Stop Apologising for Drama!
Practical Wisdom in a Storytelling Crisis
HANDS UP if you’re fed up having to justify why drama matters.
It’s that time of year. High School pupils are considering subject options, sixth formers are looking at university courses. Theatre practitioners who work with young people suddenly find themselves giving informal advice sessions or sitting in careers fairs trying to justify the importance of their subject for those who may not necessarily want to make a career out of it. The usual arguments emerge: drama builds confidence, develops creative skills, teaches empathy. All perfectly true. But when young people are bombarded with information about “foundational subjects” and “essential skills,” it’s hard not to feel like you’re trying to flog a soft skill in a bear pit. And harder still not to wonder whether what’s getting lost in all that information is our ability to make sense of it.
We’re living through multiple crises of narrative right now. Islamophobic harassment and attacks are rising, while anti-Semitic incidents in the UK have also hit record levels. Meanwhile, health misinformation spreads faster than accurate information, with people genuinely unable to distinguish between a qualified doctor’s advice and a wellness influencer’s dangerous fiction.
These aren’t separate problems. They’re symptoms of the same deficit: our collective inability to critically examine the stories we’re being told, to understand how narratives shape reality, to recognise when seemingly innocent claims mask something more troubling.
So maybe we’ve been defending drama on the wrong grounds entirely. Drama education isn’t just about building confidence or unlocking creativity. It’s about developing our most fundamental human capacity – one we desperately need right now.
We love our theories about unique “fundamental human capacities”. When I was child, I had a book called “Man the Tool Maker” which, gendered language aside, claimed our ability to use tools set us apart from other forms of life. Then there’s the Homo Rationalis claim – we are the only logical species. Or Homo Ludens, the playful creature.
The trouble is, most of these claims have been quietly dismantled. Crows fashion hooks from wire. Dolphins play elaborate games. Octopuses solve complex puzzles. Our supposed uniqueness keeps getting less unique.
But there’s one capacity that genuinely seems to set us apart: we are the species that tells stories. We’re Homo Narrans – the storytelling animal.
And we’re losing our capacity to do it.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han puts it bluntly:
“If the art of storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has played a decisive role.”
Information and narrative are opposing forces. Information is ephemeral, consumed instantly and forgotten. It fragments time into disconnected moments, each demanding immediate attention before vanishing. A narrative, by contrast, exists through time. It creates connections, establishes meaning, provides orientation. Information tells you what happened; narrative tells you what it means.
The Storytelling Animal
Everyone you know is an expert story analyst. When we suspect someone’s lying, we check if their story adds up. You explain coming home with wine instead of bread by saying “it’s a long story.” We can even infer complete narratives from just a few words. Sayings and proverbs are basically freeze-dried stories - we add the water in our heads.1
We start early. Whilst we’re marvelling at a toddler’s first steps or celebrating potty training victories, something far more remarkable is happening. By age two, most children have mastered the fundamentals of narrative: sequencing events, setting action in space and time, and understanding character. By three or four, they’re spinning autobiographies, fiction, and retelling events they’ve never experienced as if they lived them.
They’re not just telling stories – they’re obsessed with narrative accuracy. Change one word in a familiar bedtime story and face the wrath. Leave a gap in the plot and prepare for an avalanche of questions. Children aren’t just wired for storytelling; they’re driven to perfect it.
One strand of recent research suggests this capacity evolved in the Stone Age as sophisticated social information sharing – academic speak for gossip. In small communities, stories were a non-violent way to enforce cooperation. You’re less likely to hide behind a tree during a mammoth hunt if you know Ug’s going to tell Og, who’ll tell Ig, who makes brilliant hand axes but won’t trade with cowards.
But gossip has limits. Once communities grow beyond a certain size, tracking everyone’s behaviour becomes impossible. This is where fiction enters the picture. Fiction allows us to imagine things collectively – Aboriginal Dreamtime myths, biblical creation stories, and even the nationalist narratives of modern states.
As Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens myths give us “the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.” Nations, money, human rights, laws – none exist outside the stories we tell each other. Yet these fictional constructs enable cooperation on scales no other species has achieved.
They can also tear us apart.
Consider the recent flag campaign in England. On the surface, it claims to be about patriotism, about demonstrating love of country. Who could object to that? But look closer at where flags are being placed, when they appear, what happens around them. The barely maintained fiction of innocent patriotism masks something more deliberate.2 Paint a St. George’s cross on a roundabout in certain neighbourhoods at certain times and you’re not making a neutral statement – you’re telling a story about who belongs and who doesn’t.
This is the dark twin of our storytelling capacity. The same collective fictions that enable cooperation can be weaponised to exclude, to divide, to prepare the ground for violence. And when our ability to critically examine narratives weakens – when we’re overwhelmed by fragmented information rather than grounded in coherent stories – we become more vulnerable to these manipulative fictions. The Islamophobic and anti-Semitic incidents we’re seeing didn’t emerge from nowhere – they grew in an environment where misinformation drowns out narrative clarity, where we’ve lost the capacity to ask: whose story is this, and what purpose does it serve? As Byung-Chul Han continues:
[These] stories do not narrate; they advertise. Vying for attention does not create community. In the age of story-telling as story-selling, narration and advertisement become indistinguishable.
The capacity to critically examine stories, to understand how narratives shape reality, to recognise when seemingly innocent claims mask unpleasant intentions, to participate in the collective authoring of our shared future – this isn’t a nice-to-have creative skill. It’s essential democratic infrastructure. And it’s precisely what drama education develops.
So next time you’re put on the spot to explain why drama matters, perhaps the answer isn’t “it builds confidence” or “develops creativity” – though it does both. The answer is that we’re living through a crisis where information has replaced narrative, where our capacity to tell and critically examine stories is atrophying just when we need it most. Drama doesn’t just teach performance skills; it develops narrative literacy – the ability to distinguish between information that fragments and stories that connect, between fictions that unite and fictions that divide.
In a world drowning in information but starving for meaning, that’s not a soft skill. That’s survival.
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To cite this article:
Burns, B (2025) Stop Apologising for Drama! The Philosophical Theatre Facilitator: www.philosophicaltheatrefacilitator.substack.com
© Brendon Burns 2025
Sources:
Engel, S., 1996. Storytelling in the First Three Years. ZERO TO THREE Journal, [online] (December 1996/January 1997). Available at: <https://www.zerotothree.org/resource/storytelling-in-the-first-three-years/>.
Han, B.-C., 2024. The crisis of narration. Translated by D. Steuer Cambridge: Polity Press.
Harari, Y.N., 2018. Sapiens: a brief history of humankind. First Harper Perennial edition ed. New York: Harper Perennial.
Economists rely on this one - it’s also why so many of them fail to predict human behaviour!
Take “The early bird catches the worm.” We don’t need the full narrative about a bird waking early, finding breakfast while others sleep late and miss out. We fill in the story ourselves. Counter-arguments work the same way: “The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”
This is a perfect example of the No Exception stasis we talked about a couple of newsletters ago, where the difference between literal and intended meaning is in dispute.