bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gogol's ‘The Government Inspector’ at the National Theatre, 1985
Authors: Hawkins-Dady Mark
Published: January 2009

Although numbered among the earliest of masterpieces from the modern repertoire, Gogol'sThe Government Inspectorhas its roots deep in earlier Russian society, and much of its apparent humour is based on close observation of the gradations and prejudices of provincial Russian society in the early nineteenth century. In a detailed exploration of the revival in the National Theatre's Olivier auditorium, Mark Hawkins-Dady relates the play to its origins, suggesting that the director Richard Eyre stuck closely to the metaphorical truth, at least, of the social ambience selected by Gogol – and that the apparently eccentric casting of ‘alternative comedian’ Rik Mayall in the central role closely reflected Gogol's own feelings about the nature and playing of the character. Mark Hawkins-Dady is a graduate student in the Drama Department of Royal Holloway College. University of London, currently preparing a doctoral dissertation on directing practices at the National Theatre.
Rehearsal as a Subsystem: Transactional Analysis and Role Research
Authors: Constantinidis Stratos E.
Published: January 2009

What happens during a rehearsal? How are actors' expectations and achievements affected by different directorial approaches, and how do the various ‘systems’ of acting fit with the responses of an audience? From Diderot through Stanislavski. Brecht. and Artaud to the work of such modern experimental directors as Brook, Grotowski, Chaikin, and Schechner, the theory may or may not be adequately tested against the practice. The author of two earlier, complementary studies in empirical theatre research – ‘Feedback as a Subsystem’ and ‘Prompt–Copy as a Subsystem’, both published inKodikas/Code: Ars Semeiotica(1984 and 1987) – Stratos E. Constantinidis here checks several normative fallacies which have influenced theatre practice by relating the findings of empirical research in theatre to the experimental work of theatre artists. The author, who has previously worked in the Universities of Iowa and Arizona, presently teaches theory and criticism in the Department of Theatre at Ohio State University.
Cash and Customers: Theatre Revenue and the National Economy
Authors: Huntington Paul
Published: January 2009

While statistical information on certain sectors of the British theatre is slowly becoming available – notably from the Arts Council and the Society of West End Theatre, as also from researchers in the Department of Arts Administration at the City University – few attempts have yet been made to draw useful conclusions from these figures, or to deduce how they might be helpful in terms of forward-planning and projections. In the following article. Paul Huntington examines the relationship between theatre revenue and total consumer expenditure, in the context of published figures which illustrate the changing national economic picture of the past decade. He examines not only the way in which these figures tend, naturally enough, to confirm certain expectations – for example, concerning the impact of tourism on the theatre – but also less expected findings, such as the relative upsurge in the fortunes of the regional theatres at a time of slump in the commercial sector of the West End.
Lear's Terrible Journey: Charles Laughton at Stratford, 1959
Authors: Carter Ken
Published: January 2009

Interest in Charles Laughton has recently been revived by the publication of Simon Callow's biography (Methuen, 1987), in which the author quoted from the personal recollections of a teacher. Ken Carter, whose view of Laughton's Stratford performance as Lear in 1959 ran counter to the critical dismissals which have otherwise come down to us. Carter expanded his views for a short article published in Drama (4–1987), and now provides a fuller account of a performance recollected in remarkable detail after almost thirty years. An Oxford graduate, Ken Carter has worked mainly as a teacher in London, with interludes near Bath and in Madrid.
Lorca on the English Stage: Problems of Production and Translation
Authors: Edwards Gwynne
Published: January 2009

The production during 1987 of no less than three plays by the usually-neglected Spanish dramatist Lorca – Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba – provided a rare opportunity for a reconsideration of the plays as works for the live theatre, and of the particular problems involved in ‘translating’ them (in every sense of the word) for the English-speaking stage. In the following article. Gwynne Edwards considers the difficulties which confront the translator of Lorca's plays, the production-style which is implicit in Lorca's theatre, and the varying extents to which the three recent productions approximated to it. Gwynne Edwards is Professor of Spanish at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published full-length studies of Lorca and of Luis Buñuel, and numerous translations of Spanish plays, including two in the volume of Three Plays published by Methuen in 1987, and the version of Blood Wedding used in the Contact Theatre production here considered.
Brown Rice and High Ambition: Twenty-Five Years at the Traverse
Authors: Lustig Vera
Published: January 2009

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, which had its beginnings in a paperback bookshop, and its first proper premises in a cramped one-time brothel. The Traverse has consistently walked the tightrope between its own ambitions and the cultural constraints of the City of Edinburgh – outside the annual explosion of activity during the festival. In the following article, Vera Lusting combines a view of this cultural context with an historical survey of the theatre's work, a glimpse of some of its more significant productions, and an assessment of the often divergent styles of its succession of artistic directors. She illustrates her survey from interviews conducted with many of the leading figures who have contributed to the Traverse's history.
First Women Playwrights Conference
Authors: Fitzsimmons Linda
Published: January 2009

