bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Drama of Disease and Derision: The Plays of Thomas Bernhard
Authors: Esslin Martin
Published: April 2013

In the German-speaking world, and in the whole of continental Europe, Thomas Bernhard, born in Holland of Austrian parents in 1931 (on the 10 February, the date also of Brecht's birth), is generally accepted as one of the leading literary figures of his time, the author of a remarkable series of short stories, seven major novels and ten successful plays; yet in the English speaking sphere, he is still practically unknown. One of his plays, Die Macht der Gewohnheit (The Force of Habit), has been translated, was briefly performed at the National Theatre in London in 1976, and proved a resounding failure. But apart from that, his name has hardly been mentioned.
Moving into the Eighties: The German Theatre a Decade after the Breakthrough
Authors: Stenberg Peter
Published: April 2013

If the term "the zero hour" ("Stunde Null") is legitimate as a description of the state of German literature at the end of the war, then most so surely for the theatre. In 1945 almost half of the 200 German theatres lay in ruins and only the Zuricher Schauspielhaus had any continuous connection to the pre-Nazi German stage. All other German-language theatres had been isolated from the rest of world drama for ten years. While prose writers and poets could continue to write and publish in exile, dramatists were basically cut off from their means of communication, the quality of Brecht's exile plays (if not their production) remaining the exception which proves the rule. The establishment of the Bundesrepublik almost five years after Stunde Null and the priority given by it to the reestablishment of the German theatre resulted in a major effort being spent on the rebuilding of the theatres, a massive project which was concluded as late as the early seventies. Thirty years have now passed since the founding of the Bundesrepublik and thirty-five since Stunde Null. A generation has grown up in that time and experienced a most dramatic cultural metamorphosis. Children who were fifteen at the end of the war, and are thus untainted by the guilt of the war their parents could not escape, are now fifty, and this post-war generation has had sufficient time to develop a theatrical world of its own to fill the theatres it has so conscientiously rebuilt. It is a good time to draw conclusions about the relative success of the effort, an effort whose economic fulfillment in many ways symbolizes the tremendous financial growth of the Bundesrepublik. In addition, the start of a new decade offers a good opportunity to pass judgement on the playwrights of the generation, to determine whether they have successfully portrayed a period of extraordinary social change in which the complete dominance of the war has been replaced by the ever-increasing problems of a materialistic consumerism and the subsequent loss of the spiritual and familial strengths which had previously been central to the German communal structure.
DDR-Dramatik: Major Critical Studies, 1966-78, of East German Playwrights
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

Bibliographical information on "DDR-Dramatik" is hard to come by. The best sources are the Bibliographie der deutschen Sprach-und Literaturwissenschaft and the MLA International Bibliography, but neither one separates material on East German literature from that on other Germanic literatures, and neither can be fully relied upon to list the important books, parts of books, and articles on any aspect of modem drama. Therefore it is difficult to piece together a good working list of the major critical studies, scholarly contributions, and literary interviews concerning such dramatists as Peter Hacks, Heiner Milller, Volker Braun, and Helmut Baierl.
Book Reviews
Authors: Curb Rosemary , Knapp Bettina , McGuinness Arthur , Schmitt Natalie Crohn , Jenckes Norma , Moss Leonard , Yacowar Maurice , Schlueter June , Pronko Leonard , Carpenter Charles , Carpenter Charles , Morrison Kristen
Published: April 2013

Janet Brown, Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis, reviewed by Rosemary Curb

Thomas John Donahue, The Theatre of Fernando Arrabal: A Garden of Earthly Delights, reviewed by Bettina L. Knapp

Elizabeth Hale Winkler, The Clown in Modern Anglo-Irish Drama, reviewed by Arthur E. McGuinness

Anthony Bradley, William Butler Yeats, reviewed by Natalie Crohn Schmitt

J. L. Wisenthal, ed., Shaw and Ibsen: Bernard Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism and Related Writings, reviewed by Norma Jenckes

James J. Martine, Critical Essays on Arthur Miller, reviewed by Leonard Moss

Felicia Hardison Londre, Tennessee Williams, reviewed by Maurice Yacowar

Nelvin Vos, The Great Pendulum of Becoming: Images in Modern Drama, reviewed by June Schlueter

Maurice Valency, The End of the World: An Introduction to Contemporary Drama, reviewed by Leonard C. Pronko

Kimball King, Twenty Modern British Playwrights: A Bibliography, 1956 to 1976, reviewed by Charles A. Carpenter

Kimball King, Ten Modern Irish Playwrights: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography, reviewed by Charles A. Carpenter

Edward A. Kopper, John Millington Synge: A Reference Guide, reviewed by Kristin Morrison
The Duality of Power in the Theater of Luis Riaza
Authors: Cazorla Hazel
Published: April 2013

