Drama gives people something particularly useful: a space to practise.

In the programme model developed by Aspire Ireland, the goal is described as regulated participation. Put simply, this means feeling increasingly able to show up, stay, contribute and return to a group setting. Drama gives participants a practical way to practise those experiences through role-play, improvisation and group storytelling.

A situation can be tried. A response can be changed. Someone can observe before joining in. An unexpected moment can become part of an exercise rather than something that has to be handled perfectly.

This matters particularly during the years between 18 and 25, when young adults are increasingly expected to navigate education, employment, relationships, independence and unfamiliar social environments. As we explored in the first article in this series, this is also a period when structured supports can reduce or change.

My Life, My Script was built around three areas in particular: communication, participation in groups and responding to unexpected situations. Drama gives us a practical way to work with all three.

Drama as a practical way to practise ‘joining in’

Many everyday situations require skills people are simply expected to already know. How do you enter a group that’s already talking? What do you do when you don’t understand an instruction? How do you tell someone you need more time? What happens when somebody misunderstands what you mean? How do you contribute an idea without knowing exactly how other people will respond?

In everyday life these moments happen in real time. There’s rarely a rehearsal.

Drama creates a different environment. A role-play can recreate part of a situation without recreating all of its pressure. An improvisation can introduce something unexpected while the wider environment stays familiar. A group story lets several people contribute without any one person carrying the whole interaction.

Depending on the activity, participants might have opportunities to practise:

• joining an activity or conversation
• expressing an idea or opinion
• asking for clarification
• communicating a need
• responding to another person’s idea
• taking turns
• asking for help
• dealing with a misunderstanding
• expressing a boundary
• changing direction when something unexpected happens
• deciding when to participate and when to observe

It’s not about finding one perfect response. It’s about having somewhere to experiment.

A participant might practise asking somebody to repeat an instruction, communicating that something feels uncomfortable, or exploring what they could do when another person responds differently from what they expected.

There’s no single correct response everyone has to learn. The value is in being able to try different approaches and see what happens.

Communication is more than talking — and drama makes it visible

Communication often gets reduced to how confidently or frequently somebody speaks. In reality it can look very different from person to person.

It can mean telling somebody an instruction is unclear. It can mean asking for a few extra seconds to process a question. It can mean contributing one sentence rather than leading a conversation. It can mean expressing a boundary, communicating that something in the environment is becoming overwhelming, or choosing to listen rather than speak.

Role-play helps make these different forms of communication visible. Instead of discussing communication as an abstract skill, participants encounter it through the activity itself.

A two-person exercise built around solving a small problem together does not need to be particularly theatrical to be useful. It can naturally create opportunities to ask a question, explain a need, listen to another point of view, disagree, negotiate or say when support is needed.

There is also research behind exploring theatre in this way, although the evidence is still developing and should be described carefully.

Confidence in groups can come from experience

Telling somebody to ‘be more confident’ rarely creates confidence.

Confidence can grow through repeated experiences of doing something and discovering that it is manageable. You try something. You learn something about how it feels. You do it again. Perhaps you try a little more the next time.

Drama creates many small opportunities for this. One week somebody might mostly observe. Later they might contribute an idea from their seat. Another week they might decide to join a pair exercise. None of those steps needs to look impressive from the outside for it to matter.

For My Life, My Script the question was never simply ‘did this person perform well?’ It is closer to asking:

This is what we mean by regulated participation. The programme was designed around helping participants feel increasingly able to show up, stay, contribute and return — rather than treating confidence as something somebody either has or does not have.

A predictable structure with room for the unexpected

Improvisation and predictability might sound like opposites, but they don’t have to be.

The overall environment can remain largely predictable while a particular activity introduces a small and manageable amount of uncertainty. Participants can know where the session takes place, what time it begins and ends, who is facilitating, who is available for support, what the general structure will look like, and that they can take a break when needed.

Within that familiar structure, an improvisation might introduce a different response, a new idea or an unexpected direction.

That distinction matters because unexpected situations are already part of adult life. Plans change. Conversations go somewhere we did not anticipate. Somebody misunderstands us. A task changes halfway through. Something simply does not work the first time.

