bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Talking to Carlos Gimenez, Creator of the Rajatabla in Caracas
Authors: Loney Glenn
Published: January 2009

knowledge of the theatre of South America tends to be shamefully scanty in the English-speaking world: yet the forces of rapid political change, both revolutionary and repressive, often provoke innovative theatrical responses. NTQ intends to pursue the study of theatre in this huge continent. The following interview was conducted by Glenn Loney with the young director Carlos Gimenez – a refugee from Argentina presently working with his Rajatabla troupe in Caracas, Venezuela – whose production of Bolivar was brought to the Public Theatre in New York last summer, with a return visit planned to include The Death of Garcia Lorca, both discussed in the following conversation. Glenn Loney is a widely published American drama critic, teacher, and writer, presently teaching on the doctoral theatre programme of the City University of New York, and working on the American volume in the Documents of Theatre History series for publication by Cambridge University Press.
‘A Piece of Our Life’: the Theatre of the Eighth Day
Authors: Howard Tony
Published: January 2009

Poland's Teatr Osmego Dnia – the Theatre of the Eighth Day – has survived for 22 years, with essentially the same personnel since the early seventies, and with a constant commitment to social engagement. The group – which has never included trained actors, because, according to director Lech Raczak, any graduate of a Polish theatre school, ‘cannot act with his whole self’ – was a major voice of protest for the Polish student generation of 1968. Despite constant harassment and frequent arrests, it continues both to inspire and record the work of young oppositional theatres, although in 1985 it was forced to split when six members toured western Europe whilst four others, denied their passports, played in Polish churches. What follows is a collage of two interviews conducted that autumn – in London with Tadeusz Janiszewski, Adam Borowski, and Leszek Sczaniecki, and in Poznan with Lech Raczak and Marcin Keszycki. They discuss the importance of Grotowski for their generation: their working method, based on group improvisation; the function of poetry in physical theatre; their major productions; and the day-to-day survival strategies of a collective dedicated to exploring the expressive and political potential of the actor. The interviews were assembled by Tony Howard, a playwright who also teaches English in the University of Warwick, and who expresses his thanks to the many people who made this feature possible – especially Nick Gardiner, the ‘European’ group's manager, and the translators. Ewa Elandt and Ewa Kraskowska.
The Nature of Theatre Dialogue
Authors: Wesker Arnold
Published: January 2009

‘What makes one sentence into a line of poetry and another sentence dull and lifeless?’ This was one of the questions Arnold Wesker set out to answer from the point-of-view of the practising playwright rather than the critical theorist, when he delivered the following pape; to the biennial conference of the International Association of Theatre Critics in Rome in 1985. He examines the constituent elements of stage dialogue in supposdly ‘raistic’ drama and th rigorous if not always conscious process of artistic selection and shaping diotated, in his own practice, by the natur of the originating experence. He illustrates his argument with extracts from his own works. including his most recently staged play in London, Annie Wobbler – the first in a now-completed cycle of four plays for on woman of which Four Portraits, Yardsal, and Whatever Happened to Betty Lemon? are the other parts. A frequent contributor to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, Arnold Wesker's earliest works, the plays of the ‘Wesker Trilogy’ and The kitchen, were milestones in the creatior of the ‘now British drama’ of the late fifties, and he has continuec to write for the theatre in a wide range of styles – which have been known to disturb the ‘expectations of realism’ of some of the critics he was here addressing…
Drama, Education, and Social Change: the Debate Continues, 2
Authors:   NTQ Symposium
Published: January 2009

David Hornbrook's articles in NTQ 4 and 5 offered a challengig perspective to the history of drama-in-education. a critique of present practices and practitioners. and some positive proposals for the future place of the subject in the clrriculum. These provoked Widespread interest and we published in NTO 7 a first selection of comments. We now continue the debate with comments from Gavin Bolton, Who has published Widely on educational drama and is Head of Drama and in the School of Education of the University of Durham. and Warwick Dobson. Senior Lecturer in Drama at Bradord and llkley College.
Weaving Theories is not Enough
Authors: Bolton Gavin
Published: January 2009

Despite the successful production of Ödön von Horvath's Tales from the Vienna Woods. In the translation by Christopher Hampton at the National Theatre in 1977. the work of this inter-war contemporary of Brecht's remains little known in the English-speaking theatre. James L. Rosenberg. Professor of Drama at Carnegie-Mellon University. Pittsburgh, is himself a professional playwright who has translated some of Horvath's work previously unavailable in English. In an illuminating biographical and critical introduction to this checklist, he both outlines the reasons for our ignorance of Horvath, and suggests aspects of his undervalued importance. The subsequent checklist provides a succinct outline of the original productions of Horvath's plays and of the publication a succinct outline of the original productions of Horvath's plays and of the publication
The Drama of the Holocaust: Issues of Choice and Survival
Authors: Skloot Robert
Published: January 2009

