bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Empathy and Distance: Romantic Theories of Acting Reconsidered
Authors: Flaherty Gloria
Published: January 2009

Works dealing with the actor proliferated during the early decades of German Romanticism. Actors had come to be viewed as role models whose very costumes, hairstyles, and mannerisms often influenced prevailing fashions or, at least, gave them specific labels from particular plays. Popular interest in everything having to do with people of the theatre was seconded by contemporary poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, professors, and physicians. While some of their writings concentrated on historical and philosophical concerns, others investigated anthropological and psychiatric as well as medical ones. And contemporary actors themselves contributed publications about the ways, means, and consequences of playing roles in public.
Gründgens, Mann, and Mephisto
Authors: Kvam Wayne
Published: January 2009

Klaus Mann, the eldest son of Thomas Mann, was among the first emigrants to leave Germany after the Nazi takeover in 1933. From the vantage point of his early exile in Amsterdam, he looked back disapprovingly at German artists and intellectuals who appeared to thrive under Hitler's regime. Especially galling to him was the success of actor/director Gustaf Gründgens (1899–1963), his former brother-in-law:

I visualize my ex-brother-in-law as the traitor par excellence, the macabre embodiment of corruption and cynicism. So intense was the facination of his shameful glory that I decided to portray Mephisto-Gründgens in a satirical novel. I thought it pertinent, indeed, necessary to expose and analyse the abject type of the treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth.
‘Enter Revenge’: Henry Burkhead and Cola's Furie
Authors: Coughlan Patricia
Published: January 2009

There are very few texts written from the viewpoint of the Catholics in Ireland in the 1640s; among these, A Tragedy of Cold's Furie, OR, Lirenda's Miserie (Kilkenny, 1646), a five-act verse tragedy or tragicomedy, is striking in being a specifically literary, as well as a political, work.

Almost nothing is known about Henry Burkhead, whose name appears in various forms and who has been mistakenly conflated with another similar-sounding writer. Anthony a Wood rather slightingly calls Burkhead ‘no Academian, only a Merchant of Bristol’, and Langbaine also notices Cola's Furie, repeating this description and saying the play was never performed. A search of the Bristol city archives has failed to discover any mention of him, which may indicate that he resided in Kilkenny and traded with Bristol; various forms of his surname do, however, occur there, and it seems to be an English, rather than an Irish or ‘Old English’ one. The authors of the three sets of fulsome commendatory verses printed with the play – William Smyth, Paul Aylward, and Daniel Breede – seem even more obscure than Burkhead himself; all that is clear biographically is Burkhead's strong support of the Catholic cause, inferred from the play itself. As for its printing, it is not known whether the Jesuit press which then existed in the city was used, or that run by the Supreme Council of the Catholic confederates; it is highly unusual in being a literary text amidst the political, religious and administrative documents, pamphlets and proclamations which make up the remainder of the output from Kilkenny.
New Lamps for Old: The Theatre of Tom Murphy
Authors: Maxwell Desmond
Published: January 2009

(i) A vision and a sense of place

Tom Murphy has responded with some incredulity to an interviewer's suggestion that he has written plays ‘about emigration’. The subject figures in some of the plays; Michael, returned from the exile his tales embroider (Conversations on a Homecoming);, the Carneys, immigrants in Coventry, making a precarious sanctuary of violence (A Whistle in the Dark); John Joe's unsettling meditations on departure from and attachment to his small town (The Fooleen, revised as A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant). These are, on the face of it, situations familiar enough in the Irish dramatic tradition, from Padraic Colum's The Land (1905) and T. C. Murray's Birthright (1910). Murphy is not, however – nor, indeed, were Colum and Murray – evoking distresses measurable by newspaper editorials or the documentation of government reports. The literal emigrations are made to paraphrase emigrations of the self, interior journeys arrivine: at a goal or losing their way.
Two Plays by Ina Césaire: Mémoires d'Isles and L'enfant des Passages
Authors: Jones Bridget
Published: January 2009

In any consideration of theatre in the French Caribbean, the name Césaire is bound to be mentioned. Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963) is the most widely- known play in French by a black dramatist, and is now even in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, and his plays figure widely in checklists of ‘African’ theatre. A revealing contrast can be made between the epic dramas of Aimé Césaire, written for an international audience, especially the newly independent black nations of the 1960s, and the work of his daughter, Ina. He tackles from the standpoint of Négritude major themes of historical drama: the nature of sovereignty, the forging of nationhood; he storms the heights of tragic poetry in French. She is attentive, not to the lonely hero constructing his Haitian Citadel of rock, but to the Creole voices of the grassroots. She brings to the stage the lives of ordinary women, the lore and legends that sustained the slaves and their descendants. Her achievement should of course be assessed away from her father's shadow, but the ‘divergent orientation of the two generations’ also suggests the greater confidence today in the role of Creole language and oral literature, and in a serious theatre within Martinique.
Chronicles of the Time: Acting as Applied Criticism in Hamlet
Authors: Bent Geoffrey
Published: January 2009

