bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Blaho Uhlàr and the Slovak Theatre of Crisis
Authors: Cook Joe
Published: January 2009

When we published Barbara Day's introduction to modern theatre in Czechoslovakia in NTQ7 (1986), we could little imagine that by the turn of the decade we would be carrying regular reports from Eastern Europe on the effects of the disintegration of the Soviet empire upon the theatres and theatre people of the former satellite states. In NTQ27 (1991), we included an overview of recent developments in the Polish theatre – following this up in NTQ28 with a detailed feature on the work of a single company in the new era, Gardzienice. Here, we similarly complement Premsyl Rut's report in NTQ27 on ‘The State of the New Czech Theatre’ with a study of the work of one of the directors who, like so many people in the arts, served as a herald to the ‘velvet revolution’ – Blaho Uhlár, whose career began, in the difficult years after the Soviet invasion of 1968, with the Theatre for Children and Youth, and whose most recently completed production with the Divadle Alexandra Duchnovic company, Nono, visited the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff during the city's festival last October.
In Memory of Ryszard Cieslak
Authors: Taviani Ferdinando
Published: January 2009

The Polish actor Ryszard Cieslak, who died in June 1990, joined Jerzy Grotowski's first theatrical venture, the Theatre of the Thirteen Rows in Opole, in 1962, three years after its formation, remaining with Grotowski throughout the life of the Laboratory Theatre in Wroclaw, and until it ceased touring early in 1980 after Grotowski's period of paratheatrical experiments had begun. Cieslak is best remembered for his performances in The Constant Prince and Apocalypsis cum Figuris, and his achievements as an actor were in some senses inseparable from those of Grotowski – but in later years he worked independently, both as a director and, before his death, in the memorable Tiresias-like role of Dhrtarastra in Peter Brook's version of The Mahabharata. In the first part of this feature, Ferdinando Taviani explores the nature and the quality of Cieslak's work, and its relationship with the Laboratory Theatre. To complement his analysis, we are reprinting the final interview given by Cieslak before his death, which was first published on 2 May 1990 in the literary supplement of the Polish-language American journal Nowy Dziennik. Its occasion was the screening of the film of The Mahabharata in Los Angeles and other United States cities in May and June 1990.
The Second Act is Called Crisis
Authors: Cook Joe
Published: January 2009

AFTER STRUGGLING to survive over four decades of rigid government control, theatre in Czechoslovakia is struggling to survive freedom. Like every other sector of society, theatre is having to deal with the enormous problems of transition from life under a totalitarian system to the free-for-all rush of a liberal, market-based democracy.
Not Only a Question of Money: Shakespeare and the Ego Decade
Authors: Hakola Liisa
Published: January 2009

We get not only the kind of government but also the kind of theatre we deserve, argues Liisa Hakola, who here relates the new impulses behind Shakespearean productions of the 1980s to the social and economic assumptions which came to prevail in Britain during the ‘Thatcher decade’ – and seemingly beyond. Desirable though increased subsidy for the theatre may be – in particular for the RSC, as chief purveyors of Shakespeare – what determines the relevance of Shakespearean productions to their times, she suggests, transcends the availability of cash subsidies, however symptomatic of a prevailing climate their size or scarcity may be. Although based in Helsinki, Liisa Hakola spent much of the 1980s in Britain, preparing her PhD thesis, published in 1988, on three RSC productions of Richard II. She has published two other books in Finnish, and also translated five of Fay Weldon's novels into that language.
Giorgio Strehler's Faust Project: Signification and Reception Strategies
Authors: Balme Christopher
Published: January 2009

In the ten years between 1982, when Giorgio Strehler announced his intention to stage both parts of Goethe's Faust over six evenings, and the eventual two-evening performance amidst a ‘Faust Festival’ in 1992, the Faust project underwent a series of modifications and manifestations, in parallel with the struggle to create the Teatro Grande in Milan as a new house for the Piccolo. The progress and realization of the project are here charted by Christopher Balme, who not only describes the work processes involved, but how these became enmeshed both in the politics of Strehler's relations with the city of Milan, and with his own identification, as actor of Faust as well as director of the project, with the role of the hubristic artist, in quest of a climax to a controversial career. Christopher Balme is a lecturer in theatre studies at the University of Munich's Instituttür Theaterwissenschaft. He has published on modern German theatre, theatre theory, and post-colonial drama and theatre. He has previously held posts at the University of Würzburg, and was Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow in Theatre Studies at Munich University. He has also been a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Theatre and Film at Victoria University in New Zealand.
The Rhetoric of Theory: the Role of Metaphor in Brook's ‘The Empty Space’
Authors: Ley Graham
Published: January 2009

