Showing papers in "New Theatre Quarterly in 2014"

Authenticity and Representation: Council Estate Plays at the Royal Court

Abstract: Council estates, otherwise known as British social housing estates, have been subject to media scrutiny since their inception, and widespread criticism of social housing remains a prominent feature of British Welfare State discourse In recent media coverage, for example of the 2011 riots, these spaces remain central to discussions of class, economics, and crime in the UK This article draws on postcolonial theory to explore contemporary representations of the council estate on the Royal Court stage – with a focus on narratives of ‘authenticity’ Here, two plays, Off the Endz (Agbaje, 2010) and The Westbridge (De-lahay, 2011), are studied to assess how narratives of authenticity work in theatrical representations both to reinforce and to resist popular impressions of council estate spaces Charlotte Bell is a PhD candidate in the Drama Department at Queen Mary University, where she is currently writing her PhD thesis on the urban social housing estate and the contemporary cultural economy Katie Beswick is a Research Associate in Applied Theatre at the University of Leeds, where she has recently completed her PhD on the representation of the council estate in theatrical performance practices

Lessing's Nathan the Wise : from the Enlightenment to the Berliner Ensemble

Abstract: Lessing's Nathan the Wise (1779), exemplary for its enlightenment and humanist ideals, assembles Jews, Christians, and Muslims in dialogue during the medieval crusades in Jerusalem. Their encounters allow them to transcend conflict, to recognize their common humanity, and to resolve their differences through dialectical discourse and group arguments. In this article Eva Urban looks closely at the representation of enlightenment in this play and examines the potential role of plays and theatre practice in developing autonomous citizenship and intercultural understanding. Particular reference is made to the 2013 Berliner Ensemble production of Nathan the Wise in relation to aesthetic debates about modern political drama. Eva Urban is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and an Associate of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2010) and has published a number of articles on political drama and Irish studies.

‘Slap On! Slap Ever!’: Victorian Pantomime, Gender Variance, and Cross-Dressing

Abstract: In this article Jim Davis considers gender representation in Victorian pantomime alongside variance in Victorian life, examining male and female impersonation in pantomime within the context of cross-dressing (often a manifestation of gender variance) in everyday life. While accepting that male heterosexual, gay, and lesbian gazes may have informed the reception of Victorian pantomime, he argues for the existence of a transgendered gaze and a contextual awareness of gender variant behaviour, with a more nuanced view of cross-dressed performance. The principal boy role and its relationship to variant ways of seeing suggests its appeal goes beyond what Jacky Bratton calls the ‘boy’, a notion she applies to the dynamic androgyny of male impersonators in burlesque, music hall, and occasionally melodrama. For the principal ‘boy’ is clearly transmuting back into a girl, at least physically. Equally, while the dame role is usually unambiguously male, Dan Leno's late-Victorian dames seem based on observation of real women. There has been enormous scholarly interest in theatrical cross-dressing, but also a partial tendency to associate it with what Marjorie Garber calls ‘an emerging gay and lesbian identity’. This is appropriate, but should not obscure the relevance of cross-dressed performances to an emerging transgender identity, even if such an identity has partially been hidden from history. Any discussion of cross-dressing in Victorian pantomime should heed the multifaceted functions of cross dressing in its society and the multiplicity of gendered perspectives and gazes that this elicited.

Treading the Boards: the Significance of Walking on the Stage

Abstract: This article examines the significance of walking on the theatre stage, responding to the growing research scholarship of pedestrian performance. It seeks to provide a point of expansion for a field that is still largely concerned with site-specific works where audiences walk during the performance. Beginning with a discussion as to the possible reasons for its omission, the author addresses the prominence of walking and the journey as a rehearsal tool employed by a wealth of practitioners. As further justification for the inclusion of the stage in pedestrian performance research, a series of historical case studies are presented, which span over a century of theatrical history. There is an examination of the audience’s pilgrimage to Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) and the ‘epic flow’ of Erwin Piscator’s treadmill in Good Soldier Schwejk (1927). The significance of walking in Samuel Beckett’s life is also explored through the ‘inward walking’ of Footfalls (1976) and the proscenium staging of Matthew Earnest’s Wanderlust (2010) is made significant through its critique of supermodernity. The article concludes in arguing that an immobile audience can kinaesthetically empathise with the performers, embarking on their own internalised journey within the theatre. Kris Darby is a Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow in Drama at Liverpool Hope whose research interests concern the relationship between walking and performance.

