Play: Peter Slade

 Peter Slade was born in 1912 in Fleet, Hampshire.  As a child he attended boarding school in Sussex where he, and other boys, were very unhappy.  Indeed, they were so unhappy that they created a suicide club.  He and other members of the club would go out onto the Downs and enact dramatic scenes in which various teachers were symbolically killed.  These enactments, "helped young men not to kill themselves after all, but to find hope and try to believe life must be better after school...we could see and feel the difference after such sessions." (Slade, 2000)  Slade noticed that in fact not only were these dramas cathartic but they actually seemed to improve the boys' academic performance too.

After school he went to the University of Bonn where he studied economics and philosophy.  It was here that he met Jungian psychotherapist William Kraemer with whom he later collaborated.  He returned to Britain in 1932 due to teh deteriorating situation in Germany, and began his life's work of developing drama in education and therapy.  Initially living in London, he used to watch children playing on the streets and noticed their absorption in creative play, their use of different levels of the road and pavement and their sudden bursts of running.  All this observation became the foundation for his child drama philosophy.

He began using drama to build confidence in adults and began founded Parable Players to perform for schools and churches.  Between 1937 and 1939 he collaborated with Dr Kraemer (now living as an exile in London), addressing the British Medical Association in 1939 on dramatherapy.  By 1959 he published "Dramatherapy as an Aid to Becoming a Person", the first published use of the one-word term, the normal British usage.  After the war he was appointed Birmingham's Drama Advisor, a post he held from 1947 until 1977.  He took drama into schools and developed drama training in colleges, and established the Rea Street Centre where he offered sessions for children, theatre for children by adult actors and courses for teachers.  His annual summer schools trained teachers from around the world and he gained an international reputation after the publication of his influential Child Drama in 1954.

Slade developed a body of theory and practice based on those early observations.  He noticed two distinct types of play:

He realised both types of play were essential for a balanced development, but that it was important to enable the child to move from projected play into personal play if they were to fulfil their potential.

His last book, Child Play: Its importance for Human Development was published in 1995 and is his testament.  Intended to help parents, teachers and therapists, he said, "It might make some children more happy too.  That's why I wrote it."

He died in 2004.

Reference:
Slade, P (2000) Personal communication, letter to Dr John Casson

For more about Peter Slade, please see:
Casson, J, Peter Slade, Sesame Journal Vol 3