Showing papers in "New Theatre Quarterly in 1985"

Theatre Analysis: Some Questions and a Questionnaire

Abstract: One of the problems of applying semiotic techniques to theatre work has been a vocabulary which too often mystifies rather than clarifies the theatre experience for the non-specialist student. Patrice Pavis, in his work with students at the University of Paris III, has evolved a questionnaire about theatre performance which, while not in itself utilizing semiotic terminology, attempts to direct the respondents' attention to all the aspects of theatrical signification upon which it touches. In the following article, Patrice Pavis, whose major study of theatrical terminology, entitled Dictionnaire du Theâtre, was published by Editions Sociales in 1980, outlines the purpose of the questionnaire, and provides explanatory notes to the individual questions, outlining an approach on which many involved in theatre teaching may wish to comment and build.

The Nature of Dramaturgy: Describing Actions at Work

Abstract: Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret has recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and a full retrospective of the company's work – based since 1966 at Holstebro. in Denmark – will appear in a future issue of NTQ. It is a mark of the insularity of English-speaking theatre, however, thatBarba himself probably remains best known as an early collaborator of Grotowski's, whose ideas he was responsible for assembling into Towards a Poor Theatre. But Barba's own workhas in fact developed in entirely distinctive directions, always substantiated by a framework of theoretical debate – most recently through his involvement in the International School of Theatre Anthropology, whose activities will also be documented in forthcoming issues. Here, Barba discusses the concept of ‘dramaturgy’, and how methods of theatre analysis may best be utilized in discussing theatre works based in performance rather than in written texts.

Popular Theatre and the Changing Perspective of the Eighties

Abstract: John McGrath is one of those few writers who, having begun his career in a success-fully orthodox manner, came to prefer working through ‘alternative’ channels – notably, in his formation and continuing work with the two 7:84 Companies, England and Scotland, their names reflecting the persistent fact that 84 per cent of the nation's wealth is owned by seven per cent of the population. Thus, McGrath's early work as one of the creators of the vintage TV series Z Cars, and his major ‘commercial’ success with the film version of his play Events while Guarding the Bofors Gun, has been succeeded by numerous plays and productions less familiar to conventional audiences, but which have made an enormous and often stirring impact in touring venues (frequently of a less expected kind) both north and south of the border. The full range of his work is charted in the ‘NTQ Checklist’ which follows this interview, and its development through to the mid– 'seventies was discussed in the earlier interview with McGrath in TQ19. reprinted in New Theatre Voices of the Seventies, edited by Simon Trussler (Methuen, 1981). Here, Tony Mitchell talks with John McGrath about some of his more recent work, and discusses his views on the nature of popular theatre, as set out in his important study of the subject, A Good Night Out (Methuen, 1981).

‘A Faithful Betrayal of Performance’: Notes on the Use of Video in Theatre

Abstract: Video recording has recently become an accessible, unobtrusive, and increasingly inexpensive way of making a permanent record of theatrical performances. This might seem to anticipate a revolution in theatre studies, once the theatre of the present has become the object of study by future generations: yet little thought has been given to the dramaturgical or the pedagogic implications of this new tool. How, for example, will the medium affect the message it transmits, by the way in which it makes permanent what is in essence ephemeral, and ‘fixes’ what is constantly changing? Marco de Marinis here offers some tentative thoughts about the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the audiovisual recording of theatre, intended not so much to present a definitive methodology as to clear the ground of some prevailing mistakes and misconceptions. His paper was first presented to a round-table at the Prato Centre for Theatre Semiotics in February 1983.

NTQ Checklist No. 1: John McGrath

Abstract: A series of nearly two dozen ‘Theatre Checklists’ appeared as supplements to the old series of Theatre Quarterly, recording biographical, performance, and bibliographical information in accessible form about a wide range of mainly living playwrights. The format was subsequently extended by Simon Trussler for the ‘Writers on File’ series he now edits for Methuen London, of which the first six titles have recently appeared. However, it was felt that the former style of checklist would still provide a valuable source of information for writers not scheduled for early inclusion in the new series, expecially when this complemented other forms of documentation in the journal: and this first ‘NTQ Checklist’ on the work of John McGrath thus appears alongside Tony Mitchell's interview with the playwright. Its compiler, Malcolm Page, teaches in the English Department of Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. Besides contributing several of the earlier series of ‘Theatre Checklists’. Malcolm Page has published widely in the field of modern British drama: his study of John Arden appeared last year from Twayne, and his volume on Arden was among the first of the ‘Writers on File’ from Methuen.

