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Journal articles on the topic 'Contemporary English theatre'
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1
King, Barnaby. "The African-Caribbean Identity and the English Stage." New Theatre Quarterly 16, no. 2 (May 2000): 131–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00013646.
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In the first of two essays employing academic discourses of cultural exchange to examine the intra-cultural situation in contemporary British society, published in NTQ 61, Barnaby King analyzed the relationship between Asian arts and mainstream arts in Britain on both a professional and a community level. In this second essay he takes a similar approach towards African–Caribbean theatre in Britain, comparing the Black theatre initiatives of the regional theatres with the experiences of theatre workers themselves based in Black communities. He shows how work which relates to a specific ‘other’ culture has to struggle to get funding, while work which brings Black Arts into a mainstream ‘multicultural’ programme has fewer problems. In the process, he specifically qualifies the claim that the West Yorkshire Playhouse provides for Black communities as well as many others, while exploring the alternative, community-based projects of ‘Culturebox’, based in the deprived Chapeltown district of Leeds. Barnaby King is a theatre practitioner based in Leeds, who completed his postgraduate studies at the University of Leeds Workshop Theatre in 1998. He is now working with theatre companies and small-scale venues – currently the Blah Blah Blah company and the Studio Theatre at Leeds Metropolitan University – to develop community participation in
2
Milhous, Judith. "Lighting at the King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1780–82." Theatre Research International 16, no. 3 (1991): 215–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883300014991.
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For late eighteenth-century London theatres, lighting is the facet of production about which we have least information. In his authoritative Lighting in the Theatre, Gösta Bergman describes Garrick's reforms of the 1760s with reference to contemporary French practice and then speculates on what de Loutherbourg's advances in scene design imply about lighting. However, no detailed lighting accounts like those for the Comédie-Française have hitherto been known for any English theatre of this period. This gap can now be partly filled: a ‘Schedule’ attached to the answer in a 1787 Chancery lawsuit gives two seasons' worth of the daily accounts of Joseph Hayling, a tinman and purveyor of lamps, who provided light at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket from about 1768 to 1782. His schedule can be compared with contemporary French and English records to clarify our picture of lighting practices in London in the late eighteenth century.
3
Duchesne, Scott. ""A Golf Club for the Golden Age": English Canadian Theatre Historiography and the Strange Case of Roy Mitchell." Theatre Research in Canada 18, no. 2 (January 1997): 131–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/tric.18.2.131.
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This article contends that through the work of academics committed to recording and discussing the efforts of the alternate theatre movement, the narrative of English Canadian theatre history was subsequently revised. As a result, two suppositions were established which form the implicit basis of much research into contemporary English Canadian theatre history. They are: (1) the significant development of an English Canadian dramatic literature by a movement of professional and postcolonial theatre-makers signaled the theatre's "coming of age", and therefore (2) a specific set of events from 1968 to 1975 constitute the "golden age" of English Canadian theatre history. The narrative as it stands, therefore, clearly and unfairly privileges the achievements of the alternate movement at the expense of numerous other, equally vital historical voices. This article will focus on a particular individual who serves as a prime example of this exclusion; the director and theorist Roy Mitchell (1884-1944).
4
Kim, Yoo. "Crossing Borders: Korean Nationalism and Contemporary Theatre." New Theatre Quarterly 25, no. 4 (November 2009): 363–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x09000657.
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In October 2007 South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun walked across the inter-Korean border for a summit with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. Although adhering to the primordialist view of nationhood, this state-led border-crossing also indicates the effects of globalization. As the heavily militarized inter-Korean border is permeated by interaction between ethnic nationalism, the nation's anti-colonialist history, and the transnational forces, the image of border-crossing becomes a metaphor for a contested space of national unification. This article examines a selection of works by three contemporary South Korean playwrights who, from a post-nationalist perspective, have emerged to contest the contradictory aspects and trajectories of the past ten years of populist nationalism. Yoo Kim focuses on the ways these post-nationalist plays employ the motifs of border-crossing and borderland encounter to challenge the romantic and exclusionary narratives of the conventional nationalist theatre. Yoo Kim is an Associate Professor in English at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea. His recent article, ‘Mapping Utopia in the Post-Ideological Era: Lee Yun-taek's The Dummy Bride’, was published in Theatre Research International in 2007.
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Urban, Eva. "Multilingual Theatre in Brittany: Celtic Enlightenment and Cosmopolitanism." New Theatre Quarterly 34, no. 3 (July 13, 2018): 283–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x1800026x.
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In this article Eva Urban describes a historical tradition of Breton enlightenment theatre, and examines in detail two multilingual contemporary plays staged in Brittany: Merc’h an Eog / Merch yr Eog / La Fille du Saumon (2016), an international interceltic co-production by the Breton Teatr Piba and the Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh-language national theatre of Wales); and the Teatr Piba production Tiez Brav A Oa Ganeomp / On avait de jolies maisons (2017). She examines recurring themes about knowledge, enlightenment journeys, and refugees in Brittany in these plays and performances, and presents the argument that they stage cosmopolitan and intercultural philosophical ideas. Eva Urban is Senior Research Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen's University Belfast. She has held a Région de Bretagne Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Centre for Breton and Celtic Studies, University of Rennes 2, a research lectureship in the English Department, University of Rennes 2, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011) and has published articles in New Theatre Quarterly, Etudes Irlandaises, Caleidoscopio, and chapters in book collections.
6
Lal, Ananda. "Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India. By Nandi Bhatia. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004; pp. vi + 206 pp. $49.50 cloth." Theatre Survey 46, no. 2 (October 25, 2005): 311–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557405210207.
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There are few dependable books in English on political theatre in India. Professor Bhatia's collection of essays, therefore, fills a long-felt need. She introduces the subject contextually, followed by four chapters chronologically examining key areas (British censorship of nationalistic drama, Indianizations of Shakespeare as an anticolonial statement, the Indian People's Theatre Association as a mass phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century, and Utpal Dutt's reinterpretation of Raj history in his play The Great Rebellion 1857), and concludes with a short epilogue on contemporary activist theatre by women. Most valuably for theatre historians, she places in the public domain many primary sources previously untapped in English, and unearths much secondary material that has escaped academic attention. Not least of all, she writes articulately and readably.