The First International Women Playwrights Conference took place in Buffalo, New York, from 14 to 23 October 1988. It was attended by over 200 playwrights (and a few non-playwrights) from 34 countries. That number included many eminent women – Renée (New Zealand), Alice Childress (USA), Bai Fengxi (China), Miriam Kainy (Israel), Zulu Sofola (Nigeria), Somalatha Subasinghe (Sri Lanka), Iren Kiss (Hungary) – plus women (mostly, because of the cost, American) whose plays are as yet unproduced or who are beginning to write. Much of the focus was on how much theatre work is being written by women, but which meets with obstructions to performance.
The Sociology of the Theatre, Part Two: Theoretical Achievements
Authors: Shevtsova Maria
Published: January 2009

In the first part of this three-part series. Maria Shevtsova discussed the misconceptions and misplacement of emphases which have pervaded sociological approaches to theatre, and proposed her own methodology of study. Here, she examines in fuller detail two aspects of her taxonomy which have an existing sociological literature – looking first at dramatic theory, as perceived by its sociological interpreters from Duvignaud onwards and (perhaps more pertinently) backwards, to Gramsci and Brecht. She then considers approaches to dramatic texts and genres, especially as exemplified in the explication of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. Finally, she explores the implications and assumptions of the relatively new discipline of ‘theatrical anthropology’, in which theatre is taken to be the prototype of society. Now teaching in the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney, Maria Shevtsova trained in Paris before spending three years at the University of Connecticut. She has previously contributed toModern Drama, Theatre International, andTheatre Papers, as well as to the originalTheatre Quarterlyand other journals.
Theatre in Crisis: Conference Report, December 1988
Authors: Lavender Andy
Published: January 2009

In our previous issue, NTQ18 (May 1989). We carried a report on the exploratory discussions held by a number of theatre people on the left (Under the joint aegis of NTQ and the Drama Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London) to discuss the problems posed by ‘Thatcher's Theatre’ and the national priorities it reflects. A more broadly-based conference was held on 4 December 1988, devoted to the theme of ‘British Theatre in Crisis, and here Andy Lavender, theatre writer and graduate student at Goldsmiths’ College. Provides a brief report of the proceedings. We also reprint the manifesto to which the conference gave its unanimous support.
Getting under the Aztec Skin: Evangelical Theatre in the New World
Authors: Versényi Adam
Published: January 2009

In NTQ16, Adam Versényi explored the theatricality of performance rituals in pre-Columbian Latin America. Here, he takes up a line started by Robert Potter in NTQ8, and examines the way in which the Spanish mendicant friars who followed hard on the heels of Cortés adapted Aztec rituals for their own pedagogic purposes. Less expectedly, the friars were also to some extent ‘adapted by’ those rituals, in moulding a performing medium that borrowed from the medieval cycle drama, yet also anticipated the later form of the auto sacramental - and which, intriguingly, combined an expression of the internal politics of conquest with its theatricalization of Christian baptism. Adam Versényi is currently preparing a study which parallels recent developments in Liberation Theology and Liberation Theatre in Latin America.
Howard Barker, the Wrestling School, and the Cult of the Author
Authors: Shaughnessy Robert
Published: January 2009

Howard Barker was the last playwright to be interviewed in the original Theatre Quarterly – in TQ40 (1981) – and a subsequent interview was included in NTQ8 (1986). Yet he has also been accused of encouraging a credo of ‘engagement but confusion’ which serves the cult of Thatcherism which it claims to oppose: and certainly he is unique among his generation of British dramatists in having achieved both a large cult following, and a considerable body of opposition to his theoretical position. Robert Shaughnessy, who teaches in the Roehampton Institute, here analyzes not so much Barker's work as the Barker phenomenon – the process by which a self-effacing writer has been packaged into a personality, to the extent that, with the creation of The Wrestling School, he even has a theatre company devoted exclusively to the production of his work. Shaughnessy concludes that – as Barker perhaps fore-shadows in The Last Supper – it may now be necessary for the cult-figure to ‘die’ if the writer is to survive and flourish.
The American Actor Prepares: Scene-Study for Oblivion?
Authors: Loney Glenn
Published: January 2009

Never mind the theory, face the facts: is there room in the American theatre for all the performers graduating as drama majors from American universities? Glenn Loney, who has himself been teaching drama since 1960 as well as writing widely on theatrical subjects, sketches in the background to the American system, looks at the limited horizons for the newly qualified actor, and suggests a shift in the aims and orientation of academic drama – and the expectations of those who pursue it.
Dialectics and Dionysus: on Pasolini's ‘Affabulazione’
Authors: Puppa Paolo
Published: January 2009

IN 1966 PASOLINI was confined to bed with an ulcer. While he steadily lost blood, he was reading Plato's Dialogues and going over his translations of The Oresteia and Plautus' Braggart Soldier. This is the picture given by his hagiographers, and those were the classical works that inspired the series of six texts, which he wrote in sporadic bursts of creativity during those years.
The Dramaturg
Authors: Kott Jan
Published: January 2009

