Boal in Paris: "But in these Theatre of the Oppressed workshops there also appeared oppressions which were new to me: 'lonliness', the 'impossibility of communicating with others', 'fear of emptiness'. For someone like me, fleeing explicit dictatorships of a cruel and brutal nature, it was natural that these themes should at first seem superficial and scarcely worthy of attention. It was as if I was always asking, mechanically: 'But where are the cops?' Because I was used to working with concrete, visible oppressions.
Little by little, I changed my opinion. I discovered, for instance, that the percentage of suicides was much higher in countries like Sweden or Finland - where the essential needs of the citizen in matters of housing, health, food and social security are met - than in countries like ours, Third World countries. In Latin America, the major killer is hunger; in Europe, it is drug overdose. But, whatever form it comes in, death is still death. And, thinking about the suffering of a person who chooses to take his or her own life in order to put an end to the fear of emptiness or the pangs of lonliness, I decided to work with these new oppressions and to consider them as such"
(Boal, The Rainbow of Desire, 1995 p7-8)
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