bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Text and Stage: Shakespeare, Bibliography, and Performance Studies
Authors: Holderness Graham , Loughrey Bryan
Published: January 2009

This article continues the debate initiated by Brian Parker, who in NTQ24 (1990) offered a critique of the new Oxford Shakespeare, and one of its editors, Stanley Wells, who responded in NTQ 26 (1991) with a defence of his departure from traditional practices of textual conflation. Here, Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey suggest that, on a closer examination, there is evidence that editorial intervention and conflation have been regularly employed in the Oxford edition: and in arguing against all such attempts to reconstruct ‘authoritative’ texts, they propose that, in their inevitable absence, the originals present the closest we are likely to approach to recreating the collaborative theatrical practice of Shakespeare's time. In illustrating the effects of editorial intervention from a close comparative examination of particular passages, they suggest, for example, that the stage directions make a shovel a likelier object of Hamlet's graveside contemplation than Yorick's skull. Graham Holderness, newly-appointed Professor and Dean of Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire, and Bryan Loughrey, Research Director at Roehampton Institute, have recently begun, through the Centre for Textual Studies, a programme of publishing accessible reprints of the important early editions, of which the first three have now appeared from Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Questions of Survival: towards a Postmodern Feminist Theatre
Authors: Levy Deborah
Published: January 2009

Deborah Levy is a playwright, poet, and novelist, whose theatre work is informed by a concern to combine visual imagery, music, and text. After working with visual artists and sculptors, and performing her poetry in pubs and galleries and on the cabaret circuit, she was commissioned by the Women's Theatre Group to write Pax. This was followed by Clam, three more plays for the fringe, and then by Heresies for the RSC. She is currently working on an adaptation of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. A collection of Deborah Levy's poetry, An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, have both been published by Jonathan Cape. She has also worked as a writer and director with the Magdalena Project, for whom she directed a devised theatre piece entitled The B File, based on her own short story ‘Swallowing Geography’. This was performed in October 1991 in the theatre of Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, where it was well received by both critics and audience, and has since been staged for the European Arts Festival at Chapter, and at the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast. It was in Cardiff that Irini Charitou, who acted in both productions of The B File, talked to Deborah Levy about her concerns and interests as a feminist playwright who has chosen postmodernism as a means of articulating her cultural position. Irini Charitou, who complements the interview with a brief introduction to Pax, Clam, and Heresies, is presently researching towards an MPhil on contemporary British and Greek women's theatre at the University of Lancaster.
Bottom and the Boys
Authors: Kott Jan
Published: January 2009

Whereas the director of a play in performance never ventures more than a provisional interpretation, content with its truth at a particular moment in time, literary critics have until relatively recently presented their judgements as definitive. Jan Kott, who has probably had greater influence over the living theatre than any other critic of his generation, is closer kin to the director in his acceptance that any written judgement of a play also stands open to redefinition. Thus, his first view of A Midsummer Night's Dream, offered in his seminal Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1965, was reconsidered some fifteen years later in the title essay of The Bottom Translation. Now, in a third major essay on the play, Kott addresses the issue of ‘translation’ in relation to the practicalities of the Elizabethan theatre, and the likelihood that the mechanicals, doubling as the fairies, were played by boys brought in for the wedding celebration where it is thought to have been first performed. Jan Kott, who has been an advisory editor successively of Theatre Quarterly and New Theatre Quarterly since 1971, has most recently published The Gender of Rosalind and The Memory of the Body: Essays on the Theatre and Death (Northwestern University Press, 1992). Next year NTQ plans to celebrate his eightieth birthday in a special issue, NTQ40, for which appropriate contributions are invited.
Building an Unstable Pyramid: the Fragmentation of Alternative Theatre
Authors: Kershaw Baz
Published: January 2009

In his earlier article, ‘Poaching in Thatcherland: a Case of Radical Community Theatre’, (NTQ34, May 1993), Baz Kershaw explored the work of the regional touring group EMMA during the 1970s, looking in particular at the quality of ‘performative contradiction’ which enabled it, for example, to make a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of a play steeped in rural nostalgia. Here, he explores other paradoxes of that era of burgeoning alternative and community theatre activity in the years before Thatcher, assessing the role and the ‘hidden agenda’ of the funding bodies, and analyzing and contrasting the working methods, aims, and resources of two of their very different clients – the ‘national’ fringe company Joint Stock, and the small-scale ‘reminiscence theatre’ group, Fair Old Times. Although both groups were engaged in the ostensibly radical and oppositional theatre practice which eventually led to their closures, there was, notes Kershaw, an increasing tendency by the funding bodies to judge the work of the latter by the more amply endowed standards of the former. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the work of Fair Old Times's ‘parent’ company, Medium Fair (TQ30, 1978), and has put the present studies into a broader context in his most recent book, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992). He is co-author, with Tony Coult, of Engineers of the Imagination (Methuen, 1983), a study of Welfare State, and has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers.
The Dimensions of Drama: the Case for Cross-Curricular Planning
Authors: Nixon Jon
Published: January 2009