The year 1975 marked in Spain the end of an era: with the passing of the dictatorship, Spanish intellectuals and artists were about to taste a freedom unknown for forty years. Dramatists whose talents had necessarily been exercised under the constraints of censorship and the pressures of a dogmatic society were suddenly able to write with unaccustomed liberty. When comparing the arts in post-war Spain with those of the rest of Europe and the United States, critics had always taken into account the fact that Spaniards labored under the disadvantage of a peculiarly Spanish type of ultrapuritanical censorship imposed after the excesses of the Civil War. To be a writer under the Franco regime, especially in such a highly visible art as the theater, meant having to dupe the authorities, if possible, by exercising all sorts of ingenuity to get one's message through to a limited minority. Some writers, frustrated by the endless obstacle race, gave up the struggle to write creatively within their native country, choosing exile or silence.' Many others (and to them we owe the continuance of the Spanish theater) chose what came to be known as the way of "posibilismo," that is, of writing within the possibilities of the given situation, in the belief that to keep the theater alive it was necessary to find a way to publish and produce plays somehow. even if it meant outwardly complying with the censor's whims. Censored theater was better than no theater at all, they reasoned, and, ironically, some of the best features of their work resulted precisely from the necessity of having to cope with this difficulty.
Reality Perception and Stage Setting in Griselda Gambaro' s Las paredes and Antonio Buero Vallejo's Lafundacion
Authors: Podol Peter
Published: April 2013

In his introduction to the book Encounter with Reality, John Horrocks makes the following observation: "To a large degree, man can control reality-even as he can create, he can destroy, and sometimes he is defenseless, and reality can be imposed upon him. But of all man's activities, the struggle to come to terms with reality is at the apex of his experience." Human nature is such that the confrontation of reality I under any conditions, is never an exact replication of the environment, but rather an individual process of rearrangement and modulation. And in Griselda Gambaro's Las paredes and Antonio Buero Vallejo's La fundacion, both of which present a dramatic milieu permeated with imprisoning totalitarian forces, the need on the part of the protagonists to seek refuge in a subjective, inner reality becomes paramount. The implementation of the process of modifying reality is manifested through the stage settings of the plays. This technique involves the audience in a direct and immediate manner in the task of defining and dealing with the nature of man's existence, while posing the Pirandellian question of the interrelationship between life and form , between illusion and reality.
The Role of the "Guardians" in T.S. Eliot's Cocktail Party
Authors: Hammerschmidt Hildegard
Published: April 2013

When T.S. Eliot's Cocktail Party had its world premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949, the audience was not only deeply impressed with the play, but obviously also deeply puzzled. On 24 August 1949 the Scotsman commented: "it [The Cocktail Party] is bound to be some kind of message to humanity." Yet it could not be stated precisely what the message was about. And after more than thirty years The Cocktail Party still contains some of the enigmas which at that time confused even the most sophisticated critics. In the meantime the European drama has, of course, seen a number of various new theatrical currents: the "Theatre of Despair," a worldwide reception of the plays of Bertolt Brecht, the "New Wave" and the "Second Wave" in the British theatre, the renaissance of the history play, the "Theatre of Cruelty," the "Comedy of Menace," the "Theatre of the Absurd" and the new documentary, to mention only the most important. With the plays of Beckett and Ionesco, however, literature in general seemed to have reached a kind of spiritual dead end. In attempting to find a way out, playwrights tended to employ magic and the occult, striving to restore the original density and strangeness of the world. Looking back now, one realizes that the craving for the more mysterious aspects of reality seems to have been anticipated in Eliot's Cocktail Party with its strong emphasis on ritual magic.
Thematic Contexts in Four of Yeats's Plays
Authors: Vlasopolos Anca
Published: April 2013

As the twentieth century unfolded, Yeats met with a number of disappointments, first in love and politics, then in his cherished hope for Unity of Culture through a national theatre of Ireland. He had expected to revive and direct Irish culture by creating a drama devoted to the life of the imagination and rooted in the myths and legends of the people. As director of the Abbey Theatre, he discovered economic and political realities of the "management of men," as well as of audience expectations and demands, which made him profoundly disenchanted with his age. Between 1912 and 1916 when he wrote At the Hawk' s Well, Yeats met Pound and through him came in contact with the Noh drama of Japan, which provided him not so much with a dramatic model as with an aesthetic and cultural justification for his playwrighting tendencies, as well as for the themes that he explored in his poetry.
Justice Breeds Murder: Justice in Diirrenmatt as Theme and as Theatrical Material
Authors: Robinson Gabrielle
Published: April 2013

In Durrenmatt's plays "justice is at stake," as Palamedes tells his father in The Blind Man. Durrenmatt tends to examine every situation and every action from the standpoint of justice, discussing such themes as the possibility of changing the world through justice, the perversion and parody of justice in our world, and man's injustice versus the justice of God. As far as his characters are concerned, they are obsessed with it; it is the idea of justice which makes their existence meaningful. "If there is no justice, one parts easily from it [life]," says the man who is about to die in Nighttime Talk With A Despised Man. Durrenmatt's characters fight to their last breaths for their visions of justice, however distorted. For no matter how elevated or debased their aims, their conflicts arise from their pursuits of justice: whether hunting down a criminal, sentencing a son, robbing a bank, seeking revenge, destroying or saving an empire, they all believe themselves to be fighting for justice and order. Some of them, like the old lady in The Visit, seek personal justice for wrongs they have suffered, but most of Durrenmatt's major heroes pursue absolute social and historical justice. The Emperor in Romulus the Great sets himself up as Rome's judge and condemns his corrupt civilization to death in the name of justice. In The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi, Mississippi fights to reinstitute iron Mosaic justice in his unjust and chaotic society. The Bastard in King John uses all the power of his reason to work for justice and order in his war-tom country, whereas Titus of Titus Andronicus seeks justice for Rome as well as for his tortured family.
Studies of Wole Soyinka's Drama: An International Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

