bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Theatre of Franz Xaver Kroetz
Authors: Schregel Ursula
Published: April 2013

Thirty-four year old Franz Xaver Kroetz is the most frequently performed playwright writing in German in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) , Austria and Switzerland. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), he has also recently achieved a significance that should not be overlooked.
The Plays of Bernhard, Bauer, and Handke: A Checklist of Major Critical Studies
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

Three Austrian dramatists have emerged into prominence since the mid-1960s: Thomas Bernhard, Wolfgang Bauer, and Peter Handke. As Martin Esslin says, "These three young playwrights have already attained a world-stature. They are dominant in the German theatre and are making strong inroads into the European -and even the Anglo-American -world." One significant aspect of their world-stature is reflected in the range and number ofserious, substantial critical studies devoted to their plays. By this measure, only Handke can decisively be regarded as a dramatist of wide international reputation, although Bernhard and Bauer have evoked some academic interest outside Austria and Germany. The following highly selective bibliography of criticism and literary interviews shows this pattern clearly.
Book Reviews
Authors: Tracy Gordon , Innes Christopher , Page Malcolm , Paolucci Anne
Published: April 2013

BENJAMIN BENNETT, Modern Drama and German Classicism: Renaissance from Lessing to Brecht, reviewed by Gordon Tracy

JOHN WILLETT, The Theatre of Erwin Piscator., reviewed by Christopher Innes

ERIC SALMON, The Dark Journey: John Whiting as Dramatist., reviewed by Malcolm Page

DENNIS A. KLEIN, Peter Shaffer, reviewed by Malcolm Page

ROGER W. OLIVER, Dreams of Passion: The Theater of Luigi Pirandello, reviewed by Anne Paolucci
The Tooth of Crime: Sam Shepard's Way With Music
Authors: Powe Bruce
Published: April 2013

In her poem about Sam Shepard, "Sam Shepard 9 Random Years [7 + 2]," rock star Patti Smith describes that playwright's use of music, and particularly rock 'n' roll, as an evocation of immediacy and energy, as an expression of the disruptive rhythms of the present, and as a kind of force that can affect both the audience and perhaps even the way certain characters speak:
The Troubled Flight of Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird: From Manuscript through Published Texts
Authors: Gunn Drewey Wayne
Published: April 2013

Tennessee Williams has seldom been able to resist revising or rewriting his plays. Of his eighteen full-length plays published as of autumn 1979, thirteen have appeared in print, and seventeen been produced, in more than one version. Critics have rarely examined the differing texts, but in general one can say that Williams's final revisions are the superior versions. As he reworks a play, he usually tightens its structure and sharpens its dramatic values. However, one notable exception to this pattern exists: Sweet Bird of Youth. The three successive texts , 1959-1962, represent rather a sequential degeneration of Williams's artistic control, for in each revision the structure, the development of the characters, and the focus of the play become progressively less coherent. The fact is all the more lamentable since even the first published text of the play represents a failure in vision. After working and reworking elements that went into Sweet Bird for at least nine years, Williams had in 1958 arrived at an unpublished script of great literary and probably considerable dramatic merit. But for some reason, when the play went into production in New York the following year, he frantically rewrote it and in the process lost sight of his initial concept. The manuscripts at the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin allow us to follow the growth and unification of Williams's ideas as he came to this 1958 version, and likewise pennit us to understand the extent of the play's deterioration in printed form.
Drama in the Netherlands
Authors: Van Den Bergh Hans
Published: April 2013

The situation of theatre in the Netherlands about 1960 was paradoxical: dramatic productions blossomed, but virtually no plays of any importance were being written in the Dutch language. There were approximately a dozen repertory companies in the country, mostly in the more densely populated Western region, the provinces of North and South Holland. These companies annually staged between sixty and eighty new productions with which they toured all the theatres in the country. So even in the most remote towns, people had the opportunity of seeing some of the new productions in the local theatre during the season, sometimes even twice a week. This system enabled a small circle of people to keep abreast of developments in classic, semi-classic and contemporary drama written by all the leading international playwrights past and present, often in competent professional performances in Dutch translations. But original Dutch plays, whether classic or modern, were exceptional.
Giraudoux's La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu and Homer's Iliad: The Scales of Zeus as Dramatic Device
Authors: Pocknell Brian
Published: April 2013

It has become common practice in myth criticism and in thematological studies to link Giraudoux's La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu with the Iliad. Sometimes a critic pursues the matter further and points to interesting reworkings of the original material; often the usefulness of the comparison for the philosophical and political climate of the modem period is the focal point. Giraudoux's play offers rich opportunities for critics seeking the diachronic patterns in myth forms described by Professor Ruthven, but here our task will lead us beyond these questions towards consideration of an intertextual relationship in a new light. The success and popularity of recent revivals of La Guerre de Troie n' aura pas lieu should encourage us to take this fresh look at a familiar comparison in the hope of giving a more precise definition to Giraudoux's use of Homer's text and a reassessment of the basis of the play.
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 1974. 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 Buchner and Becque) and influential men and women of the theatre otherthan performers. This year's list covers 1980 and further 1979 and 1978 items. It is divided as follows:
Book Reviews
Authors: Durbach Errol , Donohue Joseph , Rusinko Susan , Silverstein Mariem , Gerould Daniel , Parkin Andrew , Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: April 2013