In NTQ4 and 5 David Hornbrook offered a two-part analysis of the purposes, practices, and projected future of drama teaching in schools. Discussion continued in NTQ7 and 8, with responses to Hornbrook's suggestions from a number of other practitioners in the area. Among them was Jon Nixon, currently research fellow in the Division of Education at Sheffield University, who now continues the debate with an article in which he provides a broader perspective, presenting a functional rather than theoretical model of classroom practice. This, he suggests, takes a three-dimensional form: drama as social interaction, as discourse, and as a mode of cognition – or what he calls the ‘depth dimension’ which ‘complements our various ways of knowing’. He concludes that drama should not by necessity be consigned to the margins of ‘the arts’, but be recognized for the vital role it can play not only in the whole humanities cirriculum but, crucially, in the cross-curricular development of communication and expressive skills.
Thieves and Parasites: on Forty Years of Theatre Reviewing in England
Authors: Wardle Irving
Published: January 2009

Irving Wardle has spent his working life as a theatre reviewer – for thirty-seven years after 1959 passing what he estimates to have been an average of four nights a week, excluding holidays, sitting in theatres, and turning out notices to meet overnight or weekly deadlines – successively as deputy to Kenneth Tynan on The Observer, from 1963 as long-serving critic for The Times, and subsequently for the Independent on Sunday until he retired from the profession in 1995. The following retrospect was originally conceived as a talk for the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada, where it was delivered in July 1996. While a good deal of the history of British theatre through which Irving Wardle moved will be familiar to NTQ readers of the same generation, he brings to that common experience an uncommon perspective – and here confesses frankly to failures of judgement and misgivings, as well as snaring some of the underlying motivations and turning points of his career.
Of ‘Butterfly’ and Men: Robert Wilson Directs Diana Soviero at the Paris Opéra
Authors: Shevtsova Maria
Published: January 2009

In NTQ40 (November 1994), in the first of two pieces on modern directorial approaches to the staging of opera as music theatre, Maria Shevtsova discussed Peter Brook's production of Impressions de Pelléas, complementing her own analysis with an interview with one of the leading actor-singers, Vincent Le Texier. Pursuing a similar dual-faceted approach, here she provides a detailed explication of Robert Wilson's production of Madame Butterfly, seen at the Opéra de Paris Bastille in 1993, exploring the ways in which Puccini's original orientalisms are translated and transmuted into a version of intercultural theatre appropriate to our own fin de siècle. Again setting her own views against those of a leading actor-singer – here, Diana Soviero, who played Butterfly – she explores how Wilson's coolly aesthetic, even ascetic style ‘incarnates the century's tentacular, monopolistic tendencies (of which interculturalism in its many guises in the arts are a sign), as well as its polyvalencies (of which the blurring of genres – hybrid genres – is a sign)’. Maria Shevtsova, who teaches in the Department of French Studies in the University of Sydney, earlier contributed a three-part survey of ‘The Sociology of the Theatre’ to NTQ17–19 (1989), and recently published a major collection of essays, Theatre and Cultural Interaction. Her present article forms part of research supported by the Australian Research Council Large Grants Scheme.
The Popular Front Pageant: Its Emergence and Decline
Authors: Wallis Mick
Published: January 2009

In NTQ38 (May 1994) Mick Wallis explored some of the characteristics of the phenomenon of working-class political pageantry which reached its peak between the two world wars, looking in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. Here, he explores earlier and later forms of modern pageantry, from the bourgeois civic style (of which Louis Napoleon Parker was virtually inventor and remained the presiding genius) to the attempts of working-class organizations to create a people's form of pageantry, whether in the interests of Communist Party recruitment or – following in the footsteps of the Victorian monarchy and provincial city fathers – of creating its own, alternative memorializing traditions. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.
Peter Brook's Heart of Light: ‘Primitivism’ and Intercultural Theatre
Authors: Moody David
Published: January 2009

Peter Brook's work has always figured in debates over ‘intercultural’ projects in the contemporary theatre. However, the controversy has most often centred on his engagement with Asian theatrical traditions, and in particular on his production ofThe Mahabharata. David Moody here examines Peter Brook's writings on Africa, as theatrical ‘discourse’ with its own theoretical half-life quite distinct from actual productions. This discourse, it is argued, can be described as ‘primitivist’, in that it constructs the African audience as, in Barthes's term, ‘degree zero’ – a ‘limit-text’ to universal theatrical communication. In doing so it presents a limiting version of African theatrical traditions themselves, and, as a result, reinforces a broader, more destructive global discourse of cultural primitivism concerning African and so-called ‘indigenous’ art and performance. David Moody, who currently lectures in Theatre and Drama Studies at Murdoch University, Perth, Australia, is a playwright, actor, and director who has written extensively on African, post-colonial, and popular theatre, and is now engaged in his own problematic intercultural projects.
‘So Many Things Can Go Together’: the Theatricality of John Cage
Authors: Schmitt Natalie Crohn
Published: January 2009

