WHEN THE KISSING STOPPED......

AND WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

(Theatre Quarterly Volume IV. Number 14. 1988)

In my work training actors and my attempts to demystify the processes of theatre, I have drawn
heavily upon children's games, both as a source of a practical method and often for paradigmatic
illustrative examples.(1) I have argued, and sought to demonstrate, that children's games can be
viewed as a pleasurable means of developing certain physical skills. The aim or intention of the game
releases the energy, and the rules present resistances which the player strives to overcome, thus
raising the level of his or her skill.

Following Caillois, I have examined and used some games as a means of exploring emotional states -
what Caillois calls the desire for voluptuous panic.(2) I have seen games as a means of testing certain
patterns of social interaction and behaviour. I have gone so far as to categorize a wide range of
games according to a combination of elementary features, and to suggest that particular groupings
might have a wider social or historical significance than the simple joy of playing them.

There are a range of games, for example, of which Pig-in-the-Middle and Bull-in-the-Ring are the best
known, which rely entirely upon one individual agreeing to become the persecuted victim of the wider
group. I have tentatively suggested that these games are related to the rituals which form the basis for
the development of Greek tragedy.

To pursue this line of argument further would mean establishing or positing certain games or
categories of games as a process of social conditioning, or a confirmatory mirroring of social values,
or even a process of social thinking on an experimental basis. My justification for presenting this
preposterous proposition is that all three of these processes have been engendered in the work of
groups I have formed and worked with. In this paper I want to start by looking at an area or function of
games equally serious but much more pleasurable - kissing games.

Patterns of Playing Games

The society in which I grew up was a provincial industrial one in the 1940s. The industry was heavy -
iron, steel, and shipbuilding. The town had no roots, being just one hundred years old when I was
born, and the population was formed from a mixture of immigrant communities drawn from Wales,
Ireland, and other parts of England. My section of it was respectable working-class with some petit-
bourgeois connections.

It was a hard-drinking area, and the principal social institution was the public house, at that time in the
main exclusively for men. The nonconformist churches had a great following, and all of these had
youth clubs and often scout and guide troops attached to them. Church socials were a regular social
event, and the community at large celebrated such events as coronations, jubilees, and royal
weddings with street parties - often with fierce competition for the best decorated street. My boyhood
had the extra bonus of the two end-of-the-war celebrations, against Germany and against Japan.

Although my children seem to have built their lives on a pattern of close friendship with a few
companions, my own childhood was built on a very wide range of relationships, male and female.
Through church, school, boy scouts, and football and cricket clubs I seem to have known almost
everyone of my own generation in a town of 130,000 inhabitants. On the death of my mother, the
news spread through the town by a network of contacts: people coming in to the works on night-shift
passed the news to those finishing work. My childhood and adolescence was characterized by very
rich patterns of playing games - from which I have managed to make a living for many years. Among
the games I have not had the chance to capitalize on enough, although I learned a great deal as I
grew up, are the kissing games. There were many of these, and they featured at all socials, church or
street, and at parties. They were not restricted to either children's or adult functions, although there
are some which were predominantly adolescent - and since adolescents were the group most prone
to attend socials and to give and go to parties, it must follow that they had more opportunities to play
the games.
There are two basic games - A-Hunting-We-Will-Go and Postman's Knock. A-Hunting-We-Will-Go had
the widest currency, being played at small children's parties and adult socials. It is accompanied by a
song, the words of which are:

A hunting we will go,/A hunting we will go./We'll catch a fox and shut him in a box/And never let him
go.

The players pair off, male with female. One pair stands at the top of the room, holding hands with
arms above their heads, creating an arch through which the other pairs progress, singing the song.
On the last word of the song, the pair making the arch drop their hands and the pair caught within
their arms have to kiss.

The game continues, with the pair caught taking over to become the pair making the arch. There is
no time limit to the game, but to prolong it for a very long time some opportunity has to be introduced
for the pairs to split up and reform with different partners.