In his discussion-piece for NTQ 28 (1991), Graham Ley raised questions about the self-determination of the avant-garde, drawing on analogies from dance and design to explore the problem of the post-modern in the theatre. He also outlined a critique of what he called an ‘alternative establishment in theatrical endeavour’: here, he extends that critique into an analysis of the techniques of persuasion to be found in one of the most influential texts in post-war theatrical theory, Peter Brook's The Empty Space, arguing for an enhanced attention to be given to the language and textuality of theory. Graham Ley is a writer and researcher who has taught in the Universities of London and Auckland. As Australian Studies Fellow in Theatre at the University of New South Wales in 1984, he compiled jointly with Peter Fitzpatrick of Monash University the survey of new developments in Australian theatre published in NTQ5 (1986). Among his numerous publications on ancient performance, A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater appeared from the University of Chicago Press in 1991. He is currently working on a book on theatrical theory.
Social Space in Ancient Theatres
Authors: du S. Read Leslie
Published: January 2009

How do modern archeological discoveries mesh with and affect present views of ancient theatrical techniques – specifically, of the interrelationship between performers and audience? Looking especially at the ways in which the audience itself was able to interact through the construction of the areas devoted to its own accommodation and circulation, Leslie du S. Read here blends narrative comment and photographic illustration to create a picture of the essential sociability of ancient theatre spaces – an aspect usually ignored by scholars primarily concerned with dramaturgical techniques. Leslie du S. Read, who is presently Head of the Drama Department at the University of Exeter, has for a number of years been researching both visible and known remains of classical theatres, and writing on the social context of stagecraft. He has at present a collection of over 4,000 slides of some 300 theatres, and is in the final stage of completing a history and guide to ancient theatre sites. All photographs in the present article were also taken by the author.
Theatres of Choice and the Case of ‘He's Having Her Baby’
Authors: Goodman Lizbeth
Published: January 2009

By way of introduction to the interview which follows with Joan Lipkin, director and playwright of That Uppity Theatre in St Louis, Missouri, Lizbeth Goodman here provides a context for the discussion of what she calls ‘theatres of choice’ – plays, feminist or otherwise, which deal with the issue of reproductive rights, now being actively challenged in the United States and under threat elsewhere. She looks at the history of legislative change and reaction in the United States, and in particular at the Supreme Court decision in the ‘Webster case’, which represented a victory for the neo-conservative movement. Among theatrical responses to this were Lipkin's ‘pro-choice musical comedy’, He's Having Her Baby, in which gender role-reversal and comic stereotypes were employed in an attempt to reach audiences in St Louis – the city at the centre of the Webster controversy. Lizbeth Goodman, who lectures in literature for the Open University, has published a sequence of feminist theatre interviews in New Theatre Quarterly, and her ‘Feminst Theatre in Britain: a Survey and a Prospect’ appeared in NTQ33 (February 1993). She is the author of Contemporary Feminist Theatres (Routledge, 1993).
Evacuating the Museum: the Crisis of Playwriting in Ulster
Authors: Muinzer Philomena
Published: January 2009

When the current spate of ‘Troubles’ began in Northern Ireland over a decade ago. it was fashionable to lament the lack of plays about the political and military situation there. Now there is no shortage of plays, but a persistent worry – here articulated by Philomena Muinzer – that most of them do little to analyze the events. let alone to suggest a resolution of a crisis which is coming to be accepted as somehow endemic and inevitable. This fatalism, she suggests, is because the plays either fit all too easily into old forms which sanctify antiquated assumptions, or mould no less constricting new ‘conventions’ – thus creating a dramaturgical vicious circle which perpetuates the political. Taking a cross-section of recent plays about Ulster, she thus suggests how they share a body of themes and concerns which ‘become part of an inherited dramatic fabric, which then prejudices new political analysis and new creative thinking alike’. Philomena Muinzer herself grew up in Northern Ireland, and subsequently attended the Universities of Princeton. Essex, and Yale. In 1982 she received an Arts Council bursary on the strength of her play Together Against Him. and she is currently working on a new play about the Troubles.
Peter Brook's Six Days
Authors: Banu Georges
Published: January 2009

In the first issue of New Theatre Quarterly (February 1985), we included a descriptive analysis by David Williams of three of the major productions of Peter Brook's Centre Internationale de Recherche Théâtrale in Paris. Following the opening of the company's most recent production, the Mahabharata. a number of its earlier members returned to join in a series of meetings designed to share some of their approaches and experiences with a public audience. Georges Banu – whose own detailed account of Brook's work formed the thirteenth volume of Voies de la création théâtrale (Paris: CNRS. 1985) – was among that audience, and here presents a journal of the six days of meetings, which were held from 18–20 and 26–28 March 1986.
Designing the Shrew
Authors: Howard Pamela
Published: January 2009