Critical studies of the drama of Wale Soyinka, by far the most prominent African dramatist, have mushroomed in recent years. The only available bibliography, published in 1976, lists no more than a third of the substantial studies that now exist. The following checklist attempts to remedy this situation. It is an offshoot of my continuing research on an international bibliography of modem drama criticism. As such, it derives from personally examining over 1500 periodicals and thousands of books published since 1966 in all Roman-alphabet languages. It omits reviews and short, general pieces, but aims to include everything (even the few items published before 1966) vital to the student of Soyinka's plays. The checklist will be updated, in effect, by my annual bibliographies in Modern Drama.
Exiles, The Great God Brown, and the Specter of Nietzsche
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: April 2013

There are striking similarities in the lives of James Joyce and Eugene O'Neill, similarities that can be attributed in part to their commonly shared Irish roots — dominant fathers; passive, religious mothers; Catholic education — and in part to their shared desire to escape those roots and become self-begetting in their person and in their art.
Ethical Perversity in America: Some Observations on David Mamet's American Buffalo
Authors: Barbera Jack
Published: April 2013

David Mamet, currently an associate director of Chicago's Goodman Theater, was born in Chicago in 1947 and grew up on the city's South Side. He attributes his sense of dramatic rhythm in part to a job during his high-school years as busboy at Second City, the famous Chicago improvisational cabaret. After several years in New England attending college and working at various theaters as a house manager and actor, Mamet returned to his native city and a series of odd jobs which included a stint teaching theater classes at the University of Chicago. Some of his plays were staged at small Chicago theaters during the early '70's — including the St. Nicholas Theater of which Mamet was a founding member and first artistic director. The title of my essay is a pun on the title of a play for which Mamet received the Joseph Jefferson Award (best new Chicago play) in 1974, and later an Obie Award, Sexual Perversity in Chicago. So there is some reason to associate him with that city. It is the setting of many of his plays, including the one I shall examine here. For American Buffalo Mamet again received an Obie, and it was named the best play in 1977 by the New York Drama Critics' Circle.
Hauptmann's Hannele: Naturalistic Fairy Tale and Dream Play
Authors: Nicholson David
Published: April 2013

Central to the criticism of fairy-tale plays is the question of how the fairy world relates to reality. Playwrights as well as critics have taken up the question; A Midsummer Night's Dream illustrates Shakespeare's interest in it at the very beginnings of the genre. Hermann Hettner, commenting on the Märchenlustspiel in Das moderne Drama (1852), points to Shakespeare's fairy playas an example of those which juxtapose a real world and a spirit world so as to portray the latter as the source of superior truth. Such plays posit the existence of a numinous idealistic realm essentially to criticize social reality or the limitations of a rationalistic view of life.
The Politics of Brutality: Toward a Definition of the Critical Volksstück
Authors: Cocalis Susan
Published: April 2013

The critical Volksstiick, which has been enjoying a new vogue on the West German stage, is a dramatic genre alien to the Anglo-American tradition, and although recent English works like Bond's Saved, Pinter's earliest plays, or dramas of the kitchen-sink school could be related to it, no one would call them folk plays. The term "folk play" in English would rather designate unliterary, impromptu dramatic performances like the mumming play that are usually accompanied by song and dance (sword dance, morris dance) and given at village festivals by the villagers themselves. These plays usually treat the themes of death and resurrection, honor local worthies, or celebrate heroic feats. Since this term does exist in English and does refer to a historical form of the drama, the German term "Volksstück" will be retained throughout this paper.
Shakespearean and Pirandellian: Hamlet and Six Characters in Search of an Author
Authors: Charney Maurice
Published: April 2013

Since there has been so much "throwing about of brains" in Hamlet, it is not amiss that we should pose some difficult questions about the relation of Pirandello and Shakespeare. We are not primarily interested in how Shakespearean was Pirandello, but rather in the opposite side of the equation: how Pirandellian was Shakespeare? This historical question forces Shakespeare into a fortuitous and willy-nilly relationship with Pirandello, which is the best way to study how the later writer could have influenced the earlier one. In a literal sense he could not possibly have influenced him at all, yet there is an affinity of mind and temperament that cannot be overlooked. If we put aside for the moment the obstacle of historical relation, the Shakespearean and the Pirandellian are two analogous modes of a theatrical probing of reality, and the plays of Shakespeare and Pirandello can be made to comment on each other. Most obviously, Pirandello's Henry IV relates to Shakespeare' s Hamlet, 2 yet the masculine-feminine games of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and its illusionistic frame play resemble Pirandello's self-conscious theatrical experiments. In A Midsummer Night's Dream the imaginative displacements of the forest world are very much in the Pirandellian mode.
Dramatists at (Meta) Play: Shakespeare's Hamlet, II, ii, II. 410-591 and Pirandello's Henry IV
Authors: Levenson Jill
Published: April 2013