Postman's Knock was, or is, a domestic party game. One player leaves the room. The others of the
opposite sex are allocated a number. The player out of the room knocks on the door with 'a letter, for
number...?' The player whose number is called leaves the room and the two kiss in the privacy of the
passage or hall outside. The original player enters, and the player whose number was called
becomes postman.

One game that I remember being played only at teenage parties was Hyde Park Corner. This was
played for hours throughout the night. Couples paired off, the girls sitting on the boys' knees. The
lights were put out and the kissing continued in the dark until any player shouted 'Hyde Park Corner',
whereupon the game stopped, each girl moved to sit on the knees of the next boy, and the game
began again with different partners.

There were many such games, and they were supplemented by a variety of forfeit games which
entailed exotic penalties. In this way I learned the 'butterfly' kiss, in which the two players are held
horizontal above the heads of the rest of the group and have to snatch a kiss as they are manoeuvred
near each other. The 'over the garden wall' kiss entails both partners clambering up different sides of
a door to kiss over the top. The 'string' kiss makes the two players start at either end of a piece of
string and then chew their way to meet in the centre. A more erotic version of this replaces the string
with a banana. There are dozens more.(3)

'Time out of Time'

It is difficult to classify these games. If we accept Caillois's categories, then to some extent they can
be so defined. There is an element of competition in the forfeit games. Postman's Knock has an
element of chance. A-Hunting-We-Will-Go involves a climactic capture, and, with other pursuit
games, it has allied features of vertigo. There is no trace of disguise or pretence, unless we accept
that the whole process is an elaborate pretence. So, in terms of Goffman's concept of Frame Analysis,
(4) what we are witnessing is not a group of people playing a game but a group of people constructing
elaborate means inside which to do what can not be done in society generally - that is, kiss someone
who is not one's spouse or fiancée whilst avoiding the punitive or dangerous reactions that such
activity would normally arouse.

In short, the period of these games is 'time out of time'. The rules of the game and the presence of
other players licence the activity and supply the guarantee that the players will not transgress the
boundaries of playing a game and that 'real' consequences will not ensue. Doubtless this did happen
and is, to some extent, part of the game.

Hyde Park Comer served as a means of seeking out courting partners. The relationship was
continued outside the game. But the regular playing of the game was a factor which prevented such
relationships from being entirely exclusive, and the courting patterns of my group made for a
fluctuation of pairings. Most of the friends of my boyhood married girls who I had at one time courted.
In this way, the game forms part of the fabric of that society, cross-tying couples to couples rather than
individuals to individuals in a wider network of other couples. This is the world my parents grew up in
and lived in, and which split apart in my generation.

At the same time, the rules of the games and the presence of the other players served as a
convenient excuse for closing the eye to what was happening. My parents, who would never have
allowed me to sit all night with a girl in the front room of our house, would happily go to bed and allow
a gang of us free licence. Steamy things happened during the nights but they slept through it all - so
long as we made no noise. Part of their security rested on the assumption that, following the
prevailing moral standards of that society, a girl would always call 'Hyde Park Corner' if her partner
over-stepped the mark. But the 'mark' was never spelled out.

Origins and Codes

The origins of Hyde Park Corner are easily documented. Hyde Park Comer is a part of London, and
during the Second World War it was well known that servicemen would take girl-friends or casual pick-
ups to sit on the park benches there. Which would seem to argue for an origin as an adult game,
since it is unlikely that some sixteen or seventeen year-old would choose that model for an adolescent
kissing game. The period is doubtful as the same activity no doubt took place during the First World
War.

A-Hunting-We-Will-Go has some folk or neo-folk origin in the song which accompanies it. It is
probably of nineteenth-century origin. Postman's Knock has been in existence for some considerable
time: even at the time I remember it being played, it was incorporated into the repartee of cross-talk
comedians.

The games appear to have two sets of rules. The first of these are the fixed rules of the games, but
these provide an excuse for playing the game rather than defining a discipline or a competitive
structure. No attempt was made to enforce the rules seriously beyond overcoming the coquetry of
some players by making them fulfil the forfeits.

