bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘Ibsen Translated by Lewis Carroll’: the Theatre of John Guare
Authors: Harrop John
Published: January 2009

Among the three or four leading contemporary American playwrights, John Guare is probably least known in Britain: yet in many ways he is the most clear-sighted about the nature of American society, and the most ‘European’ in the often ironic viewpoint which informs his work. His career now spans the period from the 'sixties years of protest against the Vietnam War to the recent Lydie Breeze tetralogy, which approached the past with something of the sweep of a nineteenth-century novel. John Harrop begins this three-part NTQ feature on Guare with a brief critical overview of the man and his plays. His interview with Guare. conducted last September following the successful New York revival of his House of Blue Leaves, follows, and a detailed bio-bibliographical NTQ Checklist of Guare's work provides a full factual complement. John Harrop. an advisory editor of NTQ. is Professor of Drama at the University of California. Santa Barbara, and was a frequent contributor to the original Theatre Quarterly. His study of American actor training was published in NTQ3, and he is author of Creative Play Direction (with Robert Cohen) and of Acting with Style (with Sabin Epstein). He also acts and directs professionally, and has himself directed two of John Guare's plays
‘Living in that Dark Room’: the Playwright and His Audience
Authors: Guare John
Published: January 2009

The play deals with one of the characters, Ronnie, who is trying to kill the Pope. Now if you wrote about trying to blow up the Pope in 1971, people would say, ‘Where do you get your ideas? It's bizarre…’. I went to see the play in 1981 at the Berkshire Theatre Festival just after the Pope had been shot, because I wondered what that event would do to the play. Would it make audiences gasp? What it did was strange. People used to look at the play in some skewed fashion and say, ‘Oh, what a kooky… what a funny…’. Suddenly, with the shooting of the Pope, I felt as if a protective wall had shattered and the audience had tumbled onto the same side of the mirror as the play, and I felt that their perception allowed them to see the characters' needs and hungers with much more directness than in 1971.
Old and New in the Polish Theatre: a Season at the Stary
Authors: Żurowski Andrzej , Kuhiwzak Piotr
Published: January 2009

The Stary Theatre in Cracow has. since the death of its former director Konrad Swinarski, enjoyed a reputation for more eclectic work than those Polish theatres identified with a single, strong directorial ‘line’. Its recent season nevertheless reveals that this ‘old’ playhouse, as its name translates, remains in the vanguard of new and experimental work, with three productions of contrasting styles but shared stature – Wajda's Crime and Punishment. Pasolini's Affabulazione. and Bradecki's A Pattern of Metaphysical Evidence. The leading Polish critic Andrzej Żurowski. who is also vice-president of the International Association of Theatre Critics, provides an evocative comparison of plays, directors, and styles.
Uses for a Dead White Male: Shakespeare, Feminism, and Diversity
Authors: Hall Kim F.
Published: January 2009

This article and the two following were prepared as complementary contributions to a panel of the American Association for Higher Education conference on ‘Theatre and Cultural Pluralism’, held in Atlanta, Georgia, in August 1992. In the first, Kim F. Hall, from the Department of English at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, describes her experiences as an African American feminist teaching Shakespeare – often against the expectations of students who expect either an affirmation of his supposed universality, a simplistic condemnation of his politically incorrect positions on race and gender – or his appropriation, on behalf of those wishing to stake their own claim to the ‘culture of power’ he is taken to represent. Instead, Kim F. Hall proposes that feminism offers ‘one way of helping students look at Shakespeare ‘multiculturally’, since gender is one area of inquiry that both crosses cultures and forces one to think about the differences between cultures’.
Survival Strategies in New York Theatres
Authors: Loney Glenn
Published: January 2009

IN THE SEASON of 1893–94, theatregoers in New York would hardly have realized that ‘Broadway’, as a theatre centre, had just come into being. In fact, 1900 would seem a more appropriate date, but business in the commercial theatre in recent seasons has been so hazardous that the League of American Theatres decided to jump-start the past season with a putative centenary salute, ‘Celebrate Broadway: 100 Years in Times Square’. It was a brave attempt and resulted at least in some interesting historical exhibits. Unfortunately, these only served to remind the viewers of Broadway's glory-days years ago.
Spectatorial Theory in the Age of Media Culture
Authors: Klaver Elizabeth
Published: January 2009