One of the ways in which Jews and others have sought somehow to assimilate the knowledge of the Nazi Holocaust has been through the theatrical expression of the appalling dilemmas it posed. Implicitly or explicitly, however, the process of ‘shaping’ that this involves forces an attitude to be taken by the dramatist towards the meaning of ‘choice’ in such circumstances, and the ‘acceptable’ price of possible survival. In his anthologyThe Theatre of the Holocaust(1982), Robert Skloot assembled four plays which exemplified the possible ‘attitudes to survival’, and here he relates them to the ideas of Bruno Bettelheim, Terrence Des Pres, and other writers on the subject, in an attempt to assess how fully and honestly theatre is able to reflect the issues involved. Robert Skloot is Professor of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was Fulbright Lecturer in Israel in 1980–81. He has also edited a collection of essays, ‘The Darkness We Carry’:the Drama of the Holocaust, due for publication in the spring of 1988.
The Common Imagination and the Individual Voice
Authors: Churchill Caryl
Published: January 2009

Caryl Churchill began her playwriting career for radio in the ‘sixties’, became a writer for live theatre in association with such companies as Monstrous Regiment and, notably. Joint Stock – and recently achieved her greatest commercial success with the transfer to Wyndhams Theatre of her play about the City. Serious Money, premiered at the Royal Court in March 1987 in a production by Max Stafford-Clark. In conversation here with Geraldine Cousin, she sketches in the early years of her career and the different demands of radio and stage plays, discusses some of her recurrent themes and preoccupations, weighs how far she feels herself a ‘woman writer’, and describes the collaborative approach of working with Joint Stock. She then talks in more detail not only about Serious Money, but her earlier collaboration with David Lan (author of Flight. Sergeant Ola and His Followers, and The Winter Dancers) – a variation upon the Bacchae theme, A Mouthful of Birds, directed by Les Waters and lan Spink. The interviewer, Geraldine Cousin, teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick.
The Plays of David Mamet: Games of Manipulation and Power
Authors: Schvey Henry I.
Published: January 2009

David Mamet, born in Chicago in 1947, is one of the most talented and eagerly watched young playwrights in America today, whose work has also found a ready response among British audiences. After such plays asSexual Perversity in Chicago(1974).American Buffalo(1975) andEdmond(1982), hisGlengarry Glen Ross(1982), dedicated to Harold Pinter, had its world premiere in London at the National's Cottesloe Theatre, and subsequently won the Pulitzer prize for the best American play in 1984. In the same year,American Buffalo(seen briefly on Broadway in 1977) won an award for best revival, while the London production ofEdmond, which opened at the Royal Court in December 1985, was favourably received by English critics in contrast to its mixed reception in New York. In addition to Mamet's work for the stage, he has written the screenplays for the filmsThe VerdictandThe Postman Always Rings Twice. Noteworthy for their sensitivity to the nuances and rhythms of American speech, including its unmistakable penchant for banalities and obscenities. Mamet's best plays, as the accompanying essay demonstrates, carry with them an implicit attack on American business values, usually through a confrontation between two individuals, one of whom tries to exploit or dominate the other. The interview which follows was conducted in New York City on 2 January 1986 following a performance of Mamet's latest work, a double bill of one–act plays entitledThe ShawlandPrairie du Chien, selected by Mamet's friend and close associate at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Gregory Mosher, to reopen the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York.
Celebrating the Capacity for Self-Knowledge
Authors: Mamet David
Published: January 2009

You grew up in Chicago? Yes. And then came to New York, to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, a school of theatre where I came back later to work as an actor and director, I kind of stumbled upon a career as a playwright. I became a playwright because I was an actor and I started directing because I wasn't a very good actor and I started writing because I was working with very young actors and there was nothing for them to do. I started writing because nothing existed for twelve 23-year-old actors to do.
The Rediscovery of Queen Margaret: ‘The Wars of the Roses’, 1963
Authors: Potter Robert
Published: January 2009

For many theatregoers whose sensibilities were shaped by the new theatre writing of the late ‘fifties, the adaptation in 1963 of Shakespeare's first tetralogy of history plays into the three-play cycle The Wars of the Roses came as a startling revelation of the ‘political’ Shakespeare. Directed for the still-fledgling RSC by Peter Hall and John Barton, with the latter also responsible for the adaptation and revision, the sequence was perhaps most memorable for the performance by Peggy Ashcroft as Queen Margaret-Shakespeare's ‘first heroine’ –whose presence first illuminated and then haunted the production. Robert Potter, who now teaches in the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, encountered the production while on a Fulbright scholarship to England, and here recollects in tranquility the disturbing impression of Ashcroft's performance, and its impact upon our understanding of the plays. Robert Potter, who as a practising playwright made his own adaptation of the Roses sequence in 1977, has also published widely in the field of medieval drama, and wrote on theAbraham and Isaac play as presented in Aztec Mexico in NTQ 8.
When the Kissing Stopped… and What Happened Next
Authors: Barker Clive
Published: January 2009