In NTQ7 we included an assessment by Geraldine Cousin of two recent productions of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew – one of them by Di Trevis for the touring group of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The designer for that production was Pamela Howard, who created for it a central traverse playing area adaptable to the many different kinds of venues to be visited. Here, she adds an illustrated postscript on the conception, creation, and utility of the design element, which we hope will initiate the regular documentation of this often-neglected area of theatre practice. In addition to designing for the RSC and numerous other theatres and companies, Pamela Howard has since 1972 taught theatre design at the Central School of Art in London.
America on Stage: the World in the Classroom
Authors: Jennings Caleen Sinnette
Published: January 2009

In this, the third paper originally presented at the ATHE conference in Atlanta in 1992, Caleen Sinnette Jennings, Assistant Professor of Theatre in the American University, Washington, DC, discusses the problems and rewards of introducing American theatre, film, and television studies to a class of sixty students from a wide variety of nations and social backgrounds. Outlining the ideas and intentions behind a wide-ranging syllabus, she quotes from group presentations and individual responses to illustrate how works deeply rooted in American culture and assumptions can stimulate the recognition and discussion of social and cultural similarities and differences among responsive students.
Theatre Workshop, Moussinac, and the European Connection
Authors: Paget Derek
Published: January 2009

This article investigates the influence of a French communist writer on Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. Joan Littlewood celebrated her eightieth birthday in 1994 – a year which also saw an ‘Arena’ programme about her life and the publication of her memoirJoan's Book. Critics and commentators are agreed that Littlewood was a charismatic director, her Theatre Workshop a ground-breaking company which in the late 1950s and early 1960s acquired an international reputation only matched later by the RSC. However, the company's distinctive style drew as much from a European as from a native English theatre tradition, and in this article Derek Paget examines the contribution to that style of a seminal work on design – Léon Moussinac'sThe New Movement in the Theatreof 1931. Although he was also important as a theorist of the emerging cinema, Moussinac's chief influence was as a transmitter of ideas in the theatre, and in the following article Derek Paget argues that his book offered the Manchester-based group insights into European radical left theatre unavailable to them in any other way. Moussinac thus helped Theatre Workshop to become a ‘Trojan horse’ for radical theatricality in the post-war years, while his design ideas were to sustain the Workshop throughout its period of major creativity and influence. Derek Paget worked in the early 1970s on Joan Littlewood's last productions at Stratford East, and he wrote onOh What a Lovely Warin NTQ 23 (1990). He is now Reader in Drama at Worcester College of Higher Education.
The Unspeakable Events at the Glasgow Music Halls, 1875
Authors: Kift Dagmar
Published: January 2009

The history of the music hall has for the most part been written as the history of the London halls. In Dagmar Kift's book, The Victorian Music Hall and Working-Class Culture (the German edition of which was reviewed in NTQ 35, and which is due to appear in English from Cambridge University Press), she attempts to redress the balance by setting music-hall history within a national perspective. Arguing that between the 1840s and the 1890s the halls catered to a predominantly working-class and lower middle-class audience of both sexes and all ages, she views them as instrumental in giving these classes a strong and self-confident identity. The sustaining by the halls of such a distinct class-awareness was one of their greatest strengths – but was also at the root of many of the controversies which surrounded them. The music-hall image of the working class – with its sexual and alcohol-oriented hedonism, its ridicule of marriage, and its acceptance of women and young people as partners in work as in leisure – was in marked contrast to most so-called Victorian values. The following case study from Glasgow documents the shift of music-hall opposition in the 1870s away from teetotallers of all classes attacking alcohol consumption towards middle-class social reformers objecting to the entertainment itself. Dagmar Kift, who earlier published an essay on the composition of music-hall audiences in Music Hall: the Business of Pleasure (Open University Press), is curator of the Westphalian Industrial Museum in Dortmund.
Beerbohm Tree's Production of ‘The Tempest’, 1904
Authors: Pearce Brian
Published: January 2009

Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917) is remembered today as a great character actor, as a personality, and as a wit: but as a producer he is seldom considered an important or even a positive influence on the course of Shakespearean interpretation in the twentieth century. Focusing on Tree's 1904 production of The Tempest, Brian Pearce argues that Tree was in fact an original and inventive director. Contrasting the faint praise or contempt of theatre historians with the adoption of many of Tree's ideas in later literary criticism of The Tempest, Pearce also suggests that the acceptance of the right of contemporary experimental directors to act in effect as ‘scenic artists’ sits oddly with attitudes to Tree's work, in which he fulfilled precisely such a role. Brian Pearce completed his PhD at the University of London in 1992, and since returning to South Africa has worked as a theatre director. He is a member of the board of directors of the Durban Theatre Workshop Company, and also teaches drama at Technikon Natal.
History in the Year Two: Trevor Griffiths's Danton
Authors: Garner Stanton B.
Published: January 2009

