Showing papers in "New Theatre Quarterly in 1991"

The Gospel of Rags: Melodrama at the Britannia, 1863–74

Abstract: We are happy to return to the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, the subject of pioneering studies by Clive Barker in the original Theatre Quarterly, where he used the ‘Brit’ as focus for an overview of the problems of researching nineteenth-century popular theatre in TQ4 (1971), proceeding to a detailed analysis of our knowledge of the nature and composition of the theatre's audiences in TQ34 (1979). Jim Davis now turns to the repertoire of the theatre, and, for one representative decade from 1863 to 1874, explores the sources of the melodramas presented there – a great many of them specially written or adapted by popular ‘house dramatists’. He also examines the values which may be discerned to underlie the most popular plays, and in the process, by going to manuscript sources rather than to the inevitably more ‘respectable’ plays that reached print, uncovers a more radical repertoire than previous authorities had assumed. Jim Davis, who currently teaches in the Theatre Department of the University of New South Wales, has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century theatre, including a survey of nautical melodrama in NTQ14 (1988) and a study of the ‘reform’ of the East End theatres in NTQ23 (1990).

Drawing the Black and White Line: Defining Black Women's Theatre

Abstract: Yvonne Brewster is best known in Britain as artistic director of Talawa Theatre, but she has also been active in the theatres of Jamaica, Africa, and America, having worked as a drama teacher, television production assistant and presenter, and film director in Jamaica before beginning her international theatre directing career. Talawa was founded in 1985 by four women, with Yvonne Brewster as director, and with the aim of using ‘the ancient African ritual and black political experience of our forebears to inform, enrich, and enlighten British theatre’. Although Talawa has as yet been unable to give the work of black women writers the attention it deserves, the company is itself primarily female: the artistic director and the majority of employees are women, all the designers to date have been women, and so predominantly are the technical and stage management staff. A medium- to large-scale touring company, Talawa worked without a building base until 1991, when the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre became its home. Yvonne Brewster has directed all Talawa's work to date, focusing primarily on productions of the classics with black performers and on introducing the work of black playwrights to British audiences. Her productions have included The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James (1985–86), An Echo in the Bone by Dennis Scott (1986–87), O Babylon! by Derek Walcott (1987–88), Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1988–89), The Gods Are Not to Blame by Ola Rotimi (1989–90), The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace (1990–91), and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1991–92). Yvonne Brewster is also the editor of Methuen's two volumes of Black Plays (1987 and 1989). Here she is interviewed by Lizbeth Goodman, who has just completed her doctoral dissertation on women's theatre in Britain at Cambridge, and is currently working with the Open University.

Howard Barker: Paradigm of Postmodernism

Abstract: The plays of Howard Barker are probably more fervently admired and resolutely disliked than those of any other British dramatist of his generation. Although we have twice published interviews with the playwright about his life and work – first in the original Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981), and more recently in NTQ8 (1986) – subsequent articles in NTQ have tended to be critical of his achievements: we are therefore pleased to present here a view of two of his latest plays, The Last Supper and The Bite of the Night, which, while recognizing precisely those qualities for which Barker has often been attacked, suggests that there is a social as well as a highly theatrical purpose behind the ‘postmodern’ approach to theatricality here identified. Th e author, Gunther Klotz, teaches and researches in English studies in Berlin, where he has published numerous critical studies and editions of British dramatists and other writers.

The Power of Sex: English Plays by Women, 1958–1988

Abstract: Reading backwards, through the feminist critique, Sue-Ellen Case explores the role of sexuality in women's lives as portrayed in the work of British women playwrights during the past three decades. She illustrates the way in which the oppressive uses of sexuality in the patriarchy, identified by the social movement as rape and pornography, have been dramatized through dramatic narrative and character construction. In contrast to this representation of oppression, she discusses how the liberating role of pleasure and of women reclaiming their own desires provide a revolutionary feminist stage practice, in both heterosexual and lesbian social contexts. Sue-Ellen Case is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and her works include Feminism and Theatre and Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre.

