bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Byron and the Stage
Authors: Storer Patrick A.
Published: January 2009

The eight plays written by Lord Byron between 1816 and 1822 constitute one of the major areas of his development as an important literary figure. Yet, paradoxically, these works have been relatively neglected by twentieth century criticism. Byron may be said to be one of the best documented poets biographically and critically. As a playwright, however, no comprehensive and objective study of him has been published. A great deal of the criticism of Byron's plays is to be found in magazine articles and short, often highly prejudiced, chapters in longer works devoted to theatre history. The result of this spasmodic and patchy criticism has been confusion and contradiction. One question which confronts any critic of the plays is whether Byron intended these works for stage representation or whether he saw them as ‘closet dramas’, intended for the solitary reader only. Byron's own attitude was ambiguous. Of his second published play, Marino Faliero, he wrote to Murray, his publisher, in apparently unequivocal terms:

I have never written but for the solitary reader, and require no experiments for applause beyond his silent approbation … I claim my right as an author to prevent what I have written from being turned into a stage play.
The York Cycle at Toronto: Staging and Performance Style
Authors: Lindenbaum Sheila
Published: January 2009

Because the York Corpus Christi cycle drew so much of its dramatic power from the life of the medieval community, it presents formidable problems to modern producers. One obvious difficulty stems from the anachronistic dramatization of scriptural history. How can one convey to a twentieth-century audience the contemporaneity of a play in which Pilate holds a Parliament with his ‘bishops’ and Christ enters Jerusalem like a king passing in royal procession through the gates of a medieval walled city? The forty-seven separate pageants in which the York cycle treats the story of man from the Creation to the Last Judgment were mounted by the craft guilds of the city under the supervision of the municipal authorities. By what process are these pageants to be produced today without the social and economic structure of the towns that gave to cycle plays the character of a truly civic drama? Finally, what performing style is to be used by modern actors? Even if the modern productions were to employ a historically accurate style (supposing that one could be reconstructed from surviving evidence), this style would only very partially convey to a modern audience the devotional, didactic, and ceremonial purposes of the medieval cycle.
Macbeth
Authors: Zeifman Hersh
Published: January 2009

By far the most riveting play recently on view in an otherwise rather lacklustre British theatrical season has been the Royal Shakespeare Company's Macbeth. Trevor Nunn's production opened originally in Stratford at the RSC's tiny, experimental The Other Place in the summer of 1976, and transferred a year later to the company's equivalent London theatre: The Warehouse, a small, recently renovated auditorium in Co vent Garden. The Warehouse is aptly named: a high-ceilinged space, with three rows of seats on two levels surrounding the playing area on three sides, it has probably the worst sight lines of any theatre in London. But what it lacks in architectural excellence The Warehouse gains in intimacy (seating capacity: 190). With practically no physical distance separating actors and audience, and played straight through without risk of the kind of emotional distance provided by an intermission, the RSC production creates the most intense and powerful Macbeth I have ever seen.
Arthur Kahane, Reinhardt's Dramaturge
Authors: Kahane Henry
Published: January 2009

I grew up in the world of the Deutsches Theater, a witness of Reinhardt's early period in Berlin, in the years before the First World War. I remember Reinhardt's father, a noble, distinguished-looking gentleman, friendly, quiet, and dignified; Reinhardt's mother, shy and easily worried; their early home in Den Zelten, then later and for many years, the beautiful Old-Berlin house on the Kupfergraben; many evenings with endless telephone discussions between Max Reinhardt and my father, devoted to the interpretation of the play for which Reinhardt was preparing the Regiebuch; the exciting atmosphere of a dress rehearsal; the metropolitan, cosmopolitan glamour of a Reinhardt premiere; summers in Bavaria, where Reinhardt directed the Münchener Festspiele; the summer of 1913, in Massa and Carrara, when Reinhardt tried his hand with the new medium, the film. I came in touch with that world through the role played in it by my father, Arthur Kahane. It is his portrait that I should like to sketch.
Theatrical Perception
Authors: Beckerman B.
Published: January 2009

The theory of literature expounded by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren in 1942 embraces, if somewhat gingerly, the drama. The authors acknowledge – in the apparent afterthought of an endnote – that ‘the whole tendency of dramaturgic doctrine is against any judgment of a play divorced from … its stagecraftness or theaterness’. But in the body of their work, they treat drama as one form of narrative fiction, at one point approaching and then retreating from any substantial consideration of the ‘distinction between play and story’.
Keeping Order on the Stage in Paris in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Authors: Mittman Barbara G.
Published: January 2009

For about 130 years in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, spectators sat on the stage in Paris public theatres. In Molière's theatre only 32 spectators were permitted on stage. However, by the mideighteenth century, before the practice was discontinued, there were often more than 200 persons behind the curtain of the Comedie Française, sitting on benches or standing around at the back of the stage. This contingent of spectators was exclusively male – a collection of foppish petty nobility who found the stage an excellent vantage point from which to ogle and be ogled.
Gordon Craig, the Über-marionette, and the Dresden Theatre
Authors: Eynat Irène
Published: January 2009