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Diamond, Catherine. "Parallel Streams: Two Currents of Difference in Kuala Lumpur's Contemporary Theatre." TDR/The Drama Review 46, no. 2 (June 2002): 7–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/105420402320980497.
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The politically and artistically engaged theatres of Malaysia probe contradictory aspects of this predominantly Islamic Asian nation. While some works in Malay contribute toward constructing a national culture, other works, often in English, deconstruct the monocultural motif of official culture.
8
Westgate, J. Chris. "David Hare's Stuff Happens in Seattle: Taking a Sober Account." New Theatre Quarterly 25, no. 4 (November 2009): 402–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x09000682.
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As The Power of Yes, the third play by David Hare to document recent history, opens at London's National Theatre, J. Chris Westgate examines in this article Hare's Stuff Happens in a regional production in the United States, at Seattle's A Contemporary Theater in 2007. He tracks the emphasis placed on controversy during the advertising and marketing of the play, which stands in direct contrast to the response to the play, which was received with self-satisfaction rather than increased insight in this highly liberal city. From this contrast, he discusses the way that this production of Hare's play – and the play itself – fails to produce controversy because it never holds those actually attending US productions as accountable for the Iraq War. Controversy, then, becomes a marketing device rather than a way of challenging the status quo. J. Chris Westgate is Assistant Professor in English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton. He has recently edited an anthology of essays entitled Brecht, Broadway, and United States Theatre and has published articles in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, and The Eugene O'Neill Review.
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RAE, PAUL. "Editorial: Joining the Conversation." Theatre Research International 41, no. 3 (October 2016): 197–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883316000389.
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In my previous editorial, I made reference to what Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry call ‘literacy brokering’ amongst non-native speakers of English who seek to publish in anglophone academic journals. The term ‘literacy’ makes sense in the context, and, as I noted, the practice is hardly exclusive to those whose first language is not English. However, as Aoife Monks of Contemporary Theatre Review and I planned a New Scholars session on academic publishing for this year's annual conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR, with which this journal is affiliated), a supplementary way of thinking about academic knowledge production came to mind: as conversation. And it is a conversational mode that wends its way through the articles presented in this issue of Theatre Research International.
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Wiszniowska, Marta. "Historical bridge or cultural divide—English drama and theatre against contemporary Polish background." History of European Ideas 20, no. 1-3 (January 1995): 53–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0191-6599(95)92924-j.
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Li, Yuan, and Tim Beaumont. "Dramatizing Chinese Intellectuals of the Republican Era in Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek: Encoding Nostalgia in a Comedy of Ideas." New Theatre Quarterly 37, no. 3 (July 19, 2021): 281–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x2100018x.
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Face for Mr. Chiang Kai-shek, one of the most influential Chinese plays to have garnered attention in recent years, serves as a reminder of the importance of campus theatre in the formation and development of modern Chinese spoken drama from the early twentieth century onwards. As an old-fashioned high comedy that features witty dialogues and conveys philosophical and political ideas, it stands in opposition to such other forms of theatre in China today as the extravagant, propagandistic ‘main melody’ plays, as well as the experimental theatre of images. This article argues that the play’s focus on Chinese intellectuals of the Republican era and their ideas encodes nostalgia both in its dramatic content and theatrical form: the former encodes nostalgia for the Republican era through a nuanced representation of Chinese intellectuals of that period, while the latter encodes nostalgia for orthodox spoken drama (huaju) in the form of a comedy of ideas. Yuan Li (first author) is Professor of English in the Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. She has published extensively on contemporary Chinese and Anglo-Irish drama, theatre, and cinema. Tim Beaumont (corresponding author) is Assistant Professor at the School of Foreign Languages at Shenzhen University. His research is primarily philosophical, and it is currently focused on the relationship between nineteenth-century liberal nationalism and contemporary multiculturalism.
12
Rosenberg, James L. "NTQ Checklist No. 2: Ödön von Horvath." New Theatre Quarterly 2, no. 8 (November 1986): 376–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00002414.
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Despite the successful production of Ödön 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 of his novels, plus a selective guide to available critical writing in English and German.
13
Carlson, Susan. "Leaking Bodies and Fractured Texts: Representing the Female Body at the Omaha Magic Theatre." New Theatre Quarterly 12, no. 45 (February 1996): 21–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00009593.
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The contemporary staging of Women's bodies raises both practical and theoretical issues, and in both text-based theatre and performance art women theatre artists are currently engaging these challenges in inventive ways. Drawing upon the inland expanses and ontological freedoms of the American Midwest, the women at the Omaha Magic Theatre have recently premiered two collaboratively written plays, Body Leaks and Sound Fields, which use image, action, technology, and text to engage issues of gender, identity, sexuality, and the material body. In these issues, the spectator is prohibited from making direct relations between body and self, and must instead come to terms with a web of relationships which include the self, the physical body, the community, and the environment. Susan Carlson, a professor of English at lowa State University, has written two books on theatrical comedy, most recently Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (1991). She is currently working on the contemporary performance of Aphra Behn's plays, and is writing a book on the connections between productions of Shakespeare at the turn of the twentieth century and early suffrage theatre.
14
Fo, Dario. "Hands off the Mask!" New Theatre Quarterly 5, no. 19 (August 1989): 207–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00003274.
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Dario Fo needs no introduction, though he is less well known for his work as a critical theorist of theatre than in his role as a playwright. The original Theatre Quarterly was the first journal to publish his critical writing in English, and two of his more recent essays-‘Theatre of Situation’ and ‘Retrieving the Past. Exposing the Present’ - appeared in one of the earliest issues of New Theatre Quarterly. NTQ2 (1985). Here, we are pleased to publish Fo's brief but stimulating study of the conventions and the ‘language’ of theatrical masks, in which he outlines typologies stretching from Ancient Greece to commedia and beyond, and suggests some of the distinctive requirements for the contemporary actor of performing in mask. The translation is by Gail Macdonald.