John Cage (1912–1993) is widely regarded as one of the most pervasively influential figures in the arts in the latter half of the twentieth-century. Although best known as a composer, Cage expanded perceptions of what could constitute theatrical performance, and in this essay Natalie Crohn Schmitt assesses the nature and significance of Cage's intermedia performances and their immediate influence on other such work. Natalie Crohn Schmitt's Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature (Northwestern UP, 1990) is an analysis of contemporary theatre based on Cage's aesthetics, and essays of hers on Cage have appeared in other journals and in anthologies devoted to the artist. She has previously written in NTQ on Stanislavski (NTQ 8) and on performance theory in its historic moment (NTQ 23). Schmitt is Professor of Performing Arts and Professor of English the University of Illinois at Chicago. This essay was originally published in a slightly different form in Japanese in a Cage commemorative issue of the Japanese journal Music Today.
Developing a Physical Vocabulary for the Contemporary Actor
Authors: Logie Lea
Published: January 2009

One of the distinguishing qualities of live theatre is its built-in ephemerality: yet all too often this involves the loss not only of the fruits of theatrical experience but of ‘experience’ itself, understood as the learning of craft – and this puts experimental companies and practitioners alike in danger of constantly reinventing the wheel. Connecting this to the needs of serious performers to acquire a wide range of expressive movements, and to explore the process of relating these movements to thoughts and feelings, Lea Logie discusses both common elements and contrasting approaches in the work of some of the great European practitioners, whose insights are too valuable to be forgotten or consigned to scholarly archives. Lea Logie is a tutor in Theatre and Drama Studies at Murdoch University, Western Australia, where she specializes in cross-cultural studies of Asian and western theatre.
Brecht Studies Stanislavski: Just a Tactical Move?
Authors: Mumford Meg
Published: January 2009

In the 'fifties Brecht undertook an examination of Stanislavski's theatre which in terms of breadth and intensity was unprecedented in his career – and rehearsal documentation from that period testifies that he incorporated some of Stanislavski's methods into the stage practice of the Berliner Ensemble. The seriousness of his study is attested by the organized collection of notes on the production of Katzgraben recently discovered in Elizabeth Hauptmann's estate. Brecht's preoccupation with Stanislavski at this time has been seen as an attempt to protect his theatre's existence in an environment where Stanislavski, socialist realism, and the communist cause were regarded as interlinked. In this paper, Meg Mumford, recently appointed to a lectureship in theatre in the University of Glasgow, outlines the nature of Brecht's study of Stanislavski, and draws upon the records of the ensuing theatre practice, the Katzgraben notes in particular, to illuminate Brecht's growing recognition of affinities with Stanislavski's methods, which he found useful in fostering the young Berliner Ensemble and in creating performances he viewed as appropriate to audiences in the GDR.
Towards a Language of the Stage: the Work of DV8 Physical Theatre
Authors: Buckland Fiona
Published: January 2009

In the following article Fiona Buckland describes how the leading British experimental dance company, DV8 Physical Theatre, was formed out of a disillusionment with its own dance medium, and how DV8 now works towards a reinvestment of creative need in stage performance. The first part reviews the company's work, methodology, and content to date, while the second offers a detailed analysis and explication of their award-winning and provocative Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988), which expresses the paradox of gay male cruising as a need for security and desire for risk, both in terms of content and as an exhilarating contact-release form. The article explores the dynamism and theatricality of a style in which the body is both subject and mode of performance, and also the media, critical, and audience response DV8 performances have evoked. The author, Fiona Buckland, received her MA in Film and Theatre from the University of Sheffield in 1993, after which she worked there and at Sheffield College as a part-time lecturer in movement and choreography. She has also held workshops in Loughborough, Sheffield, and New York, and is currently the recipient of a Fulbright award on the doctoral programme in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
The Dangerous Woman of Melvillean Melodrama
Authors: Aston Elaine , Clarke Ian
Published: January 2009

Almost in its death throes at the turn of the present century, sensational melodrama threw up a curious mutation at the hands of the prolific playwrights and managers, the brothers Walter and Frederick Melville. In numerous of their plays performed in the decade or so before the First World War, the ‘New Woman’, whose rights and rebellions were simultaneously the focus of debate in so-called ‘problem’ plays, took on a new and threatening aspect – as the eponymously ‘dangerous’ central character of The Worst Woman in London, A Disgrace to Her Sex, The Girl Who Wrecked His Home, and a score or so of similar titles. In the following article Elaine Aston and lan Clarke explore the nature of these ‘strong’ female roles, both as acting vehicles and as embodiments of male fears and fantasies, in a theatre which existed in large part to serve such needs and which, through such characters, at once fictionalized and affirmed the fears of ‘respectable’ society about the moral stature of the actress. The authors both teach in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University, where lan Clarke is Director of Drama, having previously published his own study of Edwardian Drama in 1989.
Under the Sign of the Onion: Intracultural Negotiations in Theatre
Authors: Bharucha Rustom
Published: January 2009