The Über-Marions notebooks were written by Gordon Craig during 1905 and 1906. The main interest of these unpublished manuscripts lies in the rich information on the über-marionette which, oddly enough, Craig initially thought to ‘find’ or ‘collect’, and the project for a theatre in Dresden. Many entries give a new insight into these subjects while other notes emphasize the direct link between the über-marionette and Craig's theory as it was formulated in The Art of the Theatre (1905), and in ‘The Artists of the Theatre of the Future’ (1907) and ‘The Actor and the Über-marionette’ (1907).
The Spectator as Creator in Contemporary French Theatre
Authors: Webb Richard C.
Published: January 2009

Perhaps the most noticeable feature of the theatre of the sixties and seventies has been the proliferation of small, generally independent, theatre groups. This phenomenon has not been limited to France but has spread throughout Europe and North America. For the most part, the groups have sought to reform, if not reject, conventional theatre practices, be it the method of productions, the dramatic language or the nature of the dramatic experience itself. Their alternative approaches have focussed attention on the process of dramatic creation. As a result, terms such as ‘collective creation’ and ‘audience participation’ have become critical clichés. But, whereas the practice of the former has been discussed widely both in the context of specific groups and of the general development of contemporary drama, the concept of audience participation has remained vague. Thus, much has been written on the transfer of creative responsibility from author to acting company and on the accompanying change in status of the actor, but the position of the spectator as a creative force has received little detailed treatment.
The Theatrical Values of John Arden
Authors: O'Hanlon Redmond
Published: January 2009

In 1977, John Arden produced a collection of essays called To Present the Pretence, in which he tried to articulate for himself and for us the main lines of his development, and to define, through his various projects and enthusiasms for other playwrights, what theatre is and what it might become. Arden's book is a fascinating work which chronicles the itinerary of a man who took the risk of opening himself and his art to the great forces of contemporary history and whose work increasingly bears the marks of the contradictions in that history. At the ideological level, these essays mark the stages in Arden's progress from a vague Left-Wing quasi-liberalism and pacificism tinged with anarchism, to a more affirmative neo-Marxism which still bears some traces of his early idealism. This political development brought with it an increasing pressure on Arden's theory and practice; and perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of his career is the tense interplay between the demands of political praxis and those implied by what he calls ‘the Ancient Principles of Drama’.
Ecriture Dramatique and Ecriture Scénique: Two Playwrights' Points of View (Ionesco and Arrabal)
Authors: Whitton David
Published: January 2009

The producer is a relatively recent and adventitious figure in the dramatic art. Whereas for centuries the theatre contrived to exist with a tripartite structure (author-actor-audience) in which the true intermediary between the author and the public was the performer, a new intermediary now exists in the shape of the producer, whose functions are partly organizational and partly creative. Barely a century has elapsed since Antoine, the first French producer in the modern sense, embarked almost single-handed on his mission to restore the French stage to its former integrity. During this time the producer's growing prestige and influence have made his role ever more central to the art of the theatre, so much so that there are times when mise en scène appears to have supplanted the dramatic writing it was engendered to serve. This is certainly one of the more controversial developments in the modern theatre, and a challenging one for writers, critics and public alike. My intention here is to consider the playwright's position in relation to this challenge, by showing how two leading modern writers, Ionesco and Arrabal, have responded in sharply differing ways to the changing climate of mise en scène in France. First, however, it will be useful to summarize how, and how far, the delicate balance between the playwright's authority and the producer's functions has evolved in recent years.
Two Costume Designs by Eugène Delacroix
Authors: Daniels Barry
Published: January 2009

In the process of concluding my thesis, ‘Alfred de Vigny and the French Romantic Theatre’ (Cornell University, 1973), I had written to France requesting permission to publish the various iconographic material relevant to the productions of Vigny's plays. A note from M. Sangnier was forwarded to me via the Association des Amis d'Alfred de Vigny concerning the existence in M. Sangnier's collection of two costume sketches by Delacroix ascribed to Vigny's La Maréchale d'Ancre. This ascription came as a pleasant surprise to me as there is no mention of Delacroix' association with the production in either his or Vigny's published papers, or in contemporary reviews of the production. A quick check of Delacroix biographies and catalogues confirmed my suspicion that the sketches (Plates I and II) had been heretofore unknown.
Stage Production and the Greek Theatre Movement: W. B. Yeats's PlayThe Resurrectionand His Versions ofKing OedipusandOedipus at Colonus
Authors: Dorn Karen
Published: January 2009