In the playing of A-Hunting-We-Will-Go, there was a general conspiracy to ensure that everyone got
caught at least once during the playing of the game, to make sure they had had their turn, and the
same applied to Postman's Knock: it was not unknown for players to slip their numbered card to an
unlucky player to 'give them a turn'. Hyde Park Comer had just one rigid rule, to keep the pairings
changing, and I don't ever remember that ever having to be enforced, any attempt to cheat, or any
complaint against having to change partners.

In the playing of the games (and in comparison with other groups of games) the overt rules were
largely irrelevant. The second set of rules are the implicit ones, concerned with the general mien of
the game. No-one was expected to overstep the mark, to take undue advantage of the situation - or to
give offence by rejecting a partner or signalling distaste.

In one church youth club of which I was a member there was an older man of not too bright
intelligence who insisted on turning up no matter how often he was told the age limits. Whenever
kissing games were being played, Ray would try to hog the kisses and the rest of the players would
improvise an elaborate juggling of the rules to prevent this. The manoeuvre always stopped short of
persecution. Ray always got his share of the kisses and none of the girls ever complained, but he
never got more than his share.

The Community Function

The occasions on which these games were played were sometimes marked off as special, as on
national holidays, but they need not have been. The occasion might be the weekly meeting of a youth
club. The street party involved a wider social grouping, and had connotations of carnival.(5) The
church or youth club social took place in a tighter social grouping which had other processes of
relationship-building and maintenance at work. The private party involved a very close generation
peer group, or a close family group which acknowledged very close ties.
Dependent on the group and the occasion the games could fulfil a range of functions in a society
based upon rigid heterosexual values with a vested economic interest in sustaining the inviolability of
the monogamous marriage relationship.(6) The sense of community, built upon mutual support in
times of hardship, served to strengthen the pressure to marry within the group. The extension of the
values of the monogamous relationship extended to a premium being placed upon virginity, and its
being safeguarded until marriage.

The games can therefore be seen as a safety valve for letting-off the pressures within that society.(7)
A regulated pattern of extra-marital sensual and sexual contact was allowed between adults in a
defused situation.(8) The sexual education of the young proceeded without adult intervention, but
within a social frame-work, minimizing the risks of aberrant behaviour - and incidentally projecting
values and processes of social cohesion into the next generation.

The cohesion of the community through its interwoven patterns of relationships was proclaimed in the
playing of some of the games. Chance gave odd pairings - older women with young men, children
with adults, mothers-in-law with sons-in-law, and other family cross-couplings. To each pairing there
was an appropriate mode of kissing, and the kisses were a public and ritual marking of the degrees of
relationship within the community.

At the same time the playing became a way of making public or acknowledging feelings or attractions
which would never be acted on. A degree of feeling could be made manifest in a kiss which was
prolonged or intensified beyond the acceptable status for that relationship: but because this was done
in public no pressure was put on the other to respond outside of the game, and the rest of the
gathering would be sure to seal this with good-hearted mockery. Sometimes the commitment of
engaged couples would be measured and mocked by counting the length of time they could kiss
without taking a breath. Young girls signalled their sexual development and had it acknowledged by
accepting kisses willingly without displays of reluctance and distaste.(9)

The kissing games seem to have disappeared with the break up of communities such as the one in
which I learned them. None of my children have played them. Their patterns of courtship have been
and are as individualistic and random as the social relationships of the world they live in. In this
respect, the disappearance of the games is only one feature among many obsolescences of cultural
forms in a changed world.

Other patterns of play and categories of games have disappeared or been transmuted. A wealth of
street games has been made impossible by the volume of motor traffic. Speed-of-reaction games
have been taken over by the electronics industry. If the kissing games had survived they would be a
ludicrous anachronism - a force for social cohesion in a society falling apart. (10)

There was much that was wrong with the society in which I was brought up and I would not want to go
back to it, even if that were possible. The negative side of the society which had, I see with hindsight,
such a practical and experimental approach to some aspects of sexual relationships was its
repressive intolerance of behaviour which deviated from the norm.

