bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Poor Man's Bread: A Spanish Version of Hauptmann's The Weavers
Authors: George David
Published: January 2009

Poor Man's Bread (El pan del pobre) is the work of two little-known Spanish authors, Félix González Liana and José Francos Rodriguez. First performed on 14 December 1894 at the Teatro de Novedades in Madrid, Poor Man's Bread was, according to its authors, inspired by a reading of Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers (1893). Both The Weavers and Poor Man's Bread describe the appalling conditions suffered by industrial workers, the indifference of their bosses to their plight, and their eventual ransacking of the bosses' property. While the German play deals with the lot of the weavers in Hauptmann's native Silesia, its Spanish counterpart is concerned with a metal smelting plant, a fundición, and is set in a small town in the south east of Spain. There are, naturally, many similarities between the two plays, but also a number of important differences which serve to highlight some of the characteristics of the Spanish social drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Metaphysics of Sex: Strindberg, Weininger and S. I. Witkiewicz
Authors: Sokół Lech
Published: January 2009

‘Otto Weininger sent me his Geschlecht und Charakter, a terrific book that seems to solve the most difficult of all problems. He pronounces clearly what I only managed to utter. Voilà un homme!’ These words, from Strindberg's article ‘Idolatry, Gynolatry’ are meant as an homage to Otto Weininger (1880–1903) who was barely twenty-three years old when he committed suicide. Strindberg's article was published by the famous Vienna periodical Die Fackel which played an important part in defending and propagating Weininger and his book. Weininger's extraordinary and scandalous work, the full title of which is Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Sex and Character. A Fundamental Investigation; English edition – 1906) was published in June 1903. It was a revised version of his doctoral thesis presented at Vienna University in June 1902. Outstanding as the book is, it also posseses some disturbing features and it did not receive the welcome its author had expected. This poor reception, or rather the lack of any serious response, was an important factor in the author's suicide on 4 October 1903. The book became the subject of critical interest only after its author's death: suicide turned out to be a good advertisement.
Soyinka and his Radical Critics: A Review
Authors: Crow Brian
Published: January 2009

The volume of critical writing on the theatre of Wole Soyinka both in Nigeria and abroad indicates his unrivalled pre-eminence among African play wrights. His work is still not as well known in the West as it should be, though his plays do occasionally get performed, especially in the USA, and it is encouraging that six of them have recently been published in one volume in the Methuen ‘Master Playwrights’ series. If cultural chauvinism is at least partly to blame for ignorance of the Third World's leading dramatist, there is also a genuine problem of access to a writer whose work is ‘difficult’ even for the educated élite among his own people. Indeed, some younger Nigerian critics have persistently accused Soyinka of obscurantism and of being too much immersed in private myth-making, an arcane metaphysics, at the expense of communicating with a popular audience about issues which directly concern it. A heated and sometimes acrimonious debate has arisen in the last few years around Soyinka's theater, in which the dramatist himself has participated both as critic and artist. Since the controversy, like the drama, is not well-known, and some of its key texts are not easily available, my purpose here is to summarize its main features, the implications of which go well beyond the work of a particular writer, however important. In conclusion, I shall briefly review Soyinka's more recent work and its bearing on the critical debate.
Woyzeck 91—A World Without Intimacy
Authors: Malka Liora
Published: January 2009

Woyzeck 91, was staged by the Itim Ensemble and the Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv, in 1991. The production was adapted from Büchner's Woyzeck and directed by Rina Yerushalmi. The adaptation expands Büchner's play text mainly through the addition of scientific lectures, mostly about human physiology, which present the human being as a biological organism: heart, sex organs, reproducing cells, nervous system as the source of feelings. These additional scenes focus attention on Woyzeck's body as an experimental model, along with other performative devices (slides of body parts, and a skeleton). The juxtaposition of the human body (human subject) with its scientific and technological fragmentation reflects the performance's central theme: it objectifies the human subjects in our modern world of genetic experiments, technological innovations and socio-political reactions, which threaten the destruction of humanity.
The Trojan Women a Love Story: A Postmodern Semiotics of the Tragic
Authors: Bryant-Bertail Sarah
Published: January 2009

Charles Mee, before turning to playwriting, authored several well-known political histories. To the last of these, from 1993, he gave the ironically portentous title of Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World. With this deconstructive final word after two decades as a historian, he did not in fact abandon history, but began to write it in the medium of theatre. In doing so Mee has come to share a view articulated by Roland Barthes, who was once a university student of theatre and actor in Greek tragedies: the view that theatre, and Greek tragedy in particular, can illuminate our history as a story unfolding before us, allowing us to connect critically past with present as our best hope for the future. The American director Tina Landau, a frequent collaborator with Charles Mee, likewise believes that the ancient Greek tragedies helped constitute, articulate, and today still codify the structural base in myth and history of Western civilization. Accordingly, Mee and Landau have created a number of what they call ‘site-specific pieces’ adapted from Greek drama, site-specific in that they are created out of the specific material space and time at hand. One of these is The Trojan Women a Love Story which was developed and premiered at the University of Washington in Seattle in the spring of 1996. The production was based on Euripides' play The Trojan Women and Hector Berlioz's 1859 opera Les Troyens, which in turn retells the story of Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage from Virgil's epic, The Aeneid.
Theatre as a Medium of Recollection—Klaus Michael Grüber's and Antonio Recalcati's Rudi Installation (1979)
Authors: Kreuder Friedemann
Published: January 2009