Ronald Gene Rollins, Sean O'Casey's Drama: Verisimilitude and Vision, reviewed by Errol Durbach

B.T. Smith, O'Casey's Satiric Vision, reviewed by Errol Durbach

Russell Jackson, ed., The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy For Serious People, reviewed by Joseph Donohue

Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson, Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work, reviewed by Susan Rusinko

Victor L. Cahn, Beyond Absurdity: The Plays of Tom Sloppard, reviewed by Mariem Silverstein

Harold B. Segel, Twentieth-Century Russian Drama: From Gorky to the Present, reviewed by Daniel Gerould

Hugh Hunt, The Abbey: Ireland's National Theatre 1904-1978, reviewed by Andrew Parkin

Jean Chothia, Forging a Language: A Study of the Plays of Eugene O'Neill, reviewed by Linda Ben-Zvi
J . M. Synge on the Irish Dramatic Movement: an Unpublished Article
Authors: Saddlemyer Ann
Published: April 2013

During the last week of April, 1906, the Irish National Theatre Society visited the north of England for the first time, performing in the Midland Theatre, Manchester, on April 23 and 24 before proceeding to Liverpool and Leeds. As the only Director based in Dublin, Synge had been taking increasing responsibility for Abbey Theatre business, and he arranged to accompany the players on tour. He appears to have written the following article while on the road or immediately after his return to Dublin, intending it for the Manchester Guardian. During the preceding year he had published two travel essays for the Guardian, and a series of twelve commissioned articles, illustrated by Jack B. Yeats, describing the congested districts of the west of Ireland. However, "The Dramatic Movement in Ireland" was apparently never published. Synge may well have had a hand in the writing of a more extensive illustrated souvenir programme describing the history of the movement and its major dramatists which was issued in May, however, when the company toured once again, with Synge in attendance, this time to Cardiff, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and Hull under the management of Alfred Wareing.
"Give o' er the play": Closure in Shakespeare' s Hamlet and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author
Authors: Liebler Naomi Conn
Published: April 2013

Comparisons between the plays of Pirandello and Shakespeare seem, by now, rather the norm than the exception in critical examinations of either dramatist; more often than not, and for a variety of reasons, Hamlet provides the locus classicus. So it is that the papers which follow demonstrate several kinds of comparisons between Hamlet and two of Pirandello's plays. Three of the essays were first presented, in somewhat briefer versions, to the Pirandello Society at the Modem Language Association meeting in Houston, Texas, on December 29, 1980; Matthew N. Proser's paper was prompted by the discussion at that session. In the two essays presented immediately after this one, Maurice Charney and Jill Levenson, respectively, identify and carefully analyze several particular points of comparison between Hamlet and Pirandello's Six Characters and between Hamlet and Henry IV; then Proser also examines Hamlet and Henry IV; and, finally, Terence Hawkes responds to the work of Charney and Levenson. The intention of the whole group might be to invite additional comparisons between the plays to be made by readers of these essays, thus continuing (in a manner not at all foreign to either Shakespeare or Pirandello) the process of completion in the mind of the "reader/audience." Indeed, Pirandello posited just such a process of completion as essential to the theater's special dynamism when he wrote that, "in the Theater a work of art is no longer the work of the writer (which, after all, can always be preserved in some other way), but an act oflife, realized on the stage from one moment to the next, with the cooperation of an audience that must find satisfaction in it."2 That cooperation is absolutely necessary to the play's "act of life," for it is in the reception by an audience that the play reaches its final form. With this idea as context, then, this first essay may serve to introduce the rest by suggesting some general similarities in the ways both writers involve, and subsequently discomfit, their audiences in search of the final form of the play.
Opening Closure
Authors: Hawkes Terence
Published: April 2013

Since we speak of roles and masks, perhaps I should begin by referring to my own designation here as "discussant." The term makes me sound like a patent medicine with analgesic and laxative qualities. So permit me to reassure you: I hope to encourage the former propensity and discourage the latter. This, despite the evident commitment of my colleagues to fundamentals.
The Politics of Anxiety: Contemporary Socialist Theatre in England
Authors: Bigsby C.W.E.
Published: April 2013

