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Reading Marina Jenkyns' The Play's the Thing is like being taken out to the theatre and treated to wine, dinner and conversation afterwards with lively and intelligent company. Her book manages to be scholarly without being purely academic and
specialized without being elitist. It is the sort of encounter which leaves you feeling full and satisfied with the promise that many of its moments may be savoured for some time to come.
Marina Jenkyns is a therapist who is driven to use drama in her work not, it would seem, because some aspect of her training may have prescribed its application as required technique but rather because, at some very deep level, she is in love with the play itself as well as being passionate about it as an inexhaustible tool for selfunderstanding. She tells us in her prologue:
The characters and life of any text open to us the moment we open the book. They sleep till we come. They can waken to us over and over and over again. Each time we encounter a text we bring to it… not only our conscious but also our unconscious life. So we do in dramatherapy. As the child in the drama class does. As the actor does. As the audience does. (p. xi)
Her passion for the text, the play, is infectious. To ensure the less Thespian reader is not left floundering Jenkyns supplies a detailed synopsis of plot and breakdown of characters for each work she explores. Thus armed it is practically impossible not to follow with the same breathless excitement as she journeys through play after play combining a detailed personal analysis with colourful accounts of practical application with participants in dramatherapy group settings. She permits the reader audience with her own internal monologue as well as those of the characters in the plays and the participants in the groups. The way that Marina Jenkyns works with text is much as an analyst does with a patient, staying with the material, allowing the story to unfold and applying gently but firmly the probing of a tooth-c