Showing papers in "New Theatre Quarterly in 1986"

Oppression, Resistance, and the Writer's Testament

Abstract: Of the generation of playwrights who began to write around 1968. Howard Barker came more belatedly than some to full critical recognition, but has emerged in recent years as a major voice in all the available dramatic media: thus, among his most recent work, Scenes from an Execution was for radio and The Blow for television, while The Castle was premiered by the RSC at The Pit in November 1985 – and last spring he contributed an updated final act of his own when adapting Middleton's Women Beware Women for production at the Royal Court. Malcolm Hay and Simon Trussler interviewed Howard Barker on his earlier work in Theatre Quarterly No.40 (1981), and now Finlay Donesky discusses with the dramatist the more recent development of his writing, as of the thinking about society and his own craft which underpins it. The interview was conducted in July 1985 while Donesky was in England on a fellowship from the University of Michigan, where he is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on the plays of Barker, Brenton, and Hare.

The Employment of Children in the Victorian Theatre

Abstract: The public nature of their work should seemingly have ensured that children employed in the Victorian theatre enjoyed better conditions than their brothers and sisters, so often suffering on one of those treadmills at which the virtuous Victorians set their offspring to work. Yet little is known of the actuality of their experiences, and the present article represents a pioneering investigation into the area. Drawing on the researches of contemporary social reformers as well as on the reminiscences of the children themselves and of their employers and colleagues, Tracy C. Davis, who teaches in the Department of Drama at Queen's University, Kingston, Canad, presents an intriguing picture of exploitation mixed with adulation, and a pervasive muddle of defensive indifference, gradually brought within the bounds of well-intentioned legislation.

Horizontal and Vertical Montage in the Theatre

Abstract: The critical concept of ‘montage’ has been familiar in film studies ever since Eisenstein. But the fixed focus and apparently continuous flow of live theatrical performance seemingly makes it an inappropriate tool for dramatic analysis. Franco Ruffini argues, however, that actors and audiences find their own ways of ‘selecting’ from and emphasizing aspects of the full theatrical vocabulary and its many means of expression, which make live performance no less subject to creative self-assembly and juxtaposition than film. Ruffini develops the distinction between ‘horizontal’ montage in time, and ‘vertical’ montage as a sort of cross-section of performance; and examines ways in which the ‘audience's performance’ can, both fruitfully and otherwise, differ from the ‘director's performance’. Franco Ruffini is Professor of Theatre Semiotics in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Bologna.

Seven Anarchists I Have Known: American Approaches to Dario Fo

Abstract: In the final issue of the original series of Theatre Quarterly , TQ40 (1981), R. G. Davis described his experiences directing the plays of Dario Fo in Canada and the USA, focusing mainly on his work with We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! Here, he looks not only at his own but at the half-dozen other productions of Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist which have so far been presented in North America – and finds himself, in retrospect, critical of his own work, as well as that of others. He concludes that it is impossible to attempt Fo's plays properly without at least an understanding of the political point of view he sums up as ‘anarcho-communist’ – a point of view which must communicate through the leading players. A regular contributor to the present and its predecessor journal, R. G. Davis, who founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the sixties, is presently teaching at San Francisco State University, reviewing for the magazine of the California Confederation of the Arts (by whose kind permission the following article is reprinted), and is now engaged in staging his own adaptation of llya Ehrenburg's The Life of an Automobile , as an ‘imagistic theatre’ production.

‘A Piece of Our Life’: the Theatre of the Eighth Day

Abstract: Poland's Teatr Osmego Dnia – the Theatre of the Eighth Day – has survived for 22 years, with essentially the same personnel since the early seventies, and with a constant commitment to social engagement. The group – which has never included trained actors, because, according to director Lech Raczak, any graduate of a Polish theatre school, ‘cannot act with his whole self’ – was a major voice of protest for the Polish student generation of 1968. Despite constant harassment and frequent arrests, it continues both to inspire and record the work of young oppositional theatres, although in 1985 it was forced to split when six members toured western Europe whilst four others, denied their passports, played in Polish churches. What follows is a collage of two interviews conducted that autumn – in London with Tadeusz Janiszewski, Adam Borowski, and Leszek Sczaniecki, and in Poznan with Lech Raczak and Marcin Keszycki. They discuss the importance of Grotowski for their generation: their working method, based on group improvisation; the function of poetry in physical theatre; their major productions; and the day-to-day survival strategies of a collective dedicated to exploring the expressive and political potential of the actor. The interviews were assembled by Tony Howard, a playwright who also teaches English in the University of Warwick, and who expresses his thanks to the many people who made this feature possible – especially Nick Gardiner, the ‘European’ group's manager, and the translators. Ewa Elandt and Ewa Kraskowska.