In his major work onTheatre Games(Methuen, 1977), Clive Barker provided both a practical textbook on the uses of game-playing for actors, and some theoretical background to its value. There, he largely stressed the function of games as a means to an end – the development of acting skills, and the enrichment of the rehearsal process. But, partly as a result of the book's appearance, he has also conducted many one-off ‘game workshops’, often for groups whose concerns are not primarily or professionally theatrical: and in the following article he discusses the value that game-playing still seems to have for such groups, by close analogy with the function of the ‘kissing-games’ of his own childhood and adolescence – as a means of breaking down inhibitions within a context that is both socially acceptable and controlled. Clive Barker, whose career in the professional theatre began with Joan Littlewoods's Theatre Workshop company, is co-editor ofNew Theatre Quarterly, and now teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick.
The Albatross and the Swan: Two Productions at Stratford
Authors: Holderness Graham
Published: January 2009

Has the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford become an expensive irrelevance – actually hindering what should be the real work of the parent company, which has to expend so much of its cash and its energy in running it? Certainly, some were tempted to suggest so when the RSC's most exciting Shakespeare productions of the ‘seventies seemed to be emerging from the spartan environment of The Other Place. Now, Graham Holderness, through a detailed comparison of last season's main-house revival of The Taming of the Shrew and the Swan production of Titus Andronicus, argues that the creation of the Swan – a theatre space specifically but not ‘archeologically’ designed for Elizabethan and Jacobean plays – heightens the sense of a ‘contradictory relationship’ between the RSC's two ‘classical’ houses in Stratford. Graham Holderness, author of several studies in the fields of Renaissance drama and the modern novel, is presently Head of Drama at Roehampton Institute.
Actor Training in Italy
Authors: Tessari Roberto
Published: January 2009

‘Fools and graceless buffoons’ was one Italian playwright's view of Italian acting at the turn of the nineteenth century – and the political and linguistic fragmentation of the country continued to prevent any national approach to the problems of actor training. By the beginning of the present century the situation was beginning to improve, but until the ‘sixties the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome remained the single major training institution in the country. In this article, Roberto Tessari looks at the explosion of opportunities for actor training – and the wide range of approaches to it – which then occurred, largely since the ‘events’ of 1968. He quotes directly from the teachers involved to illustrate the aims of the various schools, which are now beginning a necessary process of consultation – over such matters as assessment procedures and the placement of students – through the annual ‘Prima del Teatro’ meetings hosted by the Pisa Theatre.
Situation Hopeless, Not Terminal: the Playwright in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Rosenberg James L.
Published: January 2009

Playwrights in the West remain under threat not only from the ever-increasing dominance of the director and the loss of autonomy carried over from film and television, but from sheer economic deprivation – which makes playwriting impossible as a full-time profession for most of its members. Is the best way to remedy this the assertion of collective responsibility and power advocated in this country by the Theatre Writers Union, or by a frank acceptance that artistic strength is seldom likely to be matched by economic or ‘political’ power – as James L. Rosenberg now argues? NTQ does not necessarily endorse the viewpoint here expressed, but feels that it is a forceful statement of a ‘new realism’ about the role of the playwright in the likely western future – in this respect also making an illuminating contrast to the foregoing article by Zygmunt Hübner. The author, James L. Rosenberg, is a widely-performed American dramatist, who has also translated numerous plays from the German, and is presently Visiting Professor of Theatre at Williams College. Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Male Impersonation in the Music Hall: the Case of Vesta Tilley
Authors: Aston Elaine
Published: January 2009

Music hall has only recently been treated to ‘serious’ as distinct from anecdotal study, and the ‘turns’ of its leading performers remain largely unexplored. Particularly revealing, perhaps, are the acts of the male impersonators – whose ancestry in ‘legit’ performance had been a long one, yet whose particular approach to cross-dressing had a special social and sexual significance during the ascendancy of music hall, with its curious mixture of working-class directness, commercial knowingness, and ‘pre-Freudian innocence’. The most successful of the male impersonators was Vesta Tilley, whose various disguises, the nature of their hidden appeal, and the ‘messages’ they delivered are here analyzed by Elaine Aston.
The Way of Refusal: the Theatre's Body-in-Life
Authors: Barba Eugenio
Published: January 2009

Both in his practical work with Odin Teatret, and his close involvement with ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology. Eugenio Barba has developed an approach to theatre which is highly personal in expression, yet far-sightedly comparative in its concern with the nature of the actor's work and the ways in which it crosses cultural and other divides. An Advisory Editor of NTQ, Eugenio Barba contributed earlier pieces on the nature of the actor's energies to NTQ 4 and NTQ 11, and now further develops his thinking, in a consideration of what he calls ‘the body-in-life’, and the balance between its ‘three vital organs’ which is essential if the actor is to realize his full potential.
Catharsis and the Actor
Authors: Watson Ian
Published: January 2009