Jan Kott wrote for the first issue of NTQ, and has been one of our advisory editors since the beginnings of the original Theatre Quarterly, to which he was also a regular contributor. As a much-published critic – his most recent book being The Bottom Translation, from Northwestern University Press in 1987 – he needs no introduction, and, ever since the first publication of Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1965, his sense of how criticism can be made relevant to theatre practice has also meant that he is much in demand as that mysterious creature, the dramaturg. Now read on.…
A Voice of the Second Generation: Antje Lenkeit Directs Fassbinder's ‘Katzelmacher’ in Munich
Authors: Sobieski Lynn
Published: January 2009

The heavily-subsidized state theatre system of West Germany is often regarded as a model for emulation by the funding agencies of the English-speaking theatre. Yet the situation of such theatres can give rise to its own problems: and in this case-study of the rehearsals of Fassbinder's Katzelmacher at the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel, Munich, in 1985. Lynn Sobieski (who was assistant dramaturg on the production) analyzes the resulting personal and artistic conflicts, in the context of a system which encourages a degree of complacency in the bureaucracy, and arguably permits some self-indulgence to the directors – while discouraging those of the first ‘post-war generation’ from giving real opportunities to their successors. Lynn Sobieski is presently teaching in the Department of Drama of the University of Texas at Austin, having recently been awarded her doctorate from New York University for her dissertation on ‘The Crisis in West German Dramaturgy’. Her collection, Postmodernism and Contemporary Performance, will be published later this year, and she is currently working on a study of performance art groups in Britain.
Is Business Really Boffo? Factors in the Broadway Equation
Authors: Loney Glenn
Published: January 2009

Our impressions of Broadway tend to be a compound of past glories as reflected in new musicals, ritual laments of lack of intellectual substance, and the no-less-confusing mix of tawdriness and glamour in the place itself. The showbiz press, meanwhile, concentrates on the hard cash of the theatrical situation. However, as Glenn Loney here suggests, even economic generalizations can falsify the details of a complicated picture: and he considers other relevant factors, from pressures for environmental preservation to the paranoid fear of ‘the Times review’, and the often-overlooked attitudes of the playwrights and performers themselves. Glenn Loney is a widely-published writer and teacher, who contributed a survey of American academic drama to NTQ20, and here he provides a clear overview of the current Broadway scene for a British readership, while offering some lateral thinking which will also prove stimulating for an already-informed American audience.
Art Form or Platform? On Women and Playwriting
Authors: Keatley Charlotte
Published: January 2009

This is the second 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, in NTQ21, was with Gillian Hanna of Monstrous Regiment, and provided an update of a previously published interview as well as a discussion of contemporary work: its aim was to keep alive and accurate the current debate about British feminist theatre groups. This interview carries on the discourse between feminist theatres and their intended audiences by making available the views and opinions of one of Britain's leading young women playwrights, Charlotte Keatley, along with a detailed account of the origins of her 1989 Royal Court success, My Mother Said I Never Should. Charlotte Keatley was born in London in 1960, but has lived in Leeds and Manchester since she was nineteen. Her many plays include Underneath the Arndale (1982). Dressing for Dinner (1983–84), Citizens (BBC 4, 1987–88), and My Mother Said I Never Should (Contact Theatre, Manchester, 1987, and Royal Court Theatre, London, February 1989; Gaieté Theatre, Paris, September 1989, and European tour). She has been directing playwriting workshops for students while in Cambridge on a Junior Judish E. Wilson Fellowship, 1988–89, and is currently at work on her next plays. The interviewer, and compiler of this series, Lizbeth Goodman, is a New Yorker who is now a Scholar of St John's College, Cambridge, where she is preparing her doctoral thesis on feminist theatre since 1968, and completing a book on the politics of theatre funding.
Emotion is a Theatrical Weapon
Authors: Page Louise
Published: January 2009

Louise Page was born in London in 1955, but lived in Sheffield from the age of five until a short while ago. She read drama at Birmingham University, and took a postgraduate diploma in playwriting, then returned to Sheffield in 1979 as Fellow in Drama and Television. In 1982–83 she was resident writer at the Royal Court, and in 1985 was awarded the first J. T. Grein Prize by the Critics’ Circle. With a string of widely-produced plays from the early Tissue through Salonika and Golden Girls to the more recent Beauty and the Beast and Diplomatic Wives, Louise Page is now firmly established as one of the leading playwrights of her generation. The present interview was recorded while she was in Greece in September 1988 to prepare the film adaptation of Salonika. The interviewer, Elizabeth Sakellaridou, is Senior Lecturer in Modern English Drama in the University of Thessaloniki. Her publications include Pinter's Female Portraits (Macmillan, 1988), and several articles on modern English drama and feminist criticism. She is currently preparing a study of contemporary British women dramatists. Her ‘NTQ Checklist’ of Louise Page's work follows this interview.
Connections with the Audience: Writing for a Scottish Theatre
Authors: Arnott Peter
Published: January 2009