This year has seen a number of somewhat subdued celebrations of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Royal Court Theatre in its present form, and of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger. Celebration is not without its ironies, since in many ways the mood and style of the fifties are staging a come-back. History repeats itself, this time, perhaps, as farce. Whereas Sir Harold Macmillan had told the British that they had never had it so good, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher now tells them that they have had it far too good for far too long. But both periods are characterised by the disintegration of old models of behaviour and national purpose. There is a sense now as then of cultural crisis. Then it was Suez; now it is economic decline. And for twenty-five years we have had a theatre which has acknowledged this sense of unease, instability, usually in social or political terms, but in the case of writers like Harold Pinter, Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard , at least, in terms which raise ontological and epistemological questions. Indeed, even those writers initially hailed as representing some kind of breakthrough on a social or political level were in fact responding to a more profound sense of dislocation than could be contained by such an analysis.
This, That and the Other: The Critic and the Alternative Theatre
Authors: Anderson Michael
Published: April 2013

The relationship between critics and creative artists has always been a prickly one and, as Wyatt's diatribe suggests, the contemporary British theatre has not been without its share of open hostilities. But behind the irony of this author's attack there lies a sense of the inevitability of critics: “jolly helpful” or not, they seem as much a part of the landscape as Wyatt himself. Critics themselves, of course, are not slow in coming to the defence of their craft and although, if they were pressed, their claims might be more modest than those ascribed to them by Wyatt, they might not find it too difficult to argue the place of objective, evaluative judgement in the artistic scheme of things.
The Search for Epic Drama: Edward Bond's Recent Work
Authors: Roberts Philip
Published: April 2013

In our recent study of Edward Bond's works for the stage, we noted in the Preface: “Given that Bond is a developing writer, this book is hardly the last word. ” Since writing The Bundle (July-October 1977), Bond has completed Orpheus, “a story in six scenes,” which, with music by Hans Werner Henze and choreography by William Forsythe, was performed by the Stuttgart Ballet Company in March 1979. Orpheus was written between December 1977 and February 1978. After Orpheus came a full-length play , The Worlds, written during Bond's tenure of the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship in the universities of Durham and Newcastle, and first performed in March 1979 by a cast of students at the Newcastle Playhouse. The Worlds was subsequently performed by the Royal Court Theatre's Activists Youth Theatre Club at the Theatre Upstairs in November 1979 and received its first professional production at the New Half Moon Theatre, London in June 1981. Published with The Worlds was an important group of theoretical writings, developed over two years, and titled The Activists Papers (see note 13 below). A libretto, The English Cat, followed The Worlds . It was written between March and May 1979 with music again by Henze and, after a series of postponements, is to receive its premiere at Schwetzingen in May 1983. Two more full-length plays followed. Restoration: A Pastoral, written between July 1979 and October 1980, received its first performance at the Royal Court in July 1981. Summer: A European Play goes into rehearsal in December 1981 for production in January 1982 in the Cottesloe auditorium of the National Theatre. In note form in April 1980, Summer was completed in January 1981. As I write, another play, “The Human Cannon,” the first notes for which are dated July 1979, is in progress. The catalogue above illustrates both a remarkably steady output of work and emphasises the truth of my opening sentence, for in these works , Bond has developed the theoretical and practical range of his work to a remarkable degree.
Bond's Restoration
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: April 2013

Well, all true in a way, but how much it leaves out, not least the ending of Bond's new play (first perfonned at the Royal Court Theatre, London, 2 July 1981), which is on a high and sombre note. If, as Bond once said, The Sea dealt with tragedy but was a comedy, then Restoration deals with comedy but is a tragedy. More precisely, it begins as an extremely funny parody of a familiar comic mode and, without ever quite parting company with the comic, moves inexorably closer to melodrama -the pure, primitive melodrama of the early nineteenth century to which Bond gives another dimension by the force of his wit.
Nonsemiotic Performance
Authors: Kirby Michael
Published: April 2013

By talking about one of my recent plays, I intend to demonstrate two important theoretical points. The first is that, in spite of the recent widespread interest in the semiotics of performance, semiotics does not necessarily apply to all performance; there are presentations that may be referred to as "nonsemiotic." With the second point — a much less controversial one — I shall emphasize and give examples of the way in which structural theory, derived from the analysis of many works, may itself be "recycled" to become the creative source and practical foundation of a particular production.
Danger Music Number Three
Authors: Higgins Dick
Published: April 2013

Danger Music Number Three
"The eye finds no fixed point on which to rest ...”
Authors: Pontbriand Chantal
Published: April 2013

At this point I want to make a claim that I cannot hope to prove or substantiate but that I believe nevertheless to be true: viz ., that theatre and theatricality are at war today, not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as such - and to the extent that the different arts can be described as modernist, with modernist sensibility as such.
Book Reviews
Authors: Feral Josette , Brater Enoch , Neglia Erminio
Published: April 2013

Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, reviewed by Josette Feral

James Knowlson, Samuel Beckett: Krapp's Last Tape (Theatre Workbook 1, reviewed by Enoch Brater

Marion Peter Holt, Jose Lopez Rubio, reviewed by Erminio G. Neglia
Changed Textual Signs in Modern Theatricality: Gombrowicz and Handke
Authors: Krysinski Wladimir
Published: April 2013