It is common to describe the end product of an actor's labour as ‘an interpretation’, but somehow the expression's serious, critical dimension is never fully intended. Only a scholar with his pipe and tweeds would seem to possess the appropriate gravity to render judicious overviews of this kind. When one wants to know what Hamlet is ‘about’, they naturally turn to heavily footnoted exegesis found in periodicals with circulations under a thousand. What could someone prancing before a number greater than this in a single evening, wearing grease paint and tights no less, possibly add to such an exalted investigation?
The Doubling of Roles on the Jacobean Stage
Authors: Fotheringham Richard
Published: January 2009

A decade ago the analysis of the structure of the plays performed by the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline professional theatre companies, in order to discover patterns of doubling of the roles, seemed to hold considerable promise for further inquiry. D. M. Bevington's pioneering From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe and W. A. Ringler's article ‘The Number of Actors in Shakespeare's Early Plays’ offered direct evidence and tools for structural analysis, and were followed by important studies by Scott McMillin, Irwin Smith, and others. Nevertheless, since then interest in this area – and particularly in doubling on the seventeenth-century stage – seems to have declined. The assumption made explicitly by Bevington and implied by most other commentators has been that as the professional acting companies expanded their resources, found patrons, and increased the number of their liveried personnel, the frenetic doubling of the Tudor era became unnecessary. Apart from some unhurried doubling of very minor characters and extras, they believe this practice virtually disappeared from the Jacobean stage, rendering further investigation unnecessary. The small amount of direct evidence to the contrary, first noted by W. J. Lawrence in 1927, has been analysed as an interesting but aberrant phenomenon; occasional atavistic survivals in a more opulent and refined age whose taste was turning towards ‘realism’ in acting and production methods.
Alfred Sutro, Marie Stopes, and her Vectia
Authors: Sawin Lewis
Published: January 2009

A somewhat unlikely conjunction of personalities involving Marie Stopes, well-known sexologist and birth control advocate, and Alfred Sutro, writer of society dramas for London's West End, occurred during the last weeks of 1927. Part of the story has been told by Marie Stopes's biographer Ruth Hall, but hitherto unpublished letters from the vast Stopes Collection and elsewhere fill in the outlines of the brief, revealing encounter.
The Bhavāī of Gujarat: Religious Drama in Honour of the Mother Goddess of India
Authors: Free Katharine B.
Published: January 2009

I wrapped myself in a woollen cloak against the chill of an October Indian night in 1980. Camera in hand and squatting in the dirt, I was surrounded by villagers and their laughing children. We all were waiting for a performance to begin. The occasion was a Bhavāī Mela at the village of Sola near Gujarat's largest city, Ahmedabad. The Mela was sponsored by the National School of Drama (New Delhi) and the Gujarat State Sangeet Nritya Natya Akademi. The privileged, urban students of the NSD were conspicuous in their reserved seating area, disdainfully rejecting the attempts of the villagers to join them. Far in the back of the crowd I glimpsed the still-beautiful Mrinalini Sarabhai, one of India's most famous dancers, swathed in silk and carrying a large palm-frond fan. Next to her was the white-haired Kailish Pandya, director of Drama at Miss Sarabhai's Darpana Academy of performing arts at Ahmedabad. With the first eerie, insistent blast of the Bhavāī trumpets (bhūṇgaḷs), an excitement swept the crowd extinguishing physical discomforts and personal slights. The fact that I would spend the next seven days sleeping on bare, stone floors to see this Mela, became unimportant as the actors began their intricate dances and spirited singing. From my first exposure to the Bhavāī in 1976, I had awaited this moment, a performance not in a university playhouse, but in a village.
Dryden with Variations: Three Prompt Books
Authors: Hughes Leo , Scouten A. H.
Published: January 2009

Among the eleven promptbooks from the Morrab Library in Penzance sold at Sotheby's in 1964, by no means least interesting are three based on plays by John Dryden. After considerable study we are persuaded that all three were from Drury Lane Theatre. They came into the possession of H. C. Halliwell-Phillipps and were eventually presented to the City of Penzance as a token of his affection. We choose a musical term to suggest the great differences in origin and fortunes of the trio, for they represent a varied pattern: one comes from an early collaboration; one is a solo performance from late in the displaced laureate's career; one is a pastiche taken from a pair of heroic plays shortly after Dryden's death. At some risk of anticlimax we present them in the order of their appearance as promptbooks.
Coriolanus and Stavisky: The Interpenetration of Art and Politics
Authors: Londré Felicia Hardison
Published: January 2009

Repeatedly throughout French theatre history two subjects have aroused the passions of the French theatregoer: art and politics. The famous opening-night riots at Le Cid in 1636, Hernani in 1830, and Ubu roi in 1896 all resulted in the overthrow of stale artistic conventions by the new art that each of these works represented. Examples of productions that had political repercussions are abundant – like the historical dramas of Marie-Joseph Chénier that did so much to promote the French Revolution (until his Caius Gracchus in 1792 caused a backlash demonstration), or the 1943 Comédie-Française production of Claudel's mystico-religious Soulier de satin that was gleefully interpreted by the French in German-occupied Paris as ‘resistance theatre’. One noteworthy theatrical event that succeeded in arousing both artistic and political passions was not even a French play – nor was it contemporary, although the most often-repeated comment about it was: ‘It seems to have been written just yesterday.’ This was a production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus at the Comédie-Française in the 1933–4 season, just at the time when the Third Republic was nearly toppled by the public's response to press revelations of the Stavisky scandal.
Peter Brook's King Lear: Aesthetic Achievement or Far Side of the Moon?
Authors: Harris Laurilyn J.
Published: January 2009