15
Drennan, Barbara. "Theatre History-Telling: New Historiography, Logic and the Other Canadian Tradition." Theatre Research in Canada 13, no. 1 (January 1992): 46–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/tric.13.1.46.
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A proliferation of sign-posts' dot the landscape of our contemporary discourse: 'postmodernism,' 'poststructuralism,' 'postcolonialism,' 'postindustrial'.... As we wearily anticipate yet another 'post' on the horizon, it becomes clear that what theatre researchers are experiencing is a significant epistemological shift which reflects a changing reality. Any change in the philosophy of knowledge will have a bearing on Theatre Historiography in Canada as elsewhere. This essay addresses this issue and outlines an 'other' theatre historiography which weaves the theories of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan into Michel Foucault's search for the 'rules of discourse' and Julia Kristeva's 'poetic-logic.' This exploration for historical discovery into English-Canadian theatrical discourse is mapped in relation to Alan Filewod's articulation of collective creation as a theatre-making process.
16
Pearson, Tony. "Meyerhold and Evreinov: ‘Originals’ at Each Other's Expense." New Theatre Quarterly 8, no. 32 (November 1992): 321–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00007107.
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Our occasional series of original theatre documents continues with this translation, the first in English, of an article written in 1915 by the Russian director Nikolai Evreinov attacking his contemporary and erstwhile colleague Vsevolod Meyerhold for artistic plagiarism – an attack which, of course, reveals as much about the susceptibilities and private jealousies of its perpetrator as it does about its object. Tony Pearson, who currently teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies in the University of Glasgow, accompanies his translation with a full introduction and commentary, setting the polemics within the context of the Russian and early Soviet theatre, and the subsequent, separate careers of the two personalities involved.
17
Seet, K. K. "Discourse from the Margin: A Triptych of Negotiations in Contemporary Singapore English-Language Theatre." World Literature Today 74, no. 2 (2000): 305. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/40155576.
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Nicholls, Peter. "Anti-Oedipus? Dada and Surrealist Theatre, 1916–35." New Theatre Quarterly 7, no. 28 (November 1991): 331–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00006035.
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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.
19
Bolton, Gavin. "Weaving Theories is not Enough." New Theatre Quarterly 2, no. 8 (November 1986): 369–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00002396.
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Despite the successful production of Ödön 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
20
Keeney, Patricia, and Don Rubin. "Canada's Stratford Festival: Adventures Onstage and Off." New Theatre Quarterly 25, no. 2 (May 2009): 187–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x09000281.
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The festival season in Stratford, Ontario, was fraught with an offstage drama which seemed to reprise that of thirty years ago, when an experiment with a triumviral directorate ended in dissension and near disaster. However, once the dust had settled, an interestingly balanced season emerged, mixing Shakespeare and Shaw, ancient Greek and modern tragedy, Beckett and balletic Moby Dick. Here Patricia Keeney and Don Rubin offer their assessment of a wide-ranging repertoire. Patricia Keeney is a poet, novelist and long-time theatre critic for the monthly journal Canadian Forum. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Toronto's York University. Don Rubin is the founding editor of the quarterly Canadian Theatre Review, General Editor of Routledge's six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, and Director of the Graduate Program in Theatre Studies at Toronto's York University.
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Höfele, Andreas. "The Erotic in the Theatre of Peter Zadek." New Theatre Quarterly 7, no. 27 (August 1991): 229–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x0000573x.
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In NTQ 4 (1985) we included a fully-illustrated interview with the German director Peter Zadek conducted by Roy Kift. Here, Andreas Höfele 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 Höfele”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 Höfele, who has taught in the German Department of Edinburgh University and in the English Department at Würzburg, 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.
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Mahfouz, Safi Mahmoud. "Tragedy in the Arab Theatre: the Neglected Genre." New Theatre Quarterly 27, no. 4 (November 2011): 368–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x11000686.
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In this article Safi Mahmoud Mahfouz investigates the current state of tragedy in the Arab theatre and suggests some of the reasons behind the lack of an authentic Arabic tragedy developed from the Aristotelian tradition. Through analyses of the few translations and adaptations into Arabic of Shakespearean and classical tragedy, he both confirms and questions the claims of non-Arabic scholars that ‘the Arab mind is incapable of producing tragedy’. While the wider theatre community has been introduced to a handful of the Arab world's most prominent dramatists in translation, many are still largely unknown and none has a claim to be a tragedian. Academic studies of Arabic tragedy are insubstantial, while tragedy, in the classical sense, plays a very minor role in Arab drama, the tendency of Arab dramatists being towards comedy or melodrama. Safi Mahmoud Mahfouz is Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at UNRWA University, Amman, Jordan. His research interests include American Literature, Arabic and Middle Eastern literatures, modern and contemporary drama, contemporary poetics, comparative literature, and synchronous and asynchronous instructional technology.
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Carlson, Susan. "Issues of Identity, Nationality, and Performance: the Reception of Two Plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker." New Theatre Quarterly 9, no. 35 (August 1993): 267–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00007995.
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This paper explores some of the many factors which affect the way in which the critical response to a production is made manifest. Using the reception of Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale and Our Country's Good as case studies, Susan Carlson contrasts the enthusiastic response to the first production of the latter play at the Royal Court, where its supposed celebration of the redemptive effects of theatricality were widely acclaimed, with the subjection of the former to the ‘atavistic guilts of male theatre reviewers’. Examining the reception of later productions – and even the West End transfer – of Our Country's Good, she proceeds to show how different theatres, companies, and senses of cultural, sexual, and national identity shaped ever-changing attitudes towards what was presumed to be the same play. Susan Carlson, whose article ‘Comic Collisions: Convention, Rage, and Order’ appeared in NTQ12 (November 1987), is Professor of English at lowa State University, and the author of Women of Grace: James's Plays and the Comedy of Manners (1985) and Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (1991). She is now working on issues of performance and collaboration in contemporary theatre, and writing about the work of the Omaha Magic Theatre and the playwriting of Karim Alrawi.