In the middle of the cranescape around Potsdamer Platz, one of the most questionable building projects of the reunified Berlin can currently be viewed. If one walks in an easterly direction along Potsdamerstrasse, on the left, just behind the Kammermusiksaal and the Philharmonie, one sees the scaffolding of Helmut Jahn's eleven-storey Sony Centre, which, in its triangular form, extends to the Potsdamer Platz. As can be gathered from the models and computer simulations found in the scarlet infobox on the adjoining Leipziger Platz, the Chicago architect is planning to construct a complex consisting of a forum, the Sony Europa Centre, an office tower and two office blocks. In conjunction with the Centre and the tower as the tallest element, these two office blocks—one pointing east toward Bellevuestrasse and the other pointing west toward the Philharmonie—form a triangle that circumscribes an oval forum. The office blocks, as well as the Centre and the tower, are steel and glass constructions whose rooms at the back will offer a view of the forum from floor to ceiling. The approximately 100-metre high office tower will assume dynamism and elegance by virtue of a glass façade that will extend sideways above and beyond the semicircular building.
The Apogee of Perspective in the Theatre: Ferdinando Bibiena's Scena per angolo
Authors: Durand Carroll
Published: January 2009

The scena per angolo, a phrase coined by Ferdinando Galli Bibiena in his 1711 publication, L' archittetura civile, is the consummate expression of high baroque scenography. Per angolo designs for stage sets typically show corners of palatial interiors or courtyards through the use of multiple vanishing points [Fig. 14]. Secondary diagonals which radiate off the major oblique lines defining the space lead the eye, as well as the understanding, into an implied infinity beyond the frame of the proscenium and mirror the early eighteenth century's fascination with, and indeed insistence upon, boundless space. Even theatrical designs whose main vanishing points are on the centre line rely heavily on multiple minor vanishing points to provide the essential dynamic diagonal thrust beyond the implied boundary of the proscenium.
Wenceslas Hollar and Christopher Beeston's Phoenix Theatre in Drury Lane
Authors: Barlow Graham F.
Published: January 2009

In 1616 Christopher Beeston converted a cockpit in Drury Lane into a playhouse known as the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane. It was the second enclosed and private theatre in Jacobean London, Blackfriars being the first. With the exception of the Cockpit in Court, this theatre not only survived the vicissitudes of the Interregnum, continuing to operate covertly and sporadically, but also it emerged at the Restoration already adapted with some limited capacity for mounting productions decorated with changeable scenery. Yet in spite of their historical importance what is known about the architecture of this and the other private theatres, the Blackfriars and the Salisbury Court, remains essentially speculative. Because of the lack of specific internal and external graphic evidence, reconstructions of these theatres have been made from deductions drawn from close readings of play texts. With regard to the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane, Leslie Hotson laid the foundations for basic research into its reconstruction when, in The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, he wrote up his discovery of documents in the Public Record Office that dealt obliquely with the site on which the theatre was built. However, he was reluctant to accept the contemporary evidence afforded him by Hollar in his View of West London, 1657, [Fig. 26],

Unfortunately we have no graphic information as to the shape and appearance of the Cockpit Theatre, I fully expected to find a clear representation of it in Hollar's Bird's-eye View of West Central London, drawn in 1657, but I was disappointed; unless indeed we are to take a three-gabled structure, which stands where the Cockpit should be, for the theatre.
Theatre and Society in Israel
Authors: Weitz Shoshana
Published: January 2009

In Why We Need Broadway, the American scholar and critic Stanley Kaufmann depicts the theatre auditorium as the last remaining public meeting place for the lonely souls who together constitute Western society, a place where the concept of a public still exists, a place which attracts individuals who have paid out of their own pockets for a ticket which entitles them to share a personal experience with the strangers seated beside them in the dark, and with whom, for one evening, they become a community – or at least the closest thing to a community possible in the Western city of today.
Ideology and Archetypal Patterns in the Israeli Theatre
Authors: Rokem Freddie
Published: January 2009

From a contemporary Israeli perspective there is a clearly discernable connection between the concrete expressions of the national theatrical culture and some of the most comprehensive and fundamental ideological assumptions of this society. These assumptions are primarily based on its Jewish culture and religion and the national movement of Zionism as it has developed ideologically as well as practically during the last century, in particular through the establishment of the state of Israel. This article will examine the expression of some of these ideological trends and developments in the Hebrew and Israeli theatrical culture from the early 19208 until the mid-1970s.
The First Greek Drama on the Hebrew Stage: Tyrone Guthrie'sOedipus Rexat the Habima
Authors: Gilula Dwora
Published: January 2009

