Showing papers in "Theatre Journal in 1979"

Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle

Abstract: Long ago, Sir Edmund Chambers noted that "some endeavour after dramatic appropriateness is visible" in the way in which certain pageants in the Corpus Christi cycles were assigned to the producing crafts.' A comparison of the subject matter of different pageants and the crafts performing them suggests that certain subjects "belonged" to certain crafts. For example, in many cycles, the Noah plays were staged by the shipwrights, the Last Supper by the bakers. In other cases, a connection not apparent to the modem eye may have existed for the medieval craftsman; at York, Beverley, Wakefield, and Chester, for example, the tanners' guilds staged the Creation and Fall of Lucifer. These and other parallels in the assignment of play topic to craft guild in the various cycles include neither all crafts nor all topics. However, they do suggest that the connection between guild and subject was not entirely arbitrary. The basis for these assignments appears to have been the associations which were perceived between the craft guilds and the subject matter.

The Process of Aristotelian Catharsis: A Reidentification

Abstract: Twenty-four centuries after their inception, Aristotle's principles can still serve as the bases for the establishment of generic criteria which assist in both the identification and the production of tragic drama, the formulation of analytical instruments which will help us understand individual tragedies, and the foundation of theoretical propositions which relate to the corpus of serious dramas. However, if Aristotle is to be utilized to our advantage in these tasks, we must not ignore the finer points in his

A Thin Beam of Light: The Purpose of Playing in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"

Abstract: To quote one of its own phrases, Tom Stoppard's first major work is "gathering weight as it goes on."' While we have been variously intrigued and entertained by The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, and Travesties, considered responses to these plays are still being formed. Yet Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is apparently finding a stable place in our shared opinion. Now over ten years old, the play is still very much with us, as its many recent revivals and its persistence on college reading lists attest. The passage of another decade or two may well find it a modern classic.

Ritual, Theatre, and Jean Genet's "The Blacks"

Abstract: Theatre and ritual have often been linked in studies of drama. Nowhere is this more the case, for example, than in the works of Harrison, Murray, and Cornford who sought to trace the origins of Greek drama back to primal ritual.' More recently, as Anthony Graham-White has observed, "ritual" and its cognates have become increasingly common terms in both dramatic criticism and theory.2 This trend can be clearly observed in the case of the theatre of Jean Genet. Indeed, Charles Marowitz, writing in 1966 of his involvement in a production of The Screens, commented: "Ritualistic may be a critic's cliche when writing about Genet but it becomes a directional Rosetta Stone in rehearsal."3 Nearly all critical studies of Genet's theatre include some reference to the ritual elements of his drama. However, no attempt has been made to account for the emergence of "ritual" as a critical term in connection with Genet's work, nor to evaluate its relevance. The purpose of this article is to examine these areas. The discussion has three principal objectives.

Flyting in the Mystery Plays

Abstract: There is nothing modest about the medieval Corpus Christi cycle plays: they dramatize the history of mankind from Creation to Judgment.' Rightly, their composers saw that much of this story would be laughable and so made room for the comic in its many forms, from devilish gusto to religious laughter. Somewhere near the lower end, alongside the pratfalls and highjinks, is a kind of comic dialogue in which opponents abuse one another with insults, obscenities, and epithets. Although they seem to express anger and hostility, these opponents relish the opportunity to invent and flaunt abuse before an audience which responds with laughter to this contest of wits. These comic exchanges are the dramatic equivalents of the flytings which were popular in medieval life and literature and which ultimately derive from the insult contests of ritual and festivity.

Directing the Holocaust Play

Abstract: The imaginative literature of the Holocaust, especially the drama, presents special problems to its interpreters. Among the greatest of these problems is the need to respect the Holocaust experience and the memory of the millions slain while, at the same time, allowing viewers to assimilate the awful and awesome implications of that experience. This is a responsibility not easily assumed because the volatility of the subject and the frustrating inconclusiveness of the lessons of the Holocaust preclude simple understanding or emotional comfort.