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Sobieski, Lynn. "A Voice of the Second Generation: Antje Lenkeit Directs Fassbinder's ‘Katzelmacher’ in Munich." New Theatre Quarterly 6, no. 21 (February 1990): 70–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00003997.
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The heavily-subsidized state theatre system of West Germany is often regarded as a model for emulation by the funding agencies of the English-speaking theatre. Yet the situation of such theatres can give rise to its own problems: and in this case-study of the rehearsals of Fassbinder's Katzelmacher at the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel, Munich, in 1985. Lynn Sobieski (who was assistant dramaturg on the production) analyzes the resulting personal and artistic conflicts, in the context of a system which encourages a degree of complacency in the bureaucracy, and arguably permits some self-indulgence to the directors – while discouraging those of the first ‘post-war generation’ from giving real opportunities to their successors. Lynn Sobieski is presently teaching in the Department of Drama of the University of Texas at Austin, having recently been awarded her doctorate from New York University for her dissertation on ‘The Crisis in West German Dramaturgy’. Her collection, Postmodernism and Contemporary Performance, will be published later this year, and she is currently working on a study of performance art groups in Britain.
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van Erven, Eugène. "Beyond the Shadows of Wayang: Liberation Theatre in Indonesia." New Theatre Quarterly 5, no. 17 (February 1989): 36–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00015323.
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Outside its ‘classic’ forms, little is known in the West about the theatre of Indonesia. The colonial ‘heritage’ proved largely sterile, and the more fruitful recent developments of the past few decades have been dominated by attempts to integrate the indigenous tradition with contemporary problems and needs. Eugène van Erven has spent several years exploring new theatrical movements and activities in the Pacific region, and earlier results of his studies appeared in NTQ 10 (1987), on the People's Theatre Network of the Philippines. Here, he introduces the work of the two leading theatre-of-liberation companies in Indonesia, Teater Arena and Teater Dinasti, and analyzes their contrasting approaches to the integration of ‘theatre-of-liberation’ techniques with distinctively Indonesian social, religious, and theatrical traditions. Eugène van Erven also contributed a study of recent political theatre in Spain to NTQ 13 (1988), and has recently taken up a post lecturing in English at the University of Utrecht.
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Urban, Eva. "Reification and Modern Drama: an Analysis, a Critique, and a Manifesto." New Theatre Quarterly 32, no. 3 (June 30, 2016): 256–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x16000233.
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Drawing on a close reading of Theodor Adorno's essay, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, in this article Eva Urban develops the argument that an analysis of the reification that reduces human relationships to mere business interactions has been a central concern of modern drama. The article offers an analysis of some of the ways in which this theme continues to be represented, interrogated, and challenged internationally in contemporary political plays and theatre performances across a range of genres and grounded in a variety of dramaturgical principles. It asks how drama, theatre-making, theatre-spectating, and theatre-participating can create dynamics necessary to enable a move from reified consciousness towards the development of critical autonomy and solidarity. A negotiation of the principles of critical consciousness and solidarity is problematic within economic structures that cause social, ethnic, and religious atomization and divisions. Her argument concludes with an outline for a manifesto for political drama and theatre practice to work against reification. Eva Urban is a lecturer and researcher in the English Department and an Associate of the Irish Studies Research Centre, CEI/CRBC, at the University of Rennes 2, France. She recently completed a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. The author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011), she has also published articles in New Theatre Quarterly, Etudes Irlandaises, Caleidoscopio, and edited book collections.
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Karnad, Girish. "Performance, Meaning, and the Materials of Modern Indian Theatre." New Theatre Quarterly 11, no. 44 (November 1995): 355–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00009337.
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Girish Karnad is not only India's leading playwright, and a practitioner across the performing arts in all that nation's media, but the first contemporary Indian writer to have achieved a major production in a regional American theatre – Naga-Mandala, seen at the Guthrie Theatre in July 1993. The following interview was recorded on the occasion of that production, and ranges widely not only over Karnad's own work and its circumstances, but the situation and problems of the Indian theatre today, and its ambivalent relationship alike to its classical and its colonial past, and to the contemporary problems of its society. The interviewer, Aparna Dharwadker, is Assistant Professor of Drama and Eighteenth-Century British Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her essays and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Modern Drama, and The Sourcebook of Post-Colonial English Literatures and Cultural Theory (Greenwood, 1995). She has also published collaborative translations of modern Hindi poetry in major anthologies, including The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994), and is currently completing a book-length study of the politics of comic and historical forms in late seventeenth-century drama.
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Norwood, Janice. "Picturing Nineteenth-Century Female Theatre Managers: the Iconology of Eliza Vestris and Sara Lane." New Theatre Quarterly 33, no. 1 (January 10, 2017): 3–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x16000592.
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Lucia Elizabeth Vestris (1797–1856) and Sara Lane (1822–99) were two pioneering women in nineteenth-century theatre history. Both were accomplished singers who made their names initially in comic and breeches roles and, during periods when theatrical management was almost exclusively confined to men, both ran successful theatre companies in London. Despite these parallels in their professional activities, there are substantial disparities in the scrutiny to which their personal lives were subjected and in how their contemporaries and posterity have memorialized them. In this article, Janice Norwood examines a range of portraits and cartoons of the two women, revealing how the images created and reflected the women's public identities, as well as recording changes in aesthetic practice and social attitudes. She argues that the women's iconology was fundamentally shaped by the contemporary discourse of gender difference. Janice Norwood is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Drama, and Theatre Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. She has published on various aspects of nineteenth-century theatre history and edited a volume on Vestris for the Lives of Shakespearian Actors series (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011).
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Guarracino, Serena. "«Come muovermi nel mio corpo da uomo»: il corpo maschile travestito nel teatro inglese, dai ragazzi attori a Caryl Churchill." Storia delle Donne 16 (July 7, 2021): 37–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/sd-11461.