Weaving Theories is not Enough

Abstract: Despite the successful production of Odon von Horvath's Tales from the Vienna Woods. In the translation by Christopher Hampton at the National Theatre in 1977. the work of this inter-war contemporary of Brecht's remains little known in the English-speaking theatre. James L. Rosenberg. Professor of Drama at Carnegie-Mellon University. Pittsburgh, is himself a professional playwright who has translated some of Horvath's work previously unavailable in English. In an illuminating biographical and critical introduction to this checklist, he both outlines the reasons for our ignorance of Horvath, and suggests aspects of his undervalued importance. The subsequent checklist provides a succinct outline of the original productions of Horvath's plays and of the publication a succinct outline of the original productions of Horvath's plays and of the publication

Sidetrack: Discovering the Theatricality of Community

Abstract: In the interview above, Malcolm Blaylock referred to Sidetrack, a community theatre company in the inner-western suburbs of Sydney, as ‘arguably the best company in Australia’. Here, Tom Burvill examines some of the company's recent work, and sets it in the context of an understanding of community theatre which he traces back to Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Tom Burvill, who has himself acted as a dramaturg for Sidetrack, lectures in English and linguistics at Macquarie University.

Stanislavski, Creativity, and the Unconscious

Abstract: As Alice Reyner's paper on Stanislavski and Bradley in NTQ 4 illustrated, Stanislavski remained very much a man of his own time, however enduring his approach to acting has proved. Here, Natalie Crohn Schmitt examines one of the concepts most crucial to ‘the system’ – a concept which is in its essentials, however, derived from nineteenth-century ideas, now being challenged, about the relationship between creativity and the unconscious. Pointing out that Stanislavski himself believed that his ‘system’ was simply the application of natural laws to acting technique, the author shows Stanislavski's indebtedness to the psychological theories of Theodule Armand Ribot, which interpreted all human behaviour in terms of ‘an aim towards fixed ends’. One of the reasons for the decline in influence of Stanislavski's system thus reflects, she argues, the growing belief that creativity is ‘process’, its ends ‘continually redefined by the actions, and vice-versa’ – and the author suggests examples of such a non-Stanislavskian approach among contemporary theatre companies. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is associate professor of theatre in the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her earlier essays have appeared in a wide range of journals, and she has just completed a full-length study, Actors on the Stage of Life. The present paper was written under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Zen and the Art of Acting

Abstract: As a philosophy which is in effect a way of life. Zen has offered insights into most aspects of human activity from the martial arts to motorcycle maintenance. Here, Adrian Cairns, associate principal of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, analyzes the ways in which, despite their widely different origins, development, and purposes, the tenets of an eastern philosophy actually mesh with the principles common to most western styles of acting.

Czech Theatre from the National Revival to the Present Day

Abstract: Our knowledge (or pervasive ignorance) of theatre in Czechoslovakia is. sadly, still shaped in part by its being perceived as a faraway country of which we know little – almost as little as when Chamberlain thus identified it at the time of Munich. But there is also the fact that its theatre has been distinguished less by the work of individual dramatists than through collective creation, through ‘small forms’ such as cabaret, and through scenography and other aspects of technical innovation. While fully analyzing such features of Czech theatre, Barbara Day relates them to the political and social conditions of a country in which various forms of repression and censorship have made it difficult for the all-too-identifiable dramatist to become spokesperson for a national theatre. Having herself lived in Czechoslovakia for several periods between 1965 and 1969, Barbara Day returned to the study of Czech theatre in 1980, when she read for a research degree at Bristol University, also collaborating with the University's drama department in staging a Czechoslovak Festival in Bristol during October 1985.