Grotowski: His Twentieth Anniversary

Abstract: On the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Lab Theatre, some speculation about the kind of evolution his work has taken seems fitting. Even in his early work, Grotowski stressed the actor almost exclusively. As this emphasis increased there was a corresponding reduction and stripping away of all other theatrical elements. The playwright and scene designer were among the first to be subordinated and eventually eliminated. The text began to emerge from rather than precede rehearsal. The distinction between the roles of person-actor-character began to blur as the company began to develop characterizations prior to the existence of characters, foreshadowing the development of what has been called "autoperformance"-a mixture of autobiography and performance. Text and character became negligible with Grotowski's production of Apocalypsis cum figuris in 1968: the performer had become central to the virtual exclusion of all other theatrical elements. There was no question that for Grotowski theatre at its most essential was performance rather than literature; action rather than language.

From Destruction to Consecration: Covenant in the Chester "Noah" Play

Abstract: Jerome Taylor, in his "Dramatic Structure of the Corpus Christi, or Cycle, Plays," establishes an "interpretive hypothesis" for the Cycle Plays by which he concludes that the Feast of Corpus Christi and the drama of the same name bear "correspondences rooted in a common intention to commemorate the wonders by which the divine King reintegrates the creaturely kingdom disobedient to his law ... [and that] the history of these wonders can be considered as the unifying action of the Middle English cycle plays ... ."1 Taylor urges testing of his interpretive hypothesis in "detailed analyses of the separate plays." V.A. Kolve, in his excellent extended study, undertakes Taylor's charge in a general structural analysis which corroborates many points of the initial hypothesis. Kolve investigates the central principles guiding the selection of events for dramatization in the cycles. The "events chosen [are] those in which God intervenes in human history." Drawing extensively on contemporaneous medieval literature, sermons, and theological tracts, Kolve derives the following as the dual formulative factors for selection: (1) the "figuring" significance of Biblical events; (2) a modification of the "seven ages" concept of time.2 In essence both Kolve and Taylor point toward advents or incarnations of intervention in human history as the "peak experiences" around which the cycles were constructed.

Theodore Komisarjevsky's Production of "The Merchant of Venice"

Abstract: When Theodore Komisarjevsky directed The Merchant of Venice at Stratfordupon-Avon in 1932, few of Shakespeare's plays had had a hoarier stage tradition. After Henry Irving first played Shylock in 1879 as an Old Testament prophet brought to ruin by a pack of Jew-baiting Christians, his "tragic" interpretation became a venerated tradition only slightly varied by subsequent actors. Only three months before Komisarjevsky's production, Ernest Milton's performance at the St. James Theatre in London was reviewed as "the supreme tragedy of complete collapse,"' and even a slight variation in the staging first used by Irving was cause for comment. When Irving's Shylock returned home after dining with Antonio he discovered the door locked and Jessica gone. This extraneous episode was retained by Milton, and the critics did not fail to notice that the door was no longer locked but "left ajar.'"2 Some interpreters, such as Frank Benson and Arthur Bouchier, emphasized Shylock's anger and vengefulness, but their characterizations were still considered tragic, with Shylock's strength and power ending in "utter abjectness and despair.,"

"Happy Times ... If You Can Stand It": Women Entertainers during the Interwar Years in England

Abstract: Although many autobiographies and memoirs have been published describing popular entertainment during the interwar years, most of these accounts emphasize Success. They portray "the profession" as a fortuitous combination of talent, hard work, a bit of luck, and great rewards. A glow of happy memories and untarnished success usually conceals much that a theatre historian would like to know; actual conditions for the average entertainer are much harder to document. This essay, based on oral history, attempts to reconstruct the everyday lives of women performers.' It explains how they survived and thrived during years when cinema, radio, and dance bands undercut all forms of live entertainment, and halls were closing at a discouraging rate throughout the country.2 Part I describes entry into the field, the acts performed, working conditions, average pay, and life back stage. Part II analyzes the specific problems women faced-sexual advances, possible loss of respectability, difficulties in regard to marriage and children, and alternatives after retirement.