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Among the many traditions of cross-dressing in performing practices, English Renaissance theatre plays a central symbolic role, especially considering the Shakespearean canon; however, only through the disruptive reading of gender and queer studies Shakespeare’s theatre has been studied as a transvestite theatre in which all female parts were played by boy actors. This article intends to show how this transvestite body opens a diachronic perspective on those theatrical practices of the second half of the twentieth century that rediscover the Elizabethan stage as a locus of artifice. Renaissance and twentieth-century theatre thus share the transvestite male body, not following a linear dynamic of model and imitation, but in a much more complex interweaving of echoes and returns. Through an analysis of two works by the playwright Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine (1979) and A Mouthful of Birds (1986), the essay explores the transvestite male body as a place of dialogue between the Shakespearean and the contemporary scene, which share effeminacy -here understood as the staging of femininity on a male body- as a detonator for a wider crisis of binary categories.
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Melrose, Susan. "Theatre, Linguistics, and Two Productions of ‘No Man's Land’." New Theatre Quarterly 1, no. 2 (May 1985): 213–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00001585.
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Pursuing the theme of the preceding article, on possible approaches to the teaching of theatre analysis. Susan Melrose here suggests that contemporary linguistics offers a methodology which may help us to look at dramatic texts in such a way as to discover a semantics which transcends the merely verbal. The author proceeds to test her suggested method in a comparative examination of two actual productions – a French and an English version of Pinter's No Man's Land – and looks in detail at the opening scene of Julius Caesar. She concludes that in both cases what the actor often senses intuitively may also be analyzed ‘in process’ in terms of the language and rhetoric of the text. Susan Melrose is presently a Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Tunis. She presented an earlier version of this paper to the Conference on Theatre Analysis held in May 1984 at the University of Warwick, after completing her doctorate at the Sorbonne Nouvelle.
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Megson, Chris. "“Can I Tell You about It?”: England, Austerity and “Radical Optimism” in the Theatre of Anders Lustgarten." Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 6, no. 1 (April 27, 2018): 40–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2018-0010.
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AbstractOver the past decade, the plays of Anders Lustgarten have taken a prominent place in the English theatre repertoire. Performed by companies including Red Ladder, Cardboard Citizens, and the Royal Shakespeare Company, Lustgarten’s dramatic writing places social and political issues centrestage, ranging from the housing crisis and the electoral ascendancy of far-right parties to the alienation of the urban working class and the racist scapegoating of immigrants. This article focuses on Lustgarten’s landmark play inspired by the Occupy movement, If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep (Royal Court Theatre, 2013). I explore how the play engages with, and reflects on, economic austerity, forms of contemporary mass protest, and, indirectly, evolving conceptions of English nationhood. I also examine Lustgarten’s notion of “Radical Optimism” – a term he identifies with the global anti-austerity protests following the 2007-8 financial crisis – and consider its importance to what he calls “anti-prop” political theatre. The first part of the article probes the relationship between If You Don’t Let Us Dream and the established “tradition” of state-of-the-nation playwriting; the second part identifies the play’s challenge to this “tradition,” which is informed by its proximity to the Occupy protests.
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Nicholls, Peter. "Sexuality and Structure: Tensions in Early Expressionist Drama." New Theatre Quarterly 7, no. 26 (May 1991): 160–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00005431.
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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.
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Aston, Elaine. "Swimming in Histories of Gender Oppression: Grupo XIX de Teatro's Hysteria." New Theatre Quarterly 26, no. 1 (February 2010): 38–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x10000047.
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Hysteria, first performed in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2001, was assembled from oral histories, medical cases, records, and remnants documenting the lives of Brazilian women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were incarcerated in Rio de Janeiro's Pedro II Institute. Its UK premiere in 2008, performed by the all-female cast of the Brazilian Grupo XIX de Teatro, included a setting of the show in the old Victoria Baths in Manchester. In this article Elaine Aston identifies ways in which Hysteria keeps open or re-opens the question of feminist liberation. Exploring the show's critique of Western feminism's claims to independence and liberation, her analysis moves towards a mode of interdependent feminist thinking through which liberation might be realized. Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University and editor of Theatre Research International. Her most recent publications include Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003); Feminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory (edited with Geraldine Harris, 2006); Staging International Feminisms (edited with Sue-Ellen Case, 2007); and Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary (Women) Practitioners (with Geraldine Harris, 2008).
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He, Chengzhou. "‘The Most Traditional and the Most Pioneering’: New Concept Kun Opera." New Theatre Quarterly 36, no. 3 (August 2020): 223–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x20000469.
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Featuring hybridity, transgression, and improvisation, New Concept Kun Opera refers to experimental performances by Ke Jun and other Kun Opera performers since the beginning of the twenty-first century. From telling the ancient stories to expressing the modern self, this new form marks the awakening of the performer’s subjectivity and develops a contemporary outlook by rebuilding close connections between Kun Opera and modern life. A synthetic use of intermedial resources contributes to its appeal to today’s audiences. Its experimentation succeeds in maintaining the most traditional while exploring the most pioneering, thus providing Kun Opera with the potential for renewal, as well as an alternative future for Chinese opera in general. Chengzhou He is a Yangtze River Distinguished Professor of English and Drama at the School of Foreign Studies and the School of Arts at Nanjing University. He has published widely on Western drama, intercultural theatre, and critical theory in both Chinese and English. Currently, he is the principal investigator for a national key-research project, ‘Theories in European and American Theatre and Performance Studies’.
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Barnett, David. "When is a Play not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic Theatre Texts." New Theatre Quarterly 24, no. 1 (January 30, 2008): 14–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x0800002x.
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In this article David Barnett investigates the ways in which plays can be considered ‘postdramatic’. Opening with an exploration of this new paradigm, he then seeks to examine two plays, Attempts on her Life by Martin Crimp and 4:48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, in a bid to understand how their texts frustrate representation and the structuring of time, and concludes by considering how the restrictions imposed upon the postdramatic performance differ from the interpretive freedom of text in representational, dramatic theatre. David Barnett is senior lecturer and Head of Drama at the University of Sussex. He has published monographs on Heiner Müller (1998) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (2005), the latter as Research Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation, Germany. He has also published articles on contemporary German, English-language, political, and postdramatic theatre.