The status of the theory of theatricality is equivocal and perhaps incapable of resolution. As a first critical approach, theatricality may be viewed by analogy with literariness [litterarite). Thus, it is almost a tautology, since theatricality is defined by characteristics of theatre as object, as literature; is literary when a metalanguage views it as an object. But the theatre-object is much more heterogeneous than literature. From another critical angle, theatricality is a concretization of the theatrical fact - histrionic or ludic, but also physical; it is the performance minus the text. But that too is equivocal. Theatregoers are well aware that all spectacles are not theatrical in the same way, and thus theatricality is doubly - at least doubly - in a situation of dependency.
Jean Vauthier's The Struggling Protagonist: The Problem of Inner Narratives
Authors: Laughlin Karen
Published: April 2013

Many recent dramatic texts are characterized by the presence of inner narratives or stories recounted by one or more of the play's characters. These accounts, apparently set apart from the main action because of their narrative form, are in fact integrated into the dramatic and theatrical structures of the works which contain them in a variety of ways. A striking example of this phenomenon is provided by Jean Vauthier's The Struggling Protagonist or Fortissimo [Le Personnage combattant ou Fortissimo], which was published in 1955 and opened in Paris under the direction of Jean-Louis Barrault in 1956.
"Victims of Duty"? The Critics, Absurdity, and The Homecoming
Authors: Carpenter Charles
Published: April 2013

As a loyal member of an English department who makes it a point of honor to teach "dramatic literature" rather than theatre and who has indulged in the hyperliterary analysis of theatrical texts, I would be one of the last to deprecate the brilliance or doubt the relevance of the kind of criticism that pervades Pinter studies today: sophisticated, ingenious, dispel-the-mystery analysis. Pinter's plays defy augury, and thus encourage such things. In our private reactions to the plays, we probably accept an effect of mystification, bafflement, or bemusement for what it primarily is: a mystifying, baffling, or bemusing moment. But when we contemplate going public, at the lectern or in print, we positively exult in the challenge to plumb the depths of the subtext and expose the hidden secrets of motive, continuity, and intended meaning.
What Did the Butler See in Orton's What the Butler Saw?
Authors: Charney Maurice
Published: April 2013

What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton (written in 1967 and produced posthumously in 1969) is, of course, a farce without a butler, which should more properly have been called What the Butler Might Have Seen had there been a butler and had he been privileged to oversee the strange goings-on in Dr. Prentice's private clinic. Like Stoppard in The Reallnspector Hound, Orton is parodying the whodunit conventions without actually writing a mystery story. We need the invisible butler in What the Butler Saw as a stand-in for the cozy and complacent amenities of upper-middle-class drawing-room life. Dr. Prentice's establishment is actually a private lunatic asylum, which Orton establishes in his epigraph as a microcosm of the world: "Surely we're all mad people, and they/Whom we think are, are not" (p. 361). By invoking Cyril Toumeur's Jacobean play The Revenger's Tragedy (from about 1607), Orton is setting up. as a model one of the strangest and most extravagant of seventeenth-century black comedies, which is also a play much influenced by Shakespeare's Hamlet. It is a wildly, almost hysterically rhetorical play that passes for tragedy only by certain technicalities of the ending. Even better than The Jew of Malta, for which T.S. Eliot coined the term, it exemplifies all of the bizarre and unanticipatable shifts in tone that are associated with "tragic farce. ,., What the Butler Saw is hardly tragic — it is, in fact, close to The Importance of Being Earnest both in style and plot (especially the lurid denouement) — but it plays with large concepts of identity (preferably sexual identity), incest, authority, and maintaining one's sanity in a mad world. These are all farcical themes with a certain natural relevance to tragedy.
Dialectical Laughter: A Study of Endgame
Authors: Simon Richard Keller
Published: April 2013

"Let's get as many laughs as we can out of this horrible mess," Becken told the actor playing Hamm during the 1964 London production of Endgame,' a statement which echoes Nell's speech to Nagg within the play that "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness ... it's the most comical thing in the world." But Beckett wants his audience to start laughing and Nell wants Nagg to stop. Unhappiness is so constant she tells him, "like the funny story we have heard too often," that we can finally laugh no more even though "we still find it funny ... "(pp. 18-19). Nell laughs only once during the play, less than any of the other characters who are themselves infrequent laughers but not yet at her level of exhaustion (or wisdom). Beckett's audience, to take the testimony of reviewers and critics, laughs much more often. Nagg listens to Nell's speech without comprehension and Beckett's audience may have similar problems with it, for her concept is difficult, the most comical which is also the least laughable, and the audience's situation is difficult, the spectators prodded to laugh by a play that shows characters on stage prodded to stop laughing. The tears and laughs of the world are a constant quantity, Pozzo announces in Wairing for Godor, and "For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh" (p. 22). It is this principle of the conservation of psychic energy that Endgame illustrates.
Life and Love and Serjeant Musgrave: An Approach to Arden's Play
Authors: Forsas-Scott Helena
Published: April 2013