Unlike most people, plays that indulge in self-analysis often display wit, objectivity, and vision. This kind of drama — what critics have termed the "process as product" — originated in "the quintessential renaissance of Shakespeare, Calderon, and Racine," and burgeoned again in the twentieth century. During the first era, Shakespeare worked the most brilliant variations on "the idea of the play"; during the second, Pirandello worked the most influential ones. Perhaps this shared fascination with a particular stage convention stems from certain likenesses in the two playwrights' associations with the theater: both Shakespeare and Pirandello came to drama from other arts, narrative and poetic; both became absorbed not only with the writing of plays but also with the management of theater companies and production; and both produced dramatic works in which they contemplated — variously and often — the nature of theater.
Madness, Revenge, and the Metaphor of the Theater in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Pirandello's Henry IV
Authors: Poser Matthew
Published: April 2013

Both Shakespeare's Hamlet and Pirandello's Henry IV illuminate their actions with a play metaphor that forms a kind of perceptual lens through which we may study and come to understand the conduct of the characters and their tragic predicaments. Professor Anne Righter puts the matter clearly regarding Shakespeare's drama: "Hamlet is a tragedy dominated by the idea of the play." In plays like Six Characters and Henry IV, Pirandello makes his explicit thematic content the coalescence of human identity with the roles it chooses. The psyche's capacity to express and defend itself in enacted identities is the basic subject matter which underlies these dramas' broader philosophical perspectives. As "Henry" says to the Marchioness Matilda Spina, "you too, Madam, are in masquerade ...".
Chekhov and the Contemporary Theatre
Authors: Hubbs Clayton
Published: April 2013

In recent years we have seen a new appreciation of Chekhov's plays on the part of general audiences as well as students of drama. Directors have emphasized Chekhov's contemporary quality, and critics have attempted to define elements in his dramatic techniques that link him with Beckett, Pinter, and other contemporary playwrights. In this updating of Chekhov, the nature of his dramatic realism has been a subject of increasingly enlightened debate. Bernard Beckerman, in a recent article in Modern Drama on "The Artifice of 'Reality' in Chekhov and Pinter," begins with a summary of the two main sources of "reality" in the drama as a starting point for a discussion of Chekhov's contemporaneity. The first is "the impress of reality which comes from our habit of relating a play or a scene to some broader context." The second source of "reality," which Beckerman identifies with the theatre of Chekhov and Pinter, is the presentation itself, "the structure of the action scene by scene" — the reality which the character on the stage projects in "recurrent activities," fixed routines.
Book Reviews
Authors: Estrine Mark , Lederer Katherine , Arnold Armin , Riése Laure
Published: April 2013

Doris V. Falk, Lillian Hellman, reviewed by Mark W. Estrin

Katherine Lederer, Lillian Hellman, reviewed by Mark W. Estrin

Lois C. Gottlieb, Rachel Crothers, reviewed by Mark W. Estrin

Steven H. Bills, Lillian Hellman: An Annotated Bibliography, reviewed by Katherine Lederer

Mary Marguerite Riordan, Lillian Hellman, A Bibliography: 1926-1978, reviewed by Katherine Lederer

Kenneth S. Whitton, The Theatre of Friedrich Diirrenmatt: A Study in the Possibility of Freedom, reviewed by Armin Arnold

René Bablet, ed., Les Voies de La création théâtrale, reviewed by Laure Riése
Snoo Wilson: Enfant Terrible of the English Stage
Authors: Bierman James
Published: April 2013

Winning a coveted Bicentennial Fellowship to the United States in 1980 confirmed Snoo Wilson's election to the ranks of England's most “promising” playwrights. He found himself following in the footsteps of other recipients of the award, such as David Edgar, who were then “promising” and are now enonnously successful. What preceded Snoo to California was a reputation for wildness.
David Mercer and the Mixed Blessing of Television
Authors: Taylor John
Published: April 2013

The history of television drama in Britain, and the situation of serious dramatists in relation to it, is scattered with ironies, most of which are perfectly exemplified in the prolific even though sadly curtailed career of David Mercer. Television giveth, and television taketh away -never more evidently than in Mercer's case. Mercer first made his reputation in television, and though he was to become a fairly productive writer for the theatre (and occasional writer for the big screen), he continued throughout his life to write for television. Of course he regretted, as anyone in the medium must, the ephemerality of the television play, and the cursory attention (if any attention at all) which is likely to be vouchsafed it. And yet he was a consummate master of the form, in a way that he never quite became with the stage play, and was never discouraged enough to skimp his talents because it was “only” a television script. Indeed, if anything he put more of himself into his television work than into anything else; he was rewarded, if that is the word, by having more of his television plays published than any other writer I can think of. And yet the fact remains that when he died (in 1980, at the age of fifty-two), his reputation was felt to be circumscribed by his, as some commentators saw it, perverse dedication to television: if only, they said, he had ever really made it by achieving a comparable success in the theatre.
The Dumb Waiter: Pinter's Play with the Audience
Authors: Van Laan Thomas
Published: April 2013