In 1965, in an interview in Sight and Sound, Peter Brook eloquently discussed the difficulties of filming Shakespearian plays, decrying the ‘sad history of Shakespeare on the screen’ and denouncing the majority of Shakespearian films as ‘pitiful’ and ‘unspeakably bad’. Speaking at UNESCO's Shakespeare Quatercentenary Celebration in Paris, he said, in essence, that Shakespeare was impossible to film at all. However, the winter of 1968–9 found Brook in Northern Jutland, filming one of Shakespeare's most profoundly intricate tragedies, King Lear. When the film was released in 1970–1, critical reaction ranged from rapture to outrage. Nigel Andrews called Brook's Lear ‘a distinct achievement’, praising the acting, the setting, and, above all, Brook's use of the camera to ‘transcend repre-sentationalism’. Frank Kermode hailed Lear as a ‘fully realized and deeply imagined version of this great work … a masterly conception of the play’. Charles Phillips Reilly cautiously labelled the film ‘a mixed bag’, lauding Paul Scofield's performance as Lear and Brook's understanding of the themes of the play, but criticizing the camera work, especially in the storm sequence. Pauline Kael, the formidable reviewer for The New Yorker, simply said ‘I hated it’, and dismissed the film as ‘gray and cold … the drear far side of the moon’. According to Kael, the concept was ‘second-rate’, the script ‘plotless’, and the actors walking corpses.12 She dubbed the film ‘Peter Brook's “Night of the Living Dead”’.
Culture and Political Change: British Radical Theatre in Recent History
Authors: Seymour Anna
Published: January 2009

To speak of placing any theatre work within its ‘social and political context’ has become almost a matter of course, but, at the same time, the epistemological problems presented by the proliferation of critical theory based on fragmented views of society (or society as fragments), proposing tentative opinions and ‘open readings’, makes this a difficult task and expresses the insecurity of the age. The pluralistic accommodations demanded by theories based on identity, for example, can add to this insecurity. It may become ‘safer’ and considered virtuous to offer ‘partial readings’, thus suggesting a democratization of thought which I would argue is frequently spurious. What often results is a disjunction between theory and materiality. Life is experienced through materiality, action cannot be indeterminate, though it may imply indeterminacy. When the actors appear in the performance space to create a relationship with their audience, this action is predicated by material decisions. The size of the space, positioning of the audience, spatial relationships beween actors and set, textures and colours, and when to turn the lights on and off are all the subject of prior consideration conditioned by the intentions of the play's producers. What do they want the play to do? Why are they doing it? They seek an audience in order to expose ideas and to create a theatrical experience. These ideas may be confused or contradictory but they exist. Moreover since all creative work is derivative in some sense (in that it is based on pre-existent tradition), theatre makers cannot claim to be innocent observers. It is naive to suggest that theatre may be somehow ‘neutral’ or ‘open’ since all meaning is constructed on the basis of prior knowledge. Thus I am proposing that there is a crucial dialectical relationship between theory and practice.
From Blackface to ‘Genuine Negroes’: Nineteenth-Century Minstrelsy and the Icon of the ‘Negro’
Authors: Anderson Lisa M.
Published: January 2009

In 1855, the first ‘coloured’ minstrel troupe, the Mocking Bird Minstrels, appeared on a Philadelphia stage. While this company did not stay together long, it heralded a change in the ‘face’ of minstrelsy in the United States. Many other black minstrel troupes would quickly follow, drawing attention away from the white minstrels who had until then dominated the scene. However, the white minstrel show had already iconized a particular representation of the ‘Negro’, which ultimately paved the way for black anti-minstrel attitudes at the end of the nineteenth century. The minstrel show existed in two guises: the white-in-blackface, and the black-in-blackface. The form and content of the minstrel shows changed over time, as well as audience perception of the two different types of performance. The black minstrel show has come to be regarded as a ‘reclaiming’ of slave dance and performance. It differs from white minstrelsy in that it gave theatrical form to ‘signifyin” on white minstrelsy in the manner in which slaves practised ‘signifyin” on whites in real life.
On the Margins: Eastern Canadian Theatre as Post-colonialist Discourse
Authors: Smith Mary Elizabeth
Published: January 2009

Canada became a country in 1867 through the Confederation of the two small eastern (Maritime) colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick with the larger, more inland colonies of Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec). Yet the flag remained the British Union Jack and the constitution resided in London. Canada's own flag was raised only in 1965, and the constitution repatriated only in 1982, both events accompanied by considerable controversy within the nation. The political controversy then (and now) reflects a constantly ambivalent attitude of Canadians towards the relationship between identity and nationalism, an ambivalence that encompasses protean forms of nationalism, including essentialist nationalism and a more elastic concept which recognizes the legitimacy of emotional and cultural ties beyond the national borders.
Cultural Identities, Interculturalism, and Theatre: On the Popular Yoruba Travelling Theatre
Authors: Fiebach Joachim
Published: January 2009