For British dramatists nurtured in and by the hopes for socialism which characterized the 'sixties and the 'seventies, the Thatcherite period – with the eclipse of a fatally flawed communist system as its international dimension – demanded not only new thinking, but at least the consideration of a new dramaturgy. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., here explores the ways in which one of the most consistently committed of contemporary writers, Trevor Griffiths, confronts in Hope in the Year Two, his play about the death of the French Revolutionary Danton, the dilemma not only of the revolutionary hero, but of the dramatist confronted with attacks upon the concept of history itself, whether from the gurus of post-modernism or of the New Right. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., teaches modern drama in the English Department at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater (1989) and Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (1994). His current research interests include post-Cold War British drama.
The Significance of Diderot
Authors: Ley Graham
Published: January 2009

Best known in his own times as an encyclopedist, the eighteenth-century French writer, philosopher, dramatist, and critic Denis Diderot (1713–84) was to emerge a century later, though his Paradoxe sur le comédien, as a posthumous protagonist in the debate launched in Britain in William Archer's Masks or Faces? (1888). That debate – on the role of feeling and instinct versus craft and technique in acting – has been taken up and sustained by many theorists and practitioners in the succeeding century. In the following article, however, Graham Ley is more concerned with Diderot's wider role as theatrical theorist, suggesting that he offers – as also in his defence of pantomime, his proposal for the ‘serious genre’ which anticipated realism, and his advocacy of scenographic reform – not a unified vision of the nature of theatre but an enduring sense, precisely, of its paradoxical and ironic qualities. Graham Ley has just joined the Department of Drama at the University of Exeter, having previously taught in London and New Zealand. He is currently completing a book on theatrical theory, on which he has previously also published in NTQ, most recently on ‘The Role of Metaphor in Brook's The Empty Space’ (NTQ35, 1993). Among his numerous publications on ancient performance, A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theatre appeared from the University of Chicago Press in 1991.
Towards a Study of the English Acting Tradition
Authors: Jones Nesta
Published: January 2009

Here Nesta Jones outlines the history and development of the English acting tradition, and some of the issues any such consideration raises in relation to the research project introduced in the previous article by Simon Trussler. Nesta Jones is Reader in Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was for many years Head of Drama, and now directs the innovative MA programme in Theatre Arts. She is also artistic director of the NXT company, and has most recently published File on Synge (Methuen, 1994).
Bad Habits, ‘Bad’ Quartos, and the Myth of Origin in the Editing of Shakespeare
Authors: Spong Andrew
Published: January 2009

This article is the latest contribution to a continuing debate on the editing of Shakespeare in relation to new conceptions of authorship and authority and to the developing contribution of performance studies. Introduced by Brian Parker in NTQ24 (1990), it has subsequently drawn submissions from Stanley Wells in NTQ26 (1991), Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey in NTQ 34 (1992) and, most recently, Alan Posener in NTQ39 (1994). Here, Andrew Spong challenges criticisms which Holderness and Loughrey's ‘Shakespearean Originals’ project has received, and suggests that the sort of methodological and theoretical fallacies which its editors have been accused of displaying can be no less readily evidenced from the positions adopted by their critics. Andrew Spong is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Textual and Contextual Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. His research interests include the challenge of historical materialism to postmodernism and the sociology of the Elizabethan theatre.
TV Drama in Papua New Guinea: a Case Study in National Identity
Authors: Anyanwu Joseph Chika
Published: January 2009

The single television station serving Papua New Guinea transmits between ten and twelve hours a day of programmes that – apart from the new and a musical slot sponsored by Coca Cola – lack and significant national interest. Yet an eight-episode television drama, Warriors in Transit – conceived, written, shot, and performed entirely on location by local artists and talents, and with the potential to develop into a long-running series – has for three years remained unseen, despite several good reviews and sneak previews. The assertion of the Tv executives that Papua New Guineans do not want to watch their own programmes, and the inability of the production, alike bear witness to a problem typical of the develpment of television in the Third World, as traditional national cultures ineluctably give way befor the easy attractions of homogenized imports – a problem that can only be tackled by affirmative action on the part of governments whose best intentions too often conflict with financial constraints. The author, Joseph Chika Anyanwu, teaches in the Facutly of Creative Arts of the University of Papua New Guinea, and first presented the present paper at the 1994 conference of the Australasian Drama Studies Federation.
Theatre in the Service of Health Education: Case Studies from Uganda
Authors: Frank Marion
Published: January 2009

International organizations are increasingly turning to theatre as a means of raising development issues, exploring options, and influencing behaviour. This paper examines some structures and techniques inherent in this type of applied theatre, analyzing two plays used to supplement AIDS education programmes in Uganda. One is a video production by a typical urban popular theatre group, while the second production analyzed exemplifies the Theatre for Development approach through its sub-genre, Campaign Theatre, used to raise awareness on health issues, hygiene, sanitation, child care, and the environment. The study analyzes the performance of the two plays and addresses some contradictions arising from the involvement and influence of external organizations. Marion Frank is a graduate of Bayreuth University in Germany, whose extensive field research has resulted in the publication of AIDS Education through Theater (Bayreuth African Studies Series, Bayreuth, 1995). Dr. Frank is currently living in the US, where as a Visiting Scholar at Duke University she is now working on a research project aiming to establish a closer link between literary/cultural studies and medicine/medical anthropology.
Gramsci on Theatre
Authors: Gramsci Antonio
Published: January 2009

