The essence of forum theatre is getting audience members to understand a situation from the viewpoint of or more of the characters it involves. A key scene in the play is performed and then frozen, and a facilitator guides what happens next. The audience is divided into several sections, one for each character relevant to the scenario. And each of the actors is the coached by that section of the audience into behaving in a fashion that will change the outcome of the situation being played out. For instance, a character could be guided to stand their ground rather than backing down, or conversely be flexible where they’d been stubborn. The play is then started again, and the actors improvise in line with the instructions they’ve been given.

It’s a simple sounding approach, and it’s a great way of getting audience members to really understand what it’s like from one character’s point of view. And to make the learning complete, after the audience gets used to working with one character, the facilitator will switch the groups round so they each direct another actor, and hence get to know the situation from another angle.

Often, audiences are sceptical as they go into events like this; they’re wary of the notion of drama being used in training, see it as a skive from work, and so on. But on every occasion I’ve seen this method used, the audience embrace it fully and come out of the experience brimming with enthusiasm for both the approach and what it’s taught them. That response is a world away from how most organisation’s training days go down, and helps explain why forum theatre is increasingly used to bring complex issues alive.

From a writing point of view, the scripts required call for thorough research and an ability to dramatise matters that can seem complex or abstract. I did one play for use in training prison officers, that allowed me the opportunity to spend some research time in a prison talking to inmates and staff — how often does a chance like that crop up? And what I learned will be useful for my own writing projects, as well as the forum theatre piece that emerged from the process.

Writing in this way can be liberating. Whereas most forms of drama are about finding closure and resolution to the story, forum theatre passes that responsibility over to the audience: the dramatist’s job is to raise matters of relevance, not to resolve them in a tidy fashion. That’s why it creates such strong feelings in the audience, and why it’s such a powerful training tool: shape the actions of several characters all involved in the same scenario, but with agendas of their own, and you learn a lot about different perspectives that can inform a more systemic approach when those issues are confronted in the working lives of audience members.