Pregnant unmarried girls were heavily stigmatized. Homosexuality did not exist, full stop. Sex was
never talked about. A poll of my school class revealed a startling number of parents who had left sex
education pamphlets lying around with pencil markings on the furniture, so that they could see later if
the pamphlet had been moved. And, of course, generations arrived at the marriage bed knowing a
great deal about foreplay and nothing of intercourse.

When the great movement for sexual freedom began in the 1960s, I was in my thirties and bitterly
regretting the accident of time that had made me miss out on earlier possibilities. Now I am not so
sure. We seem to have exchanged one set of contradictions for another just as destructive. The
movement towards the emancipation of women has got rid of the paternalistic 'respect' for women,
whilst the sexual exploitation of women has become more blatant and dehumanized. In spite of the
lavish increase in sex-education, one in every five births is illegitimate and a lot of girls get stuck
holding the baby or are faced with the alternative traumas of adoption or abortion.
Whatever freedom the sexual revolution has given to girls, it has not taken away from them the onus
of setting limits. In a society without a cohesive framework, where there are no rules of conduct, the
girl is placed in the position of being a prude or a tart, and the pressure of risk and responsibility is
burdensome. Recent years have seen a marked and alarming rise in violent sexual assaults on
women. By and large, my sons seem to have had a much happier time than I did, but I fear for my
daughters in ways in which the parents of an older generation never did.

Games for Actors - and Others

The work I do has developed the use of children's games as the basis for training actors. In this work,
instead of carrying out a strict programme of technical exercises, we appeal to a learning process
which is associated with pleasure rather than anxiety. When we can reveal physical inhibitions and
blocks, we can use adult powers to overcome them. I have used this work in acting schools and
universities and I have worked and work with professional companies in a number of countries.

A particular feature of this work is the invitation to give a one-off workshop, often of a single day's
duration, based on this approach. We play games, we observe, I direct the attention, ask questions,
push the participants to experience certain sensations. These sessions are very popular. I put them
on for educational classes, both school and adult, for amateur theatres, teachers' associations, and
interested bodies with no particular attachments to theatre or education. It is important to point out
that although my work exposes and demystifies the processes through which the actor works, the
people taking part in these sessions are often not actors nor interested in being actors.

It is now some years since I remarked, in the course of defending my method, that you could take a
group of apparently repressed teachers and have them throwing themselves around a room with great
abandon by setting up a horseplay game. I remarked at that time that what made it work was an
advertised title such as 'Exploring the Actor's Ways and Means' or 'How Does Theatre Work?'-some
safeguard that marked out the purpose of the session as 'serious'. The result, as I said at that time,
seemed to show that the participants had been waiting for a long time for someone to ask them to
play a game and let off steam.

As the work has gone on, I have come to realize a major qualitative difference in these sessions from
those run for actors. Both types of sessions occasion the release of great energy and are generally
enjoyed. The amount of commitment can be equated. The difference lies in the adherence to the
rules: with professional actors, the rules are the disciplining of the activity, and through them we direct
and shape the development of skills; but the rules in the other sessions are little more than the
framework within which the energy is released.

In the first type of session, the games progress through various stages, from playing the game for its
own sake to playing the game in order to achieve an aim or end. In the second, we never get much
beyond the first stage of playing. I used to think this was because of the limited time. Now, I think even
if more time were available, we would still not go much further. The participation is more important
than any achievement. In the formula of learned enjoyment or enjoyed learning the balance stays
firmly on the side of enjoyment.

Curious things happen, some beautiful, some sad. Sometimes the direction of a workshop session
has to be changed because of unspoken pressures within the group. On one specific occasion a
violent children's game. The Raft of the Medusa, in which the aim is to push all the other players out
of a chalked square until only one winning player is left inside, turned into an exploration of touch. The
dynamic of the game was lost at a certain point, and the players who had been ejected from the
square at that point became engrossed in watching the patterns of tactile exploration being carried out
by the remaining players. Almost at the outset of that session a deep-felt need for sensitive, sensual
touch-contact was revealed, and the remaining sessions changed direction to cope with this.