Theatricalizing Shakespeare's Text

Abstract: BRIAN PARKER'S article ‘Bowers of Bliss’ attempts to place the 1986 Oxford edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in its scholarly, intellectual, and theatrical context, and in the course of doing so offers a number of criticisms of the procedures adopted in that volume, with particular reference to its use in the theatre. Of course, single-volume editions of the complete works are rarely selected for theatrical use, but a number of directors have chosen to base productions on this edition, having photocopies made of the text on which they are working. For them, at least, the edition has seemed to have something special to offer. It seems to me that Professor Parker's criticisms are based on imprecisions of detail and on logical fallacies, and I should like to attempt to correct them.

Subverting Rosalind: Cocky Ros in the Forest of Arden

Abstract: The foregoing article by Jan Kott explored the nature of gender in As You Like It largely by looking forward to later analogues of androgyny: but here Lesley Soule examines the character of Rosalind in close relationship to traditions of popular theatre and performance on which Shakespeare himself could draw. She points out how our own two-centuries-old love affair with an idealized heroine has, despite some recent feminist modifications of the character-myth, distorted our reading of the play, obscuring the fact that the text describes a performance in which the controlling presence is not a female performer but a male adolescent – a figure whose long theatrical antecedence she explores. This portrayal by a pert boy Roscius of Shakespeare's boy-girl character the author dubs ‘Cocky Ros’ – a figure who first represents and then subverts the feminine fiction of ‘Rosalind’, thus providing a paradigm of character-actor interplay. Only by giving authority to such subversive, gender-free performers, she argues, can we challenge the power wielded by theatrical illusion over our ideas of identity, gender, and love. Lesley Soule, who has taught at the University of British Columbia and at Polytechnic South West, is currently completing a study of theories of the character-actor relationship.

A Tale of a Few Cities: Interculturalism on the Road

Abstract: This is a personal record of a theatre worker's journey to places where theatre is inextricably mixed with politics — or is no less significantly divorced from social concerns Visiting mainland China and South Africa in the summer of 1990, Richard Schechner records how theatre people confronted the aftermath of major political upheavals – the crushing of hopes in Tiananmen Square, and the perhaps deceptive raising of them following the release of Nelson Mandela His trip also took in the widely different perspectives and problems of Taiwan, where pluralism struggles (almost unnoticed in the West) to displace an ageing autocracy Richard Schechner teaches at New York University, and recently returned to the editorial chair at The Drama Review , the journal he conducted through its vintage years in the 'sixties – at the same time creating the Performance Group, and beginning his researches into theatre and anthropology, the field in which he has published widely and innovatively in the interim

A Theatre of the Everyday: the Plays of Michel Vinaver

Abstract: It has only been in the last few years that the plays of Michel Vinaver have begun to be discovered and produced in Britain. Yet he has been working as a playwright in his native France since 1955, and has become increasingly respected and widely produced there since overcoming a seven-year ‘writer's block’ in 1967. Here, David Bradby's introduction to Vinaver's dramaturgy is followed by a detailed analysis of one of his most recent plays, L'Emission de television, and this critical material is complemented by a chronology of Vinaver's career, excerpted statements by and about the writer – including an ‘auto-interview’ of Vinaver by Vinaver – and a bibliography. David Bradby is Professor of Drama and Head of the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London: he has published widely, especially on the French theatre, and his major study, Modern French Drama, 1940–1990, has recently appeared in a revised edition from Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on a study of Vinaver for the University of Michigan Press. Michel Vinaver's own assessment of the present state of French theatre funding was included in NTQ25 (1991).

Kantor, Memory, Memoire

Abstract: The Polish director Tadeusz Kantor died in December 1990 at the age of seventy-five. Also a poet and painter, who designed his own work for the stage, Kantor brought to the traumatized and Stalinized post-war Polish theatre a sensibility saturated in the pre-war avant-garde: but he was only able to give theatrical expression to this after 1956, when a marginally more liberal climate allowed him to form his own company. For this company, Cricot-2, Kantor created a sequence of scrupulously orchestrated works in which he was always present, half witness, half auteur – works which were redolent of an apocalypse that had already occurred, yet remained eternally imminent. The Dead Class, Wielopole Wielopole, Let the Artists Die, and, most recently, Today Is My Birthday all toured widely, evoking for their audiences a past at once scrupulously ‘real’ in its physical texture yet macabre in its experiential pain. Kantor's fellow countryman and near-contemporary Jan Kott here evokes the distinctive sources and qualities of memory in Kantor's work. An advisory editor of New Theatre Quarterly and of Theatre Quarterly, Jan Kott has been a frequent contributor to both journals, most recently with a study of ‘The Gender of Rosalind’ in NTQ26, which extended the line of thinking of his seminal study, Shakespeare Our Contemporary.