‘Othello’ in Poland: Notes from a Director's Diary

Abstract: In 1980 Wilfred Harrison was invited to Poland to direct Shakespeare's Othello, of which the Polish playwright Bohdan Drozdowski had prepared a translation. The following account. taken from the diary Harrison kept of rehearsals at the Wilama Horzycy Theatre in Tourn, decribes the encounter between an experienced British director and his Polish company from the first reading on 29 January to the opening night on 2 March, reveating some intriguing differences between two cultures andtwo conceptions of theatrical converntion. Wilfred Harrison was director for thirteen years of the Octagon Theatre, Botton, having earlier been founding-director of the moblie Century Theatre. Now a freeiance, he was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 1974, and has continued to travel Widely: his Othello earned him the Amicus Poloniae award in 1981, and also an invitation to direct in Bulgaria, where the production tourned.

Subsidy, Community, and ‘Excellence’ in Australian Theatre

Abstract: The Australian Labour government elected in 1972 (and sacked in highly controversial circumstances by the Governor-General in 1975) instituted under the premiership of Gough Whitlam a policy of greatly increased subsidy for the arts. But this was succeeded by a period of neglect, culminating in a drastic policy of cutbacks in 1981; and the election of a new Labour government in 1983 thus coincided with a major debate over both the nature and the distribution of arts subsidy, which has resulted in a wider spread of funding for culturally diverse forms of theatre. Malcolm Blaylock works both as director of one of the new community-based companies. Junction Theatre, and as a member of the federal funding body, the Theatre Board of the Australia Council: he talked to Graham Ley about both aspects of his work, and the background to the present funding policy.

The Nature of Theatre Dialogue

Abstract: ‘What makes one sentence into a line of poetry and another sentence dull and lifeless?’ This was one of the questions Arnold Wesker set out to answer from the point-of-view of the practising playwright rather than the critical theorist, when he delivered the following pape; to the biennial conference of the International Association of Theatre Critics in Rome in 1985. He examines the constituent elements of stage dialogue in supposdly ‘raistic’ drama and th rigorous if not always conscious process of artistic selection and shaping diotated, in his own practice, by the natur of the originating experence. He illustrates his argument with extracts from his own works. including his most recently staged play in London, Annie Wobbler – the first in a now-completed cycle of four plays for on woman of which Four Portraits, Yardsal, and Whatever Happened to Betty Lemon? are the other parts. A frequent contributor to the original series of Theatre Quarterly , Arnold Wesker's earliest works, the plays of the ‘Wesker Trilogy’ and The kitchen , were milestones in the creatior of the ‘now British drama’ of the late fifties, and he has continuec to write for the theatre in a wide range of styles – which have been known to disturb the ‘expectations of realism’ of some of the critics he was here addressing…

Exploring the Limitless Depths: Mike Alfreds Directs Chekhov

Abstract: ‘Deadly British productions of Chekhov remain all too common.’ Or so suggests David Allen, who finds in the Chekhov productions of Mike Alfreds a refreshing recognition of the distinctively ‘Russian’ qualities of the plays, and an ability to render these in terms of the choices available to British actors. Mike Alfreds founded the Shared Experience company in 1975, and in Theatre Quarterly No. 39 (1981). Clive Barker interviewed him and members of the company on the processes of collective creation through which most of their productions then evolved: the present feature thus in part reflects Alfreds's own developing interest in working on ‘fixed’ scripts, both with Shared Experience, for whom he directed Three Sisters earlier this year, and in his work as guest director of The Cherry Orchard, first for Oxford Playhouse in 1982, and subsequently for the National Theatre at the Cottesloe, in 1985. In the following interview, Mike Alfreds's own perceptions of his work are intercut with author David Allen's observations during rehearsals, and the subsequent reactions of the critics.

The Benefits of ‘Marginalization’

Abstract: DAVID HORNBROOK'S intelligent and lucid account of the problems which have beset the drama in education community during the last thirty years has a compelling look to it. In Part One of ‘Drama, Education and the Politics of Change’ (NTQ 4), the historical analysis is astute and the questions posed at the end are important and pressing ones. I should lik, however, to confine my own obsrevations to the issues raised in Part Two of the paper (NTQ 5), where of offers specific proposals for future developments, because it is here that the argument falters.

The Théâtre du Soleil, Part Two: the Road to Cambodia

Abstract: One theatre company alone in France, since the end of Vilar's Theâtre National Populaire, continues to make us consider the relationships between theatre and life, the place of theatre in society, its ability to modify the order of things in some way. It is the Theâtre du Soleil, guided by Ariane Mnouchkine . THE SEARCH for a contemporary popular theatre which has occupied the Theâtre du Soleil almost since its foundation 22 years ago has led the company at various times into innovations in both subject matter and performance style. Their latest production, The Terrible but Unfinished History of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Combodia , breaks new ground in both areas.