Intercultural processes have become a major concern of European theatre people and critics since the 1970s. They serve to bolster the postmodern discourse marked by endlessly alterable and changing cultures and, therefore, by essentially elusive cultural identities. But the aggressive global expansion of audiovisually mediated performing culture, primarily American television, film, and video, is being viewed as a menace to received cultural identities. There are fears that European cultures are being submerged and disfigured by an ever increasing inundation of overpowering American cultural productions and may even disintegrate altogether.
Actor and Character in African Masquerade Performance
Authors: Harding Frances
Published: January 2009

The tension between form and meaning pervades the entire life of the performer … How is routine life connected to that intensified union of form and meaning which constitutes performance?
Bulgarian Theatre Companies in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
Authors: Roussinova-Zdravkova Snejina
Published: January 2009

The first signs heralding the birth of the Bulgarian theatre date from the middle of the nineteenth century. The first people to put on plays and dramas written for special celebrations were amateurs, schoolmasters as well as other representatives of the Bulgarian intelligentsia, who would gather in their spare time. They may be considered as the first witnesses of the awakening of a national Bulgarian self-consciousness during the years of Ottoman power.
Bulgarian Puppetry: A Stylish Art Form
Authors: Vigouroux-Frey Nicole
Published: January 2009

Primarily a melting-pot of influences and techniques, the rapid development of the Bulgarian puppet theatre into a series of achievements, over a relatively short period of time, may be regarded as archetypal of the enthusiastic quest of a young nation for new artistic modes of expression. An imaginative, vital flexibility characterizes this pervasive art form, aimed at children and adults alike, with its twenty professional companies across the country at the beginning of the 1990s.
Evreinov and Pirandello: Twin Apostles of Theatricality
Authors: Pearson Tony
Published: January 2009

Nikolai Nikolaevich Evreinov (1879–1953) has never been accorded his due credit as one of the most original thinkers and practitioners of modern European theatre. The absence of a rigorous and extensive appraisal of Evreinov's vast creative output has undoubtedly blinded otherwise well-informed critics to the seminal importance of his ideas on the essence of theatre. While names like Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Strindberg, Piscator, Brecht, Artaud, Craig, Appia, Reinhardt, Pirandello and even the lesser known Russians, Vakhtangov and Tairov have all become by-words in the history of experimental and innovative theatre, Evreinov has remained a shadowy figure.
Ut Pictura Tragoedia: An Extrinsic Approach to British Neoclassic and Romantic Theatre
Authors: Wilson Michael S.
Published: January 2009

It is a commonplace among historians that British theatre during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is best characterized on the one hand by its taste for scenic spectacle, and on the other by what Allardyce Nicoll termed ‘a general dramatic debility’. For the first time in British theatrical history, spectacle for its own sake became the principal attraction for most of the audience. Not spoken language, whether poetry or prose, but the sentient lure of elaborate scenery, pantomime, music, and mechanical effects swelled the receipts of the major and minor houses alike. The ascendancy of visual spectacle over dialogue drama of autonomous literary merit is customarily regarded as a debasement of theatre as an art form, attributed with varying degrees of emphasis to the legal shackles of the patent system and the Lord Chamberlain's censorship; to the cavernous expansion of the major houses; and to commercially expedient appeals by the managers to less cultivated tastes in the burgeoning, heterogeneous audience. This durable theory of theatrical prostration is a reductive judgement, the result of critical bias and a limited methodology that have been mind-forged manacles for historical research in theatre since its inception in the 1930s.
Elizabethan Stagings of Hamlet: George Pierce Baker and William Poel
Authors: Hutson William
Published: January 2009

On 21 February 1900, William Poel staged the First Quarto Hamlet for a single performance in the Carpenters' Hall, London. On 5 and 6 April 1904, George Pierce Baker mounted a production of Hamlet with Johnston Forbes Robertson in Sanders Hall at Harvard University. The two productions shared a number of remarkable similarities. Both were attempts to stage the play in the Elizabethan manner; therefore, they departed from illusionistic traditions of the nineteenth century. Although there were distinct differences – for example, one had a cast of amateurs, one was professional; one was performed for the public, one for a university – each was an important step in the reformation of Elizabethan staging. The productions also reflected the pursuits of two men who, although they had similar ideas about Elizabethan drama, were motivated by different objectives.
Intention and Purpose in Rina Yerushalmi'sWoyzeck 91
Authors: Rozik Eli
Published: January 2009

I assume that any work of art reflects authorial intention. Its determination, however, is probably one of the most difficult tasks in interpretation. I also assume that accounts by the authors themselves are not necessarily valid, and indeed they are often conspicuously inadequate. Therefore, for the scholar, the work itself essentially remains the only reliable object of research. In the following paragraphs I intend to suggest, apply and eventually formalize a method of research whose main objective is to determine authorial intentions and purposes in a given theatrical performance text.
The Dawison-Booth Polyglot Othello
Authors: Watermeier Daniel J. , Engle Ron
Published: January 2009