Rustom Bharucha's Theatre of the World (Routledge, 1993), sections of which first appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, was a major intervention in the debate about the nature and ethics of interculturalism – an unfortunate side-effect being that he has, by his own wry admission, now been ‘academicized as Peter Brook's Other’, a category he finds both offensive and redundant. The following article extends his explorations by developing a careful and pertinent distinction between interculturalism and intraculturalism – a distinction derived from practice rather than theory, specifically from his experience directing an Indian production of Peer Gynt, performed in Kannada as Gundegowdana Charitre. Rustom Bharucha explores the implications of ‘translating’ such a classic text across and within cultures as well as languages – and the further paradox of this being, as for most of us, a process of transmission through English rather than Norwegian. He sums up the nature of the challenge as ‘to negotiate different selves, cultures, histories, and languages through the labyrinth of multiple Others’.
Performing Shakespeare: Voice Training and the Feminist Actor
Authors: Werner Sarah
Published: January 2009

Although voice work presents itself as a neutral set of tools that can help actors in performing a text, an analysis of the cultural biases behind voice training reveals that both the underlying ideology and the methods of reading and acting it produces limit the possibilities for feminist performances of Shakespeare. By naturalizing the language and rhythms of the text, by focusing attention on the characters' need for the words as opposed to the dramatist's, voice training denies actors ways of questioning the politics of the playscripts. Sarah Werner has just received her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania for her dissertation entitled ‘Acting Shakespeare's Women: Toward a Feminist Methodology’. She has presented papers at a number of conferences, including the Shakespeare Association of America and the International Conference on Medieval Studies, and is currently a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.
‘Folkism’: Towards a National Aesthetic Principle for Nigerian Dramaturgy
Authors: Ukala Sam
Published: January 2009

Nigerian playwrights face the problem not only of finding ways of communicating with their audiences which address popular concerns in an assimilable manner, but of deciding the appropriate language in which to do so, in a notion which embraces many language groups and cultures. The solution of employing English as alingua francaposes problems hung over from the colonialist past – and a tendency for plays written in English also to employ an inappropriate western dramaturgy. In the following article, Sam Ukala considers the various objections raised to English-language Nigerian plays, conceding some points and answering others, and proposing the concept of ‘folkism’ as a national aesthetic principle – a way of reconciling the use of a common language with the distinctive and often disparate needs of the Nigerian people.
Protest in the Playhouse: Two Twentieth-Century Audience Riots
Authors: Dallett Athenaide
Published: January 2009

Theatre historians are now reconsidering traditional attitudes towards ‘theatre riots’ of the past, in the light of the new perception of ‘mob’ activity pioneered by the social historian George Rudé. Here, Athenaide Dallett looks at two more recent audience revolts – the well-documented riots at the opening of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in Dublin in 1907, and the indignant response of Berkeley students in 1968 to the Living Theatre's presumption in Paradise Now, in lecturing them about a revolution already taking place on the streets. In both cases, she suggests, riots were provoked by a breach of the contract between performers and audience, taken as legitimating a revolutionary response by such social theorists as Locke and Rousseau. Athenaide Dallett, who recently gained her doctorate from Harvard, teaches at the University of Connecticut at Torrington, and is currently working on a study of the connections between political philosophy and theatre.
Bunburying and the Art of Kabuki; or, Wilde, Mishima, and the Importance of Being a Sardine Seller
Authors: Musolf Peter
Published: January 2009

In this period of politically correct regard for cultural difference it is easy to overlook the unifying effect on human experience of modernity's cultural boundary-jumping. In the following essay Peter Musolf compares Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest with Yukio Mishima's 1954 kabuki play Iwashiuri Koi no Hikiami (The Sardine Seller), focusing on the belief these writers shared in the sovereignty of illusion over fact and their consequent conviction that life is to be lived as if it were a dramatic fiction. Taken together with Mishima's novel Confessions of a Mask, the plays comprise a remarkable ironic commentary on the nature and construction of being in the modern world. Peter Musolf is a teacher and writer living in Yokohama. Gozira to wa nani ka, his book on the science fiction screen monster Godzilla in US-Japanese mass psychology, appeared earlier this year, and he is currently writing a play.
Disputing the Canon of American Dramatic ‘Literature’
Authors: Tavel Ronald
Published: January 2009