Peter Arnott is a young playwright whose relatively brief working career has spanned a wide spectrum not only of Scottish theatrical outlets, but of the styles and approaches open to a politically committed writer in a community which has consistently and vehemently rejected Thatcherism, yet which has to live within its political if not its cultural boundaries. Here, Peter Arnott talks with Greg Giesekam, of the Department of Theatre Studies in the University of Glasgow, about the development of his own thinking, and its relationship to his working methods and their theatrical applications.
Deep Culture: Thoughts on Third–World Theatre
Authors: Davis R. G.
Published: January 2009

Does vague approval for the social objectives of much third-world theatre blind sympathetic western observers to its defects? And, where those objectives are specifically socialist, are the complex dialectics which generate revolution too readily supplanted in favour of simplistic affirmation? R. G. Davis takes examples from his own experience in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Algeria to propose a closer, more active, and inter active attention to the relationship between theatre and national needs, based in a lateral approach to what theatre can and cannot do well. R. G. Davis was founding director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and is currently teaching at San Francisco New College, while working on two films and a book. He has been a regular contributor to Theatre Quarterly and NTQ – most recently, on ‘The Politics and Packaging of Performance Art’ in NTQ13 (1988).
Bowers of Bliss: Deconflation in the Shakespeare Canon
Authors: Parker Brian
Published: January 2009

The new Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (1986), has shaken loose many of the assumptions of historical editing by questioning the existence of single authoritative ‘ur-texts’ and by attempting to present the plays as reflections of contemporary performance rather than as literary texts enshrining authorial intention. Inevitably, Brian Parker argues here, the editors’ success has been variable, and the new approach raises crucial questions of canon, format, the influence and potential of current technology, and the degree to which the editors’ own ‘postmodernist’ assumptions have influenced their decisions. This essay was presented as a discussion-paper for a session on the Shakespeare canon at the 1989 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Austin, Texas. Brian Parker is a professor at Trinity College, University of Toronto, who has prepared critical editions of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Volpone for the ‘Revels Plays’ series and is currently editing Coriolanus for the Oxford English Texts.
Cop-Out, Cop-In: Carnival as Political Theatre
Authors: Prentki Tim
Published: January 2009

In response to the conference on political theatre held last April at the University of Lancaster under the title ‘Points of Contact’, Tim Prentki, Course Director of B.A. Drama and TV Studies at King Alfred's College, Winchester, proposes a new yet very old way of achieving contact between a beleaguered political theatre and its community – the use of the ‘traditionally’ inversionary qualities of carnival to pose highly contemporary questions about the power structures of today's society.
Nativity as Living Picture: the Christmas Crib at Andechs
Authors: Stephan Brother
Published: January 2009

In the year of the Oberammergau Passion Play, with its reminder both of the long tradition of such celebrations and their danger of being subsumed into the ‘heritage industry’, it is instructive to be reminded that the best traditions can also be the most recent, because the freshest and most relevant to the needs to which they respond. Also in Bavaria, and virtually unnoticed by the tourist industry, a nativity celebration is held each Christmas, in a hillside stable to which the participating donkey knows its own way – a ‘living picture’, which began alongside a charitable market and an exhibition of cribs as part of one small community's seasonal celebrations. Its creator, Brother Stephan, talks here about the event to Walter Siegfried.
Brecht and Weigel at the Berliner Ensemble
Authors: Rülicke-Weiler Käthe
Published: January 2009

As this issue goes to press, the GDR has just been united with its western neighbour in circumstances which, just a year previously, would have seemed almost as improbable as when Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel returned after the war to create the Berliner Ensemble. Käthe Rülicke-Weiler joined their dramaturgical team in 1951, and witnessed from the inside the attempt to build Brecht's ideal of a socialist theatre. Here, she talks with Matthias Braun about the personal, social, and political background to the Ensemble – which, although under the artistic direction of Brecht himself, was managed by Weigel, who was thus in the position of preventing herself from becoming a conventional ‘star’ performer. As well as dealing with the nature of Weigel's acting – and of her administrative skills – the interview assesses the contributions of Brecht's other co-workers, his own techniques as a director, and the factors (including touring under difficult post-war conditions) which led to the Ensemble's recognition as a major international company. This interview was first published in 1985 in Theater der Zeit, by whose kind permission it is here translated.
Howard Barker: Paradigm of Postmodernism
Authors: Klotz Günther
Published: January 2009

The plays of Howard Barker are probably more fervently admired and resolutely disliked than those of any other British dramatist of his generation. Although we have twice published interviews with the playwright about his life and work – first in the original Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981), and more recently in NTQ8 (1986) – subsequent articles in NTQ have tended to be critical of his achievements: we are therefore pleased to present here a view of two of his latest plays, The Last Supper and The Bite of the Night, which, while recognizing precisely those qualities for which Barker has often been attacked, suggests that there is a social as well as a highly theatrical purpose behind the ‘postmodern’ approach to theatricality here identified. Th
e author, Günther Klotz, teaches and researches in English studies in Berlin, where he has published numerous critical studies and editions of British dramatists and other writers.
Finding a Voice: the Community Dramas of Monticchiello
Authors: Andrews Richard
Published: January 2009