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Güvenç, Sıla Şenlen. "‘Yae, Nae, or Dinnae Ken’: Dramatic Responses to the Scottish Referendum and Theatre Uncut." New Theatre Quarterly 33, no. 4 (October 11, 2017): 371–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x17000501.
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In this paper Sıla Şenlen Güvenç surveys the key plays staged in the run-up to the Scottish Independence Referendum of September 2014, with special emphasis on the six Theatre Uncut plays – Rob Drummond's Party Pieces, A. J. Taudevin's The 12.57, and Lewis Hetherington's The White Lightning and the Black Stag (composed in 2013), and Davey Anderson's twin plays, Fear and Self-Loathing in West Lothian and Don't Know, Don't Care, and Kieran Hurley's Close from 2014. Written prior to the referendum and performed together for the first time at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2014, these plays became even more meaningful with developing events in the United Kingdom, especially Brexit and the potential for a second independence referendum in Scotland. The plays reflect many of the issues discussed in both the ‘Yes Scotland’ and ‘Better Together’ campaigns. Sıla Şenlen Güvenç is currently Associate Professor at Ankara University's Department of English Language and Literature. Besides articles and theatre reviews on English drama, she is the author of ‘Words as Swords’: Verbal Violence as a Construction of Authority in Renaissance and Contemporary English Drama (2009) and ‘The World is a Stage, but the Play is Badly Cast’: British Political Satire in the Neo-classical Period (in Turkish, 2014).
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McIntyre, John Alexander. "New Education beyond the school: Rosemarie Benjamin’s Theatre for Children, 1937-1957." History of Education Review 47, no. 2 (October 1, 2018): 217–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/her-11-2017-0021.
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the work of Rosemary Benjamin’s Theatre for Children in Sydney as a compelling narrative of the New Education in Australia in the late 1930s, an historical moment when theatre for children emerged as a cultural experiment rich in educational ideas. Design/methodology/approach Contemporary sources and archival records are explored through several interpretive frames to develop a historical account of Benjamin’s Theatre for Children from 1937 to 1957. Findings Benjamin’s concept of children’s theatre was shaped by English progressive education as much as the Soviet model she extolled. She pursued her project in Sydney from 1937 because she found there a convivial European emigré community who encouraged her enterprise. They understood her Freudian ideas, which commended the use of the symbolic resources of myth and fairy tales to help children deal with difficult unconscious material. Benjamin also analysed audience reactions applying child study principles, evidence of the influence of Susan Isaacs and the New Education Fellowship. More successful as a Publicist than a Producer, Benjamin was able to mobilise support for her educational cause among performers, parents, cultural figures and educational authorities. Her contribution was to pave the way for those who would succeed with different models of theatre for children. Originality/value This is the first study to employ archival sources to document the history of the Theatre for Children, Sydney and address its neglect as a theatre project combining educational and theatrical values.
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KENNEDY, DENNIS. "Shakespeare: histories and nations." European Review 13, no. 3 (July 2005): 319–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1062798705000475.
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Shakespeare's history plays have been taken as a grand epic of the English nation, especially in the period after World War II when they were performed in marathon cycles in the English theatre. As a group, these works investigate and question the meaning of authority, kingship, and nation in an unparalleled way. Shakespeare is the world's most popular playwright, his work staged and filmed in a huge variety of locations around the globe, yet the history plays have traditionally not spoken as directly to other nations as do the comedies and tragedies. Using the analogy oftrans-national sport, this essay looks at the changing position of the history plays in contemporary Europe and in the larger world.
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McEvoy, William. "Finding the Balance: Writing and Performing Ethics in Théâtre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail (2003)." New Theatre Quarterly 22, no. 3 (July 11, 2006): 211–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x0600042x.
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Théâtre du Soleil’s latest production, Le Dernier Caravansérail (The Last Caravanserai), staged the stories and experiences of immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers from around the world. In this article, William McEvoy argues that the company was motivated both by a political agenda to make migrants more visible and a concern to investigate the ethical implications of its own creative processes. This led to a potential conflict between representing migrants directly on stage and a performance that reflected the company’s worries about turning migrants’ traumatic narratives into theatre and spectacle. Focusing on the concept of balance in the production, the article shows how Théâtre du Soleil presented the ethical negotiations between creative self and represented other through exploring the links between text and performance, writing and the body, and manipulation and resistance. William McEvoy is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Sussex, specializing in contemporary theatre and performance. He has published work on Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, and his current research deals with the shifting role of the text in experimental and physical theatre.
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Kelly, Veronica. "Beauty and the Market: Actress Postcards and their Senders in Early Twentieth-Century Australia." New Theatre Quarterly 20, no. 2 (April 21, 2004): 99–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x04000016.
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A hundred years ago the international craze for picture postcards distributed millions of images of popular stage actresses around the world. The cards were bought, sent, and collected by many whose contact with live theatre was sometimes minimal. Veronica Kelly's study of some of these cards sent in Australia indicates the increasing reach of theatrical images and celebrity brought about by the distribution mechanisms of industrial mass modernity. The specific social purposes and contexts of the senders are revealed by cross-reading the images themselves with the private messages on the backs, suggesting that, once outside the industrial framing of theatre or the dramatic one of specific roles, the actress operated as a multiply signifying icon within mass culture – with the desires and consumer power of women major factors in the consumption of the glamour actress card. A study of the typical visual rhetoric of these postcards indicates the authorized modes of femininity being constructed by the major postcard publishers whose products were distributed to theatre fans and non-theatregoers alike through the post. Veronica Kelly is working on a project dealing with commercial managements and stars in early twentieth-century Australian theatre. She teaches in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland, is co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies, and author of databases and articles dealing with colonial and contemporary Australian theatre history and dramatic criticism. Her books include The Theatre of Louis Nowra (1998) and the collection Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s (1998).
