Why Theatre? The Case for Participatory Arts in Difficult Conversations

Article 1 of 4  |  IRL: In Real Life Blog Series

By Geraint Brown, Spectacle Theatre

“I thought it did a really good job exploring issues that aren’t widely talked about, and you did those characters justice, and kind of gave representation to people in that situation.”

Year 9 pupil (female), RCT secondary school

Have you ever watched a young person close down the moment a difficult subject comes up? Not out of defiance. Just a kind of quiet closing-off, a sense that this particular conversation is not for them, not here, not now.

Or perhaps you have been the one trying to start it. Searching for the right words. Wondering whether the room is safe enough, whether the timing is right, whether bringing it up will help or simply make things worse.

These moments happen in classrooms and living rooms alike. Around topics like peer pressure, online behaviour, gender, consent, and the grey areas that are hardest to name. The subject is present, often urgently so, but something keeps the conversation just out of reach.

Participatory theatre has been working on this challenge for over sixty years. And it is the approach at the heart of IRL: In Real Life, Spectacle Theatre’s new programme for young people aged 11 and over.

What it does, and why it works, is worth understanding. Because it is not magic. It is method.

From Brazil to the Rhondda: sixty years of theatre that opens conversations

The idea that drama could be a tool for learning and social change took deliberate shape in Britain in 1965, when the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry sent a company directly into schools: age-specific, issues-based, free at the point of delivery, and designed not to give young people answers but to help them find their own. By the 1970s, around thirty Theatre in Education (TIE) teams were operating across the UK. Wales embraced the movement with particular commitment. Companies including Theatr Powys, Gwent Theatre, Theatr Iolo, and Spectacle Theatre itself have been rooted in this tradition since the late 1970s, each bringing professional theatre into schools and communities across the country. It reflects something particular about Wales: a belief that culture is not a luxury, and that theatre belongs to everyone.

Meanwhile, in 1960s Brazil, a theatre director and political activist called Augusto Boal was developing what he called Forum Theatre. Working with communities who had little access to power or platform, Boal’s central idea was that people watching a story about injustice should not just watch it. They should be able to stop it, enter it, and try to change it. He called the people in the room not spectators but “spect-actors.” His insight: when you rehearse something in the protected space of a story, you begin to believe you can do it in real life. His ideas travelled quickly, and they remain central to participatory theatre today.

Six things participatory theatre does that other approaches cannot

1. Safety in story

When a Year 7 pupil challenges a character on stage about why they showed a child something they should never have seen, they are not talking about their own experience. They are talking about what’s behind the behaviour of a character, Kyle Coghlan, in a story. That distance is not avoidance. It is permission. Young people who said almost nothing in the warm-up were directing pointed, clear-sighted challenges at characters by the end of the session.

2. The trusted adult

One finding from the IRL tour was unexpected. When young people were invited to respond to Kyle Coghlan, a teacher character in the play, the warmth in their responses was striking. Pupils described him as someone who cared a lot and was willing to put others first. They asked him whether he knew how valued he was.

For many of the young people in this programme, these are not abstract qualities. They are qualities that they’re actively seeking in the adults around them. The story gave them a safe figure to respond to. And in doing so, it did something that perhaps only fiction can: it made it possible to rehearse the experience of being supported, before having to ask for it in real life.

3. Meet them where they are

IRL uses a specific device to draw its audience in: the play is framed as a video game. Jay is online. The characters appear on screen. The choices have consequences. For secondary-age young people who have grown up inside games culture, this framing is immediately legible. The fiction does not feel remote. It feels familiar.

“I found it really interesting the way it was portrayed as a video game, but it was like an actual story, and it was interesting to hear in the workshop bit what the other characters thought about it and see different perspectives.”

Year 9 pupil, RCT secondary school

The frame is not decorative. It is the specific mechanism that gets young people inside the story quickly, before their defences are fully up.

4. They knew. They just didn’t have the word.

Perhaps the most revealing observation from the entire tour came from a youth worker at a community setting in Rhydyfelin. She noted that the most striking thing was how young people already recognised the behaviours being depicted in the story. What they lacked was the vocabulary to describe them. Theatre addresses this in a way that a worksheet cannot. The story shows the thing first. The workshop gives the language. And suddenly the experience a young person has been living with, perhaps for years, has a shape and a name.

5. Built-in breathing space

IRL deals with serious material. Online coercion. Racial prejudice. Gender-based harm. The grooming of a young person by an adult. Any one of these topics would be challenging in a classroom. Together, they require a particular kind of care from everyone in the room.

The same youth worker also observed that a dog character in the play creates space for the audience to breathe. This is craft, not accident. Participatory theatre at its best holds both: the weight of a serious subject and the lightness that allows young people to stay in the room with it. Without that balance, sessions become overwhelming. With it, the most challenging material can be explored safely and honestly.

6. They don’t watch. They decide.

In a conventional lesson, the teacher holds the knowledge and distributes it. In participatory theatre, the young people are part of the process of making meaning. They make choices. They redirect the story. They decide what questions get asked of which characters. The learning is not delivered to them. It is arrived at together. Agency and learning are connected, and the pupil responses from the IRL tour are evidence of it.

“Although I disagree with his opinions, I can understand what experiences have influenced his paranoia.”

Year 9 pupil, RCT secondary school

That is not a pupil reciting what they have been told. That is a pupil thinking.

What this has to do with Wales in 2026

The Curriculum for Wales places health and wellbeing at the centre of every learner’s experience. The RSE Code, which sits within it, places a statutory duty on schools to address misogyny, gender stereotypes, online behaviour, and bystander responsibility. The Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 sets a broader framework, committing Wales to joined-up, preventative action rather than simply responding to problems after they arise. Both frameworks call for approaches that are inclusive, age-appropriate, and sensitive to what young people bring into the room.

Participatory theatre is exactly what they are asking for. It meets young people where they are, creates safety for difficult conversations, and builds not just knowledge but the confidence and agency that turn knowledge into action.

“Young people are genuinely engaged and able to explore different perspectives in a meaningful way. It feels well aligned with current priorities around wellbeing and RSE, which makes it very relevant for schools.”

Specialist Senior Educational Psychologist, RCT Educational Psychology Service

The IRL pilot ran from February to April 2026 across twenty educational settings in Rhondda Cynon Taf, including secondary schools, a further education college, and special provision settings. An evaluation, developed with RCT’s Educational Psychology Service, measured changes across eight areas. All eight showed statistically significant improvement.

More of what those findings revealed follows in the articles ahead. For now, the starting point is this: theatre works. Not instead of other approaches, but because it does something they cannot. It creates a space where difficult things can be named, explored, and understood, before anyone has to face them alone.

If any of this resonates with what you see in the young people you work with, or live with, IRL may be exactly what you have been looking for.