On the Hebrew Stage, Greek and Roman drama was never a first priority, The Habima Theatre, from its inception in 1917 to the present day, staged only six classical productions (out of more than four hundred), the Cameri Theatre – four, the Haifa Municipal Theatre – five, the Ohel theatre, in all of its forty-four years of activity (1925–69), although it staged 163 plays, never found the need or drive to produce a Greek or a Roman drama, and the young Beer-Sheba Theatre, the last addition to Israel's theatrical establishment, although daring and innovative, has yet to venture into the classical world. The reasons are not far to seek, and there are weighty local reasons in addition to the general cultural factors, which have contributed to the scarcity of classical drama productions. Hellenism and Hellenization, according to the view held even today by some educated and secular Israelis, are not neutral entities. The terms themselves are polemic, connote cultural assimilation, and stand for departure from national Jewish values and the forfeit of cultural originality and independence. From the times of the Hebrew Enlightenment movement, however, classical languages and culture became an integral part of the curriculum of Jewish studies even in religious institutions of higher learning, such as the Bar-Ilan University. On the other hand, as a reaction to the classical culture becoming an embodiment of secular, anti-clerical Zionist renaissance, the extreme Orthodox establishment in contemporary Israel has continued to treat it as a dangerous desecration and even extended the derogatory use of the term ‘Hellenization’ to cover the entire Western cultural influence. As a result until today classical literature has only a marginal place in the high-schools' curriculum, it is not an immediate, and certainly not the most important source from which Hebrew writers and playwrights draw their inspiration, and even well educated spectators have at best only a very superficial knowledge of the classical heritage. The few classical plays produced on the Hebrew stage were chosen at random, chiefly because leading or popular directors insisted on directing a certain play, or because a play, which achieved success in Europe, was transplanted lock, stock and barrel to Israel, sometimes together with its director.
Comic Stages in Magna Graecia: the Evidence of the Vases
Authors: Hughes Alan
Published: January 2009

It has long been believed that the style of comedy depicted on southern Italian vases of the fourth century BC was a local Italiote form calledphylax. A. D. Trendall, the leading authority on the vases, has consistently taken the view that the plays were ‘impromptu’ performances, ‘in which light, movable sets could be used to indicate the required background’. It is not surprising that this has become accepted history: the vases, it is believed, represent improvised farce performed on makeshift stages by strolling actors, also calledphlyakes.
Shakespeare and the Birth of Polish Romanticism: Vilna 1786–1846
Authors: Komorowski Jaroslaw
Published: January 2009

The first phase of a long and complex process of the Polish reception of William Shakespeare's oeuvre ended in the middle of the nineteenth century with the popularization of new translations and the gradual elimination of French and German classicist adaptations. Vilna, vital centre of Polish culture, science and art, was the birthplace of Polish Romanticism and a hotbed of theatrical innovation. Vilna was also, at the turn of the eighteenth century, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and one of the major cities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The school stage of Vilna Academy, established by Stefan Batory in 1578, had been active since 1582. In 1639, English actors belonging to Robert Archer's company may have visited the town; though the performances planned by King Wladyslaw IV did not take place. A permanent professional theatre was opened in 1785, when Wojciech Boguslawski, the greatest personality of the theatre of the Polish Enlightenment, came up from Warsaw with his troupe.
Shakespeare in Poland, 1918–1989
Authors: Fik Marta
Published: January 2009

‘Shakespeare in our theatres is nothing but a lie. As we know, his plays are staged to be mentioned in the paper list to blind people's eyes with great repertory’, wrote Stefan Jaracz in 1936, one of the most famous Polish actors in the inter-war period. This bitter statement made by the performer of, among other parts, Caliban and Shylock sounds exaggerated. After the First World War Shakespeare remained one of the most appreciated ‘classics’ in our theatre. There was no stage, including those of minor importance, which would not have Shakespeare in its repertory, on many he was the most frequently performed foreign author.
Introduction: Francophone Theatre Today
Authors: Elstob Kevin
Published: January 2009

In the wake of French colonization, exploration and trade throughout the world, the French language permeated cultures on five continents. Depending on the source of the statistics, today's world-wide French-speaking population numbers anywhere from 67 to 450 million people. It is estimated that in the year 2000 there will be 500 million French speakers. French is the world's twelfth language, but next to English, the only language to be spoken on all five major continents. From such statistics we might project a community, but do these figures represent a genuinely united people? And, why, if the francophone community is growing should French governmental and cultural organizations be so concerned about the preservation of French? Before examining these questions, let us briefly outline the evolution of ‘la francophonie’.
Le Passé a-t-il de l'avenir devant lui? Bilan du théâtre francophone de l'Ouest canadien
Authors: Joubert Ingrid
Published: January 2009