‘gratuitous assistance’? the west end theatre industry, late victorian charity and patterns of theatrical fundraising

Abstract: London's theatre industry and charity culture have been closely connected since the mid-nineteenth century. In this article Catherine Hindson explores the nature of this relationship in the later years of the century. Focusing on a charity bazaar held at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1899 to raise funds for the Charing Cross Hospital, she argues that extra-theatrical occasions staged for charity organizations were firmly located within the stage culture of the day. Rather than peripheral occasions, high-profile, public charity events functioned as significant forces in the reputation and success of the West End theatre industry and its personnel. They held cultural, social, and economic potential for theatrical performers and represent a key factor in the improvement in the moral and social status of the stage in this period. Catherine Hindson is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on popular performance between 1820 and 1930 and is currently completing a monograph on the actress, the West End stage, and charity between 1880 and 1930.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau: Romantic Pierrot

Abstract: Jean-Gaspard Deburau was the nineteenth-century mime artist who created a new model for subsequent performers to either imitate or reject, but hardly to ignore. Silent cinema benefited from the nineteenth-century vogue for the mime in general – and the Pierrot character that he did so much to popularize in particular. The most famous mime of the twentieth century, Marcel Marceau, derived his character ‘Bip’ in part from Deburau's Pierrot. And while two of the most influential French mime artists of the twentieth century, Jean-Louis Barrault and Etienne Decroux, sought a radical departure from his Pierrot tradition, they ironically found themselves in the now legendary French film Les Enfants du paradis acting the parts respectively of Deburau and Deburau's father. In this article Edward Nye explores the reasons for Deburau's success from two perspectives: first, by considering Deburau's reputation for clarity of expression, and the absence of critical or public debate over any obscurity; and second, the context of the Romantic movement which primed spectators to appreciate his style of performance. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Mime, Music, and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: the Ballet d'Action (CUP 2011), Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in A Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000).

Paradoxes of Acting: Bakhtin and Stanislavsky

Abstract: While much has been written about Bakhtin's later writings, most notably Rabelais and his World , little attention has been paid to his early manuscripts written in the mid-1920s. In this article Dick McCaw compares Bakhtin's early philosophical ideas about authorship and Stanislavsky's theory about how an actor creates a character. Bakhtin argues that actors can only be authors when they remain outside the character. He agrees that there is a need for empathy, but that this moment of co-experiencing with the character is followed by a return to oneself. Although this would seem to fly in the face of Stanislavsky's demand for the actor's empathetic identification with their role, McCaw concludes that both writers agreed that there was a necessary doubleness in the consciousness of the actor. This article develops ideas first considered in McCaw's PhD, ‘Bakhtin's Other Theatre’ (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2004) and now being reworked as a book on Bakhtin and the theatre of his time. Dick McCaw is a Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, and has written With an Eye for Movement (2006) and edited the Laban Sourcebook (2011).

The Choreography of Space: Towards a Socio-Aesthetics of Dance

Abstract: With its emphasis on the socially constructed and mobile nature of ‘space’, Henri Lefebvre's theory of spatial production presents rich possibilities for a sociocultural analysis of choreography. In this article Arabella Stanger uses an examination of social space and spatial aesthetics as a basis upon which to develop a socio-aesthetics of dance – an approach in which the societal contexts and the aesthetic forms of choreography are understood to be fundamentally interrelated. Borrowing from Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1974) and Maria Shevtsova's sociology of the theatre and performance, Stanger establishes the theoretical parameters and methodological steps of such an approach, and locates a short illustrative example in the socio-spatial formations of Aurora's Act III variation from Marius Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty (1890). Ultimately extending a bridge between formalist and contextualist strands of dance studies, the article argues for the use of a particular concept of space in understanding choreographic practice as social practice. Arabella Stanger is Lecturer in Dance at the University of Roehampton. Having trained in classical ballet, she completed her MA and PhD studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has published on the work of Merce Cunningham, Michael Clark, and William Forsythe.

