In Playback Theatre the image of a gathering where stories are told around a campfire serves as a kind of creation myth. It suggests a link between playback and something ancient and essential about humans in community - the idea that we have always come together to witness and honour one another’s stories, and that this impulse is hardwired into us as social beings. 

The campfire is invoked as proof that playback is more than a contemporary, experimental form of community theatre - it represents a return to a fundamental human practice. That narrative suggests that when we create the ritual space of a playback performance, we are not only working with something new, we are also remembering something old. We are tapping into patterns that predate civilisation itself. 

I would argue that this view is problematic in several ways.

First, it collapses cultural, historical, and political differences across time and context into a single imagined notion of ancient life, practice and wisdom. In doing so, it invokes a kind of primitivism: the implication is that people in earlier or “simpler” societies all had access to an authentic, common form of communal life that has since been degraded. That logic risks invoking the racist noble savage trope, even when it is unintentional.

Even more problematically, the campfire myth ignores questions of power. Ancient storytelling practices were not necessarily neutral, inclusive, egalitarian, democratic, or benign. Who was permitted to speak around those fires? Whose stories were valued, and whose were marginalised or silenced? What social functions did storytelling serve, and in whose interests? Which topics were sanctioned, and which were forbidden? By uncritically invoking the campfire, playback practitioners risk creating a reductive understanding of what “story” means, and projecting an imagined purity onto the past…and then claiming it back as their own.

Anthropological research on actual firelight gatherings complicates the romantic picture further. Polly Wiessner’s studies of the contemporary hunter-gatherer Ju/’hoansi people of the Kalahari found that daytime talk was largely practical and sometimes critical, while campfire conversations moved more toward storytelling, imagination, and building social connections across wider networks. But those conversations were not egalitarian free-for-alls. There were still clear patterns around who spoke, what topics were appropriate and whose stories carried more and less weight. Wiessner’s research simultaneously validates that campfire creates a distinctive quality of social space while it undermines any notion of ancient campfire democracy. If we are going to invoke the campfire at all, we might attend to what it actually reveals: that intimacy and the dynamics of power have always coexisted around the fire.

These questions also intersect with ongoing conversations about ethics within the playback community. When Western practitioners invoke “ancient” or “indigenous” wisdom to validate and justify their work, they risk appropriating cultural authority without relationship, responsibility, or accountability. The campfire myth thus functions as a way of claiming spiritual depth and universality while remaining firmly grounded in modern, Western theatrical and psychological frameworks.

Playback Theatre is, in fact, a contemporary theatre form responding to contemporary conditions, particularly our hunger for community and authentic witnessing in an era marked by fragmentation and digital distance. It does not require an ancient and romanticised lineage to legitimate that need. The form has its own integrity, emerging from its social justice roots, Moreno’s psychodrama, contemporary oral history practices, improvisational and experimental theatre, and late twentieth-century therapeutic cultures.

I wonder what the attraction is of the campfire storytelling narrative? Could it be that lets practitioners avoid examining the shaky and uncertain power dynamics of our own practice?

At best, the campfire operates as a metaphor rather than a lineage. Firelight creates intimacy. Darkness focuses attention. Ritual shapes meaning. Can we not acknowledge those resonances without claiming continuity with human practices thousands of years old?

A more honest account would recognise that Fox and Salas simply created a new ritual for witnessing stories. It draws on existing traditions, responds to real needs, and generates genuine meaning and connection. That is sufficient. Playback Theatre does not need the campfire’s blessing to stand on its own.