Edward Bond Directs ‘Summer’ at the Cottesloe, 1982

Abstract: The early issues of the original Theatre Quarterly carried extensive coverage of the work of Edward Bond – a conscious editorial emphasis, which it became less important to maintain as Bond's work acquired its present international recognition and a corresponding share of critical attention. Yet the very distinctiveness of Bond's dramaturgy demands a no less distinctive approach from its critics – notably, a recognition and evaluation of the many non-literary strands of the ‘text’ as performed, especially when under the author's own direction. Pete Mathers, who teaches in the Film and Drama Division of Bulmershe College, here attempts to assess one of Bond's most recent plays, Summer , in close relationship to its original production by Bond himself, at the National's Cottesloe Theatre in 1982, examining every element through which its audiences experienced that production – including the poster and programme, as well as the more clearly crucial ingredients of design, performance, and the ‘gests’ through which they interconnect.

The Théâtre du Soleil, Part One: a Brief History of the Company

Abstract: In spite of the international acclaim for its spectacular productions of the early 'seventies, the Theâtre du Soleil has generally received less than adequate attention in English-language theatre journals. The original series of Theatre Quarterly included a lengthy interview with its leading member, Ariane Mnouchkine, focused upon its then-current production, L'Age d'or, in TQ18 (1975), and we now bring the story up to date – first, with a survey of the company's earlier work and its distinctive qualities by Adrian Kiernander, who recently spent a year with the Theâtre du Soleil on a French government scholarship, between working as a freelance director and his present position teaching theatre studies in the University of Queensland. Two complementary studies of the company's most recent production follow. In the first, Adrian Kiernander places The Terrible but Unfinished History of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, within the context of his preceding analysis. In the second, David Graver, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, and presently a Visiting Scholar at Clare Hall, Cambridge, describes and assesses the nature and qualities of the script by Helene Cixous, as realized in the production.

Feminism in the French Theatre: a Turn-of-the-Century Perspective

Abstract: Even to sympathetic theatrical observers, ‘feminism’ in France at the turn of the century was often regarded as merely incidental to the larger concerns of the ‘social’ drama; and dramatic debate tended to focus on the issue of a woman's assertion of ‘freedom’ versus her presumably ‘natural’ functions as wife and mother. In this article, Elaine Aston illuminates such attitudes, utilizing both the texts of contemporary plays and discussion in journals current at the time. But she also detects early theatrical evidence of a slow shift towards a questioning of prevailing assumptions – and a belief (which today strikes her as enviable) in the power of theatre to effect social change.

Computer Databases for Theatre Studies

Abstract: Slowly the theatre is coming to terms with the computer – not only in practical matters ranging from lighting control to ticket sales, but also in the collection and collation of the material which is the concern of the theatre student and scholar. Ian Herbert, whose own editorial work on Who's Who in the Theatre was largely assisted by lots of box-files and strong coffee, has converted the production of his invaluable London Theatre Record , now into its fifth year, to a computer-based system, and has recently been appointed to a fellowship at the City University to investigate the use of computerized databases for the theatre. In this capacity he helped to organize a conference held at the University in the summer of 1985, which brought together many theatre people with experience of using computers: in the following article he summarizes some of their contributions, and the conclusions of the conference.

Designing for Reinhardt: the Work of Ernst Stern

Abstract: Although a good deal of his work was seen in London and New York, the name of Max Reinhardt remains for most English-speaking theatre students all-too-vaguely associated with those innovations which helped to give a new importance to the ‘totality’ of the relationship between actors, audience, stage lighting and design, movement and music, in the earlier part of this century. Even less is known here about one of Reinhardt's leading collaborators. Ernst Stern – the longest-serving, most versatile, and most professional of his designers. Yet Stern settled in England in 1933, and left his papers to the Victoria and Albert Museum, upon whose resources Hugh Rorrison has drawn in assembling this view of Stern's contribution to Reinhardt's theatre in particular, and to twentieth-Century scenography in general. Hugh Rorrison, who was a regular contributor to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, teaches in the Department of German of the University of Leeds.