During that and other sessions a sense of community had grown up, which it is sad to see die at the
end. Often these sessions end with impractical intentions to keep together/get together/keep in touch,
rather than see something of such value to all participating (including myself) disappear. From this I
have come to see myself in some ways as an enabler rather than an educator - a role which has been
thrust upon me with some initial reluctance on my part.
When my work achieved wider notice than the groups with whom I was working, I was pressed to take
the techniques into areas of psychotherapy. This I refused to do. Whilst accepting that much of my
work is concerned with setting up situations through which actors can explore and become aware of
the structures of their personalities, the processes of interaction, and alternative modes of acting, I
have stuck to the security of claiming only to expose the processes of theatre. I have never claimed to
be a psychotherapist.

For a long time I regarded the one-off lay sessions as a necessary social chore, an inadequate
rehearsal of the processes of 'real' work which was done elsewhere, relieved only by the fact that I
spent two or three hours with very pleasant people and we had a few laughs and some fun along the
way.

I took the occasional moments of beauty which occurred for intimations of what could have happened,
given more advantageous circumstances. The feeling of community engendered by the work I took as
justification of the power of the 'real' work. It has taken me time to separate the two areas of work in
my mind, and to see that the one-off sessions provide a social service and answer to a range of social
needs.

Encounter Groups - with Rules

At a moment of crisis in her life, I suggested to my first wife that she take part in a series of group
sessions I was running with student actors. Afterwards, she said that what she envied most in my
work was the opportunity to touch people. In her life she touched and was touched by no-one outside
the nuclear family.

In the atomized society, there is little physical contact in its social-dance forms. Apart from the kissing
games there were other rich opportunities for sensual physical contact in the dance forms of the older,
repressed society. The three main (but by no means only) features exposed by the one-off workshops
are the need for some excuse for throwing off restraint and letting energy run wild, the desperate need
to touch other people, and the fact that it is easy to release the inhibitions against violence, whereas
there are deep inhibitions against the display of tenderness.

Clearly, this range of social needs has been recognized in the past, and has today been catered for in
some ways, by encounter groups, touch-therapy groups. Whilst not disputing the validity and
effectiveness of this work within the therapeutic area, I have reservations about a lot of the work that
was done in the late 'sixties and early 'seventies, but which now seems largely to have faded away. To
meet the need for touch and to explore relationships head-on, beginning with the intention of building
a group cohesion, seems to me to run the risk of characterizing something natural, even if repressed,
as symptomatic of a sickness and, by so doing, fuming the individual's mind to dwell on negative
present obstacles as opposed to some idealized future utopia.

The work of these groups also runs the risk of reinforcing inhibitions by a direct confrontation from
which it is difficult to escape. The very intensity of the sessions can be used to break through barriers
and inhibitions to interpersonal relationships to such a degree that an equally intense feeling of loss is
invoked when the individual returns to his or her everyday situation.

There is something about the drama workshop which creates an oblique and secure way of bringing
people out of their shells and establishing group contacts. As with the kissing games, it is only a
game, it is only for the here and now, and there are clear limits which will not be transgressed, even if
they are not clearly defined. (11)

One Kind of 'Third Theatre'?

I am by no means the only person carrying out this work or something similar to it, nor would I ever
pretend that my work is of a higher standard or more important than many other games players. There
is a mass activity going on under the name of theatre and drama which has nothing whatsoever to do
with performance: is this to be included under the heading of 'theatre' or, on whatever terms,
excluded?

I am quite sure where it should be located. Ignoring the fact that I continue to work as a freelance
director, I am still asked why I gave up working in the theatre. As far as I am concerned I never left,
although I lost interest in working in certain forms of theatre. If we accept that this activity should be
classified as 'theatre', then it is probable that the greater part of all' theatrical' activity at present does
not fall within a strict traditional definition.

If we need an authority, Eugenio Barba, in "The Floating Islands", says: 'In order to understand the
social value of theatre it is necessary to look not only at the wares, the performances produced, but
also at the relationships established by producing performance'.(12) Within the professional situation,
this is how I would like my work to be justified. But I don't see a clear line that can be drawn between
the professional work and the workshop work. I cannot draw this line in the work of other colleagues.
Nor, in fact, would Barba draw that line. Can we consider the inclusion of this mass of workshop work
as one more variation of Third Theatre?