The last few decades of the twentieth century have seen the rise of a significant and powerful media culture. We now live in an age in which those media forces associated with visual entertainment – film, theatre, and television – have come increasingly to circulate among and interact with each other. Given the consequently porous nature of media boundaries, how should viewership and its effect on subjectivity be theorized today? Does the concept of the ‘spectatorial gaze’, as developed by critics in film and extended to theatre and television, actually work, given the plurality of the media culture? Elizabeth Klaver argues in the following essay that the ‘ways of looking’ currently available to viewers break down the isolated gaze of mastery – with or without its sexual-political connotations – and offer instead the potential and sometimes the actuality of performative interaction. Elizabeth Klaver is Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. As part of her current work on the media culture, she has recently published in the field of television and contemporary drama, and has also published articles on Beckett and Ionesco.
Danger Delights: Texts of Gender and Race in Aerial Performance
Authors: Tait Peta
Published: January 2009

Circus artists, especially aerial performers and wire-walkers, transgress and reconstruct the boundaries of racial and gender identity as part of their routine. In the following article, Peta Tait analyzes the careers of two twentieth-century Australian aerialists of Aboriginal descent who had to assume alternative racial identities to facilitate and enhance their careers. Both Con Colleano, who became a world-famous wire-walker in the 1920s, and Dawn de Ramirez, a side-show and circus aerialist who worked in Europe in the 1960s, undermined the social separation of masculine and feminine behaviours in their acts. Theories of the body and identity, including those of Foucault and Judith Butler, inform this critique of the performing body in circus. The author, Peta Tait, is a playwright and drama lecturer at the University of New South Wales. She is author of Original Women's Theatre (1993) and Converging Realities: Feminism in Australian Theatre (1994).
Polish Alternative Theatre during the Period of Transition, 1989–94
Authors: Tyszka Juliusz
Published: January 2009

AN ALTERNATIVE theatre movement emerged in Poland in the mid 1950s, following the post-Stalinist thaw. Its creators invented and applied new means of communication between actor and spectator thanks to their radical opposition to the mainstream state repertory theatres. This resulted not only in the internationally known achievements of Grotowski and Kantor, but also in the creation of thousands of independent student and amateur groups of great artistic and social importance. The new political and economic order in Poland has liberated these alternative theatres from their political duties and charged them with the even more difficult task of helping and supporting the search for new means of social communication.
Electrifying Fragments: Madonna and Postmodern Performance
Authors: Watts Mark
Published: January 2009

The rise and (perceived) decline of Madonna has gone, so to say, hand-in-hand with that of postmodern theory – slightlydémodéjust at present, but none the less pervasively influential for that. The singer's two most recent albums were critical successes, and the controversy in Argentina over the choice of the star to play Eva Peron testifies to her continuing capacity to attract notoriety. But in what does that notoriety consist? How is the persona that is all we know of Madonna constructed, and how does it work? How is she able to make such distinctive use of the emergent potential of multimedia? What constitutes thecoherenceof Madonna's image? Mark Watts, a graduate in Film and Literature of the University of Warwick, here analyzes the appeal of the singer-actress in terms of the concept ofpunctum, defined by Barthes (in opposition to the rational, linear understanding ofstudium) as the ‘electrifying fragment’ that seizes and ravishes the imagination.
Imperial Transgressions: the Ideology of Drury Lane Pantomime in the Late Nineteenth Century
Authors: Davis Jim
Published: January 2009

How far do popular theatre forms express popular sentiments, and how far populist? This is one of the issues explored in the following article, in which Jim Davis looks at the ideology, explicit and underlying, of the spectacular Drury Lane pantomimes of the late nineteenth century. At once imperialist and redolent of Little England, the pantomimes often displayed an ambiguous attitude to the moral concerns of the time, from temperance reform to ‘the woman question’ – to the influence of the music hall from which they drew their most popular performers. The prevailing tone, it becomes clear, was lower middle rather than working class, despite the irony of such class imperatives being energised by a form which has always transgressed sexual and racial identities. Jim Davis, who teaches in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies in the University of New South Wales, has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century theatre: his earlier contributions to New Theatre Quarterly have included a survey of nautical melodrama in NTQ14 (1988), a study of the ‘reform’ of the East End theatres in NTQ23 (1990), and an analysis of the melodramas played at the Britannia, Hoxton, in NTQ28 (1991).
The Lewes Bonfire Festival
Authors: Wiles David
Published: January 2009