Fifty years ago, the renowned American humorist, Don Marquis, creator of the ‘Archy and Mehitabel’ stories, sat in the dining room of the Players Club and contemplated a playbill: ‘Mr. Bogumil Dawison will appear at the Winter Garden as Othello. Mr. Edwin Booth will play Iago.’ Who was Bogumil Dawison, he wonders? Why did his name appear at the top of the bill above Booth's? Perhaps he had a European reputation like Salvini or Coquelin, but if so why had Marquis never heard of him? He could not have been a Nobody, Marquis concludes, otherwise Booth would never have acted with him. Marquis thinks that perhaps he should find out all he can about Dawison, but then decides that he'll have another brandy instead: ‘Damn Bogumil Dawison! Maybe he was a bad actor, he mooned around and drank himself to death, because the wind was cold and wet … a ridiculous person undoubtedly, and I don't want to know his ghost.’
The Theatrical Figures in Tyrnau's Illustrated Book of Customs
Authors: Belkin Ahuva
Published: January 2009

The late fifteenth century and the whole of the sixteenth century were dark years for the Jewish people, and the Jews of Italy did not escape the grim fate of their brothers. Old decrees were resuscitated and reinforced by a succession of newly-passed harsh measures. Expulsion, forced wearing of the humiliating Jewish badge, censorship of books, the burning of the Talmud and pogroms inspired and led by zealous Christians, were daily occurrences. It is during those tragic years that an astonishing phenomenon emerges on the Italian scene: Jews engage in the performing arts with passion and play an important role in the development of spectacles and shows. They do so in defiance of internal opposition; the fierce objection of Rabbis, ever since Talmudic times, to any form of theatrical entertainment, had never abated.
‘Nobody Was Ready for That’: The Gross Impertinence of Terence Gray and the Degradation of Drama
Authors: Nicholson Steve
Published: January 2009

In 1932 Terence Gray, the innovative director of Cambridge's Festival Theatre, was invited by the monthly journal of the British Drama League to contribute to a series exploring the possible modernization of British theatre. Gray's article was caustic and typically heretical. ‘Let the gangrenous old thing die’, he urged, denying the possibility of revitalizing something so riddled with sickness and already ‘sitting on its long-overdue coffin… waiting for the undertaker’. Within a year, Gray had abandoned not only the Festival theatre, which he had created in 1926, but all theatre.
Shakespeare's Paradoxical Victory: the 1990s
Authors: Krakowska Joanna
Published: January 2009

The fall of communism in Poland has meant that theatre is no longer a substitute for normal public and political life—the Denmark of Hamlet has ceased to be the necessary metaphor for our prison, and the attractions of a gloomy Prince, representing repressed Poland, have waned. There is now a burgeoning interest in Shakespearian comedy, shared by theatre people and their spectators.
The Siting of Greek Theatres
Authors: Ashby Clifford
Published: January 2009

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the orientation of buildings in ancient Greece received a great deal of scholarly attention; since that time, it has fallen from favour. In 1939, William Bell Dinsmoor made an ‘attempt to illustrate a method of obtaining more accurate information concerning the dates of Greek temples and certain details of religious practice through the application of an outmoded theory, that of “orientation”’. When this complex study, replete with trigonometric calculations of seasonal star positions met with little favour, orientation became a dead issue for several decades, only reviving in 1962 with the publication of Vincent Scully's The Earth, The Temple, and the Gods (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Fires and Fire Precautions in the French Theatre
Authors: Hemmings F. W. J.
Published: January 2009

The ‘notice préliminaire’ to L.-H. Lecomte's unfinished Histoire des théâtres de Paris includes a list of eighteen major fires occurring between 1789 and 1900, each of which resulted in the total destruction of a theatre. The date of each disaster is given, as also the date at which the theatre was rebuilt, either on the same site or in a new location. But beyond these brief particulars, Lecomte gives little information on the circumstances and none at all on the probable causes of each catastrophe and the precautions taken subsequently to avert a recurrence. It is the purpose of this paper to flesh out the bare bones of Lecomte's statistics, and to extend the picture to embrace similar disasters befalling provincial playhouses in France over the same period. There had of course been spectacular fires before the Revolution at Paris theatres, notably that which destroyed the opera house located in the Palais-Royal on 6 April 1763 (incidentally severely damaging the palace itself), although, since it occurred during the Easter break, the theatre was fortunately empty at the time. The Opera was eventually rehoused on the same site, but on 8 June 1781 the building once more went up in flames and was reduced to a pile of smouldering rubble. Again there were no victims among the spectators, since it was only when they had left after the evening's performance that the fire broke out; but many of the dancers were still changing into their outdoor clothes at the time and two of them failed to follow the example of the others and make their escape across the roof and down to the street. A total of a dozen or fifteen people perished as a result of this fire, including one elderly woman living in the Cour des Fontaines who died of shock at witnessing the fearsome spectacle.
The Law That Never Was: A Note on The Merchant of Venice
Authors: Schotz Amiel
Published: January 2009