‘Catharsis’ remains one of the several concepts employed by Aristotle in thePoeticswhose precise meaning and implications have tantalized critics over the centuries. But all too often ‘catharsis’ has largely been discussed as a process which occurs to theaudienceof a tragedy: in this article, Ian Watson looks instead at the different forms it may take (and the differences in underlying intentions) so far as performers are concerned. He relates his ideas to forms of dramatic experience as discrete as psychodrama, and to schools of acting from Stanislavski to Grotowski.
Theatre in Thatcher's Britain: Organizing the Opposition
Authors: Symposium NTQ
Published: January 2009

On 7 May 1988 a meeting was held at Goldsmiths' College, London, involving a number of theatre practitioners and academics on the left, to discuss the current state of British theatre under Thatcherism and suggest some possible responses. The meeting was organized by Vera Gottlieb, and NTQ Editor Simon Trussler, who both teach in the Drama Department at Goldsmiths' College. Also present were Clive Barker, Pam Brighton, Colin Chambers, Trevor Griffiths, Peter Holland, Kate Harwood, Albert Hunt, Nesta Jones, John McGrath, Paul Moriarty, Rob Ritchie, and Juliet Stevenson. Apologies for absence were received from Caryl Churchill, Tilda Swinton, and Clare Venables. This abbreviated transcript was edited by Andy Lavender.
Jagran: Theatre for Education and Development
Authors: Bakshi Parminder Kaur
Published: January 2009

‘Jagran’ means ‘awakening’ – as Aloke Roy, the director of this Delhi-based company points out, a more immediate term for most of his marginalized Indian audiences than ‘consciousness-raising’. In a multilingual society. Roy also found in mime a more immediately expressive means of theatrical communication for the street-corners and other sites of urban dereliction where his company typically performs its fifteen to forty-minute pieces, each of which focuses upon a particular social issue or contemporary problem. Parminder Kaur Bakshi, of the University of Warwick, recently visited the company in Delhi and experienced their work, which she here introduces before discussing with Aloke Roy the origins, development, and techniques of the group. Outline scenarios of a selection of the Jagran pantomimes accompany the feature.
‘When a Dream Vanishes’: Edward Gordon Craig in Florence
Authors: Sardelli Alessandro
Published: January 2009

When Gordon Craig settled in Florence before the First World War, he found himself amidst a flourishing avant-garde artistic community. which he regarded with some caution. Between the staging of Rosmersholm with Duse in 1906 and the closing of his short-lived theatre school at the Goldoni Arena in 1914, he also conducted a correspondence with the eclectic cosmopolitan Carlo Placci – a previously unpublished source on which Alessandro Sardelli has drawn to illuminate Craig's Florentine years, during which his influential journal The Mask made its earliest appearance, and Craig also developed the idea of his adjustable screens, first employed during his Moscow collaboration with Stanislavski on Hamlet.
Games in Education and Theatre
Authors: Barker Clive
Published: January 2009

In his major work onTheatre Games(Methuen, 1987), Clive Barker provided both a practical textbook on the uses of game-playing for actors, and some theoretical background to its value. There, he largely stressed the function of games as a means to an end - the development of acting skills through the enrichment of the rehearsal process. In NTQ14 (1988). he described how he came to develop ‘games workshops’ for non-theatrical purposes, and considered the value of games-playing for adults by analogy with the function of the ‘kissing games’ of his own childhood and adolescence. In this article (based on a paper presented in November 1988 at the conference on theatre and education in Mohammédia, Morocco), he considers our changing perception of the relationship between the two senses of ‘play’, and the way in which ‘games’ have been institutionalized to avoid their inherent threat to an organized, work-disciplined society-a trend still being reinforced, as the improvisatory element of drama in schools becomes subject to the rigours of evaluation and examination. Clive Barker, whose career in the professional theatre began with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop company, is co-editor ofNew Theatre Quarterly, and now teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick.
Stanislavsky in Poland: Ethics and Politics of the Method
Authors: Tyszka Juliusz
Published: January 2009

The reception of most manifestations of Russian art and culture in Poland is linked inextricably with the political situation, and official and popular attitudes are often widely divergent. From the first visit of the Moscow Art Theatre to Warsaw in 1908, when most Poles boycotted the performances, through enthusiasm tempered by ignorance in the inter-war period, to the 'Stalinization' of Stanislavsky as official mediator of socialist realism in the late 'forties, Polish attitudes to the 'method' which was Stanislavsky's legacy are here examined by Juliusz Tyszka. Today, he concludes, Poles have largely consigned Stanislavsky to the lumber-room of history – though there are a few cautionary voices who urge his continuing relevance.
Ingmar Bergman Directs ‘Long Day's Journey into Night’
Authors: Törnqvist Egil
Published: January 2009