Our occasional series on early Marxist theatre criticism – which has already included Trotsky on Wedekind in NTQ28, Lunacharsky on Ibsen in NTQ39, and Mehring on Hauptmann in NTQ 42 – continues with two essays by the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, whose concepts of hegemony, the national-popular, and the organic intellectual have had a profound influence on twentieth-century western thought. From 1916 to 1920 Gramsci was also a theatre critic, writing a regular drama review column in the Piedmont edition of the socialist daily newspaper Avanti! in which he first explored ideas about the ideological function of theatre. His review of a 1917 Italian production of Ibsen's A Doll's House is a particularly strong example of his attempt to generate notions of the theatre as an arena of political struggle in which the cultural values of the bourgeoisie were expressed, but which also had the potential to subvert these values and provide the proletariat with the critical wherewithal to express its hegemony. He saw the function of the theatre critic as promoting social, cultural, and moral awareness in the spectator, and Ibsen's play as a particularly apt vehicle for critiquing the moral superficiality of Italian bourgeois women in its powerful portrayal of the oppressions of a patriarchal society. While Gramsci's review of A Doll's House can be seen as a forerunner to contemporary feminist ideas, he saw Pirandello's use of the ‘power of abstract thought’ as making him a potentially revolutionary playwright, whom he described as ‘a commando in the theatre’. His plays were ‘like grenades that explode inside inside the brains of spectators, demolishing their banalities and causing their feelings and thoughts to crumble’. After reviewing ten of Pirandello's early plays for Avanti! Gramsci later expressed his intention of writing a full-length study of the playwright's ‘transformation of theatrical taste’. All that came of these intentions were the rather fragmented notes he made in the Prison Notebooks, in which he expressed his views on Pirandello in the context of the politics of culture and the idea of a national popular literature. Gramsci saw Pirandello's metatheatre as subverting traditional dramatic principles, but failing to establish new ones or to subvert the social and economic aspects of tradition. Gramsci responds to the critical debates on Pirandello in the 1920s by Tigher and Croce about Pirandellism's combination of art and philosophy and its conflict between ‘life’ and ‘form’, but his final comments about his views being taken with a ‘pinch of salt’ indicate that they are not definitive.
Alan Bennett: Political Playwright
Authors: Scarr Richard
Published: January 2009

Alan Bennett is one of the most popular mainstream dramatists working in Britain today, his canon now a mainstay of regional and amateur theatre companies. Yet for a writer who was once compared to John Osborne as taking ‘the moral temperature of the nation’, his output is widely regarded as apolitical and, at worst, ‘safe’. In the following article, Richard Scarr suggests that this viewpoint is misleading, and argues that Bennett is not only one of the most politically contentious playwrights in dominant theatre, but that the ideological viewpoints he has supported have changed as his career has progressed. Richard Scarr is an English graduate of the University of North London, and has recently completed an MA in Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary and Westfield College. He is currently researching a PhD on the rhetoric of Renaissance comedy, with particular emphasis on the double-entendre.
When Theatre was for All: the Cork Report, after Ten Years
Authors: Brown Ian , Brannen Rob
Published: January 2009

By the mid 'eighties, the Thatcher government's public funding restrictions had taken a firm hold, leading to a now familiar position of crisis theatre management. In 1985, under pressure from the profession, the Arts Council of Great Britain commissioned an independent enquiry, the first for sixteen years, to evaluate the needs of the publicly funded theatre and to determine funding priorities. Although the resulting Cork Enquiry was seen by many at the time as a cost-cutting exercise, eight months intensive research and evidence-taking led to a carefully constructed case for a funding increase against an estimated shortfall of up to £13.4 million – and also produced a broad vision of the nature of theatre in England. It is now ten years since the Cork Enquiry delivered its report, with the aim of ensuring the healthy development of an art form placed under severe financial constraint. Here lan Brown and Rob Brannen, Secretary and Assistant Secretary to the Enquiry, provide insight into the Enquiry's setting-up, its process, and formulation of recommendations. In the light of recent consultation exercises, they examine the nature and function of such reports alongside the long-term impact of the Cork Enquiry. lan Brown was Drama Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1986 to 1994, and is now Professor and Head of the Drama Department at Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh. Rob Brannen is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University, Bedford.
Myths and Enabling Fictions of ‘Origin’ in the Editing of Shakespeare
Authors: Egan Gabriel
Published: January 2009