Stanislavsky to Grotowski: Actor to Performer/Doer

Abstract: Stanislavsky's ‘life of the human spirit’ is at the heart of his understanding of how the actor could become an organic actor rather than a player of borrowed actions and lines. In this article Maria Shevtsova explores the links between Stanislavsky's aspirations for the actor and Grotowski's ‘holy’ actor, the latter providing the impetus for a theatre of presence rather than one of presentation – one that is concerned with the embodiment of fictional bodies and souls. The notion of actor ‘training’ is re-examined in the light of Stanislavsky's practice concerning the actor's mindful and probing work on himself/herself. Grotowski's work on presence-in-action, the basis first of the performer and then of of the doer, has been a catalyst for the singer-movers of Teatr ZAR and this group's goal of spiritual journeying, shared also by its spectators.

The trial that never was: Russian documentary theatre and the pursuit of justice

Abstract: Twenty-first-century Russian theatre artists have increasingly taken to using material from real-life events to explore the intricacies of injustice in the civic sphere and its connection to the country's past. In a fifteen-year time span documentary forms have come to the forefront of Russia's theatrical avant-garde. In this article Molly Flynn offers a close reading of one of the most politically charged productions to have emerged from Moscow's booming documentary theatre – One Hour Eighteen: the Trial that Wasn't but Should Have Been (2010). The play uses verbatim texts from the prison and medical staff directly involved in the final days before the murder of Russian attorney Sergei Magnitskii in 2009. Setting the piece in a theatrical courtroom, the creators of One Hour Eighteen place their work in the context of Russia's judicial history in the previous century, during which the resemblance of trials to theatre has often been uncomfortably close. Molly Flynn is a doctoral candidate in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis on the history and significance of documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia.

Nurturing the Outstanding Actor: Lessons from Action Research in a Drama School

Abstract: In this article, Ken Rea examines the factors that make for success in an overcrowded acting profession. He asks what actors can do to influence their chances of having a successful career and doing outstanding work, and suggests what drama schools could do to increase the number of their students who achieve this. He examines research on peak performance in other domains, such as sport and music, then formulates a profile of the outstanding actor, based on his own empirical research and more than thirty years' teaching at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Drawing on interviews with world-class professionals, he proposes seven key qualities that most outstanding actors manifest, and he suggests how these can be nurtured in a training context. This article explores ideas now being reworked as a book on success in acting. Ken Rea is senior acting tutor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and author of A Better Direction (1989).

Getting Stanislavsky Wrong

Abstract: In 1923, all of New York was bowled over by the first visit of the Moscow Art Theatre to America. No one in this country had seen such synchronized ensemble playing or a troupe of individual actors of such power and persuasiveness. When the company returned to Russia after a triumphant national tour, actors such as Maria Ouspenskaya stayed behind and, along with Richard Boleslavsky, an earlier dropout, began instructing American actors in that strange doctrine known as the Stanislavsky System. One of Boleslavsky's most attentive students was Lee Strasberg. He and his close friend Harold Clurman were early converts to Stanislavsky as handed down by Boleslavsky.

The Losey–Moscow Connection: Experimental Soviet Theatre and the Living Newspaper