Published commentary on The Dumb Waiter is for the most part rather unsatisfactory. Instead of analyzing the playas Pinter wrote it, most commentators rely on distortions and fabrications -or, at best, conclusions based on guesswork -to concoct a new play of their own making. The discrepancy is most apparent in the commentators' accounts of how the play ends. In the playas Pinter wrote it, after Gus has gone out the door on the left to get a glass of water, he says -Ben hears through the speaking tube that the victim they have been waiting for “has arrived and will be coming in straight way. The normal method to be employed. ” Ben calls Gus, gets ready while the toilet flushes off left, calls Gus again, and then the play closes with the following stage direction:
Cinematic Fidelity and the Forms of Pinter's Betrayal
Authors: Brater Enoch
Published: April 2013

Pinter's characters in Betrayal are boring. Preoccupied with children, home, extramarital affairs, tablecloths, and happiness, they recite the lines that have been assigned to them as educated, pampered, polite, moderately cultivated, upper-middle-class Londoners. Even their taste in modern literature is as unexceptional as it is predictable. Though they may occasionally feel obliged to read Yeats on Torcello or to take their summer holidays in the Lake District, what they really enjoy are the mundane little novels about ordinary people much like themselves in “the new Casey or Spinks.'” Here everything is ordered, fixed, and, above all, contained. Life does not pass these people by; it merely goes on for them. “Betrayal” is in this context a rather lofty word for such bourgeois and unimaginative infidelities. For Pinter's people in this play only think there is depth to their passions: though their lives are not exactly meaningless, the fact is they are not especially interesting. What is there about this trio, then, that compels us to study in detail every move they make as we reconstruct their sad, sometimes comic, and always ironic chronicle of who-did-what-to-whom, when, where, and under-what-circumstances? To answer these questions we must first take a hard look at some of the dramatic forms Pinter employs so skillfully in this work.
Orton's Loot as “Quotidian Farce”: The Intersection of Black Comedy and Daily Life
Authors: Charney Maurice
Published: April 2013

After his mother died, one of the few remembrances Joe Orton wanted was her false teeth: “I found my mother's teeth in a drawer. I kept them. To amaze the cast of Loot . .. . '” Orton's diary for January 4, 1967, supplies more details about the incident:
Adultery is Next to Godlessness: Dramatic Juxtaposition in Peter Nichols's Passion Play
Authors: Schlueter June
Published: April 2013

In the past several years, the London theatre has experienced a diffusion of the intense politicism that characterized its fringe in the late 1960's and early 1970'S. Though the same generation of playwrights remains the lifeblood of the contemporary stage and politics are often its concern, the political spine that gave structure to the theatre of a decade ago has splintered into sinews of dramatic subjects, not the least of which is sex. Yet while those playwrights who favor sexual politics over just-plain politics have a ready market in both London and New York, some of the most dramatically interesting plays have come from those who have transcended the Neil Simon version of sex that has dominated the contemporary theatre. Harold Pinter, for example, would seem an unlikely reviver of the “eternal triangle,” yet this veteran British playwright turned a play about adultery into one of the conversation pieces of the seventies. Betrayal, which dramatizes in reverse the nine-year love affair of a man with his best friend's wife, suggests the formal challenge of the contemporary playwright who sees sex as a legitimate dramatic subject but is unprepared to reduce it to a Simonesque smirk or a class in Fellatio 101.
Bond, Shaffer, Stoppard, Storey: An International Checklist of Commentary
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

After the regenerating spark of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956, the ensuing decade brought four English dramatists into world prominence: Osborne himself, Arnold Wesker, John Arden, and Harold Pinter. When their fortunes waned somewhat in the late sixties, a new cluster ofdramatists -John Russell Taylor dubbed them “the second wave” -coopted a large share of the limelight. Again, four major figures emerged: Edward Bond, Peter Shaffer, Tom Stoppard, and David Storey. The amount of critical attention given to this group, especially Bond and Stoppard, has escalated in recent years to the extent that more than half of the significant studies in print have been published since 1976. Ofthe eighty-plus that exist on Stoppard, for example, nearly fifty were issued in this period; of sixty-five on Bond, thirty-eight. A commendable bibliography that embraces these dramatists, Kimball King's Twenty Modern British Playwrights (New York: Garland, 1977), purports to cover international criticism through 1976, but it is already so out-of-date that it includes only a quarter of the noteworthy studies available by mid-198 I. A new bibliography is obviously needed.
Book Reviews
Authors: Jones Daniel , Gontarski  , Miller Judith , Savona Jeannette , Leland Charles , Rey John , Lachman-Kalitzki Eva , Gerould Daniel
Published: April 2013

Malcolm Hay and Philip Roberts, Bond: A Study of his Plays, reviewed by Daniel R. Jones

James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett, reviewed by S.B. Gontarksi

Ruby Cohn, Just Play: Beckett's Theater, reviewed by Judith G. Miller

Patrice Pavis, Dictionnaire du théâtre, reviewed by Jeannette Laillou Savona

Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt, reviewed by Charles Leland

Brian Johnston, To the Third Empire: Ibsen's Early Drama, reviewed by Charles Leland

Olga Ragusa, Pirandello: An Approach to his Theatre, reviewed by John B. Rey

Michael Ossar, Anarchism in the Dramas of Ernst Toller, reviewed by Eva Lachman-Kalitzki

Bettina L. Knapp, Theatre and Alchemy, reviewed by Daniel Gerould
From Giorgio Strehler to Victor Garcia
Authors: Aslan Odette
Published: April 2013