‘What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Genoa and Michael Angelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two buttends of a seesaw?’ Christ and Oedipus, the contrasting images inA Vision, were central figures in W. B. Yeats's theatre work in the late 1920s. Following the publication ofA Visionin 1925, Yeats completed his versions of Sophocles' two plays of Oedipus. Designed for the main stage at the Abbey Theatre,King Oedipuswas produced in 1926 andOedipus at Colonusthe following year. During that time Yeats wrote a play on the death of Christ based on his work with the Sophocles plays but designed for the smaller Peacock Theatre, the Abbey's new experimental stage. Yeats's play,The Resurrection, was produced there in 1934. Those three productions were the culmination of Yeats's long involvement in two aspects of non-naturalistic theatre – the relation between stage performance and audience in the amphitheatre, and the nature of the poetic and dramatic image produced in that type of theatre.
A Taxonomy of the Theatre: Simon Trussler's A Classification for the Performing Arts
Authors: Ellis James
Published: January 2009

Simon Trussler, first in conjunction with the Bibliography of Drama and Theatre, planned to complement his revision of The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, and more recently in response to the proposal by the Commission for a British Theatre Institute for a union catalogue of British theatrical literature, has taken upon himself the awesome task of devising A Classification for the Performing Arts. He has made a thoroughly admirable job of it, and his system deserves the widest possible circulation and discussion among librarians, bibliographers, and scholars if it is to establish itself as a useful standard and model in collections worldwide. What should please all students of the performing arts is the system's remarkable combination of logical sequence and consistent format, coupled with a flexibility and adaptability to accommodate the most specialized of libraries or the most stubbornly anomalous of titles.
A New Witness of the Restoration Stage, 1660–1669
Authors: Orrell John
Published: January 2009

Among the additional manuscripts in the British Library is a nineteenth-century transcript of the diplomatic correspondence of the Florentine agents in London from 1616 to 1679/80. The agents – or Residents, as they were sometimes called – were during this period the Salvetti, father and son. Amerigo wrote the dispatches every week until his death in 1657, after which the task was undertaken by his son Giovanni, though there were at first a few letters also from Giovanni's brother, Amerigo the younger. As befitted people with Florentine connexions, both father and son were interested in the Court theatre, and among their voluminous accounts of the affairs of state there are frequent references to the staging of plays and masques, so frequent indeed that they constitute a useful supplement to the calendars of the period published by G. E. Bentley and W. Van Lennep. In this article I print for the first time translations of the dramatic references culled from the correspondence of 1660–9; passages from the letters of 1670–9 will appear in a later issue. The more methodical notes of Salvetti père on the Jacobean and Caroline Court stage will, I hope, be published elsewhere.
Sardou on the English Stage
Authors: Rowell George
Published: January 2009

If by successful is meant widely performed, the most successful playwright in the English theatre between T. W. Robertson in the 1860s and A. W. Pinero in the 1890s was a Frenchman, Victorien Sardou. This apparent paradox can be elucidated not only by the list of English adaptations of Sardou which concludes this survey, but by noting some of the leading English actors who appeared in Sardou. They include Irving (Madame Sons-Gêne, Robespierre, Dante); the Bancrofts (Nos Intimes, Dora, Les Bourgeois de Pont-Arçy, Odette, Fédora); the Kendals (Les Pattes de Mouche, Nos Intimes, Dora, Maison Neuve); Wyndham (Rabagas, La Papillonne); Hare (Les Pattes de Mouche, Dora, La Tosca); Tree (Fédora); Forbes-Robertson (Dora, Les Bourgeois de Pont-Arçy); Hawtrey (Divorçons!); Bourchier (Divorçons!); Du Maurier (Dora). The admission to the list of such leading ladies as Ellen Terry, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Modjeska, Elizabeth Robins, and Gladys Cooper would extend it further.
Translating Ibsen for the Contemporary English Stage
Authors: Ewbank Inga-Stina
Published: January 2009

It is not, I think, a coincidence that the contemporary English stage, where so many of the new plays are so deeply concerned with problems of communication, is in some measure a translator's theatre, steadily giving us new translations – or ‘versions’, or ‘adaptations’ – of old classics. It is more than a coincidence when No Man's Land and a new English version of John Gabriel Borkman appear side by side in the National Theatre repertoire, as they did both at the Old Vic in 1975 and in the Lyttelton in 1976. For, as we follow the pattern of intimacy or (more often) mutual incomprehension traced by a Pinter dialogue, or as with Osborne we watch the English language come down, we are made forcibly aware that any verbal interchange involves each speaker in acts of translation. Or, as George Steiner puts it in a book which also appeared in 1975, ‘whether inside or between languages, human communication equals translation’. There is of course a sense in which any director of any play is a translator who, by the time the play is put before an audience, has searched for and found a theatrical language – verbal and non-verbal – to convey to the audience his vision of the play. But it is remarkable how often, recently, directors have themselves turned translators in the more orthodox sense, driven back to the original by a sense of the importance of the text.
Josef Kainz: A Reassessment
Authors: Williams Simon
Published: January 2009