For the French speaking minorities of Manitoba, the struggle against oppression has often meshed with battles for justice and human rights waged by other Canadian minority groups. Over the past two decades, plays by English and French speaking playwrights have echoed theatrical themes of the nineteenth century by centring on the plight of the Métisse. Being of Amer-Indian and Franco-Canadian descent, the history of the Métisse offers a fascinating perspective on Anglo-French and Anglo-Indian relations. In many of the plays, much attention is paid to the legendary story of Louis Riel, a Métisse chief who led the fight against British expansion into Western Canada and who was executed by the Crown for the murder of Thomas Scott, a British officer. With Riel as an emblem, anglophone and francophone playwrights have forged new outlooks on the historical struggle for control of Western Canada. Furthermore, while investigating the past playwrights have uncovered ways in which conflicting interpretations of history throw light upon present-day Canadian cultural complexities.
Werewere Liking: Pan/Artist and Pan-Africanism in the Theatre
Authors: Miller Judith G.
Published: January 2009

The figure of Pan escapes definition. Should one even attempt to ascribe a gender? Try to seize him (or her) as the forest god and Pan will turn up as the spirit of fertile fields. Imagine Pan as an impish charmer and Pan transforms into a wily adversary. Pan is multiple and everywhere, englobing but also electrifying. Used as prefix, ‘pan’ imparts to political movements and aesthetic projects a Utopian vision, the progressive notion of broad-based co-operation and community. Yet ‘pan’ can also evoke a potentially discordant assembly.
Considering Molière in Oyônô-Mbia's Three Suitors: One Husband
Authors: Sanko Hélène
Published: January 2009

Juxtaposed these quotations, which are separated by three centuries and two continents, suggest that seventeenth-century classical French drama serves as a model for African theatre of the early post-colonial period. The first quotation is, of course, from Moliere, the Old Regime's brilliant comic writer. The second is taken from a play by Oyônô-Mbia, a contemporary dramatist from Cameroon. Given the powerful grip France held over its colonies, it is not surprising to find residual influence of France's theatrical culture on African drama. By the end of World War One, French authority in sub-Saharan Africa extended from Cape Verde to the Congo river. The Third Republic established French schools in the larger colonial towns which attracted the children of well-to-do urban families. France therefore held strong political and cultural sway over the development of African leaders and writers.
Did The Greeks Really Get to the Theatre before Dawn—Three Days Running?
Authors: Ashby Clifford
Published: January 2009

The spectators, thousands and thousands of them, begin arriving in the chill hours before the equinoctial dawn; a few torches cast huge shadows over the cavernous theatron as they move to their seats. Clutching woollen himations about them, they arrange the cushions that will soften the long sitting as well as insulate them from the night-chilled benches. They are hushed, almost reverential, speaking to each other in low tones. Not a people given to breakfasting, a few munch on olives and bread, while others tilt their wineskins for a dilute but still warming jolt of the grape. As the first streaks of light appear in the sky at the eastern-side of the theatre (near the Stage Right parodos), The Watchman appears on the roof, eerily lit by the flaming brazier he carries on. While the audience listens to an already familiar exposition they look to the southwest, awaiting the flare of a beacon fire on the nearby Pnyx that will signal the fall of Troy.
Receiving Les Atrides Productively: Mnouchkine's Intercultural Signs as Intertexts
Authors: Singleton Brian
Published: January 2009

In her analysis of interculturalist theatre practice, Erika Fischer-Lichte has developed a theory of productive reception, in which the subsuming of a source culture's codes and conventions into a target culture's production has a telos of solving problems (political, aesthetic, cultural) and/or of filling gaps. In The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre Own and Foreign, Fischer-Lichte sites the practice's operation: ‘An intercultural performance productively receives the elements taken from the foreign theatre traditions and cultures according to the problematic which lies at the point of departure’. The theory also extends to the act of reception by the spectator in that it implies a reading which is non-oppositional between source and target cultures, which demands the interculturalist performance be read as a monoculturalist product. The Théâtre du Soleil's Greek tetralogy Les Atrides (1990–3), directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, is an example of intercultural performance with which one can engage Fischer-Lichte's theory in relation to the reading and classification of signs.
Karen Finley'sHymen
Authors: Wilcox Dean
Published: January 2009

In an interview with Richard Schechner in 1988 Karen Finley commented on her performance style by stating, ‘I'm really interested in being a medium.’ It is with this simple remark that she illuminates the most compelling aspect of her work as a performance artist. Finley's work is both frustrating and enlightening, and it is the conflicting tensions her performance style evokes within me as male spectator that I find so engaging. I am drawn into the performance via the bodily exhibitionism that permeates so much of her work, only to be pushed away by the tone and subject matter of her narration. At the end of her performance I am left with no easy answers, only disturbingly caustic questions.
The Impossible Representation of Wonder: Space Summons Memory
Authors: Nordmann Alfred , Wickert Hartmut
Published: January 2009