My approach to textual analysis is that of a practising director and actor although I am usually fairly familiar with the main streams of commentary on a particular play or playwright. Thus, when preparing a production I do not often engage in exhaustive examination of the literature. Such reading can actually be harmful, since it may interfere with the direct and intimate contact with the material that can sometimes lead to a fresh insight or approach.
Québécois Theatre: Michel Tremblay and Marie Laberge
Authors: Moss Jane
Published: January 2009

The French colonists (‘habitants’) who began settling Canada in the early seventeenth century brought with them the French language, the Catholic religion, and French cultural traditions. These basic elements of ‘le patrimoine’ continued to evolve in the North American context after France abandoned the colony in 1760. Under the influence of a conservative political establishment and the Catholic Church for two centuries, French Canadians perceived themselves as an isolated minority whose duty was to preserve their language, religion, culture, and agrarian traditions. A collective identity crisis during the 1960s led to the conclusion that the old social, educational, and religious institutions had failed to keep up with the forces of modernization, industrialization, and urbanization which had transformed the province. During the period known as the ‘Révolution tranquille’, political reforms gave Quebec greater autonomy within the Canadian confederation, economic reforms improved material conditions, and educational reforms began preparing future generations for productive careers. Rejecting the term ‘Canadien français’ because it connoted colonial status, Quebec intellectuals adopted the term ‘Québécois’ and called for the creation of a national literature, independent from its French roots and its Anglo-American connections. This distinctive Québécois literature would reflect the reality of their lives and speak to them in the language of Quebec.
Congolese Playwrights as Cultural Revisionists
Authors: Yewah Emmanuel
Published: January 2009

The Central African sub-region has a well developed literary history. Although such countries as Cameroon and Zaire have been the region's literary vanguard, the Congo presents a rather fascinating case study given its size, population and its incredible contribution to national and African literature. Roger Chemain insightfully notes: ‘De toute l'Afrique dite “francophone”, le Congo compte le plus fort pourcentage d'écrivains par rapport à l'ensemble de la population au point qu'il peut prétendre à être l'un des “poles” culturels de cette partie de l'Afrique, au même titre que le Sénégal ou le Cameroun, pourtant beaucoup plus peuplés.’ Indeed, the Congo has produced some of the continent's most innovative and daring political writings. In the theatre, a number of playwrights have attempted to take issue with post-colonial dictatorships and cultural assumptions inherited from African traditions and colonialism.
Nutshells at the Rose
Authors: Orrell John
Published: January 2009

The archaeological digs at the sites of the Rose and Globe theatres have given us a fund of new information about the theatres, and not least about the composition of their central, open yards. Those of us who took part in the campaign to protect the Rose from the great caterpillar-tracked machines that loomed over it in May 1989 will remember the surprisingly pristine look of its mortar yard, smashed through to be sure by the concrete piles of the 1950s office block that had by then been removed, and damaged around its perimeters by Elizabethan erosion of one sort or another. Yet much of it still looked clean and smooth after its four centuries of watery slumber. One day it was thrown open to an invited audience of celebrities, and bystanders could watch as Dustin Hofman—then playing The Merchant of Venice at the Phoenix—trod where the groundlings had stood long ago, or as Judi Dench—not yet a Dame—picked her way across the yard, her narrow heels apparently doing no damage at all.
Sociocultural Analysis: National and Cross-cultural Performance
Authors: Shevtsova Maria
Published: January 2009

It is well known that theatre semiotics follows the metamorphoses of theories of semiotics in general and, like them, draws on Charles Peirce and American pragmatism, Saussurean linguistics and the linguistics of the Prague Circle, Russian formalism and French structuralism. These currents converge in the theatre semiotics of the 70s, producing a methodology that is highly scientist, technical, self-reflexive and abstract. This type of theatre semiotics may no longer be an up-markettopic, nor is it stone-dead. Its fundamental principle of ‘abstract objectivism’, as Bakhtin/Voloshinov describe it, survives despite the greater flexibility provided by its attention to such areas as reception theory and theories of cultural systems. Its inclusion of reception theory acknowledged of the fact that spectators exist in the construction of semiosis. Ideas concerning cultural systems and, thus, primarily those concerning codes were used to indicate the importance of cultural contexts in the processes of signification.
Beyond Style: Typologies of Performance Analysis
Authors: Balme Christopher
Published: January 2009

The theory of mise en scène we are trying to establish allows us to eschew impressionistic discourse on the style, inventiveness and originality of the director who adds his so-called personal touch to a precious text regarded as closed and inviolate.
Interaction of Style and Meaning in Drama and Performance: The Case of Blood Wedding
Authors: Blum Bilha
Published: January 2009

In his essay entitled ‘Poetry and Drama’, T. S. Eliot states that ‘a mixture of prose and verse in the same play is generally to be avoided’. The reason, says Eliot, lies in the fact that ‘each transition makes the auditor aware, with a jolt, of the medium’ (p. 13). Alternating use of prose and verse within the same work of art is justified, he adds, only when the author's specific purpose is to produce just such ‘a jolt’ in his audience. The case of Lorca's Blood Wedding and its recent 1990 Israeli production calls for a reassessment of Eliot's analytical approach.
The National Drama
Authors: Bell Barbara
Published: January 2009