Anti-Oedipus? Dada and surrealist theatre, 1916-35

Abstract: In a sequel to his essay ‘Sexuality and Structure in Expressionist Theatre’ in NTQ26, Peter Nicholls here explores a very different set of developments in the French avant-garde drama of the period. Arguing that Dada and Surrealist theatre have a strongly marked ‘anti-oedipal’ tendency, he suggests that their polemics against the family and paternal law contrast with the increasing prominence given to Freud's masterplot in Expressionism. Peter Nicholls teaches English and American Literature at the University of Sussex: his publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing, and articles on postmodernism, contemporary poetry, and French cubism. His Modernisms: a Literary Guide will be published by Macmillan in 1992.

Women' Theatre in Ireland

Abstract: So close was the relationship between women and the Irish literary and theatrical renaissance that the severely diminished feminist role in contemporary Irish cultural and theatrical life contrasts all the more revealingly with the early achievements In this article, which is an expanded version of a paper given at the 1990 conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research at Glasgow University, Steve Wilmer etches in the historical perspective, notably the significance of women's writing to the nationalist as well as the suffragist movement, and outlines the present situation, in which the solid advances being made by women directors and administrators are only slowly being reflected in an increase in women's theatre writing and support for feminist theatre groups, let alone the assumption of real theatrical power Steve Wilmer teaches in the Samuel Beckett Centre at Trinity College Dublin, and is the author of several plays, including Scenes from Soweto

Peter Brook and the ‘Two Worlds’ of Theatre

Abstract: The ‘two worlds’ of Peter Brook's theatre are its audience and its actors. According to Brook, the actors bring their ‘world of the imagination’ to meet with the audience's ‘world of the everyday’: but instead of the temporary suspension of belief in the ‘everyday world’ which a western audience has traditionally forced upon itself, Brook conceives the true theatrical experience as an interaction between the two modes of reality – those of the ‘imagination’ and the mundane. In the following article, Paul Cohen assesses the importance of this basic philosophy to Brook's productions since 1968, paying particular attention to the tour of Africa with The Conference of the Birds and the recent epic production of The Mahabharata, attempting to show that Brook's theory still directly informs the methodology and the performance orientation of his productions. Paul Cohen originally presented this paper as an MA dissertation for Vanderbilt University, and is currently on the Professional Writing Program of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

On Frank Wedekind

Abstract: To follow Lenin on the London Hippodrome in TQ40 (1981) and Wedekind on the Middlesex music hall in NTQ16 (1988) – here now is Trotsky on Wedekind As Edward Braun, Professor of Drama in the University of Bristol, points out in a brief introduction, this assessment by Trotsky follows in a thin line of dramatic criticism by Marx, Engels, Mehring, Plekhanov, and Lunacharsky, and dates from Trotsky's involvement with a number of radical journals during his exile in Vienna The article first appeared in the Neue Zeit in April 1908

From Shakespeare to Shakespeare: the Theatre Transcended

Abstract: In spite of periods of withdrawal, Leo de Berardinis is one of the few author-directors from the new Italian theatre of the 1960s and 1970s who has remained faithful to the spirit of experiment, and attempted consistently to renew himself and his processes of theatremaking. In an introduction to the interview which follows, Marco de Marinis outlines the earlier years of de Berardinis's career, and notes the characteristic features of the productions of that period. The interview itself explores his view of the theatre and theatricality from the standpoint of the mid-1980s. At its core is a discussion of de Berardinis's 1985 production of King Lear – the director's second encounter with the play – in relation to his own aims, to the interpretive views of other theatre people and critics, and to what de Berardinis believes we may still perceive of Shakespeare's intentions. A postscript by Marco de Marinis outlines subsequent developments in the director's work.