In this article, Ronald Tavel argues that the commercial American theatre, endorsed by the American educational system and theatrical establishment, has never nurtured a vision of the scripted play as art – and has consequently produced no single example of it. The nation's genuine playwrights who saw their tasks as makers of art have, he claims, been neglected throughout American history, and left to wither in the wings. In the 1960s, Ronald Tavel founded and named the still-extant Theatre of The Ridiculous, and has written forty produced plays, a number of which have been translated into a dozen languages and staged in four continents. He has written and directed thirteen films for Andy Warhol: ten of these have recently been restored for international distribution by the New York Museum of Modern Art, and all are to be collected for publication later this year by Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles. Ronald Tavel lives in Taipei, but is currently teaching a course on Warhol and the filmmaker-architect Jack Smith at the Art Centre College of Design in California. The American Institute in Taiwan selected the article which follows as the keynote address at the Seventeenth Annual Convention of the American Studies Association of the Republic of China.
Naming the Frame: the Role of the Pre-Interpretive in Theatrical Reception
Authors: Watson Ian
Published: January 2009

When is a theatre event not a theatre event? Where, in the shifting relationships between (and even the shifting definitions of) actor and audience in modern and postmodern performance, is a useful line to be drawn – if only for purposes of analysis and discussion? How adequate are such traditional concepts as the ‘suspension of disbelief’, when the distinction between the ‘realities’ of the theatre and of the everyday begin to merge or dissolve? Ian Watson, an advisory editor of NTQ who teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, New Jersey, here explores how the issue is affected by the differing pre-interpretive perspectives of performers and spectators. In this light he describes three recent theatre events – the Broadway production ofDeath and the Maiden, Harold Pinter's London production ofCirce and Bravo, and an instance of Augusto Boal's ‘Invisible Theatre’ – to suggest that it is in these perceptual variations that the clue to understanding theatrical reality may lie.
The School of Being Together: Festivals as National Therapy during the Polish ‘Period of Transition’
Authors: Tyszka Juliusz
Published: January 2009

For most western theatre people, accustomed to the festival as an institutionalized annual ritual, the notion of a theatre festival as a celebration of true, holiday festivity – as signifying freedom from institutionalized ritual – comes alive more often in the pages of Bakhtin than on the stages of Edinburgh or other ‘festive’ cities. Yet Juliusz Tyszka, surveying no fewer than a hundred and fifty festivals that have sprung up or renewed themselves in his native Poland during the post-Cold War ‘period of transition’, finds that, while their economic success has been surprising in a straitened economy, the social causes which have ensured this success have to do with changed notions of communality and sociality. The festivals signify, he suggests, a rediscovery that joining together in celebration need not be an imposition of church or state, but can be a means of renewal for the national psyche after a long period of suppression. The following article has the quality rather of a heartfelt polemic – and, through lavish illustration, a celebration of the multiplicity of performance styles – than the academic analysis to which NTQ more usually subjects the new theatres of eastern Europe. It is none the less significant as a theatre document for our times.
‘Identity — Even if it is a Fantasy’: the Work of Carran Waterfield
Authors: Trowsdale Jo
Published: January 2009

The largely solo work of the Coventry-based performer Carran Waterfield is clearly part of a tradition of avant-garde performance and of so-called ‘third theatre’ in its refusal of a narrative line, and its multi-disciplinary, performer-centered orchestration of the elements of visual, aural, and dynamic expression. Yet Waterfield's performance pieces are also highly distinctive in their organic relationship both to her own life and to the life of the community in and for which she performs. Jo Trowsdale here suggests that the points of difference provide an unusual model in which elements of drama therapy, community art, and educational theatre find a fruitful interface with ‘third’ and avant-garde theatre forms. Jo Trowsdale lectures in drama at the Institute of Education, University of Warwick, and is presently researching the role of artists in education, especially in the training of teachers.
Reinhabiting ‘The Cherry Orchard’: Class and History in Performing Chekhov
Authors: Tulloch John , Burvill Tom , Hood Andrew
Published: January 2009

Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is clearly ‘about’ the end of one social order – about time changing and time static. Yet different interpretive communities – academics in journal articles and students in their classrooms, newspaper reviewers, theatre writers like Trevor Griffiths and David Mamet, and theatre directors like Adrian Noble and Richard Eyre – ‘read’ Chekhov's representation of history and class change in different ways. The authors of this study have been exploring these different reading formations in a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council, ‘Chekhov: in Criticism, Performance, and Reading’. Here – grounding their work in industry ‘readings’ via production study and interviews – they focus on production and performance of The Cherry Orchard, contrasting the Richard Eyre/Trevor Griffiths production of 1977 (reproduced in 1981 for BBC TV) with Adrian Noble's production at the Swan Theatre, Stratford, in 1995. In particular, they discuss the writing, directing, acting, and staging of Chekhov's ‘modernity’ in these productions, suggesting that whereas Noble referenced and yet simultaneously occluded class in his rehearsal style and staging, Griffiths and Eyre worked for a production which not only embodied the intra-class mobility of the Thatcher era in 1981, but also the ‘then’ of Chekhov's own particular engagement with modernity and environment. John Tulloch, Professor of Cultural Studies at Charles Sturt University, New South Wales, is author of Chekhov: a Structuralist Study. Tom Burvill is Associate Professor of Drama and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, where Andrew Hood is a PhD student working on reception cultures.
Solo Black Performance before the Civil War: Mrs. Stowe, Mrs. Webb, and ‘The Christian Slave’
Authors: Clark Susan F.
Published: January 2009