The National Drama was a nineteenth-century dramatic genre unique to Scotland, dealing with Scottish characters in Scottish settings. It has been neglected this century by scholars of theatre and of Scottish history in general. This is a curious oversight given the importance of the National Drama in the development of the Scottish theatre and to the image of Scotland as a nation at home and abroad. The omission may have been the result of a too close association with Sir Walter Scott in the minds of many for whom the phrase ‘High Tory Romanticism’ summed up Scott's career and influence. But, the National Drama is worthy of fresh consideration because, although it is true that dramatizations of some of Scott's Scottish works formed the core of the national repertoire, the National Drama comprised a wide variety of pieces from a range of sources and its influence over the Scottish theatre was considerable.
‘The Quest for a Truly Representative Scottish Native Drama’: The Scottish National Players
Authors: Marshalsay Karen Anne
Published: January 2009

The Scottish National Players were the most interesting and important group in Scottish theatre in the 1920s, and the ‘national drama’ which they produced defined Scottish theatre for almost two decades. The SNP, as they were known, became the focus for the aspirations of young people wanting to progress to a professional career within theatre and were responsible for training a whole generation of Scottish actors. Later theatre groups, such as the Curtain and the Gateway, were greatly influenced by the Scottish National Players, who also made a major contribution to the early years of broadcasting in Scotland. Though mainly an amateur group, the SNP recognized the necessity for a national theatre company to tour as widely as possible, and in doing so helped to fire the enthusiasm for amateur drama which swept Scotland in the thirties. Many of the problems and debates which confronted them in their attempt to provide Scotland with a national theatre, such as the vexed question of whether production should be restricted to Scottish plays, irrespective of quality in the hope of better things to come, are still relevant issues.
Under New Management: The Changing Direction of 7:84 (Scotland)
Authors: Maguire Tom
Published: January 2009

7:84 (Scotland) Theatre Company was launched in 1973 through an epoch-making tour of The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil, pioneering small-scale touring theatre in Scotland. The arrival of the company coincided with a more general resurgence in indigenous theatre and its success heralded the rise of touring companies as an integral part of the theatrical scene. During the 1970s, its reputation was established as a campaigning left-wing company which combined music and documentary in shows touring to popular audiences throughout Scotland. Although 7:84 had been a revenue-funded client of the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) since 1976, in January 1988 SAC announced that it was to withdraw the company from the list of revenue-funded clients from April 1989. On 22 July 1988 John McGrath, writer, director and co-founder of the company resigned as Artistic Director, levelling allegations of political interference at SAC because of this proposal. The company was taken over by David Hayman, Gerard Kelly, and Jo Beddoe. By the beginning of 1992, Jo Beddoe had left the company and the intention of Kelly and Hayman to resign had been made public.
Glasgow's Tramway: Little Diagilevs and Large Ambitions
Authors: Cameron Alasdair
Published: January 2009

When dawn broke on 1 January 1991, Glasgow's year as European City of Culture was over. It was time to count the cost, £32 million it emerged, to pick up the pieces and to begin the inquest. As Glasgow is a city self-conscious to a fault, with an infinite capacity for self-analysis and self-flagellation, the inquest began long before 1990 had even dawned. The predictable round of ‘Whose City?’ and ‘What Culture?’ articles poured out as soon as Glasow had been awarded the title in 1986. Predictably, many of those early doubters ended up getting involved in the City of Culture events and profiting from them. Indeed, even those most virulently opposed to the whole notion, a group called ‘Workers City’, which rallied around the Glasgow novelist James Kellman, provided what was possibly the year's most entertaining and certainly longest running event. The furious and intensely public debate centred on the ramifications of the £4 million lost by an exhibition called Glasgow's Glasgow.
Marginality and English-Canadian Theatre
Authors: Nunn Robert
Published: January 2009

Le théâtre canadien anglais a toujours été et est encore un art marginal. Bien que certaines transformations culturelles et économiques–nous pensons, par exemple, à la poussée exponentielle de la culture de masse–aient contribué à marginaliser le théâtre, au Canada aussi bien que dans le reste du monde, nous considérons que cette marginalisation constitue un élément positif de la culture post-coloniale et postmoderne. Le théâtre Canadian anglais, plus que tout autre, est un produit presque exclusif des théâtres «à cote», ou alternatifs. Trois pièces récentes, deux écrites en anglais (Love and Angerde George F. Walker etDry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasingde Tomson Highway) et une en français (Á toi, pour toujouis, ta Marie-Lou, de Michel Tremblay dans la traduction de John Van Burek et Bill Glassco), présentent en raccourci l'esthétique actuelle du nouveau théâtre canadien, qui est ici analysé dans les rapports complexes entretenus entre les divers courants d'activité théatrale, tant au point de vue de la représentation de ces pièces que par rapport à leurs structures textuelles.
Picture and Counter-Picture: An Attempt to Involve Context in the Interpretation of Théâtre Italien Iconography
Authors: Holm Bent
Published: January 2009