The paradox lies in the relationship between the workshop games and the processes of performance.
At present, performance provides the invitations to do this work and gives the guarantee or security
which enables strangers to take part in it.(13) Were I to advertise the work as a social,
psychotherapeutic, or relationship-workshop it might be that people would not come. Certainly, a
different clientele would come: my relationship to the group would change, and so would the style and
direction of the work.(14)

In at least one area, however, this orientation towards performance is causing major problems. A very
important body of developmental work has been built up in schools under the umbrella of drama-in-
education. This work has grown out of a shift of thinking in schools away from production-centred
drama activity towards child-centred activity. It has, however, kept its descriptive connection to the
theatre processes.

This has in the past caused considerable trouble because of the confusion (often deliberate) in the
minds of the educational authorities as to what was going on. An activity which is and is not theatre is
easy to attack and hard to defend, and the use of the term drama has done nothing at all to remove
any of the ambiguities. At present in Britain, a new examination system has established the activity of
Drama and Theatre Studies in a secure position in the school syllabus at the expense of subjecting it
to quantifying examinations which will squeeze the spontaneity and creative spirit of exploration out of
the work.It is not possible to foresee how long the drama workshops will continue to be a feature of
contemporary life and what form they will take in future. I cannot think, though, that any study of
today's theatre can ignore them - and, as one example of a peculiar social manifestation where
elaborate play structures are set up in order obliquely to cater for human needs, I do not believe that
sociology should ignore them either.

Subsequent to the publishing of this paper I found a book from the Victorian era which contained
descriptions of many of the games I have cited here. The one exception is Hyde Park Corner which
obviously is tied to the period of the Second World War. It should not have surprised me to discover
that games had been designed to operate against the moral-sexual proscriptions of the Victorian era.

Notes and references

1 C. Barker, Theatre Games (London: Methuen, 1977).

2 R. Caillois, Man, Play and Games (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962).
3 I am sure these games have a wide currency as they are used satirically in several films - for
example, Tom Jones, directed by Tony Richardson.
4 Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
5 Other forms of forbidden activity (I realise now) were licensed at street parties. I could not
understand, as a boy, why one particular married couple always appeared in each other's clothes on
these occasions.
6 The most cohesive force in the community was the common ownership of property. All security was
invested in 'the house'. The strongest force acting against divorce was the mutual vested economic
interest in the family house.
7 My mother was aware of sexual tension. In 1969 she complained bitterly that all her life she had
been told that sex outside marriage was 'wrong'. At the time, every magazine, even the most staid of
women's magazines, was telling her it was a good thing.
8 In the particular period under discussion here there was the added problem of marriage partners
being split up as men were sent away and often abroad in the armed forces with an indefinite
possibility of returning.
9 A similar function is served by the mistletoe hanging at Christmas.
10 The particular community in which I grew up has now disintegrated completely with the rapid and
almost total decline of industry. At present 39 percent of the male population is out of work and in at
least one area the male unemployment figure is over 90 percent.
11 Part of the function of the session-leader is to provide the guarantee that no-one will be put at risk,
by remaining in a control capacity and not participating in the games.
12 Eugenio Barba, The Floating Islands (Holstebro: Odin Theatre, 1979). The quotation is from the
essay 'Theatre-Culture', p.149.
13 It has borne in mind that although it is notionally possible that any workshop can be developed into
a long-term group project, which could lead to the formation of a Third Theatre Company, what I am
discussing is most unlikely to develop in that way, since it largely involves people with a settled way of
life. It is possible that such a pattern of work carried out among young unemployed people might lead
to the formation of such a company. However, it is unlikely that such a social grouping would be
attracted to a workshop on acting or theatre in the first place.
14 It should be acknowledged that my colleagues in Inter Action, Ed Berman, David Powell, and Carry
Gorney, have moved right away from theatre into other areas of social cooperation and enterprise,
using games structures as the basis of their work.