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Bignell, Jonathan. "Trevor Griffiths's Political Theatre: from ‘Oi for England’ to ‘The Gulf between Us’." New Theatre Quarterly 10, no. 37 (February 1994): 49–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00000087.
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This paper examines two plays by Trevor Griffiths, ten years apart in the writing, which responded in different ways to burning contemporary issues. The first, Oi for England, though originally seen on television in 1982, was conceived as a theatre text, and was eventually toured to audiences closer to the age (and perhaps to some of the beliefs) of its racist rock-band central characters. The Gulf between Us, written in the aftermath of the Gulf War, was staged in Leeds in 1992 as a local theatrical ‘event’ at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, under Griffiths's own direction. Jonathan Bignell looks at the ways in which the different nature of these occasions and audiences, and the different ways in which the plays can be viewed as ‘political theatre’ – in particular, the new demands made by The Gulf upon critics who arrived with a type-cast view of its author – in both cases militated against a successful political statement being conveyed. Jonathan Bignell completed a PhD on narrative in film and television fictions in 1989, and since then has lectured in English and Media Studies in the English Department of the University of Reading. His research interests are in literary theory, and film and television analysis.
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Heuvel, Michael Vanden. "The Politics of the Paradigm: a Case Study in Chaos Theory." New Theatre Quarterly 9, no. 35 (August 1993): 255–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00007983.
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This article continues NTQ's explorations, commenced in NTQ18 (1989) and NTQ23 (1990), of the interactions between theatrical performance and emerging views of nature coming out of the ‘new sciences’. Here, Michael Vanden Heuvel argues that analogies between quantum science and performance are productive mainly in reference to work which investigates the nature of perception, and which foregrounds the spectator's awareness of the ‘event-ness’ of theatrical performance. Models drawn from the new science of ‘chaotics’, on the other hand, appear more applicable to performances which seek to move beyond phenomenology into the sphere of cultural discourse. He offers as an example of this ‘post-quantum’ theatre the work of the renowned New York collective the Wooster Group, whose performances create a dialogics between order and disorder which acts to map dynamic interactions between hegemony and difference in American culture. Michael Vanden Heuvel is Assistant Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Arizona State University. His Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theatre and the Dramatic Text was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1991, and he has written articles and reviews for Theatre Journal and Contemporary Literature.
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Schmitt, Natalie Crohn. "‘So Many Things Can Go Together’: the Theatricality of John Cage." New Theatre Quarterly 11, no. 41 (February 1995): 72–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00008903.
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John Cage (1912–1993) is widely regarded as one of the most pervasively influential figures in the arts in the latter half of the twentieth-century. Although best known as a composer, Cage expanded perceptions of what could constitute theatrical performance, and in this essay Natalie Crohn Schmitt assesses the nature and significance of Cage's intermedia performances and their immediate influence on other such work. Natalie Crohn Schmitt's Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature (Northwestern UP, 1990) is an analysis of contemporary theatre based on Cage's aesthetics, and essays of hers on Cage have appeared in other journals and in anthologies devoted to the artist. She has previously written in NTQ on Stanislavski (NTQ 8) and on performance theory in its historic moment (NTQ 23). Schmitt is Professor of Performing Arts and Professor of English the University of Illinois at Chicago. This essay was originally published in a slightly different form in Japanese in a Cage commemorative issue of the Japanese journal Music Today.
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Puga, Ana Elena. "TRANSLATION AND PERFORMANCE: A PREVIEW OF THEATRE SURVEY'S FIRST WORKING SESSION (NASHVILLE, NOVEMBER 2012)." Theatre Survey 53, no. 2 (August 28, 2012): 309–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557412000117.
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I recently translated and then served as dramaturge on the English-language world premiere of Patricia Suárez's Matchmaker (Casamentera), a contemporary Argentine play about the early twentieth-century sex trade in Jewish women imported from Eastern European villages to Buenos Aires brothels. Matchmaker was published in an anthology I edited, Spectacular Bodies, Dangerous Borders: Three New Latin American Plays, along with my translation of The Girls from the 3.5 Floppies (Las chicas del tres y media floppies) by the Mexican playwright Luis Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio (who goes by the acronym LEGOM) and Heather McKay's translation of Passport by the Venezuelan playwright Gustavo Ott. In February 2012, Matchmaker was staged in the Thurber Theatre at The Ohio State University. The production was directed by Lesley Ferris.
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Aqil, Mammadova Gunay. "American English in Teaching English as a Second Language." International Journal of English Language Studies 3, no. 2 (February 27, 2021): 52–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/ijels.2021.3.2.7.
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With the lapse of time the two nations- Americans and British always blamed each other for “ruining” English. In this article we aim to trace historical “real culprit” and try to break stereotypes about American English status in teaching English as a second language. In comparison with Great Britain the USA has very short and contemporary history; nevertheless, in today’s world American English exceeds British and other variants of English in so many ways, as well as in the choices of language learners. American English differs from other variants of the English language by 4 specific features: Inclusiveness, Flexibility, Innovativeness and Conservativeness. Notwithstanding, British disapprove of Americans taking so many liberties with their common tongue, linguistic researcher Daniela Popescu in her research mentions the fields of activities in which American words penetrated into British English. She classifies those words under 2 categories: everyday vocabulary (480 terms) and functional varieties (313 terms). In the case of functional varieties, the American influence is present in the areas of computing (10 %), journalism (15 %), broadcasting (24%), advertising and sales (5 %), politics and economics (24%), and travelling and transport (22%). Further on, the words and phrases in the broadcasting area have been grouped as belonging to two areas: film, TV, radio and theatre (83%), and music (17%). The purpose of the research paper is to create safe and reliable image of American English in the field of teaching English as a second language. Americans are accused in “ruining” English and for that reason learners are not apt to learn American English. The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used while collecting the data. The study concluded that the real culprits are British who started out to ruin English mainly in in the age of Shakespeare and consequently, Americans inherited this ruin from the British as a result of colonization. Luckily, in the Victorian Age British saved their language from the ruins. The paper discusses how prejudices about American English effect the choices of English learners.