Actors typically create characters and thereby appropriate the time of the performance and the space of the stage. As a common denominator to the words spoken and actions performed, the character correlates dramatic time with real performance time. When Kant says of the human subject ‘the “I think” must be able to accompany all its representations‘, the actor might say of the character ‘it must be able to accompany all my presentations’. Similarly, the stage as a hostile, indeterminate, and empty space makes room for the character, it is appropriated as a necessary platform for the realization of the character or as the medium for the production of its history: in the name of the character the actor can step into this space as into a costume; it clothes, contours or profiles, and physically projects the character.
Scottish theatre and the impact of radio
Authors: Scullion Adrienne
Published: January 2009

Histories of broadcasting in Britain tend to have a distinct London bias–in other words they all but completely ignore developments in Scotland –and yet the early broadcasting infrastructure ensured that each regional centre could advance the boundaries of radio in more exciting and challenging ways (certainly in different ways) than the production centre in London. This critical bias, however, is perhaps only symptomatic of a more general social tendency to displace diversity within British culture and to focus on a metropolitan vision, a core-legitimized version of culture which discounts the regional and the local as parochial. This tendency is thrown into relief at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century when social and cultural requirements, technological and political contexts reset the role of the state and its institutions (and the BBC is one of the most powerful in the system) as fundamental to the dissemination of culture. In this indigenous and local cultural activities may fall outwith the legitimized cultural capital of the state, and yet be fundamental to the identity used and referred to by the region. This is the perceived lack for ‘Scottish culture’ within the context of British arts. Increased centralization and bureaucratization of the arts community and cultural institutions towards the metropolitan core can produce an intractable gap between the respectable culture of the centre and the barbaric, parochial, dangerous arts of the periphery: a periphery which may then be recast as ‘other’. Within that context, however, the same technological, political and social advances are imposed and experienced but they will be interpreted and used with reference to the local and the indigenous as well as to the national and the international. To discount the distinctiveness of much of Scottish culture is, within a centralist model, justified.
Translating Tremblay into Scots
Authors: Findlay Bill
Published: January 2009

Odd though it may seem, the most popular contemporary playwright in Scotland over the past few years—judged in terms of frequency of productions—has not been a Scot but a Quebecer. In the four years from 1989 to 1992 there will have been four Scottish productions of Scots translations of plays by Michel Tremblay, as well as a revival of one of these shows. Glasgow's Tron Theatre staged The Guid Sisters (Les Belles-Sœurs) in 1989, revived it in 1990, and mounted a double bill of The Real Wurld? (Le vrai monde!) and Hosanna (Hosanna) in 1991; and Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre is staging The House Among the Stars (La Maison suspendue) in the autumn of 1992.
An Alternative Scholarship: Canadian Theatre Study 1970–91
Authors: Plant Richard
Published: January 2009

Après avoir établi que le théâtre et la recherche théâtrale au Canada ont poursuivi une évolution parallèle, l'auteur examine la nature et les contributions de cette recherche au cours de ces vingt dernières années, période pendant laquelle il a lui-même participé à ce cheminement. En tant que discipline universitaire, la recherche théâtrale s'inscrit, en quelque sorte, dans une idéologie «alternative» semblable à celle qui a amené la création d'un théâtre national, écrit et produit par et pour les Canadiens. Cette idéologie, fondée sur une activité dite «professionnelle» et «nationale» à laquelle on appliquait les grilles théoriques et méthodologiques agréées par la discipline, a servi à proposer des normes ou des cadres théoriques définis sur un mode empirique ou documentaire. Mais cette discipline «alternative» est désormais remise en question par une érudition nouvelle qui en identifie les faiblesses et explore certains aspects jusqu'ici occultés ou marginalisés de la création dramatique.
Aventure du côté du carnaval: Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux
Authors: Vigeant Louise
Published: January 2009

Jean-Pierre Ronfard's Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux, an impressive six-play cycle telling the story of King Richard ‘Premier’ (i.e. ‘The First’, but Premier is meant here as a family name, as would be Jones or Smith), was created in 1981 and has been seen ever since as a landmark in the recent evolution of Québécois drama. It starts out as games played by children in a back lane and focuses on a limping boy who will be king. The limping king whose story is told as a ‘play-within-a-play’ refers to Oedipus's club foot as well as to Shakespeare's deformed Richard III. The story is heavily parodic, set simultaneously in all parts of the world and at all times, so that Marilyn Monroe and Queen Nefertiti can meet, as well as Brecht and Aristotle. Each play has been staged separately, but the full cycle was occasionally done in succession, a spectacular event lasting fifteen hours. The subject of this article is the very first full-length production, done partly outdoors, on 24 June 1982, in Montreal.
Theatre Iconography: An Introduction
Authors: Erenstein Robert L.
Published: January 2009