Drama, Education, and the Politics of Change: Part One

Abstract: Drama-in-education is a subject – or a set of theories – which became an educational discipline almost by historical accident, and about which strong feelings can still be aroused. That the arguments are too often confined to educationalists is symptomatic of the way the problems raised have seldom been shared with or considered by people working in professional theatre – and this in turn reflects the way that the subject has tended to be taught, with the emphasis strongly on its ‘educational’ rather than its ‘theatrical’ potential. Back in 1973. David Clegg's article ‘The Dilemma of Drama in Education’, in TQ9, caused a briefly wider flurry of interest, and in the present article David Hornbrook also attempts to put the subject into a contemporary critical perspective, looking here at what children are supposed to ‘learn’ and ‘experience’ through drama, and in the second part of his article, to follow in NTQ 5, examining present and future prospects for the subject. A repertory actor in the 1960s. David Hornbrook has himself taught drama in a large comprehensive school, and is currently Head of Performing Arts at the City of Bath College of Further Education, and Special Lecturer in Drama in the University of Bristol.

Playing the Fool: the Pragmatic Status of Shakespeare's Clowns

Abstract: The fool occupies an uneasy place in Shakespear's plays-half way between character and commentator, in part carrying over his real-life role as jester into the ‘court-world’ of the play, but also serving as a metadramatic intermediary between author and audience. And of course, Shakespeare's use of the role in turn modifies our own expectations and understanding of it. Roberta Mullini. of the University of Bologna, here examines the full range of the fools created by Shakespeare, both in terms of their specific dramatic functions, and as holders of the ‘fool's licence’ to disrupt language, action, and the very relationship between seeming and being.

‘Pulling Faces at the Audience’: the Lonely Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor

Abstract: With Grotowski and Szajna, Tadeusz Kantor has become one of a trio of contemporary exponents of experimental theatre whose influence has spread far beyond the boundaries of their native Poland: and Kantor himself has toured widely with his three major works. The Dead Class, Wielopole, Wielopole, and Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear? Both in his published manifestoes and in forthright interviews about his approach, as also through his personal participation as on-stage ‘conductor’ of his productions. Kantor has proclaimed a theatre philosophy rooted in his own past as surrealist painter and creator of happenings, and now exponent of what he has called ‘in-formal’ theatre, in which ‘the director must die with the actors’. While acknowledging the innovative significance of Kantor's work, Andrzej Zurowski – a leading Polish critic who is also president of his national section of the International Association of Theatre Critics – here questions some of the premises behind the creator's presence on his own stage.

The Dilated Body: on the Energies of Acting

Abstract: All too many teachers and theorists treat acting as if it were a sort of puzzle to be solved, a role as a sort of summit to be conquered. Eugenio Barba sees it rather as a process, involving the use of trained energies which often work intuitively, even contradictorily, in search of new relationships between actions and ideas. Using examples as diverse as the legend of the Flying Dutchman and his own company's work on a story by Jorge Luis Borges. Barba explores the way in which the mutation of a narrative line can interweave with the presence of the actor to create that ‘sudden dilation of the senses’ which he sees as the essence of the theatrical experience. Eugenio Barba has just celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his formation of Odin Teatret, now based in Holstebro, and is an Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Appia, Jaques-Dalcroze, and Hellerau, Part One: ‘Music Made Visible’

Abstract: While Appia's name is dutifully linked in our theatre histories with the full realization of the revolution in stage lighting wrought by electricity, the nature of his broader scenographic philosophy has remained little understood, and his own writings are not readily accessible in English Still less have English-speaking theatre people given due attention to the work of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, creator of the system of eurhythmies – and virtually nothing has previously been written about the unique collaboration between these two innovators, which began in 1906, and eventually flourished in the unlikely setting of a German ‘garden city’, dedicated to the humanization of modern industrial practices – Hellerau, or ‘the bright meadow’ Here, Richard Beacham, who has published a study of Appia's earlier work in Opera Quarterly (Autumn 1983), describes how the two men came to meet and to plan for the possibilities offered by the projected Hellerau festivals: in a subsequent article, he will assess the extent and nature of the work they achieved there

