- WebMuseum, Paris. Goya, June 2006, Nicholas Pioch. Web 8 September 2011.
David Porter - Member of Parliament (1987-97), district councillor, party political organiser, former teacher of drama and now retired Head of Performing ...
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