Academic literature on the topic 'Classic Theatre : the Humanities in drama'

Does it matter that all fifth-century staged performance was masked? Modern discussions of fifth-century drama focus almost exclusively on the words of the text, for that is what survives to us, and there is a sound methodology in this, since in a theatre that held over 15,000 people aural appreciation was central. I wish to isolate the amount of information that was communicated to the audience by masks, and so discover what then can be incorporated into modern studies of ancient staging, and in particular to determine what visual details existed for the ancient audience to help them understand ‘character’. Direct evidence is slight, and this must remain a brief overview. Nevertheless, reasonable deductions from the plays allow for a clear appreciation of what was the essential information conveyed by fifth-century masks.

Unlike the theatre, there is no established tradition of plays being revived (new productions made from existing scripts) on television. The only instance of this mode of production in Britain has been the regular adaptation of classic theatrical plays. The existence of three separate BBC versions of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1962, 1971, 1981) creates a rare opportunity to trace developing styles of direction and performance in studio television drama through three different interpretations of the same scene. Through close analysis of The Cherry Orchard, I outline the aesthetic and technological development of television drama itself over twenty years.

In the late nineteenth century British culture, politics and history were customary topics in Polish newspapers, and Shakespeare's dramas were the most often performed classic texts on the Warsaw theatre stage. However, in this paper focusing on Warsaw seasons 1814/1815–1900/1901 I demonstrate that surprisingly one can hardly talk about any form of cultural transfer between the British and Polish popular theatre and drama in that period. The analysis of the Warsaw repertoire, travel recollections to the United Kingdom and press articles, reveal that even though the Polish nation treated the UK as a point of reference, it consistently rejected the British theatre at large and theatre entertainment in particular, and considered it ‘crude’ and in bad taste. I claim that the geopolitical situation of Poland cannot alone account for this puzzle.

Fred Astaire once remarked of performing in London that he knew when the end of a play's run was approaching when he saw the first black tie in the audience. Perhaps this is an American's ironic representation of the snobbishness of pre-War London (though he was the American who sang the top-hat, white tie and tails into a part of his personal image). Perhaps it is merely an accurate (or nostalgic) picture of the dress code of the audiences of the period. The very appeal to such a dress code, however – in whatever way we choose to read the anecdote – inevitably relies on a whole network of cultural ideas and norms to make its point. It implies tacitly what is easily recoverable from other sources about the theatre of the period: the expected class of the audience; the sense of ‘an evening's entertainment’ – attending the fashionable play of the season, with all the implications of the theatre as a place not merely for seeing but also for being seen; the range of subjects and characters portrayed on the London stage of the period; the role of London as a European capital of a world empire (with a particular self-awareness of itself as a capital); the expected types of narrative, events, and language, that for many modern readers could be evoked with the phrase ‘a Fred Astaire story’. If we want to understand the impact of the plays of Ibsen or Brecht or Osborne or Beckett, it cannot be merely through ‘dramatic techniques’, but must also take into account the social performance that is theatre. Ibsen's commitment to a realist aesthetic is no doubt instrumental to the impact of his plays, but it is because his (socially committed) dramas challenged the proprieties of the social event of theatre that his first reviewers were so hostile.

Recognizing analogies between the assumptions about theatricality found in the classic Sanskrit treatise on acting, the Natyasastra, and those of the Elizabethan theatre, John Russell Brown suggests that the concept of rasa as the determining emotion of a performance is similar to that of the Elizabethan ‘humour’, or prevailing passion, as defined by Ben Jonson. Here he describes his work exploring what happens when actors draw on their own life experiences to imagine and assume the basic rasa of the character they are going to present, based on experiments in London with New Fortune Theatre; in Bremen with actors of the Bremer Shakespeare Company; and in New Delhi with actors of the National School of Drama. Using actors both young and experienced, familiar and unfamiliar with ensemble playing, and well or poorly acquainted with the concepts involved, he suggests that the results merit further exploration of a technique which could empower actors to bring Shakespeare's plays to new kinds of life. John Russell Brown founded the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and for fifteen years was an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre. His New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia was published by Routledge in 1999, and his Shakespeare Dancing: a Theatrical Study of the Plays by Palgrave Macmillan in 2004. He edited and contributed to The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (1995), and for Routledge has been General Editor of the ‘Theatre Production Studies’, ‘Theatre Concepts’, and forthcoming ‘Theatres of the World’ series.