The regular community drama activity of the village of Monticchiello in Italy has been pursued for nearly a quarter of a century, but is still little known abroad. A full study of the phenomenon is as much a study of the community, past and present, as it is a piece of theatrical analysis, in the area where there is a complete interlock between social history and the theatrical activity which a society produces. Since the work and history of the Teatro Povero have too many ramifications for everything to be summarized or even alluded to in one article, Richard Andrews here sets out to introduce the subject to students of theatre ‘by example’ – aiming to dig a single trench into the strata, in order to convey the outlines of the subject, hopefully without damage to the evidence needed for a more complete survey. Richard Andrews is Professor of Italian at Leeds University, having previously taught at Swansea and Kent. For the past fifteen years his research interests have been mainly concentrated on theatrical material, and he is currently preparing a study of sixteenth-century Italian comedy for Cambridge University Press. His regular contact with Monticchiello dates from 1983, and has been supported by a systematic analysis of all the texts produced there since 1967.
The Actor's Journey: ‘Judith’ from Training to Performance
Authors: Carreri Roberta
Published: January 2009

New Theatre Quarterly has provided extensive coverage of the work of Odin Teatret, based since 1966 at Holstebro in Denmark, as also of the approach and ideas of its director, Eugenio Barba, who first wrote for us on ‘The Nature of Dramaturgy’ in NTQ1 (1985). Most recently, we documented Odin's twelfth production, Talabot, through David Shoemaker's analysis in NTQ24 (1990). Here, we offer an actor's experience of the creation of a one-person production – uniting personal circumstances, experiences in training, and exploratory research in the process which led towards the creation of Judith, based on the apocryphal story of the woman who seduced an enemy general in order to murder him. Its performer, Roberta Carreri, joined Odin Teatret in 1974, since when she has also performed in The Book of Dance (1974–80), Come! and the Day Will Be Ours (1976–80), Anabasis (1977–84), The Million (1978–84), Brecht's Ashes (1980–84), and The Gospel According to Oxyrhincus (1985–87). Her evocation here of the process which led to the creation of Judith is based on an interview with Exe Christoffersen, who also provides a detailed scenario of the production in performance. This feature forms part of Exe Christoffersen's Skuespillerens Vandring, published in Denmark by Klim in 1989. It has been excerpted and translated for NTQ by Gordi Roberts.
Theatricalizing Shakespeare's Text
Authors: Wells Stanley
Published: January 2009

BRIAN PARKER'S article ‘Bowers of Bliss’ attempts to place the 1986 Oxford edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in its scholarly, intellectual, and theatrical context, and in the course of doing so offers a number of criticisms of the procedures adopted in that volume, with particular reference to its use in the theatre. Of course, single-volume editions of the complete works are rarely selected for theatrical use, but a number of directors have chosen to base productions on this edition, having photocopies made of the text on which they are working. For them, at least, the edition has seemed to have something special to offer. It seems to me that Professor Parker's criticisms are based on imprecisions of detail and on logical fallacies, and I should like to attempt to correct them.
The Erotic in the Theatre of Peter Zadek
Authors: Höfele Andreas
Published: January 2009

In NTQ 4 (1985) we included a fully-illustrated interview with the German director Peter Zadek conducted by Roy Kift. Here, Andreas Höfele explores one of the subjects touched on in that interview, as in most responses to Zadek's work: the utilization of the erotic as a recurring motif. From his introduction to London of the then little-known work of Jean Genet to his most recent productions – of Wedekind's Lulu and of Chekhov's Ivanov – Zadek has, in Höfele”s words, opted for ‘the kaleidoscopic uncertainty of play’ and a ‘deliberate lack of closure’, which are here analyzed in terms of Baudrillard's ‘structure of seduction’ employed both as aesthetic principle and as working method. Andreas Höfele, who has taught in the German Department of Edinburgh University and in the English Department at Würzburg, has been Professor of Theaterwissenschaft at the University of Munich since 1986. Apart from four novels, and books on Shakespeare's stagecraft and Malcolm Lowry, he has published articles and lectured on contemporary German productions of Shakespeare, on contemporary British drama, and on aspects of theatrical theory.
The Power of Sex: English Plays by Women, 1958–1988
Authors: Case Sue-Ellen
Published: January 2009

Reading backwards, through the feminist critique, Sue-Ellen Case explores the role of sexuality in women's lives as portrayed in the work of British women playwrights during the past three decades. She illustrates the way in which the oppressive uses of sexuality in the patriarchy, identified by the social movement as rape and pornography, have been dramatized through dramatic narrative and character construction. In contrast to this representation of oppression, she discusses how the liberating role of pleasure and of women reclaiming their own desires provide a revolutionary feminist stage practice, in both heterosexual and lesbian social contexts. Sue-Ellen Case is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and her works includeFeminism and TheatreandPerforming Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre.
John Barrymore's ‘Hamlet’ at the Haymarket Theatre, 1925
Authors: Morrison Michael A.
Published: January 2009