The Central Event in David Storey's Plays

Abstract: Like most authors, David Storey writes novels and plays which reflect his dominant experiences (working class background, art school, professional rugby). He has attempted to define a style which suits his material while avoiding the traditional solutions to problems of form provided by preceding generations. In his novels, Storey has striven to treat the gap between inner and outer experience without resorting to either of two popular solutions: "Today there is no kind of cohesive social gesture which illustrates or opens up a wide aspect of society, which in a way disarms the novel itself. So you're left with either the interior element-endless subjective novels-or what we're going for in this country, imitation novels, rather like Angus Wilson. Using an old conception of a novel and trying to animate it with new but in the end basically conventional material."'

Intimations of Immortality: W. B. Yeats's "At the Hawk's Well"

Abstract: It has often been observed that At the Hawk's Well (1917) marks a stylistic turning point in William Butler Yeats's career. But the relationship between the style and the meaning of the play has been largely ignored, perhaps because such influential critics as Richard Ellmann have assumed that the meaning of the play is expressed explicitly in the lines with which the chorus ends the play in the original prose draft: "Accursed the life of man-between passion and emptiness what he longs for never comes. All his days are a preparation for what never comes."' The recurrence of this thought in Yeats's other writing supports such an assumption. Yeats had earlier expressed this same thought in his unpublished Diary (1909) and again in his Autobiography (1914).2 Four years after At the Hawk's Well, it appeared again in the original sketch for "Among School Children": 'Topic for poem. School children, and the thought that life will waste them, perhaps that no possible life can fulfill their own dreams or even their teacher's hope. Bring in the old thought that life prepares for what never happens.'"3

The Staging of Plays at the Salisbury Court Theatre, 1630-1642

Abstract: The Salisbury Court Theatre was the last London playhouse to be built before all theatres were closed by the Puritans in 1642. Although we know that the theatre was converted from a barn standing on a piece of property measuring 140 feet by 42 feet at a cost of ?1200,1 and we can now locate the property with some precision,2 there are no extant illustrations or descriptions of the interior of the Salisbury Court, as there are for its contemporary, the Cockpit-in-Court. As Oscar Brownstein points out, this playhouse may have represented the culmination of all previous private theatre experience, or it may have marked a major change in form or size from the other private theatres. "Though . . . these suggestions are interesting," says Brownstein, "they must remain insubstantial speculations until some better grasp of the physical features of the theatre can be found."3 While Glynne Wickham speculates that the Inigo Jones drawings held at Worcester College (Nos. 7B and 7C) might represent the Salisbury Court,4 there is no substantiation for this claim. In a recent article John Orrell suggests that this drawing represents the Phoenix, or Cockpit, in Drury Lane.5 While no firm conclusions can be drawn, it is far from certain that these drawings represent the Salisbury Court Theatre. The title of Edward A. Langhan's brief article in Theatre Notebook, "A Picture of the Salisbury Court Theatre,"6 seems hopeful but proves misleading, since Langhan speculates that the Lea and Glynne 1706 map of London contains by mistake a picture of a theatre known to have burned down some forty years earlier. In the absence of any acceptable illustrations or detailed descriptions of the interior of the theatre, the plays that were

Moral Re-Armament Drama: Right Wing Theatre in America

Abstract: Between 1940 and 1964, a theatrical enterprise began and thrived in the United States which can best be described as Right Wing Theatre. An organization called Moral Re-Armament (MRA) presented to audiences numbering in the millions dozens of plays, movies, and television programs expounding the MRA philosophy that all social ills could be cured if individuals would listen to the voice of God within themselves. MRA owned two major theatres and toured productions throughout the world, often simultaneously presenting different plays in a number of countries.

Shadow Puppet Theatre in Northeast Thailand

Abstract: Among the theatrical traditions of Asia, shadow puppets are perhaps the best known and the most highly developed. The most lively traditions are found in Java and Bali as well as in northeastern Malaysia and southern Thailand. Shadow puppets were important elsewhere too, especially China, India, Cambodia, but except for India these traditions seem to be nearly extinct now, as is the nung yail tradition in central Thailand. To our knowledge no one has previously taken note of the fact that shadow puppet theatre flourishes in northeastern Thailand, a region whose cultural heritage is Lao rather than Siamese (central Thai). While there is no doubt that shadow theatre in the northeast began under outside stimulus, what is especially interesting is the process of acculturation which has taken place and is still taking place, the Laoization, if you will, of shadow theatre.