Theatre iconography systematically attempts to integrate the pictorial representation of theatre as a vital source of information in researching the history of theatre. Given the primacy of the written word (lógos) in western culture, the status of the illustration as a source of historical research has remained low in the West where it is the norm to give the text priority over illustrations, which serve merely as decorations, to support a conclusion or confirm a statement made in the text. Theatre iconography, however, involves the search for a new dialectical relationship between the written word and the theatre illustration, one in which the illustration is not immediately interpreted as an appendage to a text. It involves an autonomous ‘reading’ of the image in which the use of other documents, preferably from other sign systems, cannot and may not be discounted. The aim here is to study theatre history with the help of tools that are more effective than those used previously.
Interpreting the Pictorial Record: Theatre Iconography and the Referential Dilemma
Authors: Balme Christopher B.
Published: January 2009

In 1926 the German theatre critic and scholar Julius Bab compared the endeavour of the theatre historian engaged in reconstructing past performances with that of the art historian required to study paintings solely on the basis of descriptions. The analogy serves as a justification for Bab's own study of contemporary theatre based on personal observations: only the privileged status of the eye-witness account can do justice to the transitory nature of theatrical performance, he argues. What today may seem like a self-evident truth was in the 1920s by no means so. GermanTheater-wissenschaftof the time was very much a historical discipline, focusing on the theatrical past and utilizing historiographical tools borrowed from neighbouring disciplines. Contemporary theatre was not in its field of vision.
Doubtful Images
Authors: Hummelen W. M. H.
Published: January 2009

The earliest Dutch illustrations of indoor theatrical performances date from the seventeenth century, and portray the activities of itinerant professional actors or plays performed in fixed areas, in chambers of rhetoric (Het Wit Lavendel in Amsterdam) and in what may be classed as their successors: the Nederduytsche Academie (1617–37) and Jacob van Campen's Theatre (1637–65). There are also between thirty and forty illustrations of open-air theatre performances given by non-professional actors (mostly rhetoricians), in paintings and prints of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sometimes one cannot be entirely sure as to whether the illustrated scene contains a theatrical performance or even a stage. These are the ‘doubtful images’ of my title.
The Functions of Language in the Theatre
Authors: Rozik Eli
Published: January 2009

Roman Ingarden's publication of ‘The Functions of Language in the Theater’ (1958) was a landmark in the development of theatre theory in the twentieth century. Since its appearance several methods of research have radically influenced our understanding of the functions of language within this art, particularly semiotics, pragmatics and philosophy of language. More than thirty years after publication of Ingarden's work, it is sensible to address the same question once again and to suggest a theory that reflects the state of the art today.
‘Les Grecs’ à la Française
Authors: Lieblein Leanore
Published: January 2009

In July 1989 the ‘trilogy’ of Œdipe et les oiseaux, directed by Jean-Pierre Vincent with decor and costumes by Jean-Paul Chambas and dramaturgy by Bernard Chartreux, was presented in its ‘premier état’ at the Festival of Avignon. This preliminary version consisted of full scale productions of Œdipe tyran and Œdipe à Colone by Sophocles in new translations by Chartreux, and a reading of Cité des oiseaux, Chartreux's adaptation of The Birds by Aristophanes. The definitive version was presented at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre. Tyran and Colone opened in October and played in alternation until joined by Oiseaux in November. The complete trilogy—the three plays in succession on a single day—was performed to sold out houses on five successive Saturdays in November and December.
Sarah Bernhardt and the Refining of American Vaudeville
Authors: Woods Leigh
Published: January 2009

None of Sarah Barnhardt's many biographers has treated her American vaudeville tours as anything more than a footnote to a career remarkable in so many other ways. Examined more closely, Bernhardt's encounter with vaudeville suggests a not always tranquil marriage between high art and popular culture, and it serves as an index to the evolution of a distinctively American form.
Research in the Service of Theatre: the Example of Shakespeare Studies
Authors: Brown John Russell
Published: January 2009

Masterpieces of theatre are tantalizingly inaccessible, except in print. Before we can see or hear the great plays of past ages, a theatre company has to learn how to produce them in a very different world from that in which they were written. Directors, designers, and actors who are available today are very different from the people first responsible for staging the plays. The buildings and equipment of newly-built theatres make their own distinct and irresistible contributions to any production. Before old texts can be staged problems of meaning, characterization, convention, and stagecraft have to be tackled. How can classics become fully and engagingly alive under such changed conditions? Any responsible theatre should consider establishing its own laboratory in which to conduct the necessary research.
Performing Translation
Authors: Littau Karin
Published: January 2009