Abstract: Although Joseph Losey is best known as the blacklisted director of films such as the Pinter-scripted The Servant, The Go-Between, and Accident, as well as Mr Klein starring Alain Delon, he also had an important career in leftist theatre prior to making his Hollywood film debut in in the late 1940s. Because of his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on the 1947 Hollywood production of Galileo, it is assumed that Losey learned from him most of his stagecraft – particularly the use of Verfremdungseffekt and self-reflexivity. However, as this article shows, Losey's apprenticeship was rooted not in the Epic Theatre (which was largely a second-hand phenomenon) but in the Soviet theatrical avant garde, observed at first hand during a 1935 Moscow visit studying the techniques of Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Pavlovich Okhlopkov, whose ‘theatre in the round’ stagings and use of complex ramps and projections provided the basis for Losey's subsequent Federal Theatre Project ‘Living Newspaper’ productions – notably Triple-A Plowed Under and Injunction Granted! Under the aegis of co-founder Hallie Flanagan, the Living Newspaper proved to be the model of 1930s political theatre: topical, didactic, fast-paced – and almost immediately obsolete as events superseded the plays' relevance. Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of critical studies on Joseph Losey and Karel Reisz for Manchester University Press's ‘British Film Makers’ series and of Beckett, Deleuze, and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art for Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently working with Felicity Colman on a three-volume Encyclopedia of Film-Philosophy.

Shakespeare in Gyula

Abstract: THE GYULA Shakespeare Festival celebrated its tenth anniversary this year, coinciding with the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth; and this double reason for partying made the festival quite special not only in the eyes of its founder Jozsef Gedeon but also for its spectators. The latter included MTVA (Hungarian National Television), which was back in its third year in a row to shoot productions and hold interviews with actors, direc tors, and several noted guests. The status of the event prompted Gedeon to ask the National Theatre to premiere its Mid sum mer Night’s Dream in Gyula rather than Budapest. Directed by David Doiashvili from Georgia, the work thrilled the outdoor audience in Gyula Castle on the opening night with its scintillating cast. Some of the best actors of the National Theatre scaled the black boxes that made up the set or jumped on them or over them, or hung from them as they ‘became’ the forest and the bank where the ‘wild thyme grows’. Or else they romped on top of them, or, as the production came to an end, they sat beneath the ledges that they formed to suggest a stage within a stage . Quite extra ordi nary lighting that might be described as silver on black created huge and powerful, constructivistlike shapes that accentuated the actors’ stylized physicality. The latter, recalling Meyerhold’s ‘bio mechanics’, gave the production another ‘con struc tivist’ feature. Most impressive of all, from an interpretative point of view, was the bitter-sweet quality of the production, which built up progressively as a tyrannical Oberon (Horvath Lajos Otto, who doubled as Theseus) lorded it over a feisty but nevertheless subordinated Titania (Eszter NagyKalozy, who doubled as Hippolyta). Oberon is less playful than imperious, and, by the time he decides to draw to a close the whole game that he has set up at everybody’s expense, it is too late to reassert his dominion: Titania has truly fallen in love with Bottom, and, as several scenes have shown, Bottom has given her the sexual time of her life. The refrain of a French pop song, blasted at strategic moments through the space – ‘tu es formidable’ and ‘c’est formidable’ – ironically but passionately tell the spectators that this has well and truly been more than a one-night stand. Laughter, of which there is plenty, turns into a hush when Bottom silently falls at Titania’s feet

The Female Bomber's Body in Performance

Abstract: Following the rules of self-sacrifice for a higher cause, the Palestinian female bomber performs the values of the struggle through and on her body in a farewell video statement. She leaves herself behind to create an image of a strong and victorious soldier. The female bomber's performance of the new self introduces her as a role model for younger generations. Her public appearance in hijab challenges notions of the body, physical beauty, and freedom in the secularist world at the same time as it deviates from the norms of a fundamentalist view of women. It is the dual impact on local and international viewers that politicizes the female bomber's public performance and makes it significant. Rana Salimi has received her PhD from the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. She currently lectures at UCSD and at National University on a variety of subjects, including theatre history and language arts.