The debate in NTQ about editing Shakespeare has engaged with the practices embodied in recent scholarly projects from the Oxford Complete Works (1986) to the continuing ‘Shakespearean Originals’ series. The issues raised have been philosophical, concerning the nature of authorial subjectivity, and practical, concerning the interventions made by editors in manifestly corrupt or incomplete texts. Here, Gabriel Egan surveys the progress of the debate and responds in detail to Andrew Spong's defence in NTQ 45 of the principles embodied in the ‘Shakespearean Originals’ series. Rejecting Spong's claim that editorial interference cannot be justified and that early printed texts must be ‘cordoned off’, Egan argues the necessity of explained interference based on ‘enabling fictions’ of authorial intention. Since all textual transmission is necessarily mediation, he argues that scrupulous explication of interference is called for, and that this is lacking in the ‘Shakespearean Originals’ produced to date. Gabriel Egan is completing a PhD on Shakespearean original staging at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-on-Avon.
Shakespeare, Feminism, and Voice: Responses to Sarah Werner
Authors: Berry Cicely , Rodenburg Patsy , Linklater Kristin
Published: January 2009

When I was asked if I would like to reply to Sarah Werner's article in the August issue of NTQ entitled ‘Performing Shakespeare: Voice Training and the Feminist Viewpoint’, my first reaction was that it was so unfounded in the reality of practical voice work that it was not worth the time needed to respond. But then, re-reading it, I became incensed at the notion that voice teachers, through the work of freeing the voice, are after some romantic notion of connecting with an idyllic past – a notion so utterly absurd that I spoke with my friends and colleagues, Kristin Linklater and Patsy Rodenburg, and we agreed that Ms. Werner's assumptions must be challenged. As Edgar's words imply in the last speech of King Lear: ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’ Words hurt, cost, are ugly and violent: but it is my belief that when we reach the point of articulating our dilemmas – it is then that we become free to take action. That is what my work is about. So, to follow are our answers to, and our questions for Ms. Werner.
Representing Sexuality in Shakespeare's Plays
Authors: Brown John Russell
Published: January 2009

Sexuality resides in much more than what is spoken or even enacted, and its stage representation will often work best when the minds of the spectators are collaboratively engaged in completing the desired response. John Russell Brown, founding Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and a former Associate Director of the National Theatre, here explores Shakespeare's arts of sexual obliquity, whether in silence, prevarication, or kindled imagination, and their relationship both with more direct forms of allusion and with an audience's response. John Russell Brown, currently Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, is author of numerous books on Shakespeare and modern drama, and editor of many Elizabethan and Jacobean texts – most recently a new edition of Shakespeare for Applause Books, New York.
The Starfish and the Strange Attractor: Myth, Science, and Theatre as Laboratory in Maria Irene Fornes' ‘Mud’
Authors: Gargano Cara
Published: January 2009

Cara Gargano sees the plays of Maria Irene Fornes as reflecting ‘nucleate disorder in a system far from equilibrium’ – a theatrical response to the overturning by the new science of the Aristotelian as of the Newtonian paradigm. Comparing the wildly divergent critical interpretations of Fornes'Mudsince its premiere in 1983, she suggests that in this overtly simple dramatization of a far from simple triangular relationship, Fornes ‘uses the theatrical space as her laboratory – a place to explore the interface between our society's construction of the world and our evolving artistic and scientific vision’. Cara Gargano is a writer, teacher, and choreographer who took her doctorate at the City University of New York, was on the faculty at the New York School of Ballet, and is presently Chair of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. She has written extensively on the Quebecoise playwright Marie Laberge, and her articles on performance, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory have been published inModern Drama, L'Annuaire Théâtrale, andDance and Research.
Resistance and Resilience: an Overview of the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg
Authors: Shevtsova Maria
Published: January 2009

The reputation of the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg has been growing steadily in this country and elsewhere – ironically, since the economic problems of its native Russia have made touring as much a matter of economic necessity as of cultural cross-fertilization. In the following article, Maria Shevtsova offers a detailed explication of four of the Maly's most notable productions under its present director, Lev Dodin – Aleksandr Galin's Stars in the Morning Sky, appropriately one of the final offerings within the ambit of the former Soviet Union; Brothers and Sisters, a view of a Russia in ‘perpetual motion’ in the immediate post-war years which has come to be regarded as the company's ‘signature piece’; a transposition onto the stage of Dostoevsky's masterpiece, The Devils; and – following briefer studies of Gaudeamus and Claustrophobia – a revival of The Cherry Orchard which, like so much of Dodin's work, offers a bleak vision of disintegration as Chekhov's portrayal of a crumbling society at the turn of the last century comes full circle to reflect our own fin de siecle. Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Contemporary Performance and Theatre Studies at the University of Lancaster, and has published on a wide range of subjects including the work of Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Patrice Chereau, and Robert Wilson, having also contributed a three-part study of ‘The Sociology of Theatre’ to NTQ17–19 (1989). Her most recent full-length work is Theatre and Cultural Interaction (1993).
Patel … and Not Patel
Authors: King Shelley
Published: January 2009