I have arbitrarily paired these two directors in order to give an account of two entirely different theatrical practices, two processes of production which I had the opportunity to follow when I attended the 1978 rehearsals of La Trilogie de la villegiature by Goldini , produced by Giorgio Strehler at the Odeon Theatre with actors from the Comedie-Francaise; and the 1979 rehearsals of Gilgamesh (adapted from the Sumerian epic), produced by Victor Garcia at the Chaillot Theatre with an Arab cast. Rather than dealing with the performances themselves, I shall discuss here the rehearsals, the concepts of theatrical production, and the ways in which Strehler and Garcia choose to influence the people they are directing.
Theatricality in Japan
Authors: Yamaguchi Masao
Published: April 2013

Space, time and character, all heavy with consequence, come immediately to mind when one thinks of theatricality in the particular context of theatre in Japan. In this paper, I shall discuss briefly the way in which these three elements are articulated.
Theatre as Semiotic Practice
Authors: Melancon Joseph
Published: April 2013

To consider theatre as semiotic practice is, initially at least, to refer to the gestural, visual or auditory communication which accompanies discursive communication on the stage. From this perspective, the term semiotic practices is used to designate all semiotic processes other than "verbal practices," which, when considered from the point of view of language, are basically semantic practices. Yet, I hope to demonstrate that theatre can be a "semiotic practice" at the level of speech when language becomes discourse. And the specificity of theatrical discourse, of discourse inscribed in dialogue, is its inherent capacity to articulate a semiotic dimension in perhaps much the same way as do rituals and ceremonies. My purpose, therefore, is to attempt to define theatricality at the level of the production of verbal discourse. However, it is important not to isolate verbal discourse from other "pragmatic'" processes which function syncretically, but rather to examine the discursive operation when the verbal is linked to other forms of semiotic construct, such as theatrical forms.
Didascalies as Speech Act
Authors: Savona Laillou
Published: April 2013

While research into discourse in the novel continues to benefit from many studies of the concepts of verbal tense, person, narrative voice, and point of view, dramatic discourse remains relatively little investigated. The linguistic model of the six functions of discourse proposed by Roman Jakobson provides a classification which, fruitful as it is, is too general to permit a detailed study of textual and stage language in theatre. Moreover, Roman Ingarden's analysis of dramatic discourse and its functions, while equally probing because of its specificity, does not sufficiently take into account the fact that theatre is a phenomenon which is more socially coded than the novel and that, even at the level of the written text, it relies heavily on the social strategies of the different speakers.
Space and Time in the Plays of Antonine Maillet
Authors: Gobin Pierre
Published: April 2013

Antonine Maillet's dual careers, as novelist and playwright, have been developing in parallel for some twenty years now. She began as a novelist with Pointe-aux-Coques in 1958, and also achieved her greatest success with a novel, Pelagie-la-Charrette, which won the Goncourt Prize in 1979. However, her most memorable character, La Sagouine, was created for the stage, and around her a mythical universe has developed. The stage bas also provided the medium whicb enabled Maillet to articulate most coherently a complex Wellanschauung. For the stage sbe has created a concert of voices and characters (as Godin has shown to be the case in Evangeline Deusse), as well as a succession of monologues in which the narrator/performer explores her memories and her perceptions just as one sight-reads a score - rehearses them, redefines and modulates them. She has also developed a dual intertextual network: the external, explicitly referred to by the author writing as critic; and the internal, reaching from one play to another, with echoes and allusions , or reworking the same "score" in successive versions.
Armand Gatti on Time, Place, and the Theatrical Event
Authors: Lenin Jean–Pail
Published: April 2013

Most followers of contemporary theatrical developments know that since 1960 Annand Gatti, playwright and director, has been one of a small number working to create a twentieth ~century theatre. I address the following introductory remarks to those unfamiliar with some of these changes or with Gatti's work.

After the styles of Ionesco, Beckett and Adamov that characterized the theatre of the fifties, two well-known plays by Jean Genet — The Blacks, performed in 1959, and The Screens. banned in France, but partially performed in Berlin in 1961 — set new directions for dramatic research and, responding to a preoccupation with specifically political concerns, brought back to the stage a broader investigation of the conflicts then stirring French society. The war in Algeria, then in its cruellest phase, was at the centre of violent social unrest; and the atmosphere of world conflict, revolutionary struggle and insurrection inspired, and continues to inspire, Annand Gatti .
The Political Spectrum of Edward Bond: From Rationalism to Rhapsody
Authors: Innes Christopher
Published: April 2013

The landmarks in contemporary English drama have been more like landmines, shattering conventional expectations, with a whole new configuration of subjects and themes emerging on the stage each time after the dust of public outrage settled. What Look Back in Anger had done for the fifties, Saved did for the sixties, and a play like The Romans in Britain may yet do for the eighties (though Howard Brenton's play seems to lack the qualities that might give its shock effects the same resonance). Like Osborne, Edward Bond achieved immediate prominence through the controversy surrounding his first play to be given a full production, when the Lord Chamberlain tried to throw a baby out with the bath-water. But where Osborne quickly became accepted - partly because his approach was relatively simple and consistent, partly because his plays were recognizably traditional in shape, despite his use of diatribe which shifted dramatic conflict from its conventional locus between characters within the play to a point between his protagonists and the audience - there is still little consensus about Bond.
Makers of Real Shapes: Christopher Hampton and his Story-tellers
Authors: Black Sebastian
Published: April 2013