Oberammergau, 1634–1990: the Play and the Passions

Abstract: Since 1634 the villagers of Oberammergau have kept their bargain with God to present a Passion Play every ten years in gratitude for their deliverance from the Plague. It is now staged every decennial year, most recently in 1990, and the single performance that long sufficed has now multiplied to almost a hundred – still not enough to meet the demand for tickets for this internationally-renowned event, which is at once a tourist attraction and, for the Christian, an affirmation of faith. Glenn Loney, theatre journalist and teacher from New York, has had an acquaintance with the play since 1958, and here places the event in its historical and present social context, analyzes the most recent production in terms both of its management and its staging, and describes the controversies which continue to surround it, from the practical problems of an uncompromising dramaturgy to the charges of anti-semitism which are still levelled against a play once defended by Hitler himself against the disfavour of his Nazi cohorts.

A Theatre for Urban Renewal

Abstract: Teatro Settimo is a theatre group which was created in the Italian industrial city of Turin in 1979 by a group of theatre-making friends who wished to discover a kind of left-wing theatre that would respond directly to the problems of an urban environment Their story is one of institutionalized success achieved – and then deliberately rejected, as the problems of administering that success, with all its attendant bureaucracy, threatened to stifle the original impulses behind the company Their most recent production, Stabat Mater , was presented at the ‘Divina’ conference held in Turin in June 1990, as described elsewhere in this issue Lizbeth Goodman and Gabriella Giannachi spoke there to members of the group, which has since brought Stabat Mater to the ‘Theatre under Threat’ conference in Cambridge last October

Sexuality and Structure: Tensions in Early Expressionist Drama

Abstract: In the first of two essays, Peter Nicholls explores connections between ideas of an ‘absolute’ or non-representational theatre and the forms of narrative and discursivity which have traditionally invested dramatic forms. In one of the earliest Expressionist plays – Oskar Kokoschka's Murder, Hope of Women – the tension between these ideas is powerfully in evidence. Nicholls shows how Kokoschka's formal experimentalism is grounded in contemporary polemics about gender and sexuality, tracing the ways in which theatrical innovation seeks to evade the Oedipal constraints of plot and narrative. That tension, he believes, informs subsequent Expressionist drama, where an almost obsessive preoccupation with the working-through of family histories is contested by forms of theatrical ‘affect’ which undermine structure from within. Peter Nicholls's second essay will pursue the ‘anti-Oedipal’ implications of Dada and Surrealist theatre. The author teaches English and American literature at the University of Sussex, and his publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing, and articles on postmodernism, contemporary poetry, and French Cubism. His Modernisms: a Literary Guide will be published by Macmillan later this year.

Why This Farce

Abstract: In exploring the repertoire of farce from its nineteenth-century exponents in France and England through the ‘typically British’ pre- and post-war varieties at the Aldwych and the Whitehall, to the work of such contemporary exponents as Alan Ayckboum and Michael Frayn, Vera Gottlieb also analyzes the ways in which ‘mechanistic’ or ‘clockwork’ kinds of farce are philosophically akin to absurdist drama. She suggests that English approaches to Chekhov have overlaid his work with similar assumptions – as in the contention of Michael Frayn, himself both a Chekhov translator and a highly successful farceur, that Chekhov's characters are ‘reduced by their passions to the level of blind and inflexible machines’. In arguing that this is not the case, she elaborates a crucial distinction between farces which, in effect, assume the impotence of human aspirations, and those in which behaviour derives from character rather than from imposed situations, thus offering at least the potential for change. Vera Gottlieb is Professor of Drama at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and the author of Chekhov and the Vaudeville (Cambridge, 1982) and Chekhov in Performance in Russia and Soviet Russia (Chadwyck-Healey, 1984). She was also translator and director of A Chekhov Quartet, first seen at the New End Theatre, London, in 1990, and subsequently at the Chekhov Festival in Yalta and the GITIS Theatre in Moscow.

The Erotic in the Theatre of Peter Zadek

Abstract: In NTQ 4 (1985) we included a fully-illustrated interview with the German director Peter Zadek conducted by Roy Kift. Here, Andreas Hofele explores one of the subjects touched on in that interview, as in most responses to Zadek's work: the utilization of the erotic as a recurring motif. From his introduction to London of the then little-known work of Jean Genet to his most recent productions – of Wedekind's Lulu and of Chekhov's Ivanov – Zadek has, in Hofele”s words, opted for ‘the kaleidoscopic uncertainty of play’ and a ‘deliberate lack of closure’, which are here analyzed in terms of Baudrillard's ‘structure of seduction’ employed both as aesthetic principle and as working method. Andreas Hofele, who has taught in the German Department of Edinburgh University and in the English Department at Wurzburg, has been Professor of Theaterwissenschaft at the University of Munich since 1986. Apart from four novels, and books on Shakespeare's stagecraft and Malcolm Lowry, he has published articles and lectured on contemporary German productions of Shakespeare, on contemporary British drama, and on aspects of theatrical theory.