The Mind as a Theatre: Radio Drama since 1971

Abstract: The critical attention paid to radio drama has dwindled in almost inverse proportion to a steady increase not only in quantity but, less expectedly, in quality – though Britain has become one of the very few countries where this entirely distinctive dramatic medium is still seriously practised. As Head of BBC Radio Drama from 1963 to 1976. Martin Esslin was instrumental in developing the form, and his article in TQ 3 in 1971. ‘The Mind as a Stage’, in which he summed up his own ‘aesthetic of radio’, provides the starting point for the present article: but its authors believe that the very strength of Esslin's own artistic beliefs and authority limited his understanding of the less ‘artistic’ output of radio drama, and that it is in this area that some of the most notable of recent advances have been made. Their article thus examines not only the development of radio drama since 1971, but the way in which its changing ‘codes’ have altered the relationship between play and listener: and it analyzes two distinctive uses of the medium – to create what they call ‘alternative histories’, and a sense of ‘fragmented space’. Frances Gray, herself a radio playwright, has recently published a study of John Arden in the Macmillan Modern Dramatists series, and presently teaches at the University of Sheffield, from which Janet Bray has just received her M.Phil. degree for a study of radio drama in the 'seventies.

‘Theatre for Development’: Diary of a Zimbabwe Workshop

Abstract: The years since independence have seen a remarkable range of work in experimental forms of theatre in the nations of Africa – ‘experimental’, that is, in their shared rejection of the imposed colonial heritage of westernized forms, and the common attempt to revitalize indigenous cultural traditions while making them relevant to present and future development priorities. Ross Kidd, who has worked and written widely in this field, here provides a case study of just one ‘Theatre for Development’ workshop, held in a small Zimbabwe village in August 1983. A member of the secretariat of the International Popular Theatre Alliance. Ross Kidd is also an advisory editor of NTQ, and will be contributing a full survey of the range of popular theatre activity in the Third World to a forthcoming issue.

‘A Place Marked by Life’: Brook at the Bouffes du Nord

Abstract: After his experimental work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which bore fruit in the production of Marat/Sade in 1964 and culminated in the controversial Vietnam play US in 1966, Peter Brook returned to the classical repertoire in which he had made his name as ‘enfant terrible’ of British theatre, with Seneca's Oedipus for the National Theatre in 1968, and, two years later, A Midsummer Night's Dream for the RSC But the very success of ‘Brook's Dream’ – the way in which its transformation into an ‘event’ required actors ‘to do their duty rather than what came from life’ – heightened Brook's sense that he could no longer work creatively under such conditions, and in 1970 he formed his Centre International de Recherche Theâtrale, which developed its early work for the Persepolis festivals and in the treks across Africa chronicled by John Heilpern in Conference of the Birds Eventually the company settled in Paris at the Theâtre aux Bouffes du Nord in 1974: but while their work there has been widely acclaimed, it has been subjected to little detailed analysis in English In the original series of TQ, Kenneth Tynan offered a highly critical view in TQ25 Here, David Williams – a graduate of the Drama Department of the University of Kent, currently working in community theatre at Hoxton Hall in London's East End – corrects the balance with a full descriptive analysis of Brook's major productions at the Bouffes – Timon of Athens The Ik, a conflation of Jarry's Ubu plays, and a re-creation of the Conference of the Birds

Some Aspects of Popular Theatre

Abstract: It is a matter for pride that the old TQ was one of the first English-language journals to include material by and about the Italian dramatist Dario Fo. Our ‘Theatre Checklist’ on Fo in 1978 provided the first full reference guide to his plays (notably to his work since 1970 with the theatre collective La Comune), and Tony Mitchell contributed a documented study of Fo's one-man show Mistero Buffo to TQ 35 in 1979. In between, Belt and Braces had established Fo's British reputation with their long-running productions of Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can't Pay, Won't Pay – while in TQ40 Fo's leading American director, R. G. Davis, looked at some of the problems of presenting Fo in the USA. Now, Trumpets and Raspberries looks set to repeat the success of its predecessors at London's Phoenix Theatre. What sustains Dario Fo's unique ability to create political comedy which is at once hard-hitting yet widely accessible? As he suggests in the first of these articles (which originally appeared in Italian as an introduction to a volume of his plays), the answer lies in part in Fo's very rejection of the label ‘political’. Here, he analyzes some of the features by which he would rather distinguish his work as popular theatre, notably its traditional dependence on situation rather than character. In the second article, published in Italian in 1978, Fo examines the way in which this kind of theatre also fuses the elements of past culture with a critical examination of the present. Tony Mitchell, who translated both pieces, has just published a study of Fo. People's Court Jester, in the Methuen Theatrefiles series.