Both actor and translator, and by extension translation and performance suffer the plight of second hand art. Disloyal to their original masters they commit adultery. Thus, translation and performance become the unfortunate bastards of literature. If translation is meant to overcome the difference between itself and its other, performance is accused of playing it out and playing up. Such is the attitude which both have shared in each of their respective literary histories. The emphasis here is on literary history, for it assumes the tyranny of the text, the sacredness of the word. The quest for the origin, the reconstruction of the original greatness will always follow the linear path to the bastardized version, towards its own inferiorization. Precisely because translation and performance share this secondary status, this paper will adopt the metaphor of translation and adapt it to describe the relationship between text and performance. Translation here will be taken as that process which underlies any meaning production; it will not be reduced to a merely linguistic motion, nor seen in the form of an obvious reduplication, but as a complex interrelation between two elements. We will thus examine the translatory processes between text and performance before exposing the most illegitimate member in this affair: the translated dramatic text.
The Staging of a New Year's Play at Presov (Eperies) in Eastern Slovakia in 1651
Authors: Cesnaková-Michalcová Milena
Published: January 2009

In the seventeenth century, school plays were performed in practically all schools in Slovakia, which was then part of Hungary. The first teacher to stage plays with his pupils was Leonard Stöckel in Bardejov (Bartfeld) in the second half of the sixteenth century. After Stöckel's death, plays continued to be performed in Bardejov, but—thanks to a body of teachers who took Jan Amos Comenius as their model in the field of dramatic art—it was the neighbouring town of Presov (Eperies) which became the centre of Protestant school theatre in Slovakia in the seventeenth century. Comenius was active in the years 1650–4 in nearby Sárospatak, in present-day Hungary, and it was there that he wrote his Schola Ludus and performed it with his pupils.
Neglected Evidence About the Actor Michel Baron (1653–1729)
Authors: Brooks William , Yarrow P. J.
Published: January 2009

When Louis XIV died, in 1715, the Comédie-Française was a weakened institution. It had barely survived the lean years at the end of the reign, and although it was sufficiently endowed with good actresses, it could boast no charismatic leading male actor who by his very presence might restore its fortunes in the new confident era that was beginning. Indeed, the adverse competitive environment created by the bawdy and vivacious theatres of the fairs on the one hand, and by the ever-popular Académie Royale (or Opera) on the other, was soon exacerbated by the return to Paris of the Italian actors, recalled in 1716 after an absence of nineteen years. It was in this context that in 1720, after an absence of nearly three decades, there returned to the Paris stage one of the most admired actors of the previous century, Michel Baron.
An Englishman Abroad Louis Calvert at the New Theatre, New York
Authors: Foulkes Richard
Published: January 2009

In November 1909 William Archer wrote an article for McClure's Magazine in which he surveyed developments in the American theatre over the past twenty years. The most innovative work had been undertaken by non-commercial companies, such as Victor Mapes' Chicago repertory and Winthrope Ames' Castle Square Theatre in Boston, and in the universities: ‘Brander Matthews at Columbia, W. L. Phelps at Yale, and George P. Baker at Harvard’. These ventures took as their models Antoine's Théâtre Libre in Paris; the Freie Bühne in Berlin; J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre, the Stage Society, Vedrenne-Barker at the Court, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester and Charles Frohman's proposed repertory company at the Duke of York's Theatre. However whereas in the 1890s the progressive theatre in America had been heavily dependent on the European repertoire of plays, when he returned in 1907 Archer found ‘the scene entirely changed’:
Towards a Stylistics of the Modes of Ostension
Authors: Dorval Patricia
Published: January 2009

Patrice Pavis offers an excellent analysis of ostension in his dictionary of theatre. Ostension (Latin ostendere, to show), he writes, is an essential feature of performance. The expression ‘theatrical ostension’ calls to mind quite naturally the notions of set, stage properties, body motions, and so on. In addition to purely visual elements, ostension also refers to verbal signals. But ostension is rarely total; one often sees only fragments of the dramatic world. Ostension is a relative notion modulated by elements that are not shown or not clearly shown. Synecdoche (the part for the whole) is one possible mode of ostension: the director suggests a complex reality by a characteristic detail: a crown for the King … Performance often resorts to metaphor: one element conjures up another. Pavis concludes that a stylistics or rhetoric of ostension would be a most precious tool for performance analysis.
Cultural Politics and the Irish Theatre: Samuel Beckett and the New Biology
Authors: Armstrong Gordon
Published: January 2009

Lawrence Stone, Princeton Professor Emeritus of History, has recently declared that ‘every cultural enterprise, even science, is at least in part a social construction’. Biologist Jay Gould vehemently agrees. ‘Science’, says Gould, ‘is done by individuals, whose conclusions are influenced by the beliefs they bring with them.’ The contamination factor is unavoidable. On the other hand, Erwin Schrodinger, the renowned quantum physicist, brought to biology experimental truths that may take us to the edge of the universe. For him, the contamination factor was intentional. Beginning in the 1940s, his work had a direct effect on the writings of Samuel Beckett.
Civil War and Civil Discord: Theatrical Representation of the Common Will and the Single Heart in the Terrible Century
Authors: Armstrong Gordon
Published: January 2009