In connection with the Eugene O'Neill centenary in 1988 Ingmar Bergman directed Long Day's Journey into Night at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, where this play (like A Touch of the Poet and Hughie), also had its world premiere. While the director of the 1956 production, Bengt Ekerot, settled for a realistic approach. Bergman's pruned version, widely acclaimed both inside and outside Sweden, is existentially stylized. Here Egil Türnqvist discusses especially the visual aspects of the production, partly on the basis of information from the scenographer, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss. Egil Törnqvist received his doctorate from Uppsala University in 1969, and since then has been Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include A Drama of Souls: Studies in O'Neill's Super-Naturalistic Technique (1968). Strindberg och Bergman: Spöksonaten – drama och iscensättning (1973), Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structure (1982), and (with Barry Jacobs) Strindberg's Miss Julie: a Play and Its Transpositions (1988). He contributed a production study of Bergman's production of Strindberg's Ghost Sonata to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, No. 11 (1973).
Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting
Authors: Quinn Michael L.
Published: January 2009

One of the persistent problems in acting, and one that seems to grow steadily in importance, comes from the public identity of the actor. This study suggests that a semiotic approach to the acting sign can help to distinguish the function of celebrity in acting, the threats to authority that celebrity imposes, and the results of celebrity acting both on stage and in the efforts of the actor to achieve an identity. This essay is related to earlier discussions of the stage figure by its author, Michael Quinn, inModem DramaandGestus. applying the Prague School model of analysis that also supported his article on reading and directing in NTQ11 (1987). Michael Quinn, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, is currently working on a critical study of Vaclav Havel, as well as a longer study of the stage figure in different theatrical contexts.
Telling the Story: Shakespeare's Histories in Performance
Authors: Jarvis Andrew
Published: January 2009

The English Shakespeare Company was founded in 1986 by Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington with a commitment to take large-scale productions to regional venues. Henry IV, Parts One and Two and Henry V opened at the Plymouth Theatre Royal in November 1986 under the title The Henrys: they were then staged at the Old Vic and toured extensively. In December 1987 Richard II, with a two-part adaptation of the three parts of Henry VI (House of Lancaster and House of York) and Richard III, were added to the previous trilogy to create a complete cycle of history plays – The Wars of the Roses. The cycle was toured in England and abroad before playing at the Old Vic in the spring of 1989. It has since been filmed for television by Portman Productions. The only comparable treatment of the histories in the theatre took place at Stratford in 1964. when Peter Hall and John Barton staged seven plays as a sequence spanning English history from the reign of Richard II to the downfall of Richard III. Andrew Jarvis has been with the English Shakespeare Company since 1986 when he played Gadshill, Douglas, Harcourt, and the Dauphin. He has since played Exton, Hotspur, and Richard III. In 1988 he won the Manchester Evening News Award for Best Actor in a Visiting Production for his portrayal of Richard III. Prior to joining the ESC he had played many roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Here, he is interviewed by Stephen Phillips, lecturer in drama at the College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth, who is currently preparing a study of Shakespeare's history cycles in performance in the twentieth century.
Subverting Images of the Female
Authors: Swinton Tilda
Published: January 2009

This is the third in a series of interviews with women who are involved in various capacities in feminist theatre today, whose career paths intersect and connect with the feminist movement and the feminist theatre movement, tracing developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview, with Gillian Hanna of Monstrous Regiment, set out to provide an update of previously published information, and thereby to keep alive and accurate the current debate about British feminist theatre groups. The second interview, with playwright Charlotte Keatley, put forward a new vision of a ‘map’ to women and (play)writing. This interview carries on the discourse between feminist theatres and their intended audiences by putting forward the responses of one of Britain's strongest young performers, Tilda Swinton, to questions about the challenges and expectations involved in performing gender roles and reversals, or of ‘playing woman’, on film and on stage. Tilda Swinton was born in London in 1960. She studied Social and Political Sciences and English at Cambridge as an undergraduate from 1980 to 1983, under the supervision of Margot Heinemann. It was at Cambridge that Swinton first met and worked with director Stephen Unwin, her closest colleague throughout her career. In 1983, she went to Southampton and worked for six months at the Nuffield Theatre, where she earned her Equity card. In 1984–85, she worked with the RSC, but has chosen not to work on the main stages of the nationally subsidized theatres since. Swinton is primarily known for her work in political theatre, based at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, the Almeida (most notably on The Tourist Guide in 1987 and Mozart and Salieri in 1989), and the Royal Court in London, where she starred in the celebrated Man to Man – a transfer from the Traverse – in 1987, and where she assistant-directed Conquest of the South Pole in 1988. Swinton has also worked at the National Theatre Studio, and has just played Nova at the Cottesloe in a production of Peter Handke's The Long Way Round. She has worked in Italian opera (1988), and has collaborated on and been featured in films by John Berger (Play Me Something, 1988) and Derek Jarman (most notably, Caravaggio, 1986; The Last of England, 1987; and War Requiem, 1988): she continues to collaborate with both. Current and future projects include work on a TV series written by John Byme, which began filming in late September 1989, and work with director Sally Potter on a film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, in which Swinton plays Orlando.
‘Injunction Granted’ in Its Times: a Living Newspaper Reappraised
Authors: Cobb Gerry
Published: January 2009