Shakespeare from Scratch: the Footsbarn ‘Hamlet’ and ‘King Lear’

Abstract: The Footsbarn company had its beginnings in a Cornish commune, very much in the spirit of the early 'seventies: yet unlike most companies formed in those years, it has not only survived but developed its work in ways which now communicate as fully to the cultural elite at international festivals as to non-theatre audiences in rural England. Geraldine Cousin, a lecturer in theatre studies at Warwick University. talked with members of Footsbarn at the time of their production of Hamlet in 1980, and again four years later while they were performing King Lear. Her descriptive analysis of those productions here runs parallel with the company's own assessment of how their work has developed. offering both a documentary retrospective of Footsbarn itself, and an individual approach to playing Shakespeare for contemporary audiences.

Peter Weiss and the Politics of ‘Marat-Sade’

Abstract: Peter Weiss, who died in 1982, achieved international recognition as a playwright relatively late in his life – at the age of almost fifty when, in 1964, the Marat-Sade received its premiere in West Germany and in London. Although these productions were followed by a Marxist interpretation in East Germany in the following year, it was Peter. Brook's version for the RSC, later filmed, which shaped most English-speaking theatregoers' perceptions of the play, as a culmination of Brook's exploration of ‘theatre of cruelty’. So what is the philosophy of the Marat-Sade? In this article, John McKenzie, who teaches in the Department of German at the University of Exeter, returns to the statements made by Weiss himself – which, though numerous, were mostly in ephemeral or untranslated sources – and traces the feelings of the playwright as these evolved from the political neutrality of what he called the ‘third standpoint’ to the overtly Marxist position of Weiss's later life.

Broadway and the Necessity for ‘Bad Theatre’

Abstract: Is Broadway necessary? As the focus for new writing and major experimental work in the USA shifts ever further from the old theatre district around Times Square – first to off- and then to off-off-Broadway, more recently to the flourishing regional theatres – many critics have come to regard Broadway either as an economic anachronism, failing to perpetuate past glories, or simply as an irrelevance to ‘real’ theatre. Yet Stanley Kauffmann argues that a focal point for a nation's theatre is more than the sum of sometimes fraying parts, and works on the imagination in ways that cannot be evaluated by the fragmentary assessment of succeeding productions; and here he analyses the ‘organism’ that Broadway remains, and the function it performs. Stanley Kauffmann has been theatre critic for the New York Times , the New Republic , and the Saturday Review , while the most recent of his full-length works is Theater Criticisms (1984).

Theatre, Linguistics, and Two Productions of ‘No Man's Land’

Abstract: Pursuing the theme of the preceding article, on possible approaches to the teaching of theatre analysis. Susan Melrose here suggests that contemporary linguistics offers a methodology which may help us to look at dramatic texts in such a way as to discover a semantics which transcends the merely verbal. The author proceeds to test her suggested method in a comparative examination of two actual productions – a French and an English version of Pinter's No Man's Land – and looks in detail at the opening scene of Julius Caesar. She concludes that in both cases what the actor often senses intuitively may also be analyzed ‘in process’ in terms of the language and rhetoric of the text. Susan Melrose is presently a Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Tunis. She presented an earlier version of this paper to the Conference on Theatre Analysis held in May 1984 at the University of Warwick, after completing her doctorate at the Sorbonne Nouvelle.

