‘I am convinced that community theatre potentially is the most efficient form of HIV prevention for young people. I am equally convinced that it is the least efficiently used form of HIV prevention’ (p. 51). Johansson strikes a note of contained anger in the passage above, and increasingly throughout his book, as he discusses the contrast between the actual impact of community-based theatre (CBT) made by young people in their home village settings in response to HIV/AIDS, and the potential for the form if it were only acknowledged and nurtured by local sources of power: elders, government, NGOs and churches.
Community Theatre and AIDS is a significant contribution to the discourse on applied theatre in the political South. Johansson writes out of a prolonged period of fieldwork in the early 2000s in, predominantly, two regions of Tanzania. He spent his time visiting the large network of youth CBT groups operating in villages, watching their work, interviewing them and asking questions about the significance of their work to audience and community members.
The book's Introduction sets a context, offering some possible statistics on HIV/AIDS infections in Tanzania in a context in which it is thought that nearly half of all cases are not recorded. He then goes on to explain the importance of CBT as a practice that can reflect site-specific realities and which is commonly performed by the very group most susceptible to HIV infection, young adults. And he explains that the focus of the book is on the potential role of CBT in prevention of infection, something which is vitally important in places where diagnosis and treatment are hard to come by.
In chapter 1, Johansson discusses changing official and theatrical attitudes to HIV/AIDS infection and prevention. He argues that there has only been a slow and partial move from expert, top-down ‘solutions’, and that the common jargon of communications theories such as KAP (knowledge, attitudes and practice) studies does not deal with underlying causes. What is powerfully argued here, with examples from plays witnessed, is that ‘superimposed educational projects rarely reach the cultural profundity of behaviour change’ and ‘that cultural changes can only transpire through people's own initiatives and actions’ (p. 44). Chapter 2 looks at performance strategies and particularly at relationships between ritual and entertainment in developing a modern, relevant form of community theatre. This is the chapter least convincingly tied into analysis of actual productions, but there is an important stress on the sustainability of community-level initiatives which can then respond to and be in conversation with the people they make their theatre about.
Johansson's third chapter privileges focus-group discussions with actors and community members, and an analysis of the data collected. In the developing thesis throughout Community Theatre and AIDS it is made crystal clear that nothing will change substantially unless grossly uneven gendered power relations are effectively challenged.
Finally, chapter 4 brings all the targets of Johansson's anger into the firing line. At the centre of the work is a description of a play performed about a young housemaid, Neema. The writer sees this play as exemplary of what his research has time and again revealed, that the powerlessness of women is the strongest determinant in the passing on of HIV infection. Johansson wants CBT to be a tool for opening up debate and allowing funders and communities to then use it to find out what communities need and implement initiatives from this learning in a beneficent circle of art and action. The problem is that this would mean both granting youth a powerful voice and redistributing power.
Johansson has a clear and urgent voice, and the book reflects his arguably utopian vision and his denunciation of the repressive control of those external powers, which are the final arbiters of the future of HIV infections.