The premature death of the Austrian actor Josef Kainz on 20 September 1910, was regarded by many of his contemporaries as the passing of an epoch in the history of the German and Austrian theatre. In obituary notices Kainz was described as the most representative actor of his generation, as the pioneer of a ‘modern’ style of acting which accurately and imaginatively communicated the experience of man during a period of transition and uncertainty, one ‘in which the old … was dead and the new not yet born’. Some notices included even more extravagant accolades; Kainz's death, it was claimed, had deprived the theatre of its most creative spirit and comparisons were made, somewhat indiscriminately, between Kainz and many of the greatest figures of Western civilization – Moses, Socrates, Molière, Voltaire, even Jesus Christ! In the years following his death writers continued to assert without qualification that Kainz had been the most important actor of his generation, the single giant among the moderns. Although some biographers, especially Helene Richter, denned precisely why this was so, others continued their flamboyant praises, one seeing him as the perpetuator of a ‘pythagorean’ tradition which included Giordano Bruno, Albrecht Dürer and Goethe. Kainz, it appeared, was more than just an actor, he was a great creator who profoundly influenced the art of acting in particular and the development of Western culture in general.
The Development of the Fireworks Display and its Contribution to Dramatic Art in Renaissance Ferrara
Authors: Marcigliano Alessandro
Published: January 2009

In Pirotechnia (1558), Vanuzzo Biringuggio describes several ways of making ‘fuochi lavorati’ or fireworks, and he mentions the great skill of the Florentines and Romans in this special art. Their famous ‘castelli’ and ‘girandole’ were built for special festivities, such as Pentecost in Florence or the election of a new Pope in Rome. The custom of using firework displays as a popular expression of joy or ‘allegrezza’, was shared by several Italian towns during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Ferrara was no exception. The capital of Este's duchy provides an interesting example of how pyrotechny eventually became independent of popular and Carnival-like displays, and an established feature of court entertainments. Ferrara, one of the liveliest theatrical cities of the Italian Renaissance, provided a fertile ground for the development of firework displays.
Collaborative Playwriting: The Chettle, Dekker, Heywood Syndicate
Authors: Carson Neil
Published: January 2009

That a large number of Elizabethan plays are the product of dramatic collaboration is well known. Just how this process of ‘collective creation’ operated in the public theatres, however, remains something of a mystery. Attempts to explore the mechanics of collaborative play writing have been of different kinds. The most common have been studies of published plays undertaken in the hope that characteristics of style would reveal the shares of contributing dramatists. In spite of valuable work (notably by Cyrus Hoy), however, too many of these studies suffer from the weaknesses described by Samuel Schoenbaum in his analysis of the limitations of conclusions about authorship based on internal evidence. As a consequence, assertions about patterns of collaboration based on the identification of an author's stylistic characteristics, such as those made in the early 19205 by Dugdale Sykes, are not as fashionable as they once were.
‘No Meat for the Teeth of my Viennese’: Don Giovanni and the Theatre of Its Time
Authors: Williams Simon
Published: January 2009

After the triumph of its première in Prague in November 1787, Don Giovanni enjoyed little immediate success in the theatres of central Europe. It was received with indifference in Vienna, with unease, even outright hostility elsewhere. Mozart's music on its own aroused almost universal admiration, but as a dramatic medium it unsettled audiences. This was best expressed by a correspondent for the Chronik von Berlin, who saw the first performance at the Berlin National Theatre in December 1790. In his review he granted readily that ‘Mozart is an excellent, a great composer’ but in Don Giovanni he felt that greatness to have been betrayed.
Segmentation of Drama
Authors: Hummelen W. M. H.
Published: January 2009

The semiotics of drama has proved incapable of formulating a theory of segmentation that can be used in practice. Tadeusz Kowzan admits that his suggestion, ‘l'unité sémiologique du spectacle est une tranche contenant tous les signes émis simultanément, tranche dont la durée est égale au signe qui dure le moins’ (1975, 215), leads to a multitude of small, totally unrelated segments. As Erika Fischer-Lichte pointed out (1983, 186–7), it is impossible to tell in advance whether any distinguishable sign system (or combination of sign systems) will manifest itself at all times in the performance. Her conclusion was therefore that semiotics should stop searching for homogeneous units. However, she added, anyone who for practical reasons seeks a division should proceed from the two categories of character and space without which no theatrical process is possible and which can never be consumed into one another. This will not create homogeneous units either, but together these two categories comprise everything to which the various types of theatrical signs may refer.
On Ambiguity: Towards a Post-Modern Performance Theory
Authors: George David
Published: January 2009

The challenge and the excitement of expanding both the focus of our research and the field of our praxis beyond Theatre (or Film, Pop or Video) to Performance is to identify phenomena which transcend one medium and may enable us to know something about acting as such, spectating as such and thus ‘being’ as such: performance, not as a second-hand version of some more primary reality, but as a ‘realm’ in its own right.
A Grain of Sand: Ellen Terry's Letters to Amey Stansfield
Authors: Whitehead John
Published: January 2009