‘A Programme for the Progressive Conscience’: the Royal Court in the 'Eighties

Abstract: This year will see the completion of Max Stafford-Clark's fifth year as Artistic Director of the English Stage Company – and the thirtieth year of that company's tenure of the Royal Court Theatre, where its arrival under George Devine back in 1956 was to prove so seminal for the British theatre. Recently under threat of losing a major portion of its Arts Council grant, the company has had to struggle to maintain its reputation as the natural home for new writing in conditions where its ability to mount regular new productions has been severely curtailed: but in spite of this it has premiered some of the most important new work and writers of the past few years. Tony Dunn, who is senior lecturer in literature and drama at Portsmouth Polytechnic, and was recently appointed editor of Gambit , talked to Max Stafford-Clark about the problems and policy of the company, in the perspective of its past history. Before joining the Court, Max Stafford-Clark directed the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in its vintage years from 1968, and was a founding member of the Joint Stock Company in 1974.

Appia, Jaques-Dalcroze, and Hellerau, Part Two: ‘Poetry in Motion’

Abstract: In the first part of this feature, published in NTQ 2, Richard C. Beacham described how the pioneer of modern stage lighting, Adolphe Appia, and the creator of eurhythmics, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, came to collaborate in 1906 – in the development of the Hellerau ‘garden-city’ project. Here, they planned to provide an opportunity for active artistic participation in a specially designed performance space. The author takes up the story with the beginning of classes at Hellerau in 1911, and preparations for the two festivals which followed – including the revelatory production of Gluck's Orpheus. The First World War brought the collaboration to an end – but not before it had put into practice for the first time many of the scenic and interpretive principles of modern staging. Richard C. Beacham published a study of Appia's earlier work in Opera Quarterly (Autumn 1983), and plans to complete the present NTQ feature with an assessment of ‘The Legacy of Hellerau’. His forthcoming full-length study of Appia will be published by Cambridge University Press.

Structuralism and After: Trends and Tendencies in Theatre Analysis, Part One

Abstract: Susan Bassnett's ‘Introduction to Theatre Semiotics’ appeared in TQ38 (1980). reflecting in its very title the need to make theatre people of the English-speaking world better aware of approaches to theatre analysis which had been influential on the Continent since the work of the pioneer Czech semioticians of the 'thirties. But, as she now points out. these early workers in the field were themselves theatre practitioners, while more recent approaches have suffered from a tendency to divorce creators of theatre from the process and the vocabulary of analysis. Developing her account from the papers presented at the Conference on Theatre Analysis held last year at the University of Warwick, where she herself teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature. Susan Bassnett here introduces the corrective work of the new generation of continental theatre analysts, and relates their ideas and approaches to the recent decline of energy felt in British (as in most European) theatre, paralleled as it is by a growth in the influence of non-western theatre forms.

Audience Disruption in the Theatre of the Weimar Republic

Abstract: Disruption of plays by their audiences has not been an uncommon occurrence in theatre history, but the received wisdom has it that rioting more or less went out of fashion once the house lights could be lowered for the performance. But the combination in the theatre of the Weimar Republic of the politically radical and artistically experimental drama of inter-war Germany with the high political tensions of the times proved an explosive one. The frequent audience disturbances of the period were, however, less the spontaneous expression of genuine indignation than a carefully planned and orchestrated attempt to suppress radical art and opinion. In this article, James Jordan, a member of the Department of German at the University of Warwick, traces the course of theatrical disruption as a tactic of emergent Nazism – and the reactions to it of the theatres, the playwrights, and a too-often-myopic judiciary.

The Four Theatres of Jerzy Grotowski: an Introductory Assessment

Abstract: The original series of TQ included very little about the work of the pioneering Polish director Jerzy Grotowski – not for any lack of offerings on the subject, but because potential contributors seemed unable to distinguish discipleship from the need for analytical description. It is, therefore, with special pleasure that we now include, by way of introduction to the more detailed study of specific aspects of Grotowski's work, this clear overview of the director's development, from his first experiments in Opole, Poland, over 25 years ago, to his present researches into ‘objective drama’ in California. Grotowski himself has divided this work into four distinct though developmental phases, and here Richard Fowler, himself currently responsible for the Canada Project of the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, outlines the distinctive nature and achievements of each successive stage of the work.