Serjeant Musgrave's Dance is probably John Arden's best-known play. It is also a play which has generated much critical argument, the focal point tending to be Black Jack Musgrave himself. Frequently, however, the SeIjeant has been interpreted in conventional naturalistic tenns, the reasons for his failure being traced to his outlook, his personality, and his mind. When John Russell Taylor asserted, in Anger and After, that "this is a play about individual, complicated human beings, ... .. , he defined a view of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance which has continued to play an important part in the critical discussion.
Terminal: The Text as History
Authors: Taylor Thomas
Published: April 2013

Experimental theatre groups of the last two decades often proceeded without a prescriptive text as their generative source. The collective performances, based on rehearsal exercises, group examinations of personal themes, and other innovative material, relied not on the structure of a play script, but rather on theatrical structures inherent in the groups performance philosophies. But the best works of the Living Theatre, Open Theater, Performance Group, and their contemporaries have long since passed into theatre history, leaving behind some rather disorganized and unreliable documentary evidence — notebooks, production photos, interviews, reviews, and occasional critical analysis. By far the most important article of documentation, however, is the postscriptive performance text, the printed and published recording of the performance event, now anthologized with considerable frequency.
Alan Ayckbourn: Few Jokes, Much Comedy
Authors: Blistein Elmer
Published: April 2013

As The Comedy of Errors unties all its knots, as it finally reaches a moment of repose after a hectic and bewildering sequence of events, only two members of the dramatis personae are left on stage.
Farce and Michael Frayn
Authors: Worth Katherine
Published: April 2013

"Is God?", asks Professor George Moore in Stoppard's Jumpers. "Is farce?" might be a question for today's theatre and for the same reason that bothers Moore and his wife, Dotty, in their speculation on God. How can farce exist in a society which has lost all its certainties and loosened all the rigid social and moral structures which were the launching pad for the farces of the past? The special pleasure of the form, as Eric Bentley has said, is that "Inhibitions are momentarily lifted, repressed thoughts are admitted into consciousness, and we experience that feeling of power and pleasure, generally called elation". But how if society is busy encouraging us not to repress but to express and feel free? It may be an illusion, but the assumption that freedom is our ambience does present problems for the farce writer looking for something fixed and solid to support the wild balancing acts which are the special triumph of the form.
Pinero's Court Farces: A Revaluation
Authors: Henrickx Johan
Published: April 2013

Before he devoted himself exclusively to dramas treating women with a past, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero was a successful farceur. Unfortunately, his farces have been critically neglected in favour of such problem plays as The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) or The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895), two dramas prominent in the history of the British stage because they offered the English audience a first glimpse of the "new" play of ideas in the Ibsen mould. Time has shown that The Second Mrs. Tanqueray owes nothing to Ibsen and everything to melodrama; Pinero was not a daring revolutionary, but a clever adapter of what was tried and true according to contemporary Edwardian taste.
The Rhetoric of a Shavian Exposition: Act I of Major Barbara
Authors: Potter Rosanne
Published: April 2013

Critics of Shaw's plays, whether they have had generally negative or generally positive things to say about each play as a whole, have agreed on one subject: Shaw writes "faultless" first acts. The recognition of Shaw's craftsmanship in the art of dramatic exposition has usually stopped, however, with the critics' admission of the fact; few have investigated the mechanics of these brilliant first acts. Commentators have sometimes recapitulated the exposition, as Louis Crompton does, or mapped out the beginnings of the various plots, as Bernard Dukore does, but they have not attempted to understand how Shaw's representation of the expository facts controls the audience's reaction to character and plot. I propose to investigate this process by examining the rhetoric of the first act of an important, albeit problematic Shaw play, Major Barbara. Attending closely to the prior representation, to the incidents and dialogue Shaw chose to prepare the audience for the initiating incident of the plot, I shall attempt to display the rhetorical techniques of a Shavian exposition.
The Gallous Story and the Dirty Deed: The Two Playboys
Authors: Hirsch Edward
Published: April 2013

The Playboy of the Western World is the most controversial play in Irish history. When The Playboy was first produced in January, 1907, it sparked a turbulent week of demonstrations and riots. Even such a devotee of the Dublin theater as Joseph Holloway labeled the play "Blackguardism!" and Synge "the evil genius of the Abbey." Yet Synge's "able lieutenant" and most incisive early commentator, W.B. Yeats, immediately responded to the "mischievous extravagance" and verbal brilliance of the play, and he considered the failure of the audience to understand it the one serious failure of the Irish dramatic movement. During the length of its first production the play spawned a diversity of opinions which in effect break down into two violently opposed camps, represented by Yeats on one side and the opening-night Abbey audience on the other. The Yeatsian, or modernist, reading of Synge emphasized how much of the mind of Ireland the play contained, while praising its imaginative extravagance and exuberance, its satiric force, and, perhaps most crucially, its rich linguistic plenitude. The initial audience, responding to what it understood as the representational mode of The Playboy, dismissed the portrayal of Irish life as false naturalism, and objected to the plot and the language of the play on social and political grounds. The audiences who rioted in New York and Philadelphia in 1911-1912 when the Irish actors took the play on tour were heirs to the representational "reading" of Synge.
Edward Bond's Summer: "a voice from the working class"
Authors: Roberts Philip
Published: April 2013

