ObituaryPeter Slade
The first British dramatherapistPeter Slade, who has died aged 91, pioneered dramatherapy and, from 1947 to 1977, was Birmingham education committee's first adviser on drama. He brought sessions on the subject into schools and established relevant courses in education colleges. With that work, and through his Rea Street Centre, he won international recognition.
The centre and its team of teacher-actors offered evenings of drama with children; theatre for children by adult actors; intimate experimental theatre; and courses for teachers, including a one-year child drama certificate under the auspices of Birmingham's education department. With Sylvia Demmery, Slade worked on what he termed "natural dance", based on his observations of athletic movement, and personality training for young adults from industry and from the retail trades. For 13 years he ran special sessions for delinquents and disabled people. His annual summer schools trained teachers from around the world.
Born in Fleet, Hampshire, the son of a GP, Slade was educated at Lancing College in Sussex. He then spent a year, at the end of the 1920s, studying economics, German and philosophy at the University of Bonn, sharing ideas about athletic movement as cathartic release, and as a way of helping people through unhappiness and distress.
On his return in 1932, he lived in London, acting with theatre companies, experimenting with more intimate and fluid productions. He also established the first specially trained, professional group working in theatre for children. He had watched children in the streets, noticing their absorption in creative play, their joy in sudden bursts of running. These observations lay behind his child drama philosophy, helping him distinguish between drama - "the doing of life" - and theatre, the scripted, carefully orchestrated production.
Four years later, aged 24, and based in Birmingham and Bristol, he became the youngest "uncle" on BBC Radio Children's Hour. In 1940, he opened his first arts centre in Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire. There he used his drama method to help under-achieving and unhappy children, and began to share his experience with the medical profession. Soon after, he addressed the British Medical Association on what he then defined as "dramatherapy" and became a foundation member of the Guild of Pastoral Psychology.
An accident while serving with a wartime army bomb disposal unit hospitalised him. After recovery in 1943, he became Staffordshire's drama adviser, establishing the professional Pear Tree Players, who took drama into schools and youth clubs. Then, in 1947, came Birmingham.
In 1964, Slade chaired the creative drama section of the first world conference on theatre for children, in London. His first book was Child Drama (1954). His last book, Child Play: Its Importance For Human Development (1995) describes the detail of play. For him that work was a "human testament for a world in moral dilemma". It was intended, he said, to help such people as parents, teachers, social workers, police, priests and therapists. "It might make some children more happy, too," he added. "That's why I wrote it."
In 1997, he was awarded the Queen's Jubilee Medal. The Slade Archives have been collected by Manchester University's museum and research centre, at the Rylands Library. In 1997 the university made him an honorary companion for his development of educational drama. His wife Xonia died in 1981. He is survived by two daughters, Imogen and Clare, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
ยท Peter Slade, dramatherapist, born November 7 1912; died June 28 2004
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