Ellen Terry's letters to Amey Stansfield were written between 1892 the first and several later ones cannot be precisely dated because the envelopes are missing – and 31 August 1907, a period covering the last decade of her association with Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre and also the peak years of her correspondence with Bernard Shaw, who called her ‘one of the greatest letter-writers who ever lived’. There are thirtythree of them, and although sometimes a long interval elapses between letters – only one for each of the years 1902 and 1907, and none at all for 1895, 1896, 1898, 1900, 1901 and 1904 – the inference need not be drawn that the collection is incomplete, for Amey carefully preserved them. Her own letters to Ellen Terry have not survived.
Actresses and Prostitutes in Victorian London
Authors: Davis Tracy C.
Published: January 2009

Despite the tendency for Victorian performers to be credited with increasing respectability and middle-class status and for actors to receive the highest official commendations, the popular association between actresses and prostitutes and belief in actresses' inappropriate sexual conduct endured throughout the nineteenth century. In the United States, religious fundamentalism accounts for much of the prejudice, but in Great Britain, where puritanical influences were not as influential on the theatre, other factors helped to preserve the derogatory view of actresses. In certain times and places actresses did have real links with the oldest of all ‘women's professions’, but the notion that the dual identity of Roman dancers or the exploits of some Restoration performers justify the popular association between actresses and prostitutes in the Victorian era is patently insufficient. The notion persisted throughout the nineteenth century because Victorians recognized that acting and whoring were the occupations of self-sufficient women who plied their trades in public places, and because Victorians believed that actresses' male colleagues and patrons inevitably complicated transient lifestyles, economic insecurity, and night hours with sexual activity. In the spirit of Gilbert and Gubar's axiom that experience generates metaphor and metaphor creates experience, the actress and the prostitute were both objects of desire whose company was purchased through commercial exchange. While patrons bought the right to see them, to project their fantasies on them, and to denigrate and misrepresent their sexuality, both groups of women found it necessary constantly to sue for men's attention and tolerate the false imagery. Their similarities were reinforced by coexistence in neighbourhoods and work places where they excited and placated the playgoer's lust in an eternal loop, twisted like a Mobius strip into the appearance of a single surface.
Lesser Ladies of the Victorian Stage
Authors: McDonald Jan
Published: January 2009

The theatrical memoirs published by actresses in the nineteenth century were generally written by women who had achieved recognition in their profession and had, therefore, acquired a place in society. Comparatively little is known about the jobbing actress who never achieved distinction in London, but who eked out an existence in the provinces, either with one of the better companies in Bath, Bristol or Edinburgh, on a theatrical ‘circuit’, or with one of the troupes of travelling players who rarely performed in theatre buildings, but in barns, village halls, inns and, occasionally, in private houses. At the bottom of the pile came the performers in fairground booths and penny theatres.
Process and Product: Contemporary British Theatre and its Communities of Women
Authors: Carlson Susan
Published: January 2009

Most of Great Britain's active women dramatists have found crucial support and encouragement for their work from communities of women in the theatre. Off stage, during the process of planning, writing, and rehearsing, collaborations have changed the standard theatrical work pattern and modified the way women writers conceive of drama. On stage, the products – the plays – reflect their communal generation in their focus on groups. In short, the collaborations, collectives, and groups which have encouraged and advanced women's theatrical work account for its particular verve. And while the position of women's theatre communities is now aesthetically and politically much more complicated than it was in the early 70s, playwright Sue Townsend can still proclaim, albeit more optimistically than most, that collaboration with a group ‘is the only way to work’.
Traditional Popular Culture and the Cuban ‘New Theatre’: Teatro Escambray and the Cabildo de Santiago
Authors: Weiss Judith A.
Published: January 2009

The community-based popular theatre movement began in Cuba about ten years after the triumph of the revolution, but its main pioneers, the founders of the Cabildo de Santiago and Teatro Escambray, were professionals with considerable experience in virtually every style and experimental form of theatre. This article concentrates on the most dynamic period of the Cuban ‘nuevo teatro’, the 1970s, when the Cabildo and Teatro Escambray emerged as internationally recognized models of popular theatre and as valuable sources for research into Cuban cultural tradition and revolutionary transformation.
E. Gordon Craig, Director, School for the Art of the Theatre
Authors: Rood Arnold
Published: January 2009

In preparing this paper I wrote, among others, to David Lees, Edward Gordon Craig's photographer son. In reply to my request for help, he wrote: ‘EGG and his schoob:[the final consonant underlined in red] this plural leaves me a bit surprised, for I have always known of just one school, that being “The School for the Art of the Theatre” started at the Arena Goldoni in Florence, on March 1913.’ He goes on to refer to A Living Theatre which is primarily concerned with the School in Florence. He concludes the paragraph by writing: ‘As for the schools – in the plural – as I said in the beginning, I know of no other school beside this one’.
The Performance of Feminism in The Taming of the Shrew
Authors: Ranald Margaret Loftus
Published: January 2009

