Augusto Boal (born March 16, 1931, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil—died May 2, 2009, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian dramatist who created the Theatre of the Oppressed, a form of interactive theatre intended to transform lives as spectators become performers, acting out solutions to social problems.
Boal grew up in Rio de Janeiro and earned a degree in chemical engineering in 1952. However, he had been interested in theatre since he was a child, and, when he attended Columbia University in New York City, he studied theatre in addition to chemical engineering. He returned to Brazil in 1955.
Boal began his career with the Arena Theatre in São Paulo in 1956, and he was its artistic director until 1971, during which time he developed his theories. In the late 1960s, inspired by Pedagogia do oprimido (1968; Pedagogy of the Oppressed) by revolutionary educator Paulo Freire, he began experimenting with a form of Living Newspaper theatre. His work was considered subversive by the military junta then ruling Brazil, and he was arrested in 1971 and tortured. He spent the next 15 years in exile.
During this period Boal published Teatro del oprimido y otras poéticas políticas (1974; Theatre of the Oppressed), in which he described three forms of activist theatre. In Image Theatre, performers form tableaux representing an oppressive situation, and spectators are invited to interpret and suggest changes to the tableaux. Invisible Theatre involves actors performing a written and rehearsed problematic situation in a public place in order to provoke responses from passersby, who are unaware that they are taking part in theatre. In Forum Theatre, actors perform a short scene based on an event involving oppression. Spectators are encouraged to suggest and enact solutions to the problem in the scene. Image Theatre and Forum Theatre require skilled facilitators, called Jokers, to mediate between the actors and the spectators.
Boal set up a centre for the practice of his theory in Paris and organized international Theatre of the Oppressed festivals in the early to mid-1980s. Boal returned to Brazil in 1986 and established a Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro as well as several community theatre companies. In 1992 he published Jeux pour acteurs et non-acteurs (Games for Actors and Non-Actors), which describes exercises and techniques for putting his method into practice. He also organized international festivals for practitioners of his style of theatre.
From 1992 to 1996 Boal served on Rio de Janeiro’s city council, and while there he developed what he called Legislative Theatre, which was similar to Forum Theatre but was directly focused on policies and laws that could solve problems. In addition to his work to promulgate the Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal taught theatre and directed conventional plays throughout his life. His autobiography, Hamlet e o filho do padeiro (Hamlet and the Baker’s Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics), appeared in 2001.