In an unpublished interview given to Salvatore Maiorana in February 1981 (p. 142), Bond states: "It would be too presumptuous of me to say that I consider myself a voice of the working class but I do consider myself a voice from it. ... " The interview took place less than a month after the final draft of Summer was completed and at the same time as detailed notes for his new play, Human Cannon, began (although preliminary notes for the latter play exist from July 1979). There are notes, dated Jul y 1979, for two plays, Restoration and Human Cannon. Bond decided to write Restoration first, but before turning his attention to the latter of the two plays, he embarked upon Summer. Notes for several plays often coexist in Bond's papers, but the play in question, once begun in detail , proceeds to the virtual exclusion of all else, apart from occasional revisions. Thus, although Bond continued to modify Restoration in parts until October 1980, the sixth and final draft was completed in July. Early notes for Summer are extant for April 1980, but detailed notes commence in August. Before picking up Human Cannon again , although he worked on the playa little from February 1981, Bond directed Restoration at the Royal Court (opened July 1981) and also Summer at the National Theatre (opened January 1982). Once Summer opened, Human Cannon came into focus again and was substantially completed by the end of July 1982.
The Magic Triangle: Ingmar Bergman's Implied Philosophy of Theatrical Communication
Authors: Marker Lise-Lone
Published: April 2013

"The true theatrical creation must always remind the audience that it is watching a performance ," Ingmar Bergman has declared in an interview. "I believe that if you try to depart from that rule, you will very soon collapse. Because the function of the spectator — if we talk about an ideal spectator watching the ideal performance — is that he continually undergoes changes of mind, changes in his concentration." An instinctive rhythmic oscillation between engagement and detachment is , in Bergman's view , the key to the nature of the spectator's involvement in the mimetic experience. "From being completely involved at one instant," he argues, "the spectator is at the very next instant aware of being in the theatre. The next second he is involved again, completely involved; then after three seconds he is back again in the theatre. And that is a pan — and a very important pan — of his being a participant in the ritual. — Because that word Verfremdung is a complete misunderstanding. The spectator is always involved and he is always outside, at one and the same time."
Strindberg and Ibsen: Toward a Cubism of Time in Drama
Authors: Bennett Benjamin
Published: April 2013

In some ways the relation between Strindberg and Ibsen is entirely obvious. The echoes of Peer Gynt in Lucky Pellr's Journey and the attack on A Doll's House in Sir Bengt's Wife require no comment; nor does it seem to me at all unlikely — even though the original titles are not as similar as their English translations — that The Ghost Sonata has to do with Ghosts in an oblique manner. In both the visionary and the realistic modes, the attempt to surpass Ibsen is a constant factor in Strindberg's intention; Strindberg is always more extreme, but the distance separating him from Ibsen is still finite, Ibsen's presence in his background still discernible.
Miss Julie: Strindberg's Tragic Fairy Tale
Authors: Napieralski Edmund
Published: April 2013

In a letter to Karl Otto Bonnier on IO August 1888, Strindberg hailed Miss Julie as "the first Naturalistic tragedy in Swedish drama.” Since its first production, critics and audiences have understood Strindberg's indebtedness to the French naturalistic tradition as well as his own prefatory explanation of the play's naturalistic elements: its tight and simple form, its definition of elemental, hereditary, and environmental forces that appear to motivate the characters, its verisimilitude, and the testimony it seems to give to the law of nature that says the fittest shall survive. While few would contest the distinctive contribution Strindberg made to theatrical naturalism in this play as well as in others like The Father (1887) and Creditors (1888), the entire Strindberg canon clearly defines another strain in the art of this complex genius: antinaturalistic, romantic, expressionistic, even mystical. What is commonly thought, however, is that this strain evolved after or at least outside his naturalistic period and came to full bloom in later works like A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907). But even in Miss Julie, Strindberg shows through his use of fairy–tale motifs that naturalism could not satisfy him and that its narrow definitions could never contain his vision of tragic human experience.
Farce and Ritual: Arrabal's Contribution to Modern Tragic Farce
Authors: Norrish Peter
Published: April 2013

