Reading Chronicle, March 1 2005

DELEGATES on a new personal development course are to be spared the dreaded roleplay. Others will do it for them.

Headline Training and Consultancy, based in Swallowfield, has teamed up with actors from CentreStage Roleplay in Bracknell to lay on performances during its Develop Yourself As A Leader courses.

CentreStage's performers will act out scenes and take directions from delegates about how to make the scenes more appropriate to them.

Four workshops - Introduction to Leadership, Personal Impact and Managing Staff, Inspiring and Developing Others and Leading The Organisation - will involve what CentreStage calls Forum Theatre, its brand of illustrating work situations with drama.

Headline director Tim Brewer said: "On old-style training courses, delegates, at the end of the day, may be asked to do a sort of roleplay - and they bloody well hated it.

"It is a little threatening and they just say 'oh,no, not role play'. "This way they don't do it themselves."

He added: "CentreStage have to do it on the hoof. It is not scripted and to tie that in with more established ways of training is very powerful."