Drama offers a way to encounter some of those smaller unpredictable moments without removing the wider sense of structure that makes it possible to experiment. Later stages of My Life, My Script use improvisation and real-life scenario work to explore adaptability, unexpected change and recovering when something doesn’t go as planned.

The aim is not to teach autistic participants that they should tolerate every uncomfortable situation, or accept changes that are genuinely harmful to them. It is to provide opportunities to explore different responses while support and structure are still available.

Different ways to express yourself, with no one ‘right’ route

Direct conversation isn’t always the easiest way to communicate an idea, feeling or experience.

Sometimes creating a character can provide useful distance. Sometimes a fictional story makes it easier to explore something indirectly. Movement, voice, storytelling and group exercises can all provide different routes into participation.

A participant might invent a character, help decide what happens next in a story, use movement rather than lots of dialogue, respond to another person’s character, create a fictional situation, contribute a single idea, or observe an exercise before deciding whether they want to join.

That flexibility matters in a group where participants may have different communication preferences. A drama session does not have to depend entirely on rapid verbal conversation, and there is no expectation that everybody should participate in exactly the same way.

Across the programme, the activities develop gradually. Early sessions establish familiarity, structure and group safety before moving into areas such as self-expression, social communication, navigating groups and responding to unexpected situations. The activities are there to experience and explore these areas, rather than treating them as theoretical skills that can be explained once and then expected to happen automatically.

Participation, not performance

This is perhaps the most important distinction in My Life, My Script.

You do not need previous acting experience to join, and you do not need to want to become an actor. If acting is something you enjoy, that’s welcome too — it simply isn’t the point of the programme.

Participants do not have to take part in every activity. Someone can observe first and decide whether they want to join when they feel comfortable. Sensory items and headphones are available. There is also a separate space that can be used if someone needs time away from the group to regulate, and support is available throughout the sessions.

Success does not mean delivering a brilliant scene. It might mean walking through the door despite feeling uncertain, staying for the session, asking for a break, contributing one idea, trying something unfamiliar, asking another participant a question, choosing to observe, communicating that something isn’t working, or returning the following week. Every one of those can be a form of participation.

We’ll explore what the programme itself looks like across the 12 weeks in another article in this series.

Strengths-based tools: the Group Participation Card

My Life, My Script is also designed to help participants understand how they participate, and what makes participation easier or more difficult for them.

During the programme, each participant develops their own Group Participation Card — a personal and portable tool based on their own preferences, needs and strengths. It belongs to them. They decide what they want to include and what they are comfortable sharing.

The point is not to produce a list of difficulties. It’s to give the participant a clearer picture of the conditions that support their participation, in their own words — and that understanding can travel beyond the drama room, into college, training, employment, volunteering or other group settings.

We’ll look more closely at the Group Participation Card and how participants create it in a dedicated article later in this series.

Why this matters between 18 and 25

The first article in this series looked at the support gap that can open up as autistic young people move from childhood and youth services into adulthood. The challenge isn’t only that services change — at roughly the same time, the expectations placed on young adults increase.

Education can become less structured. Work introduces different communication demands. Relationships change. People are increasingly expected to organise appointments, make decisions, manage responsibilities, navigate unfamiliar environments and advocate for themselves.

That is why My Life, My Script does not use drama simply because it is an enjoyable creative activity. The activities connect with experiences participants may encounter beyond the drama room — developing gradually over 12 weeks, in a consistent environment where participants have time to become familiar with the people, the place and the structure.

So, why drama?

Because it gives us somewhere to practise. It turns an abstract idea such as ‘communication’ into an actual interaction. It turns ‘confidence’ into the experience of trying something and discovering what happens. It introduces some uncertainty without making the entire environment uncertain. It gives people different ways to express themselves. And it creates opportunities to understand what supports participation and what makes it more difficult — allowing participation to develop gradually, rather than demanding everything at once.

The aim was never to produce performers. The aim is to create a structured and sensory-aware environment where autistic young adults can explore how they communicate, how they participate, and what helps them feel increasingly able to take part in a group on their own terms.

My Life, My Script is delivered by Aspire Ireland with support from the Rosie & Jim Charity & Community Fund.