T.J. Donahue and J.-J. Daetwyler have recently given various interpretations of the symbolism within the ritual of Arrabal's plays. Looking at what is generally considered the best of them, L'Archirecre er l' Empereur d'Assyrie (I966), for instance, Donahue says that it is here "that the use of ritual finds its richest and most profound significance, ... " arguing that "the play gradually grows into a parable of the fall of modern, technological man. …” Daetwyler, for his part, concentrates on three distinct planes of interpretation: the sexual, the social, and the sacred. Before they consider possible social and metaphysical implications, both critics begin, however, on a more specifically psychological and emotive note. Donahue tells us that Arrabal's rituals have as one of their uses the provision for "a continuing exorcism of his fantasies" (p. 33), while Daetwyler seems to warn against too elevated or intellectualized a view by saying that Artabal's drama is primarily "un theatre de la terre et du coeur" (p. 9). These hints, which are rather lost sight of in the philosophical complexities of later chapters, deserve to be followed up. Ritual in Arrabal may then be seen in a different light. The extensive interviews which Arrabal himself has given lead one to think that philosophical interpretations of his plays are certainly inore speculative than those which probe the personal and psychological realities that the texts indisputably contain. For Arrabal has constantly referred in these interviews to the autobiographical nature of most of his writings, particularly his obsession with unhappy childhood memories and the nightmares related to them. "Writing is perhaps a compensation, a liberation for me," he adds.
Book Reviews
Authors: Morrison Kristin , Rinear David , Floyd Virginia , Martine James , Back Lillian , Richards David , Kern Edith , Shapiro Norman , Champigny Robert , Burnham Richard , Schlueter June , Wisenthal  , Nickson Richard
Published: April 2013

Hedwig Bock And Albert Wertheim, eds., Essays on Contemporary British Drama, reviewed by Kristin Morrison

Hedwig Bock And Albert Wertheim, eds., Essays on Contemporary American Drama, reviewed by David L. Rinear

Jackson R. Bryer, ed, "The Theatre We Worked For": The Letters of Eugene O'Neill to Kenneth Macgowan, reviewed by Virginia Floyd

Neil Carson, Arthur Miller, reviewed by James J . Martine

Bernard F. Dukore, Harold Pinter, reviewed by Lillian Back

Julian Hilton, Georg Bachner, reviewed by David G. Richards

David G. Richards, Eugene Labiche and Georges Feydeau, reviewed by Edith Kern

Stuart E. Baker., Georges Feydeau and the Aesthetics of Farce, reviewed by Norman Shapiro

H.G. Mcintyre, The Theatre of Jean Anouilh, reviewed by Robert Champigny

David Krause, The Profane Book of Irish Comedy, reviewed by Richard Burnham

Carol Kleiman, Sean O'Casey's Bridge of Vision: Four Essays on Structure and Perspective, reviewed by Sean O'Casey's Bridge of Vision: Four Essays on Structure andPerspective

Gerald M. Berkowitz, New Broadways: Theatre Across America 1950-1980, reviewed by June Schlueter

Brian Tyson, The Story of Shaw's Saint Joan, reviewed by J.L. Wisenthal

Stanley Weintraub, he Unexpected Shaw: Biographical Approaches to G.B.S. and His Work, reviewed by Richard Nickson
Counterpoint, Absence and the Medium in Beckett's Not I
Authors: Lawley Paul
Published: April 2013

"The medium of drama," asserted Ezra Pound, "is not words but persons moving about on a stage using words.” Pound stated a truism, but one which is sometimes forgotten by critics of Beckett's plays. This omission is perhaps not surprising: after all, "persons moving about on a stage" are few and far between in his plays, especially in the "microscopic" dramas of the 1970's. And are the beings in these plays "persons" anyway? It is all too easy to feel that the static stage picture emancipates the text, licensing the critic to consider the playas a dramatic poem-in-prose. In a holograph note written in 1976 during the composition of That Time (in which we see on the stage only a disembodied head hanging in the air), Beckett himself wrote: "To the objection visual component too small, out of all proportion with aural, answer: make it smaller on the principle that less is more." In this essay, I want to concentrate on Not I (1972) and to demonstrate that, in this play, much less than the whole body is made to yield more dramatic interest than a whole body ordinarily does. For in Not I, it is precisely the extraordinary nature of the "visual component" which encourages the fertile interaction between this single disembodied mouth and the text which it pours forth. Beckett conspires with his medium to make less more.
The Anatomy of Beckett's Eh Joe
Authors: Gontarski
Published: April 2013

Beckett seems to have moved into television unprodded, uncoaxed by anything save the challenges of the medium, the difficulties of subsuming yet another machine to character, as he did with the tape recorder in Krapp's Last Tape and the motion-picture camera in Film. On his fifty-ninth birthday he began a new work, another monologue. It was familiar if painful matter, a man, also in his late fifties, alone in a room, and a voice in his head haunting him. As he was in Film, the protagonist is again concerned with avoiding perception and its consequence, being, and the opening mime of Eh Joe virtually repeats the early room sequence of Film (in fact, in a preliminary note to himself, a note which precedes even the first holograph version, Beckett had Joe spend the night in a chair as, presumably, O did). The plot is as simple as that of Film, which Beckett has described as follows: "one striving to see one striving not to be seen." Of Eh Joe Beckett has said: "It is his passion to kill the voices which he cannot kill." Beckett's comment, although simple, is also singular, since it seems to counter (or complete) the thrust of the play itself. In the text Joe has apparently smothered the voices of his mother and father, and is well on his way to stifling Voice. At least this is the information Voice reports. Beckett, however, seems to deny that possibility.
Hamlin Garland's Under the Wheel: Regionalism Unmasking America
Authors: Motely Warren
Published: April 2013