Back in the early 1970s, the original Theatre Quarterly published a number of articles which revived interest in the Federal Theatre Project. In TQ 4, Heinz Bernard placed the work of the FTP's Living Newspaper Unit in the context of American left-wing theatrical practice in the 1930s, and a piece on its techniques by Arthur Arent, the principal writer of the Living Newspapers, first published in 1938, was reprinted in the same issue. Then, in TQ 9 (1973), came Arnold Goldman's incisive and far-ranging article, ‘Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit’, which not only traced the political rise and fall of the Unit and the Project, but suggested the importance of the Living Newspaper form to American political theatre, and identified important formal links with Soviet and German practices. This marked the beginning of a reassessment of the work of the Unit, whose reputation had been tarnished and somewhat marginalized in the wake of the FTP's closure by Congress on the grounds of political extremism, and the subsequent legacy of the McCarthy years. The present article by Gerry Cobb continues the reassessment process, and deals with the Living Newspaper considered most contentious of all both by Congressional opponents of the Project and by its own hierarchy – Injunction Granted. Cobb argues that this piece was singled out for attack because of its divergence from the policies of the New Deal, and its call for the organization of workers under the auspices of the CIO, its politics thus coming to obscure its theatrical strengths. His article both demonstrates the historical relevance of Injunction Granted at the time of its creation, and emphasizes and reassesses its strengths as a piece of theatre. Gerry Cobb is a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where, in addition to working on a doctoral thesis on the Living Newspapers, he is editing a volume of the four major works in the form, including Injunction Granted, for publication by Bristol Classical Press late in 1990.
Femme Fatale as Scapegoat: the Modernity of Aimée Desclée
Authors: Stokes John
Published: January 2009

A scandalously successful life as an actress and a tragically early death seemed to cast Aimée Desclée in a stereotypical romantic mould, as did a succession of emotionally-fraught roles, notably in the plays of the younger Dumas. But contemporaries praised the new realism she brought to the passionately wayward women she portrayed. In what did this ‘realism’ consist, and in whose eyes did the virtual equation of female desire with neurosis constitute ‘reality’? John Stokes, who teaches in the Department of English in the University of Warwick, here follows an outline of her career and its context with detailed examinations of the creation, nature, and reception of her most famous roles – finally exploring the effects of the events surrounding the creation of the Third Republic and the impact of the Paris Commune of 1870 on the way in which male playwrights and audiences perceived the women she played in her later years. John Stokes recently contributed the section on Bernhardt toBernhardt. Terry. Duse: the Actress in her Time, with Michael Booth and Susan Bassnett (Cambridge, 1988).
A Theatre for Urban Renewal
Authors: Settimo Teatro
Published: January 2009

Teatro Settimo is a theatre group which was created in the Italian industrial city of Turin in 1979 by a group of theatre-making friends who wished to discover a kind of left-wing theatre that would respond directly to the problems of an urban environment. Their story is one of institutionalized success achieved – and then deliberately rejected, as the problems of administering that success, with all its attendant bureaucracy, threatened to stifle the original impulses behind the company. Their most recent production, Stabat Mater, was presented at the ‘Divina’ conference held in Turin in June 1990, as described elsewhere in this issue. Lizbeth Goodman and Gabriella Giannachi spoke there to members of the group, which has since brought Stabat Mater to the ‘Theatre under Threat’ conference in Cambridge last October.
Expressionism, Monumentalism, Politics: Emblematic Acting in Jessner's ‘Wilhelm Tell’ and ‘Richard III’
Authors: Kuhns David F.
Published: January 2009

Leopold Jessner's productions of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell (1919) and Shakespeare's Richard III (1920) marked a culminating point in the short-lived, politically volatile era of German theatrical Expressionism. Jessner's distinctive work in this staging style did much to define the features of one mode of performance among several which billed themselves – or were branded as – ‘Expressionist’. In the following article, David Kuhns explores the particularly striking impact of Jessner's ‘emblematic’ approach to Schiller and Shakespeare upon the acting of those productions. By transforming his actors from mimetic agents into monumentalized emblems, Jessner analyzed political consciousness in what amounted to allegorical terms. The result was a politically provocative presentation of political behaviour – particularly the will to power – as an essentially spiritual matter. David Kuhns teaches theatre history, dramatic literature, and critical theory at Washington University in St. Louis.
Ways of Being an Artist
Authors: Bolt Alan
Published: January 2009

By way of coda to our earlier coverage in NTQ of Nicaraguan theatre under the Sandinista government, we include here an interview with Alan Bolt, one of the best-known and most controversial of the playwrights of the revolutionary period. The interview was conducted in September 1989, just a few months before the free elections ended the fragile, insidiously-obstructed Sandinista experiment in socialism with a South American face. While dedicated to the ideals of the Sandinistas, for whom he had fought underground during the Somoza dictatorship, Alan Bolt found himself increasingly opposed to some of those who were putting the revolution into practice, and he chose to work instead with his own theatre group and agricultural collective for a better understanding both of the issues which made revolution necessary, and those which were now prejudicing its success. Bernard Bloom, who introduces this interview with a brief outline of Alan Bolt's career, is a Canadian writer and photographer who lived in Nicaragua during 1987 and 1989. He has lectured extensively about the country, and his photographs have been widely exhibited.
Answering to the Dead: Edward Bond's ‘Jackets’, 1989–90
Authors: Stuart Ian
Published: January 2009