In contemporary culture, an ‘Uncle Tom’ has become so derided a figure of complicity in racism that it is perhaps only with difficulty, and a corrective historicist awareness, that we can come to acknowledge both the good intentions and the undeniable effectiveness of Harriet Beecher Stowe's original – a novel in which, interestingly, women play no less prominent a part than black characters. Indeed, it is likely that the proliferating stage adaptations of Mrs. Stowe's novel were largely responsible for creating the stereotype Uncle Tom in a popular imagination on which such melodramatized accounts had a lasting impact: and it was partly in response to such perversions that Mrs. Stowe herself set out to dramatize her novel. The result, The Christian Slave, has remained relatively unknown not least because of the premature death of its solo performer, Mary Webb – herself a pioneer among black performers who achieved recognition from white audiences. In the following article, Susan F. Clark examines the play in its contemporary context, contrasts it both with other stage versions and with the seminal novel, and examines the relationship between its black performer and her audiences. Susan F. Clark is Assistant Professor of Theatre History at Smith College, Massachusetts, and is currently working on a full-length study of interpretations of Uncle Tom's Cabin on the American stage.
Theatre of Migration and the Search for a Multicultural Aesthetic: Twenty Years of Tara Arts
Authors: Ley Graham
Published: January 2009

This year sees the twentieth anniversary of the foremost British-Asian ‘company of identity’, Tara Arts, directed throughout that time by Jatinder Verma – a major interview with whom forms the core of this celebratory feature. This traces the history and evolving philosophy of the company, from its origins in outrage at a racist murder, through changing perceptions of how multicultural identity can best find its dramatic expression, to a discussion of Verma's own recent work for Contact Theatre and the National. Contributions from other leading participants in the company's work are complemented by a selection of press reactions to major productions, and a survey of bibliographical and other resources. The compiler of this feature, Graham Ley, presently lectures in the Department of Drama at the University of Exeter, having previously taught in London and New Zealand. He is currently completing a book on theatrical theory, on which he has previously also published in NTQ, most recently in ‘The Role of Metaphor in Brook's The Empty Space’ (NTQ35, 1993) and ‘The Significance of Diderot’ (NTQ44, 1995). Among his publications on ancient performance, A short introduction to the Ancient Greek Theatre appeared from the University of chicago Press in 1991.
Funding a ‘Company of Identity’
Authors: Jones Matthew
Published: January 2009

In one sense Tara belongs to a loose grouping which could be described as ‘companies of identity’, which might include the Black Theatre Co-operative, Sphinx (formerly the Women's Theatre Group), Graeae, and Gay Sweatshop. The classic funding pattern here is that the company is initially founded by individuals with shared educational, cultural and political backgrounds: then, after a number of projects or productions, the group receives funding for a specific proposal, either from a special-interest organization, a trust, or local government.
‘Push the Boat Out’: Site-Specific and Cyberspatial in Live Art
Authors: Hill Leslie
Published: January 2009

As a mutually-illuminating contrast to the academic exploration in the previous article of the potential of CD-ROM as a means both of teaching a ‘classical’ playtext and of analyzing the multiple choices involved in its performance, the two following pieces explore the potential of the new technologies in the creation and documentation of live art. Focusing upon her performance Push the Boat Out, given as part of the Jezebel Season at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1995, Leslie Hill first outlines the thinking behind her use of the Internet and the Web – as yet more economic than CD-ROM – both for creating ‘live art’ and for rendering its conventionally ‘unprintable’ form as a ‘text’ with its own integrity. The scripted element of her performance follows. Leslie Hill is a writer and performer, currently a resident artist fellow at the Institute for Studies in the Arts, and a senior lecturer in the Theatre Department at Arizona State University. Along with Helen Paris, she is co-artistic director of the ‘curious.com’ multimedia performance company.
Domestic Place as Contestatory Space: the Kitchen as Catalyst and Crucible
Authors: Blumberg Marcia
Published: January 2009