Performance is ideology! This is particularly true of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, one of his two comedies concerning the behaviour of husband and wife after the marriage ceremony—the other being The Comedy of Errors. Here he makes use of what may well be the longest-running English female stock character, the recalcitrant wife, who goes back to Mrs Noah, the disobedient woman of the mediaeval religious cycle plays. But at the same time he adapts the technique of classical farce to observation of human behaviour, by taking an impossible premise (that a wife can be tamed) and extending it logically to the utmost limits of absurdity. He also combines the Mrs Noah figure with the Judy puppet and the clever woman of the Interludes who outwits her husband, but with one distinctive omission: the physical violence commonly assumed essential to shrew-taming. I believe that here Shakespeare has forged a new dramatic mode by humanizing the intellectuality of rhetorically based classical farce and psychologizing the knockabout physicality of its Plautine offshoot.
Emandulo: Process and Performance in a Changing South Africa
Authors: Riccio Thomas
Published: January 2009

In the spring of 1992 the Natal Performing Arts Council (NAPAC) in Durban, South Africa, invited me to develop a performance based on Zulu traditions with their recently formed Kwasa Group and their long established Loft Theatre. ‘Kwasa’, Zulu for ‘it dawns’, was NAPAC's attempts to address the changing needs of South Africa. Two weeks after white South Africa voted in favour of a nationwide referendum to allow non-whites the ability to vote I began rehearsals for Emandulo.’
Unnecessary Plays: European Drama and the British Censor in the 1920s
Authors: Nicholson Steve
Published: January 2009

It is an hysterical and unpleasant affair and would have no chance of being produced here it if had been written by an Englishman. To some soi-disant ‘intellectuals’ anything foreign is good. (Lord Chamberlain's Report on Toller's Mass Man, 1924)
Gibbons's Tennis Court: Hollar v. Wilkinson
Authors: Barlow Graham
Published: January 2009

In The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage Leslie Hotson devoted a chapter to the playhouses of that period and discussed the background and development of Gibbons's Tennis Court. He drew attention to the early leases of the site on which the tennis court was built, to Gibbons's petitions, successful and otherwise, for permission to build the tennis court and to the subsequent litigation that was conducted by interested parties. Those parties were the Earl of Clare, the owner; Charles Gibbons, the tenant; and Sir Matthew Mennes, the frustrated holder of the lease of the property. Hotson also noted the extant graphic evidence for the tennis court, the Hollar engraving (PI. I); the map belonging to the Society of Lincoln's Inn, (PI. II); and the engraving (PI. III) published by Wilkinson in Londina Illustrata, 1811. Concluding his discussion of Gibbons's tennis court he traced the gradual infiltration of Davenant and his pre-Restoration theatrical activities down to the conversion of the building into Killigrew's Theatre Royal which ultimately became the home for the Nursery company.
The Folies Bergère in New York City in 1911
Authors: Moy James S.
Published: January 2009

Nineteenth century American theatre managers generally sought to attract mass audiences. Toward this end they usually featured variety, novelty, and the spectacular in attempts to provide a little something for everyone on each evening's program. By the end of the century many managers had begun to alter this policy, choosing instead to offer entertainments which appealed to only a particular segment of the theatre-going public. Accordingly, the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century brought the development of many distinct strains of theatrical entertainment like vaudeville, the circus, the Little Theatre movement, and the beginnings of the night-club industry.
Zeami on Performance
Authors: Ishii Tatsuro
Published: January 2009

Since the survival of Noh theatre at the time of Zeami (1363–1443) and Kanami depended entirely upon the support of its audience, which consisted mainly of laymen, warriors and nobles, it was essential that each presentation had its own unique beauty and power enabling each performance to become an unrepeatable idiosyncratic event. In particular, Zeami demands that each performance will attain the goals of hana (the flower, i.e. a strangeness and novelty in beauty that will attract the audience) and yūgen (a mystic quality of beauty and elegance) on stage. In order to achieve these goals, he provides us with a great deal of suggestive and analytical ideas from various points of view, ranging from precise technical comments to pure metaphysical concepts.
Social Space and Aesthetic Time East Asian Theatre: Transcultural Challenge
Authors: Tatlow Antony
Published: January 2009

After successfully eliminating the British motorcycle, Japan now threatens the European car industry; it is also rapidly developing advanced industrial techniques that will make much Western plant look like a blacksmith's forge. Is the theatre next? When is East Asian art going to undermine a culturally obsolescent Western aesthetic which is the counterpart, perhaps, of a one-dimensional voluntarist technology?
The Colonial Theatre in India
Authors: Chatterjee Sekhar
Published: January 2009

Hindu mythology claims that human activities are governed by four philosophical treatises (Veda) which were divinely conceived. A fifth Veda concerned with a religiously correct form of drama was later added and it became known as ‘Bharata's Natyashastra’. This text, originally written in Sanskrit, is particularly striking for its thoroughly detailed directives on how theatre ought to be performed. This Vedic or Temple theatre was only for the members of the Higher Castes: actors and audiences alike were necessarily Brahmins. This patrician theatre flourished between the third and ninth centuries and then fell into oblivion because of its inability to become a popular art form.
Idealization of Characters and Specialization of Acting in Eighteenth-Century Tragedy: The Villain
Authors: Massy-Westropp Jeanette
Published: January 2009