In his regional social drama Under the Wheel (1890), Hamlin Garland sought not simply to expose the related oppressions of immigrants in the East and farmers in the West, but finally to challenge his audience's vision of American society as a whole. To appreciate the contribution Garland made to realism in the drama, critics must navigate around the depressing and regressive aspects of his later career and direct their courses to Boston in the late 1880'S and early 1890'S, when Garland spoke for literary innovation and social reform. In those years William Dean Howells praised the stories of Main-Travelled Roads (189 I), Garland's best known work, for evoking "the bitter and burning dust; the foul and trampled slush of the common avenues of life: the life of the men who hopelessly and cheerlessly make the wealth that enriches the alien and the idler, and impoverishes the producer. ...” But Garland's innovations extended to the drama as well. As Main-Travelled Roads helped to turn fiction toward the contradictions between the myths and the real conditions of the American West, so Under the Wheel directed American drama toward the serious treatment of lower-class characters and social and economic problems. Garland wrote Under the Wheel for the 1889/1890 season of James Heme's theater company. He hoped to make it a showcase of American realism. Although finally Garland and Heme could not find a theater manager who would produce the radical play, Garland's regional drama influenced Heme's more successful plays and represents a step toward the distinctive qualities of American dramatic realism.
Sam Shepard's Buried Child: The Ironic Use of Folklore
Authors: Nash Thomas
Published: April 2013

Although Sam Shepard's Buried Child won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama, this eerie and provocative story continues to baffle critics and audiences alike — at least those who have not done their homework in folklore and anthropology. Buried Child, like the famous Shirley Jackson short story "The Lottery," borrows heavily from the images and motifs found in Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough. Those who do not see the hand of the anthropologist in Shepard's play — and there are surprisingly many who write review columns — have called Buried Child "an American gothic comedy" or "a poor impression of a play by Pinter or Albee." Directors are also not immune from confusion, sometimes interpreting as comedy several scenes of the play which are clearly intended as ritual. In fact, Buried Child is a serious statement that pulls at the very bone and marrow, its plot a modem version of the central theme of Western mythology, the death and rebirth of the Com King.
Experimental Theatre and Semiology of Theatre: The Theatricalization of Voice
Authors: Finter Helga
Published: April 2013

This paper was prepared originally for the Theatre Colloquium sponsored by the Department of French at the University of Toronto in November 1980; and I should like to begin with a brief remark on the title of the session where it was delivered, a session devoted to "theatre as representation." As the title of my lecture was condensed to "Experimental Theatre and Semiology of Voice," I should explain immediately what the association of notions of re-presentation and semiology will cover here. The issue of my article is precisely, if not removing, then putting into parentheses the "re" of representation. In consequence, my argument will describe semiology as an intertext of a theory of the signifying process, rather than as a theory of signs. This approach derives from the particular kind of theatre with which I am dealing - that of Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, Mabou Mines, II Carrozzone, and Squat - which disarticulates the logocentric domination which, in our culture, governs the relation between the different signifying systems (verbal/visual! auditory), and thus brings the signifying process to light at the expense of our fixation on meaning, as the mode of perception is transformed in and by acting. This theatre permits analysis with respect to its subjective and social determinants: the single perspective gives way to multiple meanings. The spectator-voyeur sees himself faced with his own desire and the basis of that desire, namely its relation to signifying systems. From now on in this theatre it is no longer a question of describing or miming what man does and dramatizing those actions: it is a question not of re-presenting facts and actions, but of dramatizing the formation of the being of man in/by languages. Thus this theatre conducts explorations through acting, stage languages, daily languages and aesthetic languages; by comparing new subjective dispositionswith the social dispositions of the subject put forward by theatre and society.
Simone de Beauvoir as Dramatist: Les Bouches Inutiles
Authors: Jones Judith Zykofsky , Reinelt Janelle
Published: April 2013

In his Italian Chronicles, Sismondi reports that during sieges fighters sometimes disposed of the "useless mouths" by casting the women, the old people, and the children into the trenches. Simone de Beauvoir, intrigued with the dramatic possibilities inherent in these accounts, patterned her only play, Les Bouches Inutiles (Useless Mouths, 1945), on an analogous situation: she merely transposed the action from Italy to Flanders, where similar practices had taken place.

Although the play is seldom produced and has never been translated into English, Les Bouches Inutiles deserves careful study because it sheds light on the writer's evolving perspective on women and stresses the existentialist underpinnings of de Beauvoir's feminism. By focusing on the familiar existentialist themes of freedom and responsibility, as well as on the relationship between means and ends, the writer dramatized key feminist themes in Les Bouches Inutiles a number of years before she formalized her position in The Second Sex (1949). Although she credits Jean-Paul Sartre with drawing her attention to the woman question in 1946,2 the play reveals that de Beauvoir had already formulated several major concepts describing the role and place of woman in Western society.