John Barrymore's Hamlet, first seen in New York during the season of 1922–23, stands as a high-water mark of Shakespearean interpretation during the inter-war period. But although biographical studies of the actor and his family have appeared steadily over the years, little effort has been made to situate Barrymore's distinctive contribution to the acting of the character within the broader context of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Shakespearean production. Here Michael A. Morrison examines the circumstances surrounding Barrymore's visit to London with his Hamlet in 1925, and the far-reaching influence of his achievement on future generations of actors and directors. Michael A. Morrison is a New York-based writer and teacher, who is presently a doctoral candidate in theatre at the City University of New York, where he is preparing a study of Barrymore's work on Shakespeare.
On Frank Wedekind
Authors: Trotsky Leon
Published: January 2009

To follow Lenin on the London Hippodrome in TQ40 (1981) and Wedekind on the Middlesex music hall in NTQ16 (1988) – here now is Trotsky on Wedekind. As Edward Braun, Professor of Drama in the University of Bristol, points out in a brief introduction, this assessment by Trotsky follows in a thin line of dramatic criticism by Marx, Engels, Mehring, Plekhanov, and Lunacharsky, and dates from Trotsky's involvement with a number of radical journals during his exile in Vienna. The article first appeared in the Neue Zeit in April 1908.
Sacred ‘Idiocy’ the Avant-Garde as Alternative Establishment
Authors: Ley Graham
Published: January 2009

Is there a postmodernist theatre – and if so, what was the modernist theatre? What qualifies as avant-garde – and for how long? And why does the ‘established’ alternative theatre lean so heavily on appropriation, whether of ancient myths or contemporary ideologies – such as postmodernism? Graham Ley uses analogies from dance and design to explore our perceptions of and attitudes towards those contemporary theatre practitioners who may once have broken boundaries, but now often head the queue for lavish corporate finance. Graham Ley has taught in universities in England, Australia, and New Zealand, and his Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theatre will shortly appear from the University of Chicago Press.
Gardzienice: a Village, a Theatre, and a Cultural Crossroads
Authors: Allain Paul
Published: January 2009

Appropriately, this feature on the Polish theatre group Gardzienice is something of a cultural mix, in which the impressions of an English visitor may be contrasted with the voice of a Polish admirer – and the beliefs of the group itself, expressed in the words of its director, Wlodzimierz Staniewski. In the winter of 1989–90, Paul Allain, a graduate student at Goldsmiths' College, University of London, visited the company at its ‘headquarters’ – which is also, in effect, the small and remote Polish village from which Gardzienice takes its name. This was at a time when the new. Solidarity-led government had yet to be fully felt. Here, Allain describes the training methods and disciplines of the company which, within the context of its physical environment, have come to constitute a lifestyle as much as an approach to theatre. Janusz Majcherek writes rather of the significance of Gardzienice in relation to the ancient and fundamental need for a homeland – a need which, in Staniewski's writings, is related to the company's own hopes and plans. All this material was in our hands well before the upsurge in nationalist feeling which has succeeded the political changes in eastern Europe: and it may be felt to reflect ironically upon alternative ways of ‘returning home’ – on the one hand through the actuality or threat of civil war and the struggle for an elusive slice of the ‘free market’, on the other in that quest for a lost history and inheritance, for healing connections with one's environment, which is reflected theatrically in the work of Gardzienice.
Doppio: a Trilingual Touring Theatre for Australia
Authors: Mitchell Tony
Published: January 2009

Doppio is a theatre company which uses three languages – English, Italian, and a synthetic migrant dialect it calls ‘Emigrante’ – to explore the conditions of the large community of Italian migrants in Australia. It works, too, in three different kinds of theatrical territory, all with an increasingly feminist slant – those of multicultural theatrein-education; of community theatre based in the Italian clubs of South Australia; and of documentary theatre, exploring the roots and the past of a previously marginalized social group. The company's work was seen in 1990 at the Leeds Festival of Youth Theatre, but its appeal is fast increasing beyond the confines of specialisms, ethnic or theatric, and being recognized in the ‘mainstream’ of Australian theatrical activity. Tony Mitchell – a regular contributor to NTQ, notably on the work of Dario Fo – who presently teaches in the Department of Theatre Studies in the University of Technology in Sydney, here provides an analytical introduction to the company's work, and follows this with an interview with one of its directors and co-founders, Teresa Crea.
New Forms, New Relationships
Authors: Crea Teresa
Published: January 2009

DID YOUR DESIRE to start up an Italian theatre in Australia arise from your visiting the town your parents came from in Calabria?