Answering to the Dead: Edward Bond's ‘Jackets’, 1989–90

Abstract: Sustaining his reputation for production work that is both original and challenging, Edward Bond worked closely with the directors of Jackets during its productions at Lancaster and in Leicester and London in 1989–90. After a mixed experience with the RSC directing his War Plays, Bond continued to develop his concept of ‘theatre events’, and to work towards the particular style of acting that is necessary for his work in performance. Ian Stuart, a doctoral candidate in dramatic art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, analyzes here how the resulting twin concepts of ‘theatre events’ and ‘theatre acting’ translated into practice, exploring both the workin-progress and its realization through setting, lighting, and critical response. Earlier reconstructions and analyses of Bond's plays in production in TQ and NTQ have included features on Lear in TQ5 (1972) and The Fool in TQ21 (1976), both at the Royal Court, and on his own production at the Cottesloe of Summer in NTQ6 (1986).

Echt Brecht? ‘Mother Courage‘at the Citizens,1990

Abstract: The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow has a long and honourable tradition of serving its neighbourhood and its city, and a directorial team which remarkably combines professional distinction with loyalty to their theatre. In view of its reputation for productions of great visual brilliance, it is surprising to be reminded that, of all British repertory theatres, ‘national’ or regional, it has also the strongest continuous tradition of playing Brecht. Margaret Eddershaw, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, outlines the history of this tradition, which stretches back even beyond the present triumviral management, and proceeds to look at the most recent encounter of ‘the Cits’ with Brecht, Philip Prowse's 1990 production of Mother Courage. This was significant not only for the director's attitude to Brechtian theory, theatrical and political, in the aftermath of the previous year's events in Eastern Europe, but for its inclusion of an international ‘star’, Glenda Jackson, within the Cits' usually close-knit ensemble – its consequences also, arguably, of ‘political’ as well as theatrical interest.

Brecht and Weigel at the Berliner Ensemble

Abstract: As this issue goes to press, the GDR has just been united with its western neighbour in circumstances which, just a year previously, would have seemed almost as improbable as when Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel returned after the war to create the Berliner Ensemble. Kathe Rulicke-Weiler joined their dramaturgical team in 1951, and witnessed from the inside the attempt to build Brecht's ideal of a socialist theatre. Here, she talks with Matthias Braun about the personal, social, and political background to the Ensemble – which, although under the artistic direction of Brecht himself, was managed by Weigel, who was thus in the position of preventing herself from becoming a conventional ‘star’ performer. As well as dealing with the nature of Weigel's acting – and of her administrative skills – the interview assesses the contributions of Brecht's other co-workers, his own techniques as a director, and the factors (including touring under difficult post-war conditions) which led to the Ensemble's recognition as a major international company. This interview was first published in 1985 in Theater der Zeit, by whose kind permission it is here translated.

Expressionism, Monumentalism, Politics: Emblematic Acting in Jessner's ‘Wilhelm Tell’ and ‘Richard III’

Abstract: Leopold Jessner's productions of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell (1919) and Shakespeare's Richard III (1920) marked a culminating point in the short-lived, politically volatile era of German theatrical Expressionism. Jessner's distinctive work in this staging style did much to define the features of one mode of performance among several which billed themselves – or were branded as – ‘Expressionist’. In the following article, David Kuhns explores the particularly striking impact of Jessner's ‘emblematic’ approach to Schiller and Shakespeare upon the acting of those productions. By transforming his actors from mimetic agents into monumentalized emblems, Jessner analyzed political consciousness in what amounted to allegorical terms. The result was a politically provocative presentation of political behaviour – particularly the will to power – as an essentially spiritual matter. David Kuhns teaches theatre history, dramatic literature, and critical theory at Washington University in St. Louis.