Sustaining his reputation for production work that is both original and challenging, Edward Bond worked closely with the directors ofJacketsduring its productions at Lancaster and in Leicester and London in 1989–90. After a mixed experience with the RSC directing hisWar Plays, Bond continued to develop his concept of ‘theatre events’, and to work towards the particular style of acting that is necessary for his work in performance. Ian Stuart, a doctoral candidate in dramatic art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, analyzes here how the resulting twin concepts of ‘theatre events’ and ‘theatre acting’ translated into practice, exploring both the workin-progress and its realization through setting, lighting, and critical response. Earlier reconstructions and analyses of Bond's plays in production in TQ and NTQ have included features onLearin TQ5 (1972) andThe Foolin TQ21 (1976), both at the Royal Court, and on his own production at the Cottesloe ofSummerin NTQ6 (1986).
Oberammergau, 1634–1990: the Play and the Passions
Authors: Loney Glenn
Published: January 2009

Since 1634 the villagers of Oberammergau have kept their bargain with God to present a Passion Play every ten years in gratitude for their deliverance from the Plague. It is now staged every decennial year, most recently in 1990, and the single performance that long sufficed has now multiplied to almost a hundred – still not enough to meet the demand for tickets for this internationally-renowned event, which is at once a tourist attraction and, for the Christian, an affirmation of faith. Glenn Loney, theatre journalist and teacher from New York, has had an acquaintance with the play since 1958, and here places the event in its historical and present social context, analyzes the most recent production in terms both of its management and its staging, and describes the controversies which continue to surround it, from the practical problems of an uncompromising dramaturgy to the charges of anti-semitism which are still levelled against a play once defended by Hitler himself against the disfavour of his Nazi cohorts.
A Theatre of the Everyday: the Plays of Michel Vinaver
Authors: Bradby David
Published: January 2009

It has only been in the last few years that the plays of Michel Vinaver have begun to be discovered and produced in Britain. Yet he has been working as a playwright in his native France since 1955, and has become increasingly respected and widely produced there since overcoming a seven-year ‘writer's block’ in 1967. Here, David Bradby's introduction to Vinaver's dramaturgy is followed by a detailed analysis of one of his most recent plays, L'Emission de télévision, and this critical material is complemented by a chronology of Vinaver's career, excerpted statements by and about the writer – including an ‘auto-interview’ of Vinaver by Vinaver – and a bibliography. David Bradby is Professor of Drama and Head of the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London: he has published widely, especially on the French theatre, and his major study, Modern French Drama, 1940–1990, has recently appeared in a revised edition from Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on a study of Vinaver for the University of Michigan Press. Michel Vinaver's own assessment of the present state of French theatre funding was included in NTQ25 (1991).
The Third Theatre: a Legacy from Us to Ourselves
Authors: Barba Eugenio
Published: January 2009

Eugenio Barba's work with Odin Teatret and the International School of Theatre Anthropology has always been substantiated by a body of written theory. In earlier issues of NTQ he has developed his ideas about the nature of the actor's work in relation to its energies and their origins in experience and social ritual – most recently, in NTQ20 (1989), discussing the way in which the actor's body is falsely perceived as an ‘instrument’, somehow separate from himself, and exploring the processes which give the actor a true ‘second nature’, distinguishing his work as ‘ritual in search of a meaning’. In the present article, he looks rather at the company or the lone practitioner pursuing a vision of theatre beyond the safe confines of institutional theatre. Such ‘Third Theatre’ may be short-lived – sometimes to be revered in retrospect, sometimes almost lost to history, sometimes confined to a theory never realized in practice. Eugenio Barba looks at the elements which these disparate kinds of ‘Third Theatre’ have in common, including a shared concern with the search for meaning, necessarily combined with a ‘personal discovery of the craft’ – that ‘patient building up of our own physical, mental, intellectual, and emotional relationship with texts and spectators, without conforming to those balanced and proved relationships current at the centre of theatre’.
In Search of a Radical Discourse for Theatre
Authors: Lambley Dorrian
Published: January 2009

How to accommodate and utilize the insights and the methodology of marxism – and, simply, its potential as a vehicle for social change – at a time when the popular perception of its political ideology stands discredited? Dorrian Lambley explores the dilemma through the specifics of developments in British theatre since 1968 – the stifling of the early radical impulses under political and economic pressures, which has produced, at best, a sense of marginalization, at worst a conviction of impotence. In proposing ways of working within this situation, Lambley draws on the writings of dramatists such as Edward Bond to suggest that marxism must recognize the most important of the liberal humanist emphases – ‘the presence of the subject’, but perceived within a marxist understanding of social relations. Dorrian Lambley is presently working on her doctoral thesis in the University of Exeter, where she helped to organize the conference ‘Theatre and the Discourses of Power’, on which she wrote in the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section of NTQ28 (1991).
Any Event Stems from Combustion: Actors, Audiences, and Theatrical Energy
Authors: Brook Peter
Published: January 2009