My relationship with Tara Arts began in 1989, with the production of Danton's Death. Jatinder had made it very clear that none of the assembled actors would know the roles they were to play until at least the third week of rehearsal. Unsure about this process, I scanned the list of Büchner's characters full of doubt. Then, in the certainty that none of them was called Patel, I decided to put whatever reputation I had amassed during my previous twelve years as an actor in Jatinder's hands. Patel is a fine name, but I had played four characters called Patel in the last twelve months, and was just about to play another. And I was feeling claustrophobic. In the end, Jatinder cast me as Robespierre opposite the splendid Muraly Menon from Trivandrum in South India, who played Danton. Since then I have played various characters of both genders for Jatinder and Tara, and I have visited countries and continents where I have worked with performers whose skill and knowledge have humbled me.
The Pandora's Box of ‘Doi Moi’: the Open-Door Policy and Contemporary Theatre in Vietnam
Authors: Diamond Catherine
Published: January 2009

In the 1990s, Vietnamese traditional theatre has seen its popular base eroded by foreign videos, television imports, and the films that have poured into the country since the advent of the ‘open door’ policy, or doi moi. As that policy is primarily economic in purpose, the advantages offered to the national culture have been questionable. The traditional forms here discussed by Catherine Diamond – tuong, hat boi, and cheo – have lost much of their status in the urban areas, though still popular in the countryside. However, the forms which address contemporary issues – ‘renovated theatre’ (cai luong), spoken theatre (kich noi), and, most recently, ‘mini-theatre’ (san khau nho) – play to significant numbers in Saigon and Hanoi, often employing a distinctive vein of satirical humour. Though trained in the academies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Vietnamese dramatists have now broken away from the socialist realist ideal and are looking towards the West and China for new artistic developments. The author of this survey, Catherine Diamond, is a dancer and drama professor in Taiwan. She has recently published Sringara Tales, a collection of short stories about the traditional dancers in Southeast Asia.
Harley Granville Barker: the First English Chekhovian?
Authors: Weiss Rudolf
Published: January 2009

Harley Granville Barker, the major innovator in the English theatre at the beginning of the present century, was long underestimated as a playwright, and misjudged as a mediocre imitator of Bernard Shaw. In more recent years major revivals of his plays, as well as new critical studies and editions, have witnessed a renewed interest in Barker as a dramatist, which, Rudolf Weiss here argues, testifies to the Chekhovian rather than the Shavian qualities of his plays. In the following article Weiss explores these qualities in the context of the early reception of Chekhov's plays in Britain, and on the basis of a reassessment of the existing records he offers a new view of Barker's originality as a playwright, concluding that the quasi-Chekhovian stamp of his work does not derive from influence but reflects the distinctive Zeitgeist of the turn of the twentieth century. Rudolf Weiss, who teaches in the English Department of the University of Vienna, has previously published on Arthur Wing Pinero, John Galsworthy, Harley Granville Barker, and Elizabeth Baker.
Connections and Crossovers: Cinema and Theatre in Hong Kong
Authors: Bren Frank
Published: January 2009

From the run-up to its return to Chinese rule in July 1997 to the stock-market crash in October, Hong Kong has seldom been out of the news during the past year. But the attention paid to its political and economic provenance has not been matched by much interest in its cultural output – despite the existence in Hong Kong of a cinema industry with a prodigious output now approaching ten thousand films. Although a professional theatre has been a relatively more recent development, the connections between film and theatre in Hong Kong have always been close – from the film adaptations of Cantonese opera in the 1930s, through the ‘female’ films of the post-war period and the western following for Bruce Lee's kung fu movies, to the present dominance of the cross-generic production company, Springtime, in the 1990s, with a creative interest in its own past which verges on the metatheatrical. Frank Bren, who is presently living and working in Hong Kong, here captures something of the history and the distinctive flavour of the overlapping movie and theatre industries, and assesses why the relationship remains mutually profitable in artistic as well as economic terms.
Animation, Affirmation, Anarchy: Folk Performance in Brazil
Authors: Rosa Marco Camarotti
Published: January 2009

The folk theatre of North-Eastern Brazil has been given scant critical attention in the past. Even within Brazil itself attention has been largely concentrated in the writings of folklorists, musicologists, and those interested in popular dance. Marco Camarotti Rosa's article is the first attempt to provide comprehensive coverage of the activity as theatre. In describing the four major forms, with some reference to the proliferation of deviations from the norm which are bound to occur when performance is rooted in the oral rather than literary tradition, the article draws attention away from a futile search for historic precedents and stages of development in favour of viewing the performances as they are now, and considering the part they play in the hard-working lives of the communities of North-Eastern Brazil. Marco Camarotti Rosa is a Lecturer in the Department of Theory of Art and Artistic Expression in the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE).
No Flirting with Philistinism: Shakespearean Production at Miss Horniman's Gaiety Theatre
Authors: Gardner Viv
Published: January 2009