Christopher Hampton has always insisted that his plays have little in common. In an interview after Savages he was asked whether he saw "any kind of development in [his] ... work — in retrospect," to which he firmly replied: "No. People have often asked, but I see no connection between my plays whatsoever, except for the fact that I wrote them. I try to approach each subject in a way appropriate to it.” Even more forcefully, he told Oleg Kerensky: '''I have a violent urge not to repeat myself. "' Critical opinion has largely been content to accept the author's own description of his work, while at the same time drawing a rough distinction between his elegant comedies of manners, When Did You Last See My Mother?, The Philanthropist, and Treats, and the two plays which tackle more ambitious subjects in broader settings, Total Eclipse and Savages.
Book Reviews
Authors: Fueoj John , Knapp Bettina , Schlueter June , Todd Ian , Rusinko Susan , Brigg Peter , Parker Gerald , Werner Craig , Brown Janet , Gabbard Lucina , Lima Robert
Published: April 2013

Christopher Innes, Modern German Drama: A Study in Form, reviewed by John Fueoj

Christopher Innes, Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant Garde, reviewed by Bettina L. Knapp

C.W.E. Bigsby ed., Contemporary English Drama, reviewed by June Schlueter

Douglas Colby, As the Curtain Rises: On Contemporary British Drama 1966-1976, reviewed by June Schlueter

Bernard F. Dukore, The Theatre of Peter Barnes, reviewed by Ian Todd

John Elsom, Post-war British Theatre Criticism, reviewed by Susan Rusinko

J.B. Priestly, A.A. Devitis And Albert E. Kalson, reviewed by Peter Brigg

A.D. Choudhury, The Face of Illusion in American Drama, reviewed by Gerald D. Parker

Samuel J . Bernstein, The Strands Entwined: A New Direction in American Drama, reviewed by Craig Werner,

Judith Olauson, The American Woman Playwright: A View of Criticism and Characterization, reviewed by Janet Brown

Samar Atiar, The Intruder in Modern Drama, reviewed by Lucina P. Gabbard

Phyllis Zatlin Boring, Victor Ruiz Iriarte, reviewed by Robert Lima
Modest Proposals of Modem Socialists
Authors: Cohn Ruby
Published: April 2013

A noun is not an adjective, and vice versa. I affirm this persnickety truism because Modem Drama is dedicating a special issue to Modern Comedy, which is not a mere accumulation of comic techniques. Almost every play of our frivolous era sports some comic element, so broad is our ticklish spectrum. But comedy: what is that? Our two main traditions derive from classical and medieval periods: I) classical — ridendo castigat mores, with the implication that the mores are correctable through ridicule; 2) medieval — a piece with a happy ending. Many subsequent critics blend the two, requiring that a play be funny and happy. I accept the double bind. To be a comedy, a modern play should be funny and should end happily. But "funny" and "happy" are loaded words. As funny, I therefore propose a supple embrace of all kinds of humor, especially accommodating the festive spirit that has been brilliantly studied by Bakhtine, Barber, Whitman. As happy, I am not aware of anyone who quite shares what I propose — an ending that conforms to the putative audience's sense of propriety. Thus, melodrama can he comedy if the handsome hero is united with the imperiled heroine through the machinations of a comic character, as in Boucicaulfs Shaughraun. Satire, too, is comedy, for the "right" audience appreciates the punishment of Volpone and Tartuffe. Sentimental comedy, in contrast, is mislabeled, since it is not funny; The Clandestine Marriage is more typical than She Stoops To Conquer. It is grotesque comedy that hest fits our sour half—century, but the mere presence of grotesque elements does not define a genre. If King Lear is a "comedy of the grotesque,'" we had better laugh all genre away.
Tom Stoppard's Dissident Comedies
Authors: Kennedy Andrew
Published: April 2013

How many readers and theatre–goers would find the hallmarks of Tom Stoppard's verbal wit in those Peer Gyntian lines from Every Good Boy Deserves Favour? The lines are spoken rapidly by Alexander, the political prisoner detained in a "hospital," to his absent son; every word is meant, without ambiguity or irony either in the phrasing or in the situation; and the verse is a mnemonic, in case the prisoner is not allowed writing material "on medical grounds." This is only a local example of the remarkable change in Stoppard's comedy from a relativistic and parodic universe of wit to a new kind of comedy that combines moral and political commitment with a newly stable satire of real/absurd worlds, recognizably located in Russia and Czechoslovakia. It is an interesting transformation of comic vision, strategy and language.
Comedy since the Absurd
Authors: Blau Herbert
Published: April 2013

We need to start, in approaching the subject of comedy today, by parsing out the comedy from the laughter. We can hardly think of comedy without laughter, but we have learned to think of laughter without comedy. There is also the problem of identifying the subject of comedy which, while it may seem to bring them together like the dancer and the dance, separates the laugher from the laugh. There is the subject you may remember and never can forget, the gravity of the laughing matter. Since the incursion of the Absurd upon a guilty and precarious stage, that subject has been looked upon as inseparable from the subject of language, which seems to have no gravity at all, essentially comic, words flying up, the body remaining below, growing more and more suspicious of the nature of language.
Book Reviews
Authors: Whitaker Thomas , Whitaker Thomas , Ley Ralph , Kane Martin , Fuegi John , Weals Gerald , Schlueter June , Raleigh John Henry , Meserve Walter , Eddleman Eugene , Dick Bernard , Schmiit Natalie Crohn
Published: April 2013