‘Kitchen-sink’ drama was a term used (in the main by its detractors) of the drama of the late 'fifties and 'sixties located outside the drawing-room milieu then preferred by conventional West End playwrights. It was always an inaccurate term, in that many of the plays so described neither took place in domestic kitchens nor – more to Marcia Blumberg's point – addressed the issue of the place's usual attendant: a woman. Recognizing the dominance of the kitchen as an icon, and of its related domestic chores as traditionally the tasks of women, two performance artists have recently, and in very different ways, explored the actuality of ‘Kitchen’ occupations and preoccupations. Bobby Baker's Kitchen Show (1991) used ‘found’ environments of actual kitchens, including her own, to produce ‘new and often subversive significations’, while in Kitchen Blues (1990) the South African dramatist Jeanne Goosen constructed a ‘complex feminist bricolage’ through the voices and actions of a quartet of women, embodying ‘the multiple intersections of gender in a shocking tragi-comic evocation of personal upheaval during a period of flux in South Africa’. Marcia Blumberg, herself a South African, has recently been teaching in Britain with the Open University.
News, Television, and Performance: the Case of the Los Angeles Riots
Authors: Watson Ian
Published: January 2009

When the ‘action’ at major news events is observed over days or weeks by television cameras, how far does the medium become, whether knowingly or not, a participant and shaper in the action it observes? How far does the action itself become, to some degree, a performance before the cameras? While not ignoring either the moral or practical implications of such questions, lan Watson sets out primarily to analyze the ‘frame’ of television news broadcasting, and to consider the events within that frame as elements of performance. He considers the six days of rioting in Los Angeles in 1992, sparked by the acquittal of police officers charged with the beating of Rodney King – itself caught on camera – as a case study, in which the often ignored role of the observer, whether the news anchor-man in the studio or the audience watching at home, comes in for corrective scrutiny. He concludes that in the ‘mediated present’ of the news event on television, the medium is indeed as much a producer as a reporter of an action which is pervasively shaped by its presence. An Advisory Editor and regular contributor to New Theatre Quarterly, lan Watson teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers, where he is Co-ordinator of the Theatre and Television Programs.
The Orange Alternative: Street Happenings as Social Performance in Poland under Martial Law
Authors: Tyszka Juliusz
Published: January 2009

Confronted with political opposition, an authoritarian regime predictably responds with force – but also with recognition of a knowable enemy. Confronted with anarchy and laughter, it can be caught wrong-footed – as happened in Poland in the aftermath of Martial Law, when a young surrealist, Waldemar Fydrych, self-designated ‘Major’, created what he called the Orange Alternative. In a series of published manifestoes and in the street happenings they proclaimed and recorded, the Orange Alternative tickled the soft underbelly of the Jaruzelski regime, and met with responses ranging from hostility to ostensible sympathy to simple bafflement. Juliusz Tyszka here records the progress of a movement and its moving spirit – who, disillusioned with democracy when it came, exiled himself to Paris to invent alternatives anew. Juliusz Tyszka is a past contributor on Polish theatre to NTQ, who teaches in the Institute of Cultural Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan.
Writing in the Dark: Fifty Years of British Theatre Criticism
Authors: Herbert Ian
Published: January 2009

In NTQ50 (May 1997) Irving Wardle offered his reflections on forty years of theatre reviewing, from the point of view of the seasoned practitioner. Here, Ian Herbert looks at the craft of the reviewer in the wider context of the British theatre since the war, and sees an ironic similarity between the venerable, gentlemanly generation against which Kenneth Tynan pitted his considerable wit, and the generation of Tynan's disciples now no less firmly entrenched in their seats on the aisle. His article, first presented as one of the public lectures celebrating the Golden Jubilee of the Society for Theatre Research on 15 January 1998, is as much an informal history of London theatre during the period as a discussion of the part played in it by the members of the Critics' Circle drama section, of which he is currently secretary. Having completed the last of three editions of Who's Who in the Theatre to appear under his editorship, in 1981 Ian Herbert, started London Theatre Record, now Theatre Record, the fortnightly journal which gathers together the unabridged reviews of all the major British theatre critics.
Stage over Study: Charles Marowitz, Edward Bond, and Recent Materialist Approaches to Shakespeare
Authors: Massai Sonia
Published: January 2009

The flurry of Shakespearean adaptations in the 1960s and 1970s represents a significant yet largely neglected chapter of recent cultural history. This article assesses two of the more enduring adaptations – Edward Bond's Lear (Royal Court Theatre, 1971) and Charles Marowitz's Measure for Measure (Open Space Theatre, 1975) – in order to show how these controversial texts anticipated later mainstream critical approaches which still affect our reception of Shakespeare in the late 1990s. Several parallels between Marowitz and Bond's adaptations and recent materialist readings of their Shakespearean sources suggest that the adaptors anticipated the critics, and that both sought meaning from their Shakespearean originals by focusing on certain aspects of the text and by disregarding others. By demonstrating that whilst Marowitz and Bond's adaptations should best be regarded as a form of stage-centred criticism, Sonia Massai suggests that literary critical approaches inevitably reflect an arbitrary and historically determined appropriation of the Shakespearean original. Sonia Massai is a Lecturer in English Studies at St. Mary's, Strawberry Hill, a College of the University of Surrey. She has published articles on Shakespearean adaptations in Studies in English Literature, Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, and in a special issue of Textus: English Studies in Italy. She is currently collaborating with Jacques Berthoud on the New Penguin edition of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.
The Dandy and the Dowager: Oscar Wilde and Audience Resistance
Authors: Kaplan Joel , Stowell Sheila
Published: January 2009