Theatre Practice, Theatre Studies, and ‘New Theatre Quarterly’

Abstract: The original series of Theatre Quarterly ran for ten years and forty issues, from 1971 to 1981. The relaunched journal intends to continue the best traditions of the old, while reflecting the changes that have overtaken the English-speaking theatre in the intervening years. Simon Trussler, who was an editor of the old TQ throughout its existence, here offers some personal reflections on the appearance of New Theatre Quarterly , the present mood of the theatre, and the challenges now facing theatre practitioners and researchers alike. Simon Trussler is also author of over twenty books and monographs on theatre, was drama critic of Tribune from 1966 to 1972, and currently teaches in the Drama Departments of Goldsmiths' College, University of London, and the University of Kent. Clive Barker, his associate editor on TQ since 1978, joins him as co-editor of the new journal. Formerly an actor with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, and author of the influential guide to actor training Theatre Games , Clive Barker is currently Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Warwick.

Soul in the System: on Meaning and Mystique in Stanislavski and A. C. Bradley

Abstract: Although literary criticism has moved on since the work of A. C. Bradley, his Shakespearian Tragedy (1904) is still regarded as the greatest achievement of the ‘biographical’ approach to dramatic characterization – and a reprint of that classic work, with a new introduction by John Russell Brown, has just appeared from Macmillan. But the teachings of his close contemporary Stanislavski remain more widely disseminated than disputed, though they spring from very similar assumptions and concerns. Alice Rayner, an assistant professor at University of California, Irvine, investigates what the writings of the two men had in common, how their insights and approaches can be mutually revealing – and how some of their underlying beliefs can be the cause of mystification.

The Two Hells of Doctor Faustus: a Theatrical Polyphony

Abstract: The first article in the first issue of the original TQ was a piece by Jan Knott, utilizing the concept of the absurd as a means of understanding Greek tragedy. Recently, his essays, of which many first appeared in TQ, have been published in a new collection, The Theatre of Essence , from Northwestern University Press. Kott's idiosyncratic approach to the interpretation of theatre texts continues to distinguish him as one of those rare literary critics whose insights illuminate the play in production – the reflection in the Brook–Scofield King Lear of his Beckettian interpretation in the seminal Shakespeare Our Contemporary being just the most famous instance. Now Jan Kott, who teaches at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, turns to the world of Shakespeare's own contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, and examines Doctor Faustus as the meeting-place of many kinds of Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan theatre, contributing to an understanding of the play that is rooted not in a dead theology but in a living theatricality.

Hoping for the Unexpected: the Theatre of Peter Zadek

Abstract: Over the last three decades the work of Peter Zadek in Germany has consistently aroused strong reactions, whether of lavish enthusiasm or disdainful rejection (Peter Stein is supposed to have commented that Zadek's productions of Shakespeare were ‘Shakespeare with his trousers down’). Whatever the critical reception, Zadek's work demands close attention for its free-wheeling, unpredictable, and dangerous qualities, as well as for the remarkably sensitive interplay he achieves between his actors. If Stein's productions at the Schaubuhne and elsewhere are masterpieces of formal perfection, Zadek's work by contrast is characterized by a flamboyant, imaginative exploration of the text and a healthy suspicion of polished results. In the interview which follows, Roy Kift discussed with Peter Zadek not only his attitudes to the problems of acting, but also his opinions on German theatre and literature and the experiences which shaped his development as one of West Germany's leading directors. Roy Kift has been living in West Berlin since 1981, where he has written plays for stage and radio and a prizewinning opera libretto, as well as directing for theatre and television. His article on the GRIPS Theater in Berlin appeared in TQ 39 (1981).

The American Musical and the American Dream: from ‘Show Boat’ to Sondheim

Abstract: The musical has long been recognized as one of the few distinctively American art forms. How far do these roots result in an ‘Americanism’ of ideological content – and how, indeed, does one measure the ‘content’ of a musical, with its fusion of the spoken word, song, and choreography? David Hirst, who teaches in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts of the University of Birmingham, here examines the problems of critical methodology posed by the musical form, and also traces the development of the musical as an expression (at times a critical expression) of the American way of life and the ‘American dream’. After demonstrating its reflection of themood of the Depression era, he analyzes its response to the social and political mood of the war and post-war years, and to the changing standards which made Hair an international success, yet which have consigned the work of Sondheim to Broadway failure – in a world where ‘failure’ and ‘success’ carry their own, pervasively American connotations.