‘Before attending the performance of Tragedy, it is easy to know what the Characters in it will be. If one expects to see appear a Tyrant, a Usurper, an unhappy Prince, a Princess who loves and hates; one will not be much mistaken. One does not at all fear being placed in the ranks of the plagiarists, when one gives to the Hero of a new Play, the same passions which have already served as subject for a hundred Tragedies …’ (Nougaret, 1979, I, p. 169). So wrote Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret in Paris, and indeed a feature of central importance in eighteenth-century tragedies is their use of idealized characters. The range of types from which the tragedian selected his cast was small and specialized – hero, heroine and villain or villainess with their confidants, noble elders who were often parents of the hero or heroine, forthright soldiers – and equally restricted was the range of passions proper to each role, in accordance with its bienséances. The choice of plot for the writer was similarly specialized. A well-known eighteenth-century writer on rhetoric remarked that ‘in tragedy it is necessary to be especially careful that the action of the hero who usually gives his name to the tragedy is not unfamiliar and drawn from the obscurity of an unknown tale’ (Jouvency, 1725, p. 75). Thus the eighteenth-century classical tragedian worked within strict bounds of form and content in accordance with the conventions of his time, in which the artistic proprieties were closely linked with those of everyday life and its rigid code of social deportment. Mercier, a well-known writer and dramatist, even went so far as to say: ‘…we have only one single Tragedy, that is to say, one same mould, one same tone, one same progress.’ (Mercier, 1778, p. 119)
The Use of Historical Sources in Francophone African Theatre
Authors: Warner Gary
Published: January 2009

As late as 1962 Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper made the following remark at Oxford about African history:

Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present time there is none; there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness… and darkness is not the subject of history.
The Surveying of Hell. On Theatricality and Styles of Thinking
Authors: Schramm Helmar
Published: January 2009

In 1529 Agrippa von Nettesheim criticized the ‘futility and uncertainty’ of science. Indeed, the triumphant rise of European culture and science has always been accompanied by shadows of dissent. While, on the one hand, the rhapsodic shattering of reason was heavily criticized, on the other hand, equally sharp criticism was raised against the hermetic spirit of universal systems. The accepted authority of scientific knowledge was continually served a Lenten repast, and mighty edifices built on theory have bowed to the weight of doubt, crumbling into ruins of truths. The path which we call ‘progress’ is overlaid with traces of our own actions in the image of Sisyphus in Hades, who is condemned to push a huge boulder uphill. He is forever forced back to the beginning of his task, because of the perfidious nature of the stone.
II — The Moscow Keynote Speeches Introduction
Authors: Anderson Michael
Published: January 2009

The world in which the International Federation for Theatre Research first accepted the invitation from our Russian colleagues to hold its Twelfth World Congress in Moscow was a startlingly different one from that in which the Congress eventually took place: and Moscow itself had borne witness most dramatically to this transformation. Since its Eleventh World Congress, held in Stockholm in 1989, the IFTR has been coming to terms with a world in which much, including the boundaries and contents of its own discipline, has become subject to radical change. In a formal way, the adoption of a revised Constitution for the Federation is a recognition of the new world in which we are living: now the responsibility for furthering the aims of the Federation lies firmly in the democratic hands of subscribing Institutions and individual Members. More substantially, the process initiated in Stockholm of dividing Congress Sessions into Working Groups held together by a common interest, reflects the diversity of approaches which are now embraced under the title of Theatre Research, and the role which the Federation plays in bringing together scholars from a diversity of backgrounds, not only to meet colleagues from other countries working in the same field, but to obtain through keynote speeches and informal contacts in a crowded schedule of theatregoing, receptions and private encounters, a wider view of developments outside their immediate sphere of interest.
Intercultural Problems and the Modernization of Theatre in Japan
Authors: Mori Mitsuya
Published: January 2009

Shakespeare was first produced in Japan in a version fairly faithful to the original when, in 1903, the actor-manager Kawakami Otojiro, who came from outside the Kabuki world, directed Othello. Some reviewers were quite critical of the production, saying that it would make no sense to call this genuine Shakespeare since the serious drama was played so badly as to become comic. Others were more sympathetic and said that one had to be satisfield with this brave undertaking since the audience seemed to have enjoyed it very much. However, most critics did not see the entire performance, either arriving late or leaving before the end. Yet they seem to have felt no need to apologize: they had simply followed the usual custom of theatre-going practised by Kabuki audiences.
The Origin of Punch and Judy: A New Clue?
Authors: Speaight George
Published: January 2009

The general opinion, voiced on instinct rather than conclusive evidence, has been that the Punch and Judy show came from Italy. The name Punch is clearly derived, via Punchinello (1667), Polichinello (1666), and Policinella (1664), from Pulcinella, the commedia dell'arte character who originated in Naples about 1600. Prints in abundance show a puppet performance, resembling Punch and Judy, in Naples, Rome and Venice in the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century. And one of the earliest, and perhaps the earliest Punch performer on the streets of London was an Italian, Piccini by name, whose show was immortalized by George Cruikshank's drawings and, to a lesser extent, by Payne Collier's edited text in 1828.
Cracks in the Arch of Illusion: Contemporary Experiments in Taiwan's Peking Opera
Authors: Diamond Catherine
Published: January 2009