Oscar Wilde was punished not for failing to amuse the high society audiences for which he wrote, but for offending that society's sexual attitudes. Ironically, as Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell point out, his death transformed him ‘from a criminal outcast to a figure both redeemed and bankable’. For those who wished to exploit his theatrical legacy, the problems arose first of sufficiently dissociating the plays from what was perceived as their author's irredeemable behaviour – and then of finding a theatrical language to make the ridiculing of Victorian virtues risible for a society which had settled into the more relaxed moral corsetry of the Edwardians. Here, the authors take two contrasting cases in which audience reaction was decisive – the failure in 1913 of the attempt to dramatize Wilde's novel,The Picture of Dorian Gray, by converting it into a moral tract; and the process by whichThe Importance of Being Earnest, after a few attempts to render it timeless, became firmly pinned down in its period – and so a play at which audiences could safely laugh, confident they were no longer themselves the butts of the jokes. Joel Kaplan is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. His recent publications include (with Sheila Stowell)Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettesand (edited with Michael Booth)The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage. Sheila Stowell is Senior Research Fellow in Drama at the University of Birmingham, and the author ofA Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era.
Animating Morecambe: Forkbeard Fantasy Goes to the Ball
Authors: Whybrow Nicolas
Published: January 2009

Forkbeard Fantasy is one of Britain's oldest ‘alternative’ performance companies. Founded in 1974 by the brothers Tim and Chris Britton, who have continued to work with the company ever since, Forkbeard's practice may be identified with a peculiarly British variant on performance art, which dates from the mid-sixties. Influenced as much by elements of variety entertainment as by early twentieth-century avant-garde movements in the visual arts, it produced a unique form of integrated performance which was often daringly experimental yet refreshingly tongue-in-cheek. In the Spring of 1999, Nicolas Whybrow, then teaching at Lancaster University, observed the company's residency in Morecambe, on the Lancashire coast, over a period of three weeks. Here, he presents his impressions based on a consideration of Morecambe's identity as a place and the nature of Forkbeard's relationship to that place as residential visitors. His analysis takes into account the activities he observed – including his daily trips into Morecambe by train, media ‘takes’ on the town, informal conversations with contributors to the residency, and a formal interview with the company itself, represented here by interjections into the text. Nicolas Whybrow is now Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester.
‘Transforming’ Women's Lives: Bobby Baker's Performances of ‘Daily Life’
Authors: Aston Elaine
Published: January 2009

In an earlier issue ofNew Theatre Quarterly, NTQ55 (August 1998), Marcia Blumberg examined the setting of the kitchen in performances by Bobby Baker and Jeanne Goosen, arguing for the ‘transitional and transgressive’ possibilities of this domesticcum-performance space. Here, Elaine Aston returns to the ‘kitchen’ in Bobby Baker's performances of ‘daily life’. The article examines Baker's ‘language’ of food which ‘speaks’ of domesticity, and her conjunction of comic playing and the hysterical marking of the body, to show how her performance work constitutes an angry, feminist protest at the lack of social transformation in women's lives. Elaine Aston has authored a number of studies on contemporary women's theatre, and is Chair of Contemporary Performance and Theatre Studies, Lancaster University.
‘What Counts is the Landscape’: the Making of Pino DiBuduo's ‘Invisible Cities’
Authors: Saivetz Deborah
Published: January 2009

In October 1998 the Italian director Pino DiBuduo visited the Newark, New Jersey, campus of Rutgers University on the occasion of the major international conference, ‘Arts Transforming the Urban Environment’ For the occasion, he transformed a bleakly concrete teaching block on the Newark campus into a site for the latest of his Invisible Cities projects. These had originated in his Teatro Potlach company's residency in the Italian village of Fara Sabina in 1991, where DiBudo's intention – as in a number of site-specific variations on Invisible Cities since – was to render ‘visible’ aspects of the everyday urban environment which we no longer have the imagination or the patience to ‘see’. While Deborah Saivetz looks also at this original Italian project, and at a later version in Klagenfurt, Austria, she concentrates here on the Newark production, whose development she recorded – in this opening article in her own and DiBuduo's words, and in the following piece through the experiences and recollections of the participants. Deborah Saivetz holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Theater in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark campus of Rutgers University. Her directorial work includes productions for the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, the Drama League of New York's Directors’ Project, New York's Alchemy Courthouse Theater, and the Parallax Theater Company in Chicago. She has also worked with JoAnne Akalaitis as assistant director on John Ford's ‘Tis Pity She's a Whore at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, and created original theatre pieces with Chicago's Industrial Theater and Oxygen Jukebox.