‘An Explosive Performing Force’: the Actor in Dylan Thomas

Abstract: From his childhood in Swansea until his death in New York in 1953, Dylan Thomas was an instinctive actor. During his teenage years he acted in more than twenty-three stage productions, thirteen of them as a member of Swansea's Little Theatre Company. Although his roles were essentially English and his speaking style somewhat mannered, the latter was strongly influenced by the rhythms of the Welsh language spoken by family members and experienced in the chapels of his childhood. Subsequently, radio broadcasts of his poetry and short stories were very much those of an actor, the emphasis on the voice and, in the stories, on the presentation of many varied characters, of which his play for voices, Under Milk Wood, is the supreme example. But Thomas also carried his love of performance into his everyday life, playing the fool and acting outrageously at parties and in pubs. The comment of one of his contemporaries that ‘Dylan was an actor; he acted practically every moment of every day’ could not be nearer the mark. Gwynne Edwards is Emeritus Professor in the Department of European Languages at Aberystwyth University. He is also a playwright, and two of his adaptations of short stories by Dylan Thomas – ‘The Peaches’ and ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’ – have recently been performed by the Swansea Little Theatre Company as part of the Dylan Thomas centenary celebrations.

Alluring Ambiguity: Gender and Cultural Politics in Modern Japanese Performance

Abstract: In contrast to most studies of cultural nationalism, which tend to focus on literary style, narrative devices, or the static visual arts, in this article Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei analyzes the ways that Japanese actors deploy physical and vocal techniques in portraying gender and ethnic ambiguity Expanding on her recent work on actor-dancer Itō Michio (1893–1961), she uses the concept of J-centrism (Japancentrism) to demonstrate how modern Japanese performing bodies (in both traditional and contemporary genres) imply political meaning – her title being a riff on Susan Sontag's famous essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’ While not suggesting that the artists under consideration promulgate fascism, Sorgenfrei maintains that the Japanese aesthetic preference for gender and ethnic ambiguity fuels the politics of Japanese cultural nationalism, even when the performers or directors adamantly disavow rightist, nationalistic ideologies Through a focus on analysis of selected performances by Bando Tamasaburō and theoretical writings by Suzuki Tadashi, Sorgenfrei suggests that the performance of ambiguity by a single actor implies the ‘universality’ and cultural superiority of the Japanese body Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA, Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is a specialist in Japanese theatre and intercultural performance, and was recently a Research Fellow at the International Research Institute in Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Free University, Berlin, where she researched the work of Japanese dancer Itō Michio She is the author of Unspeakable Acts: the Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii, 2005) and co-author of Theatre Histories: an Introduction (Routledge, third edition 2015)

Karolos Koun in the 1930s and the Birth of Modernist Shakespeare in Greece

Abstract: The author aims in this article is to highlight a significant moment in the history of the reception of Shakespeare in modern Greek theatre. The article outlines the main developments in the perception of Shakespeare's work in Greece from the mid-nineteenth century until the Second World War, and examines Karolos Koun's early experiments in Shakespearean production. Koun's initiatives were diametrically opposed to local theatre traditions, which emphasized psychological or historical realism and pictorial or spectacular illusion. The use of non-realistic stage conventions such as masks and simple, abstract and allusive settings, flamboyant costumes, stylized acting, and the fact that all roles were played by young boys demonstrate the significance of Koun's contribution to a modernist Shakespeare in Greece, culminating in his Romeo and Juliet with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1967. Antonis Glytzouris is Associate Professor in the School of Drama at the Aristotle University Thessaloniki, and is author of Stage Direction in Greece: the Rise and Consolidation of the Stage Director in Modern Greek Theatre (Herakleio: Crete University Press, 2011), among other publications.

This is Not a Chair: Complicite's Master and Margarita

Abstract: In this article Liliane Campos links Complicite's Master and Margarita (2011) to the company's previous productions, from The Street of Crocodiles (1992) to Shun-Kin (2008). She develops a close analysis of The Master and Margarita as it was staged at the Avignon Festival in July 2012, arguing that the company's aesthetic is characterized by a tension between narrative fragmentation and visual connections. While Complicite's shows overflow with postmodernist multiplicity and division, the urge to connect these ‘shards of stories’ is a driving force in Simon McBurney's artistic direction. This dynamic is explored here both on a semantic level, as a consequence of Complicite's physical language, and on a narrative level, through the use of framing and frame-breaking devices. The article highlights the company's recurrent themes and the defining traits of its performance style. Liliane Campos is a Lecturer in English and Theatre studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. She has published various articles on British drama and performance, and two books about the role of science in contemporary writing and devising for the theatre.