Textual and performance innovation in twentieth-century Peking Opera is not new and the experiments by practitioners in Taiwan today demonstrate approaches that both reflect past attempts and contemporary variation. There has been resistance to change in the art form, however, because it was supposed to have reached perfection with Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), who, because of his artistic pre-eminence and international status, was able to introduce several daring innovations that revolutionized the medium without upsetting its parameters. Mei not only experimented by acting in contemporary non-traditional plays, but also within the Peking Opera tradition and was responsible for shifting the limelight away from that of the old man role (laosheng) to that of the young woman (dan), his own role. He and his playwright collaborator, Qi Rushan, wrote new style Peking Opera scripts that made best use of Mei's unique performing talents. Instead of the stylized costume evolved from Ming and Qing, dress, Mei would occasionally use historically accurate costumes from earlier dynasties. He introduced the use of classical dances and encouraged the inclusion of theeihu, the second, lower pitched fiddle into the accompanying orchestra.
Theatrical Movement and the Mind-Body Question
Authors: Logie Lea
Published: January 2009

Performers in the second half of this century face an intensified confontation with physical expression in theatre. The question of how, or even whether, movement can express the ‘inner life’ of an actor/character is always present in the work of groups or individuals who wish to design innovative and physicalized performances.
A Review of Playtexts Published in Britain, 1994
Authors: Rabey David Ian
Published: January 2009

Faber gave revealing service to Steven Berkoff by issuing simultaneously two volumes, Collected Plays Volume One (East; West; Greek; Sink the Belgrano; Massage and Lunch) and Volume Two (Decadence; Kvetch; Acapulco; Harry's Christmas; Brighton Beach Scumbags; Dahling You Were Marvellous; Dog/Pitbull; Actor), priced at £9.99 each. This supplanted the earlier Faber Berkoff collection, Decadence and Other Plays (including East and West), which I lament, in that it united some of his best writing in a single volume priced at less than ten pounds, such as I felt assured in requiring my students to buy for a single week's detailed work. These volumes contain more variable material at a higher price; Volume One is the stronger, but if I set it, I expect justifiable economic complaint. With the British student grant being eroded systematically in terms of real economic worth, this provides occasion for my suspicion that if playtexts cost less, students would buy more of them, creating in turn a more theatrically and socially informed, literate and inquisitive public readership of playtexts, rather than a readership confined to economically safe, carefully predetermined limitations. Speaking of predetermined limitations, some of these presented themselves to me strikingly in a survey of Berkoff's work which seemed exhaustive to the point of repetition. The central image of Dog/Pitbull—a sketch of a ‘repulsively attractive’ man and his pet, ‘amplification of his own insane and undirected energy’—seemed the kernel of both volumes’ content.
Thresholds of the Tragic: A Study of Space in Sophocles and Racine
Authors: Brault Pascale-Anne
Published: January 2009

You have turned the page, and thus have already opened a door.

A door to the text.

A text about doors.

Or, to be more precise, about the recurrence of doors and their function in Sophocles and Racine.

Our purpose in focusing on plays in which the door or gate has a significant role for the individual and his being-in-the-world is to delineate the passageway which leads the tragic character to a boundary situation and, from there, to a possible transgression of that situation. That which is on each side of the door, the spaces created by the thresholds, will thus help locate the place of the tragic event. This spatialization of the tragic event as the transgressing of a boundary situation is emphasized by the way in which both Sophocles and Racine determine the parameters of the action as it is structured within a specific space.
Profits at Drury Lane, 1713–1716
Authors: Milhous Judith , Hume Robert D.
Published: January 2009

Surviving records of early eighteenth-century London theatres include a number of account books recording daily receipts, but fewer than we would like. ‘Rich's Register’ gives us daily totals at Lincoln's Inn Fields from 1714 to 1723, and we have accounts in one form or another for a good many seasons at that theatre thereafter. Drury Lane is a different matter. Not until 1741–2 do we possess day-by-day totals for a season there. In view of the comparative paucity of information about receipts at Drury Lane, neglect of one of the few sources of financial information available to us seems odd indeed. The MS at issue was quoted in print as early as 1939, and is cited inThe London Stage(under the wrong reference number) – but no one has ever printed or analysed more than a small sampling of the figures available.
The Gamester: A Century of Performances
Authors: Amberg Anthony
Published: January 2009

Between its first revival in 1771 and its last in 1871, The Gamester was performed more frequently on the London stage than any other Restoration or eighteenth-century tragedy. Most of these many performances, moreover, were given by Britain's finest actors and actresses. It should not be surprising, then, that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics who witnessed these many fine performances thought, on the whole, highly of the acted play. Nor should it be surprising that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences – who also witnessed the performances of these many excellent actors and actresses – received The Gamester ‘with such genuine applause’.