No, but certainly visiting that town in Calabria influenced the type of Italian theatre I wanted to make. My desire to do Italian theatre was a desire to do something I was interested in – I'd been studying drama and also studying Italian formally, both were of interest to me, and I felt that the two could be combined. At the time, strategically, I also met Christopher Bell, who was interested in both things as well.
Armand Gatti's Theatre of Social Experiment, 1989–1991
Authors: Knowles Dorothy
Published: January 2009

In TQ31 (1978), Christophe Campos described an earlier experiment in social theatre by the French playwright-director Armand Gatti – an attempt to politicize through theatre the depressed yet conservative town of Saint-Nazaire. Since that time, Gatti has continued to battle against (and when necessary within) ‘the system’ for his own, unorthodox kinds of theatrical endeavours. His work until the late ‘eighties formed the subject of Dorothy Knowles's pioneering full-length study, Armand Gatti in the Theatre: Wild Duck against the Wind (Athlone Press, 1988), and in the following article she supplements this book with a description and explication of Gatti's latest work, in which he has involved not actors, but ‘actors’ – those exclus or rejects who have been marginalized by society, but whose histories need both to be reclaimed and, in the process, given back to them, together with the dignity of which they have so often been stripped. Whether working within the close confines of a prison, or accommodating the constraints of ‘the system’ at the Avignon Festival, Gatti's voice and theatre is entirely distinctive – as also, paradoxically, is his ability to speak with and for the unheard voices of others. In a long career which has embraced both practical and academic theatre, Dr. Knowles is perhaps best known for her directing and writing in the field of French theatre, and is also the author of French Drama of the Inter-War Years (Harrap, 1967).
Tony Times and Beyond: New York's Theatre of Desperation
Authors: Loney Glenn
Published: January 2009

Declarations that the ‘Fabulous Invalid’ on Broadway is, at last, terminally ill tend to be subject to the law of diminishing returns – or to claims that wolf has been cried once too often. Yet environmental symptoms are now added to a chronic economic condition, as the ‘theatre district’ loses its distinctive character in a pincer movement between large-scale speculative developments and the sadly familiar signs of inner-city decay. In an earlier article, in NTQ22 (May 1990), Glenn Loney, a widely published theatre writer and teacher, clarified, with special concern for a British readership, the many ‘Factors in the Broadway Equation’. Here, he takes a closer look at the productions of the season just past, with its glut of musicals, from the lavish to the just plain lousy, economic ‘single-person shows’ – and the sometimes more challenging products of the Off-Broadway and not-for-profit sectors. He concludes that civic subsidy, even for the commercial theatre, is now the only way of saving the Invalid's lingering life.
Ritual Meets the Postmodern: Contemporary Mexican Theatre
Authors: Versényi Adam
Published: January 2009

Adam Versényi here considers responses to the call for a new kind of Latin American theatre, combining anthropological awareness of the area's history and culture with the technical abilities and thematic sophistication of western theatre, through an analysis of two plays which suggests both the benefits and pitfalls of such an approach. These are Nahui Ollin, a shadow-puppet play dramatizing episodes from Nahuatl cosmogeny, and Los enemigos, a contemporary adaptation of the unique Mayan script, the Rabinal Achí. Adam Versényi has written widely on the theatre of Latin America, including a study of recent developments in liberation theology and liberation theatre, and for NTQ two articles on earlier periods – in NTQ16 (1988), on the theatricality of pre-Columbian performance rituals, and in NTQ19 (1989) on the adaptation of Aztec rituals by the mendicant friars who came in the wake of Cortés – this piece being selected as the ‘Younger Scholar's Prizewinning Article’ of the year by the American Society for Theatre Research.
Running to Touch the Horizon
Authors: Cieslak Ryszard
Published: January 2009

At the moment, you're working with young actors teaching a course in experimental theatre at New York University. What are you trying to teach them?

How to be true in performance, that above all. I struggle to plant in them the principle that Grotowski handed on to me: we act so much in our daily lives that to make theatre what we need to do is to stop acting. Another very important thing to understand is that an actor must concentrate on his own body. The actor's instrument is not his voice or his diction, it's his whole body. Theatre can be a combination of all the arts – music, dance, painting, writing – but above all it is moving visual art. So long as an actor has elementary problems with his body, he is limited. So just as a musician has to exercise his fingers every day, so an actor has to exercise his body almost to the point of overcoming it, that is, being in complete control of it.
Popular Urban Theatre in Uganda: between Self-Help and Self-Enrichment
Authors: Breitinger Eckhard
Published: January 2009

In this article Eckhard Breitinger traces the sources of present-day popular theatre in Uganda back to the situation shortly before and after independence, when Europeans, Indians, Goans, and Ugandans each had their own separate cultural and theatrical traditions. Theatrical activity came to a virtual standstill under the repressive regimes of Obote and Amin, when many prominent theatre people were killed or exiled, but quickly began to flourish again after 1986: in downtown Kampala semi-professional groups thus produce commercial comedies, while in the suburbs amateur companies use theatre to supplement their meagre incomes. Meanwhile, government and aid organizations involve themselves mainly in theatre for education, particularly health education, and the campaign against Aids has generated new needs – met by a new style of ‘morality play’, here illustrated and analyzed in detail. Eckhard Breitinger teaches American, African, and Caribbean literature at the University of Bayreuth, and has also taught in Jamaica, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, and France. He is a translator of radio plays, author of monographs on the gothic novel and American radio drama, and editor of several books on African and new English literature. Presently he is editor of Bayreuth African Studies, and directing a research project on cultural communication in Africa.
Censoring Revolution: the Lord Chamberlain and the Soviet Union
Authors: Nicholson Steve
Published: January 2009