The Oppositional Theatre of McGrath and MacLennan in Scotland, 1989–96

Abstract: In this article, Linda Mackenney explores the four epic plays John McGrath wrote between 1989 and 1996 in the aftermath of his forced resignation from 7:84 Scotland in 1988. These were produced in association with David MacLennan of Wildcat Stage Productions and televised by McGrath's Freeway Films for Channel Four in the 1990s. McGrath died of leukaemia in 2002, and MacLennan died earlier this year after a battle with motor neurone disease; but the work they did together in the 1990s forms a significant part of their legacy. Linda Mackenney was introduced to McGrath's work as a student, when she attended the lectures at the University of Cambridge which were later published as his seminal critical work, A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class, and Form. She carried out the research for 7:84 Scotland's Clydebuilt Season in 1982, was the creator of the Scottish Theatre Archive at Glasgow University Library, and is the author of The Activities of Popular Dramatists and Drama Groups in Scotland, 1900–1952 (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). She was a member of the 7:84 Scotland Board of Directors between 1983 and 1988 and is currently completing a study of John McGrath's theatre writings.

Remembering Lenny Bruce

Abstract: On 13 October 2012, Lenny Bruce, had he not accidentally overdosed on narcotics (or committed suicide – the jury is still out on that one), would be eighty-seven years old. It is, of course, a thoroughly incredible notion – like an octogenarian Mozart, a super annuated Janis Joplin, or James Dean signing up for a senior citizen pension. Poètes maudits, doomed rock icons, and self-destructive superstars are supposed to die young. Their myth demands it, and we wouldn't have it any other way. Bruce at forty-one, perched on a toilet bowl with a spike in his right arm and his last typed words (‘conspiracy to interfere with the Fourth Amendment const—’) in the barrel of his still humming electric typewriter, died characteristically. He was always associated with toilet humour and throughout the last decade of his life ex hausted himself trying to demonstrate that the United States Constitution protected the free speech for which one court after another mercilessly prosecuted him. (The Fourth Amendment, incidentally, protects citizens from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures’ and, along with the state's First Amendment violations, was as much responsible for his downfall as the cocaine and morphine.)

Charles Marowitz in London: Twenty-Five Years Hard: Marowitz in the Sixties

Abstract: Charles Marowitz, who died on 2 May this year, arrived in England from his native New York in 1956, on a scholarship earned for service in Korea. He immediately found in Unity Theatre a venue for his first London production, and in the following year opened his own theatre – an attic in the headquarters of the British Drama League known as In-Stage. In 1981, after the closure of his last and longest London base, the Open Space Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, he left, disillusioned with his adopted country, to settle in California, creating companies in Los Angeles and in his new home of Malibu. But during the momentous decade of the sixties it was British theatre that Marowitz helped to reshape – not least in developing London's still flourishing ‘fringe’. In this feature, NTQ co-editor Simon Trussler celebrates not only Marowitz's directing career, on which many obituarists have written, but also – through personal recollections of the man in those early years – the many other ‘hats’ he wore: as theatre critic, editor, playwright, and cultural entrepreneur. Marowitz's long-term professional partner, Thelma Holt, shares her own memories of the twelve years when together they formed and ran the Open Space. Marowitz contributed to the old TQ and to New Theatre Quarterly, but here we include some of the articles he wrote in later life for the online Swans Commentary, to which we are most grateful for permission to reprint. All are from 2012, when Parkinson's disease was tightening its hold, and so are among the very last pieces he wrote.

Ibsen Our Contemporary

Abstract: In this article Richard Hornby argues that Ibsen's plays are badly performed today, or not performed at all, because of directors' refusal to take them with appropriate seriousness. The tendency is to stage the plays' reputation as simplistic social problem plays rather than as the complex, challenging, bizarre dramas that Ibsen actually wrote. In particular, directors avoid the grotesque elements that are the true ‘quintessence of Ibsenism’, and that are often remarkably similar in style to that of avant-garde playwrights today. Richard Hornby is Emeritus Professor of Theatre at the University of California, Riverside. For the past twenty-eight years he has been theatre critic for The Hudson Review, and is author of six books and over two hundred published articles on various aspects of theatre. This essay was delivered as the keynote address at the fourteenth annual Ibsen Festival of the Commonweal Theatre Company, Lanesboro, Minnesota, in April 2011.