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McGuinness, Frank. "Saint Behan." Irish University Review 44, no. 1 (May 2014): 78–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/iur.2014.0104.
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This essay examines Brendan Behan's evolution as a dramatist, linking him to the tradition of O'Casey's urban theatre, particularly Juno and the Paycock, and emphasising his closeness to the experimental drama of his near contemporary, Samuel Beckett. It details how subversively Behan used both music and the Gaelic language in sexualizing the story of The Quare Fellow, how he censors such radical departures in An Giall, and how The Hostage in its wild exuberance restores Behan to the status of a most dangerously liberated dramatist. Finally it looks at the influence of Behan on his most significant follower, the openly queer English playwright, Joe Orton.
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Morin, Emilie. "‘Look Again’: Indeterminacy and Contemporary British Drama." New Theatre Quarterly 27, no. 1 (February 2011): 71–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x11000066.
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The integration into conceptual art of techniques inspired by Fluxus (the international aggregate of artists who saw indeterminacy as imaginatively and linguistically enabling) has, in turn, given rise to a specific line in British playwriting since the mid-1990s, as evidenced in plays by Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, and Tim Crouch which gesture towards conceptual art, performance art, and the event score. In this article Emilie Morin brings to light the affinities between this artistic moment in contemporary British theatre and the international avant-garde. She discusses the shared interest of Crimp, Kane, and Crouch in indeterminacy and the fusion between artistic media, paying particular attention to Crouch's redefinition of the status of the modern artwork in his play for galleries England (2007). Critical recognition of the experimental mode in which these playwrights operate has remained subsumed under a non-specific appreciation of their relationship to conceptual art, leaving important questions of form and legacy unaddressed. Here, the proximity between this marginal trend in British playwriting and developments in experimental music and performance art exploring ideas of indeterminacy is highlighted, and the contemporary problematization of performance as event and concept is reconfigured in relation to the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Fluxus. Emilie Morin is Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York and the author of Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her research interests lie in European modernism and the avant-garde.
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Casado-Gual, Núria. "Pre-dicting the Past, Re-membering the Present: Theorizing Memory in Complicite's Mnemonic." New Theatre Quarterly 28, no. 2 (May 2012): 182–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x12000267.
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In Mnemonic, a play conceived and directed by Simon McBurney and devised by Theatre de Complicite, words are not only time capsules in which different fictionalized memories are preserved, but also mnemonic objects in their own right. The playtext they conform acts, of course, as a reminder of the show that this British company created in 1999 for the Salzburg Festival, and that toured internationally again in 2002: at the same time, the published text of the work contains the perspectives and potential techniques from which the notion of memory – and of individual and collective forms of remembrance associated with it – can be explored and semiotized. Núria Casado-Gual's article looks at the dramaturgical strategies and theatrical techniques used by the company in their particular theatricalization of memory. Mnemonic, she contends, is not only relevant as an outstanding piece of contemporary theatre, but also as a ‘memorable’ text that helps us decipher our enigmatic selves in apparently oblivious and eroding postmodern times. Núria Casado-Gual lectures in English language, literature, and theatre at the University of Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. She is author of a PhD thesis on the the Caribbean playwright Edgar Nkosi White, and combines her academic work with creative theatrical projects as both playwright and performer with the company Nurosfera.
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Khafaga, Ayman F. "Intertextual Relationships in Literary Genres." International Journal of English Linguistics 10, no. 3 (March 21, 2020): 177. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ijel.v10n3p177.
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Most contemporary playwrights acknowledge that Shakespeare’s dramas are for use as raw material to be assimilated into contemporary mould, not to be revered strictly as untouchable museum pieces. Being the model of all dramatists, Shakespeare had a great influence on English theatre, his plays are still performed throughout the world, and all kinds of new, experimental work find inspiration in them. This paper investigates the intertextual relationships between William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606) and Edward Bond’s Lear (1978). The main objective of the paper is to explore the extent to which Bond manages to use Shakespeare’s King Lear as an intertext to convey his contemporary version of Shakespearean classic. Two research questions are tackled here: first, how does Shakespeare’s King Lear function as a point of departure for Bond’s contemporary version? Second, to what extent does Bond deviate from Shakespeare to prove his originality in Lear? The paper reveals that Bond’s manipulation of intertextuality does not mean that he puts his originality aside. He proves his originality by relating the events of the old story to contemporary issues which in turn makes the story keep pace with modern time.
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Williams, Roy. "Roy Williams, in conversation with Aleks Sierz What Kind of England Do We Want?" New Theatre Quarterly 22, no. 2 (April 19, 2006): 113–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x06000352.
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Roy Williams is one of the outstanding new voices in contemporary British theatre. Born in Fulham, south-west London, in 1968, he has already, by his mid-thirties, won a shelf-full of awards, with plays staged at the National Theatre and Royal Court. His debut, The No Boys Cricket Club, won the Writers' Guild New Writer of the Year award in 1996. Two years later, his follow-up, Starstruck, won three major awards: the John Whiting Award for Best New Play, an EMMA (Ethnic Multicultural Media Awards) for Best Play, and the first Alfred Fagon Award, for theatre in English by writers with Caribbean connections. In 2000, Lift Off was joint winner of the George Devine Award, and in 2001 Clubland received the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. In 2002, Williams received a best school drama BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) for Offside (BBC), and in 2004 he won the first Arts Council Decibel Award, given to black or Asian artists in recognition of their contribution to the arts. His most recent play, Little Sweet Thing, was a 2005 co-production between Ipswich’s New Wolsey Theatre, Nottingham Playhouse, and Birmingham Rep. What follows is an edited transcript of Aleks Sierz’s ‘In Conversation with Roy Williams’, part of the ‘Other Voices’ symposium at Rose Bruford College, Sidcup, Kent, in May 2004, organized by Nesta Jones. Williams is a graduate and now a Fellow of the college.