Arthur Ganz, Realms of the Self: Variations on a Theme in Modern Drama, reviewed by Thomas R. Whitaker

James K. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America, reviewed by Ralph J. Ley

Patty Lee Parmalee, Brecht's America, reviewed by Ralph J. Ley

Jan Needle And Peter Thomson, Brecht, reviewed by Martin Kane

Eric Bentley, The Brecht Commentaries: 1943-1980, reviewed by John Fuegi

Bernard F. Dukore, Money and Politics in Ibsen, Shaw, and Brecht, reviewed by Gerald Weales

Michael Patterson, The Revolution in German Theatre 1900-1933, reviewed by June Schlueter

Virginia Floyd ed., Eugene O'Neill at Work: Newly Released Ideas/or Plays, reviewed by John Henry Raleigh

Anthony F. R. Palmieri, Elmer Rice: A Playwright's Vision of America, reviewed by Walter J. Meserve

Charles Lee Green, Edward Albee: An Annotated Bibliography , reviewed by Walter J. Meserve

Drewey Wayne Gunn, Tennessee Williams: A Bibliography, reviewed by Floyd Eugene Eddleman

Mark W. Estrin, Lillian Hellman: Plays, Films, Memoirs. A reference guide, reviewed by Bernard F. Dick

Timothy J. Wiles, The Theater Event: Modern Theories of Performance, reviewed by Natalie Crohn Schmiit
Book Reviews
Authors: Innes Christopher , Schlueter June , Sanders Ivan , Page Malcom , Kalson Albert , Cevasco  , Whitman Robert , Smith Carol , Rood Arnold , Chamberlain John
Published: April 2013

J ,L. Styan, . Modern drama in theory and practice (Volume I: Realism and naturalism; Volume 2: Symbolism, surrealism and the absurd; Volume 3: Expressionism and epic theatre), reviewed by Christopher Innes

Normand Berlin, The Secret Cause: A Discussion of Tragedy, reviewed by June Schlueter

Clara GyörgyeyFerenc Molnar, reviewed by Ivan Sanders

John McGrath, A Good Night Out. Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, reviewed by Malcom Page

Ian Watson, Conversations with Ayckbourn., reviewed by Albert E. Kalson

Robert Keith Miller, Oscar Wilde, reviewed by G.A. Cevasco

Charles A. Berst ed., Shaw and Religion, reviewed by Robert F. Whitman

E. Martin Browne With Henzie Browne, Two in One, reviewed by Carol H. Smith

Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker, Edward Gordon Craig and the Pretenders: A Production Revised, reviewed by Arnold Rood

Richard Hornby, Patterns in Ibsen's Middle Plays, reviewed by John S. Chamberlain
The Serious Side of Alan Ayckboun
Authors: Page Malcom
Published: April 2013

The comedies of Alan Ayckbourn have featured prominently in the British theatre in the last fifteen years. His earliest plays were the lightest and purest of comedies, giving him the reputation of being the most undemanding of entertainers. This initial reputation has obscured the depth and the seriousness of some of his plays, particularly those of 1974-78: Absent Friends, Just Between Ourselves, and Joking Apart.
Modern Drama Studies: An Annual Bibliography
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

The present annual bibliography follows the basic principles and limitations described in the first installment of March '974. The main objective is to record current scholarship, criticism, and commentary that may prove valuable to students of modem dramatic literature. The bibliography embraces all the expected areas and topics of modem world drama, including playwrights who lived past 1900 (plus Biichner and Becque) and influential men and women of the theatre other than performers. The checklist is divided as follows:
Book Reviews
Authors: Berlin Normand , Griffin Ernest , O'Connor John , Mendelsohn Michael , Rutenberg Michael , Hill Linda , Leland Charles , Browkaw John , Lima Robert , Lewis Janet
Published: April 2013

John Orr, Tragic Drama and Modern Society: Studies in the Social and Literary Theory of Drama From 1870 to the Present, reviewed by Normand Berlin

Virginia Floyd ed., Eugene O'Neill: A World View, reviewed by Ernest G. Griffin

Loren K . Ruff, Edward Sheldon, reviewed by John S. O'Connor

Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright. The Years from 1906 to 1940, reviewed by Michael J. Mendelsohn

Joan Jeffri, The Emerging Arts: Managemellt, Survival and Growth, reviewed by Michael E. Rutenberg

June Schlueter, The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke , reviewed by Linda Hill

John Ward, The Social and Religious Plays of Strindberg, reviewed by Charles Leland

Roni Unger, Poesia en Voz Alta in the Theater of Mexico, reviewed by John W. Brokaw

Emanuel Levy, The Habima–Israel's National Theater 1917-1977. A Study of Cultural Nationalism, reviewed by Robert Lima

John Macnicholas, James Joyce's Exiles: A Textual Companion, reviewed by Janet Lewis