Humour and the Representation of Fascism in Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg: Adorno contra Brecht and Hanns Eisler

Abstract: Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler's Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg occupies a key but under-recognized place in debates about humour in anti-fascist art in the late 1950s and early 1960s – debates largely dominated by Theodor W. Adorno's critique of Brecht's satirical plays on the Third Reich. In this article Anna Papaeti examines the artistic strategies and reception history of Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg in the context of such debates. Focusing in particular on Eisler's musical additions for the parodic ‘higher regions’ interludes, as well as on the controversies sparked by the 1959 West German premiere, she analyzes the play's role in stimulating key debates, showing how Brecht's play and Eisler's music attain a more complex and defensible position of resistance to fascism than was allowed in Adorno's critique. Anna Papaeti has a doctorate from King's College London, has worked at the Royal Opera House, London, and as Associate Dramaturg at the Greek National Opera, Athens. Her postdoctoral research includes a DAAD fellowship on Hanns Eisler (Universitat der Kunste, Berlin, 2010) and a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (University of Gottingen, 2011–14) on the use of music by the Greek military junta. She has previously published in such journals as Opera Quarterly, Music and Politics, and The World of Music, and in edited scholarly volumes.

The Iliad in Theatre: Ancient and Modern Modes of Epic Performance

Abstract: In this article Dmitry Trubotchkin focuses on Homer's Iliad as directed by Stathis Livathinos and premiered in Athens on 4 July 2013 as part of the Athens and Epidaurus Summer Festival – as far as is known, the first production of the complete Iliad in world theatre. It was performed by fifteen actors, each of whom played several roles and also acted the role of the ancient rhapsode, or narrator of epics. Livathinos's Iliad restored the original understanding of ‘epic theatre’, which differs from what is usually meant by this term in the light of Brechtian theory and practice with its didactic and distancing emphases. In the Greek performance, the transformation of an actor from one role to another and from acting to narration is constant, and the voice of Homer as a ‘collective author’ can be heard through all these transformations. Livathinos's Iliad may well be a landmark, indicating a new way of presenting epics on the stage. Dmitry Trubotchkin is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Russian University of Theatre Arts (GITIS) and an invited Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the Moscow State University. He heads the Department of Ancient and Medieval Art at the State Institute for Art Studies in Moscow. His publications include ‘All is Well, the Old Man is Still Dancing’: Roman Palliata in Action (2005), Ancient Literature and Dramaturgy (2010), and Rimas Tuminas: the Moscow Productions (forthcoming).

Gay Sweatshop, Alternative Theatre, And Strategies For New Writing

Abstract: Gay Sweatshop spent twenty-two years producing plays as Britain's first openly gay professional theatre company. Their alternative and political work primarily took the form of author-driven new writing, though experiments with performer-driven work intrigued the company from its earliest cabarets to its late phase of queer solo work under Lois Weaver. In this article, Sara Freeman pinpoints Sweatshop's tenth anniversary new play festival in 1985 as the moment when the company committed to new writing as a strategy for gaining greater legitimacy as a theatre group and as a central mode to encourage gay and lesbian voices and representation. She argues that while this had been the default mode of much 1970s political theatre including Sweatshop's, as it played out in the 1980s, a new writing strategy represented a move toward institutional stability as the locus of theatrical radicalism shifted aesthetics. In this analysis, the celebration of company anniversaries and the creation of festival events provided occasions for the company to experience the success or failure of its policies. Freeman is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Puget Sound. She is the co-editor of Public Theatres and Theatre Publics (2012) and International Dramaturgy: Translation and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker (2008). Her recent publications appear in Modern British Playwriting: the 1980s. Readings in Performance and Ecology, and the forthcoming volume The British Theatre Company from Fringe to Mainstream: Volume II 1980–1994.