In two earlier articles, Steve Nicholson has explored ways in which the the right-wing theatre of the 1920s both shaped and reflected the prevailing opinions of the establishment – in NTQ29 (February 1992) looking at how the Russian Revolution was portrayed on the stage, and in NTQ30 (May 1992) at the ways in which domestic industrial conflicts were presented. He concludes the series with three case studies of the role of the Lord Chamberlain, on whose collection of unpublished manuscripts now housed in the British Library his researches have been based, in preventing more sympathetic – or even more objective – views of Soviet and related subjects from reaching the stage. His analysis is based on a study of the correspondence over the banning of Geo A. DeGray's The Russian Monk, Hubert Griffith's Red Sunday, and a play in translation by a Soviet dramatist, Sergei Tretiakov's Roar China. Steve Nicholson is currently Lecturer in Drama at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds.
The Psychology of Voice and the Founding of the Roy Hart Theatre
Authors: Newham Paul
Published: January 2009

Following the departure of the Roy Hart Theatre for France in 1974, and the death of Hart in a car accident shortly afterwards, his pioneering work in exploring the theatrical potential of the human voice has tended to be neglected in the English-speaking world. In the following article, Paul Newham demonstrates that, despite Hart's undoubted importance in the application of his methods of vocal self-discovery to performance, those methods were firmly rooted not only in aspects of Freud's theory of abreaction and Jung's belief in the multi-aspected or ‘polyvalent personality’, but more specifically in the practical therapeutic work on the human voice conducted by Alfred Wolfsohn, first in Germany before the war, then in Britain from Wolfsohn's exile in 1938 until his death in 1962. The author, Paul Newham, is founder and director of the International Association for Voice Movement Therapy in London, and has worked therapeutically with a wide range of clients, including performing artists. His book The Singing Cure: an Introduction to Voice Movement Therapy, will be published by Random House in March.
Issues of Identity, Nationality, and Performance: the Reception of Two Plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker
Authors: Carlson Susan
Published: January 2009

This paper explores some of the many factors which affect the way in which the critical response to a production is made manifest. Using the reception of Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale and Our Country's Good as case studies, Susan Carlson contrasts the enthusiastic response to the first production of the latter play at the Royal Court, where its supposed celebration of the redemptive effects of theatricality were widely acclaimed, with the subjection of the former to the ‘atavistic guilts of male theatre reviewers’. Examining the reception of later productions – and even the West End transfer – of Our Country's Good, she proceeds to show how different theatres, companies, and senses of cultural, sexual, and national identity shaped ever-changing attitudes towards what was presumed to be the same play. Susan Carlson, whose article ‘Comic Collisions: Convention, Rage, and Order’ appeared in NTQ12 (November 1987), is Professor of English at lowa State University, and the author of Women of Grace: James's Plays and the Comedy of Manners (1985) and Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (1991). She is now working on issues of performance and collaboration in contemporary theatre, and writing about the work of the Omaha Magic Theatre and the playwriting of Karim Alrawi.
Direct Action, Dramatic Action: Theatre and Situationist Theory
Authors: White Graham
Published: January 2009

In exploring the relationship between situationist theory and theatre in the period of the ‘counter-culture’ in Britain, the following article seeks to provide an account of the ‘spectacularization’ of political action through the language and forms of drama. The relatively neglected work of Raoul Vaneigem is examined for its treatment of theatricality as one of the organizing discourses of the spectacle, and the suggestion that ‘drama’ is a constant choreographic presence in the social world is explored alongside related ideas concerning the dramatization of everyday life in the work of Raymond Williams and Aida Hozic. Attempts to ‘disrupt the spectacle’ through political action during the period of the counter-culture are discussed in relation to this material. Graham White is Lecturer in English at King's College, University of London, and has been Literary Manager of the Finborough Theatre since 1990.
Reinhardt's ‘Miracle’ at Olympia: a Record and a Reconstruction
Authors: Shewring Margaret
Published: January 2009

Christmas 1911 saw a remarkable collaboration in London between the Austrian director Max Reinhardt and the protean English impresario C. B. Cochran, to create what Margaret Shewring here calls ‘the most remarkable Christmas pantomime ever presented’ –The Miracle, a religious spectacular with a cast of two thousand, staged in the huge arena of the Olympia exhibition centre. Although subsequent revivals of the show, generally in more orthodox performing spaces, have already been documented, there has previously been no full account of this inaugural and in many ways most successful production. Margaret Shewring. who teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, has drawn on the previously untapped resources of Olympia, now held at Earl's Court, in this account of the spectacle from inception to reception.