In the first issue of New Theatre Quarterly (February 1985), David Williams presented a conspective overview of the work of Peter Brook at the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris. More recently, in NTQ26 (May 1991), Paul B. Cohen analyzed Brook's evolving views on the interaction between performers and audience – the worlds of the imagination and the everyday. Here, Peter Brook himself, in conversation with Jean Kalman, discusses with a characteristically eclectic range of references and comparisons the idea of the theatrical ‘event’ and how it is generated, touching in passing on subjects as diverse as the construction and deconstruction of linear narrative and the significance and nature of improvisation. The interviewer, Jean Kalman, is a lighting designer who has collaborated with Peter Brook on many of his productions in recent years, including The Cherry Orchard, The Mahabharata, Woza Albert! and The Tempest.
The Tutor as Audience: Approaches to Examining Student Performance
Authors: Taylor Val
Published: January 2009

Ever since the creation of the first Departments of Drama in British universities soon after the Second World War, the most problematic aspect of assessing student work has been in the practical area – in the disciplines of acting and directing, and the design and execution of set, costume, lighting, and sound. Can acting genius be measured on the same scale as honest effort showing worthwhile progress? How far should any assessment reward individual effort and accomplishment, and how far the student's contribution to the collaborative effort which is the finished production? Should there even be a ‘finished production’ – and if so, how far should audience response and the chemistry of a particular performance affect a tutor's knowledge of the process involved? Indeed, are there criteria which can make any one or two tutors’ individual impressions more than merely impressionistic? The following paper by Val Taylor, who teaches in the Drama Department at Roehampton Institute, tackles this last area in particular. While it began as an internal discussion document, it seemed to us to raise relevant issues so fully and succinctly as to deserve wider dissemination, not only among colleagues in British universities, but among all those called upon to measure developing theatrical skills.
Bolshevism in Lancashire: British Strike Plays of the 1920s
Authors: Nicholson Steve
Published: January 2009

In an article in NTQ 29 (February 1992), Steve Nicholson looked at how the Russian Revolution was portrayed in the 1920s by the Conservative theatre establishment. Usually it is the Left that is accused of simplistic theatrical agitation: but in this, the second of two articles about the right-wing political theatre of the 1920s, the author shows how plays about industrial conflict and strikes within Britain demonstrated a level of crude Conservative propaganda that has tended to go unremarked. This article has been researched largely through unpublished manuscripts in the Lord Chamberlain's collection of plays in the British Library, and derives from the author's broader study of the portrayal of Communism in the British theatre between 1917 and 1945. Steve Nicholson is currently Lecturer in Drama at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds.
Adaptation, Action, Response: ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
Authors: Craven Ian
Published: January 2009

Several of the novels of the Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibanez (1867–1928) have provided the basis for theatrical adaptations: but the version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916) by Peter Granger-Taylor, staged in March 1990 at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, was the first for sixty years. In the following feature, Ian Craven, who teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, provides a full account of Jon Pope's production, considering questions of adaptation, performance, and response, and also paying special attention to the influence of the screen versions of 1921 and 1962. His analysis is complemented by extracts from an interview with the adapter and director. A study by Margaret Eddershaw of Philip Prowse's production of Brecht's Mother Courage, in which Glenda Jackson took the title role during the same season at the Citizens, appeared in NTQ28 (November 1991).
Theatre versus Reality
Authors: Mrozek Slawomir
Published: January 2009

In 1988 the Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek was invited by the Nobel Foundation and the Royal Theatre in Stockholm to deliver a speech for the ‘Strindberg-O'Neill’ symposium on the issues suggested by this title. In defining his terms and their relationship, he combined Aristotelian precision and existential candour with a gentle irony entirely his own. The speech was first printed in the Polish theatre journal Dialog, to whose editors we are grateful for permission to print this translated version.
Originality at Someone Else's Expense
Authors: Evreinov Nikolai
Published: January 2009

The longer I follow the activity of V. E. Meyerhold, the more I am astounded at the derivative nature of his talent. ‘Je prend mon bien, où je le trouve’, said the genial Molière, obviously without realizing what temptation such words plant in the souls of all those who are quick to spot anything lying around just waiting to be picked up while its owner isn't looking. And Moliere has finally discovered a truly ‘original’ imitator in the person of V. E. Meyerhold!
Trying to be Dead Playwrights
Authors: Payne Ben
Published: January 2009

WHEN perestroika legitimized the social criticism for which the Russian theatre had been the only forum during the ‘years of stagnation’, playwrights such as Gelman, Galin and Petrushevskaya came to prominence. The breaking of the wave of so-called ‘black’ plays, however, also coincided with the beginning of the disintegration of the society which they scourged.