On 23 February 1653 the 15-year old Louis XIV performed in the court ballet La Nuit (Plate 21), at the Petit-Bourbon in Paris. A political allegory with clear allusions to recent events, it represented the suppressed rebellion of the Fronde, with a promise of a glorious future for the realm. The dénouement featured the monarch in an apotheosis, in the shape of Le Roy Soleil (Sun King), who dispels the dark forces of the night. This was certainly Louis's first appearance in the role, but definitely not the last.
Major Portraits and Minor Series in Eignteenth-Century Theatrical Portraiture
Authors: Aliverti Maria Ines
Published: January 2009

In recent years, eighteenth-century actors' portraits have deservedly received growing attention from both art and theatre historians. For its extent, variety and quality, for its social and aesthetic implications, eighteenth-century theatrical portraiture demands a refined theoretical approach: it has helped to create an interdisciplinary field where new methods in dealing with theatre iconography have been profitably deployed. English and American scholars have contributed to develop this field in a specific way, devoting single studies and monographs to portraits of actors. In spite of the importance of French theatrical portraiture, French contributions are less significant. In most cases theatrical portraits are considered exclusively by art historians, and in the context of catalogues or monographs on a single painter. In France the stage portrait is often undervalued: it is relegated to a pictorial genre considered as inferior (tableaux de théâtre), or it is thought to derive from a disreputable theatricalization of history painting; in any case there has been a real difficulty in submitting these images to critical and specific investigation. In short, even if a new approach to theatrical iconography prevails over the strict utilitarianism of the theatre historians, who—in the best cases—sought in actors' portraits only documentary evidence of acting practice, costume or set design, more work has to be done by art historians, to accord theatrical images the independent status of an iconographic text.
Early Photographic Attempts to Record Performance Sequence
Authors: Senelick Laurence
Published: January 2009

In a recent issue of New Theatre Quarterly an article on the visual documentation of performance notes that theatre has proved to be resistant to ‘mechanical reproduction’ and that theatre practitioners are unconvinced of its value. The author goes on, however, to argue for the ‘urgent need’ for full archives of video recordings of performances. She even quotes Eugenio Barba to the effect that what really matters in performance is not the immediate effect on the spectators, but a kind of afterglow and the impression to be made on future generations.
Havel's Actors
Authors: Quinn Michael L.
Published: January 2009

In Václav Havel's first published essay, ‘The Poet in the Contemporary Era’, he proposed a theory of interpretive understanding that emphasized a poetic response to the world, a combination of imagination with hermeneutic engagement. In this Heideggerian perspective, the things and events in the world, and the people, too, have aesthetic qualities—whether valuable or banal—that a poetic attitude toward perception can discover, and perhaps even communicate. Moreover, poets are supposed, in the same essay, to be unable to separate the quality of their literary efforts from the quality of their lives, i.e. ‘someone who writes kitsch poems on love has presumably had a kitsch love in life, too’.
A Commedia dell'arte Lazzo
Authors: Speaight George
Published: January 2009

Among the abundant iconographical records of the commedia dell' arte are a handful of engravings depicting vivaciously capering single characters, of which three have been reproduced by Allardyce Nicoll, where they are identified merely as ‘seventeenth-century engravings’. The same subjects were apparently copied by Adrian de Winter (1615–?) in a set of six groups of commedia characters entitled Titulus Stultorum, where they appear in reverse with the addition of half a dozen characters copied from Callot's Balli di Sfessania.
It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1865) and Prison Conditions in Nineteenth-Century England
Authors: Barrett Daniel
Published: January 2009

The première of It Is Never Too Late to Mend at the Princess's Theatre on 4 October 1865 marked the appropriately tumultuous return of Charles Reade to the London stage after an absence of nine years. That night, one of the most memorable disturbances in the nineteenth-century theatre occurred when the drama critics in attendance, led by Frederick Guest Tomlins of the Morning Advertiser, demanded that the play be halted because of its offensive subject matter and one particularly shocking scene. The dispute became a cause celebre among critics, dramatists, and the general public and was recalled (with varying degrees of accuracy) years later by its participants, witnesses, and other interested parties.
The Restorative Function of Language in Armand Gatti's Experimental Theatre for the ‘Exclus’ of Society
Authors: Knowles Dorothy
Published: January 2009

Armand Gatti is a recognized writer of politically committed plays. Jean-Paul Sartre speaking from the stage of the Théâtre National Populaire (T.N.P.) in Paris after the banning there of Gatti's La Passion du Général Franco saluted him as a leading exponent, along with Brecht, Gorki and Dürrenmatt of the popular theatre of the sixties.
Theatrical Pageants in the Second World War
Authors: Nicholson Steve
Published: January 2009

During the 1920s and 30s, several left-wing theatre movements developed in Britain, committed to creating a political discourse in venues and forms unknown within the existing cultural mainstream. Such organizations as The Workers′ Theatre Movement, Unity Theatre and Theatre of Action were all–to a greater or lesser extent–resolutely oppositional to the Establishment and outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain's powers of censorship. In the early 40s the situation changed, as individuals and theatrical forms previously associated with the Left were adopted by the Establishment, most notably through ENSA and the BBC.