The goal of this series of articles is to examine the nature of twentieth-century civil war and civil discord in theatrical representations and the conditions of performance by listening to the words of playwrights, scholars, performers, politicians and theatre historians in America, Africa, and Europe.
Undoing the Body Politic: Representing Rape in Women Beware Women
Authors: MacGregor Catherine
Published: January 2009

In 1986 Howard Barker abridged Thomas Middleton's tragedy Women Beware Women and wrote a new ending. This version was published and staged as a collaboration between the Jacobean and the modern playwright. There are a number of differences, but also points of connection between Barker's version and Middleton's Jacobean tragedy. Middleton sets out a moral fable on the corrupting nature of desire and greed. Leantio, a clerk, falls in love with Bianca, a rich man's daughter. They elope and live in secrecy with Leantio's mother. Despite her husband's exhortations to keep herself private, Bianca is spotted by the Duke of Florence, who determines to make her his. A wealthy neighbour, the widow, Livia, aids him in this, luring Bianca and the mother to her house where Bianca is raped by the Duke. Bianca's story is mirrored by that of Isabella, who is being ‘sold’ into marriage with a rich fool and is tricked into an incestuous relationship with her uncle Hippolito. Bianca leaves her husband to become the Duke's mistress. Leantio is taken up by Livia.
Militant Marionettes: Two ‘Lost’ Puppet Plays of the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39
Authors: McCarthy James
Published: January 2009

Although sixty years have passed since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War scant regard has been given to the theatre's contribution during the conflict to the entertainment and education of soldiers. Yet drama was prominent in the range of cultural and pedagogic activities which was a marked characteristic of the Republican army. A distinct genre, known as teatro de uigencia (theatre of urgency), was actively promoted by the Republican authorities as a means of encouraging soldiers and civilians towards a ‘correct’ pro-Republican perspective. Teatro de uigencia works were generally short, single act pieces but with a surprising variety of dramatic styles and propaganda intentions. Satirical lampooning of Franco's Nationalist forces took place, for example, alongside drama whose earnestly expressed purpose was to train the enthusiastic but inexperienced Popular Militias in battlefield strategy, the importance of fortification and the need for rigorous self-discipline. Such plays were performed by a variety of theatre companies. Some, such as Lorca's La Barraca and Max Aub's El Búho, had existed since before the war but travelled to frontline locations during the conflict to lend vigorous support to the Republican forces. Other companies, known as Guerrillas del Teatro, arose from initiatives of the Ministry of Education and were attached to the Army of the Centre and the Army of the East. Still more groups were encouraged by the General Commissariat of War through its Sub-Commissariat of Agitation, Press and Propaganda. While precise details are extremely sketchy, it is also clear that, within army units themselves, performance troupes were formed for the purposes of entertainment and politico-military education through drama.
The Troublesome Reign of King Oedipus: Civic Discourse and Civil Discord in Greek Tragedy
Authors: Zelenak Michael X.
Published: January 2009

Greek tragedy was created under a unique and very unusual set of circumstances. What we today call Greek tragedy was not really ‘Greek’ but specifically Athenian. It articulated Athenian values, celebrated Athenian institutions, debated Athenian problems. Despite the undisputed artistic achievements of the great tragedians, the primary motives behind the creation and production of classical Greek tragedy were not artistic or literary, but social and political. Greek tragedies were contemporary and topical civic spectacles, and a central component of Athenian civic life and political discourse. Aristotle identified this ‘political’ aspect of classic Greek tragedy as its distinguishing feature by noting that ‘the earlier poets [Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides] made their characters talk “politically” [politikos], the present-day poets rhetorically’.
Was Commedia dell'arte Performed by Mountebanks? Album amicorum Illustrations and Thomas Platter's Description of 1598
Authors: Katritzky M. A.
Published: January 2009

Early modern mountebanks, also known as charlatans or quacksalvers, were commercial travelling showmen associated with the sale of quack medicines and other products. They achieved wide recognition as a significant influence on the rise of professional acting, through their employment of performers to attract customers for their wares, and are frequently discussed in the context of early professional popular entertainment. Many depictions of mountebanks include commedia dell'aite costumes, but it has remained an open question whether some of their shows (as well as some of their costumes) fall within the sphere of the commedia dell'arte. Inconclusive evidence is presented by the relatively few studies which incline towards accepting a significant overlap between mountebank activity and the commedia dell'arte and clear-cut distinctions are routinely made between the repertoire of street performers, and that of the comici d'arte. Richards and Richards concede that ‘mountebank stages … may well have been the breeding grounds of many of the first regular actors’, but repeatedly emphasize the distinction ‘between performers of the trestle and those of the stage’, and are careful to dismiss mountebank stage routines as at the most ‘short playlets’. If the presently perceived lack of detailed documentation concerning mountebank entertainment is justified, then so is the cautious approach typified by Richards and Richards. On the evidence presented to date, it would appear that mountebank performances are at most distantly related to the commedia dell'arte.