The first production at Britain's first true repertory theatre – the Gaiety, in Manchester – under Annie Horniman's management was of a Shakespeare play: William Poel's staging of Measure for Measure, analyzed in detail by Richard Foulkes in Theatre Quarterly No. 39 (1981). Yet Miss Horniman's attitude both to Poel's experimental ‘Elizabethanism’ and to subsequent attempts at Shakespeare at the Gaiety remained ambivalent, and influenced by such personal tensions and disagreements as saw off Lewis Casson after his radical and political reading of Julius Caesar, in favour of safer stuff conceived as an alternative to Christmas pantomime. The author, Viv Gardner, teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Manchester: she is a former Book Reviews Editor of NTQ, and currently co-editor of the Women and Theatre papers. Here, she sets Shakespearean production at the Gaiety into the context of Miss Horniman and her colleagues' ambitions for the Gaiety and its intended role in Manchester's civic life.
Cool Britannia? ‘In-Yer-Face’ Writing in the British Theatre Today
Authors: Sierz Aleks
Published: January 2009

The appearance of a succession of controversial and attention-catching new plays on the British stage in the 'nineties has led to considerable public discussion – and not a little ostensible outrage. In ‘an interim report’, Aleks Sierz examines the rash of plays about sex, drugs, and violence – notably Trainspotting, Blasted, Mojo, and Shopping and Fucking – by twenty-something authors, and asks whether they have anything in common beyond a flamboyant theatricality and the desire to shock. After showing how Cool Britannia's manifestation on the national stage has provoked arguments for and against this ‘in-yer-face’ drama, he outlines some of the common themes – such as the crisis of masculinity and the postmodern sensibility – that characterize much contemporary new writing. He argues that while these young writers are certainly gifted and mature, only subsequent theatrical revivals of their work will show whether it has anything lasting to say. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic for Tribune, and currently writing a book about ‘in-yer-face’ drama.
‘They'd Have Pissed on My Grave’: the Arts Council and Theatre Workshop
Authors: Holdsworth Nadine
Published: January 2009

It has become a critical commonplace to contrast the relative generosity of the early Arts Council towards establishment institutions with its miserliness towards Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, as the company struggled to survive through the immediate post-war period of touring and then to establish itself with a degree of security at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. In this article, Nadine Holdsworth complements evidence that has before been mainly anecdotal with material from the archives both of the company and the Council, and traces the mutual suspicions that were later also to undermine support for Littlewood's ‘Fun Palace’ in the 'sixties. She documents also the ironic loosening of the funding purse-strings at the very moment when Theatre Workshop's run of West End transfers depleted its energies at its Stratford base – and forced it also to return a percentage of its hard-won profits to Arts Council coffers. Nadine Holdsworth lectures in Theatre Studies at De Montfort University. She contributed an article to NTQ49 (1997) on ‘Good Nights Out: Activating the Audience with 7:84 (England)’.
The Paradox of Acting in the Traditional Chinese Theatre
Authors: Sun William H.
Published: January 2009

Traditional Chinese theatre seems to appeal to audiences across the world more for its exquisite acting than for its literary qualities. Yet Mei Lanfang, Tang Xianzu and Li Yu all assert that good acting must be firmly rooted in its literary base. What compelled these masters to go out of their way to emphasize the importance of the written text, argues William H. Sun, was precisely the failure of many traditional actors to take it seriously, preferring to rely on superficial virtuosities. From this constant struggle in traditional Chinese theatre between a theoretical respect for textual quality and practical emphasis on performance has emerged the peculiar paradox of acting here explored. The author, William H. Sun, is a Shanghai-born playwright, author, and associate professor of drama at Macalester College. A contributing editor of TDR, he has taught at Tufts University, California State University, Northridge, and the Shanghai Theatre
‘Cathy Come Home’ and ‘Accuracy’ in British Television Drama
Authors: Paget Derek
Published: January 2009

When, back in 1971, the originalTheatre Quarterlydevoted one of its earliest issues (TQ6, 1972) to television drama, the strongest reactions were to remarks by Tony Garnett concerning the recently developed form already being dubbed documentary drama. Subsequent issues featured both an attack on the form from Paul Ableman, and a vigorous defence from its leading practitioner, Jeremy Sandford, author of the seminalCathy Come Home(1966). As this article bears witness, the debate still rages, and here its leading historian, Derek Paget – author ofTrue Stories: Documentary Drama on Radio, Stage, and Television(Manchester University Press, 1990) – explores some of the ways in which myth has contributed as much as analysis to the argument. He goes back to contemporary documentation to explore the nature of the BBC's own sometimes timorous attitude to the creature it had spawned, its context within the developing aesthetics and technology of television drama, the reactions of politicians and local government agencies – and the way in which repeat transmissions were (and were not) hedged about with paranoia.