The Lewes Bonfire Festival is an important piece of popular theatre, which has largely resisted attempts by higher authority to control and redefine it. Annually some 2,000 costumed participants, watched by up to 80,000 spectators, take over the streets of the usually staid county town of East Sussex, and effigies of contemporary politicians and of the Pope are burnt during six hours of carnivalesque rule. Here, David Wiles analyzes the history and organizational structure of the festival, and examines the ideology of Englishness upon which the event turns. David Wiles is Reader in Drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London. His interest in popular theatre has principally been historical, and he has published books on the Robin Hood play and on the Elizabethan clown. Most recently, in Shakespeare's Almanac (D. S. Brewer, 1993) he has explored the structural logic of the festive calendar.
Exploring Space at Play: the Making of the Theatrical Event
Authors: Warner Deborah
Published: January 2009

Deborah Warner is one of the most exciting of the generation of directors who emerged during the 'eighties – incidentally claiming for women a natural entrance into a profession previously dominated by men. In 1980 she formed the Kick Theatre Company, with whom over the following, formative years of her career she directed The Good Person of Szechwan, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Woyzeck. In 1988, following a production for the RSC of Titus Andronicus in the previous year, she became one of the company's resident directors, staging King John and Electra before moving in 1990 as an associate director to the National, where her first two productions were of The Good Person with Fiona Shaw and King Lear with Brian Cox. During the 'nineties, she has extended both the nature and the range of her work, directing Shaw in Hedda Gabler in Dublin, Coriolanus in German at the Salzburg Festival, Don Giovanni at Glyndbourne – and, in 1994–95, the season she discusses below, a revival of Beckett's Footfalls at the Garrick, controversially banned by the Beckett Estate, a dramatization of Eliot's seminal inter-war poem The Waste Land, premiered in Brussels, Richard II at the Cottesloe, with a woman, Fiona Shaw, in the title-role, and a project for the London International Festival of Theatre site-specific to the old railway hotel at St. Pancras. In September 1995 she discussed her recent and future work with Geraldine Cousin, who teaches Theatre Studies in the University of Warwick, where she has just completed a study of contemporary plays by women entitled Women in Dramatic Place and Time.
The Birdwoman and the Puppet King: a Study of Inversion in Chinese Theatre
Authors: Plowright Poh Sim
Published: January 2009

Poh Sim Plowright recently spent six weeks in Quanzhou, in the Fujian Province of China, watching the puppeteers, actors, and audiences of her native Fujian theatre tradition. Here she was able to observe at first hand the principle of inversion that, she believes, underlies all Chinese theatre: and in the following article she argues that this principle is clearly illustrated by the string puppet and human theatres of Quanzhou, whose origins can be traced to the official ‘Pear Garden Theatre’ set up in the eighth century by the Tang Emperor, Ming Huang. Theatre in this part of South China is, Plowright suggests, living testimony to the continuing basis of Chinese theatre in the practice of ancestor worship, through which most performances become sacrificial offerings – a connection she believes Brecht to have missed in his celebrated confrontation with Chinese acting techniques in Moscow in 1935. Poh Sim Plowright is Lecturer in Oriental Drama and Director of the Noh Centre in the Department of Drama, Theatre, and Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of a book on the Noh, and also of several plays and features on theatrical subjects for BBC Radio Three.
Voice: the Practitioners, their Practices, and their Critics
Authors: Boston Jane
Published: January 2009

In NTQ47 (August 1996), Sarah Werner argued that contemporary voice training did not provide a neutral set of tools to help actors perform classical texts, and that it was needful to reveal the cultural biases and underlying ideology of voice work in order to clarify a feminist understanding of acting and speaking Shakespeare. The three leading voice practitioners who came under Ms Werner's fire – Cicely Berry, Kristin Linklater, and Patsy Rodenburg – mounted a sturdy defence of their methods in NTQ49 (February 1997), to which Sarah Werner responded in the following issue. Now Jane Boston takes a fresh view of all sides in the argument, putting these into a broader historical context which embraces the culture of our own times as much as of Shakespeare's, and calls for an understanding and reconciliation of mutual misconceptions between the academy and the conservatoire. Jane Boston was a founding member of the feminist Siren Theatre in the ‘eighties, and has subsequently taught at the National Youth Theatre, the Poor School, and at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she was Head of Voice for the BA in Acting, which she helped to create. She now combines a pedagogical and practical role at Central as supervisor and trainer on the Postgraduate Diploma in Voice Studies, and has recently presented papers on acting and stress at the Institute of Psychiatry.
Evolution of a Company
Authors: Verma Jatinder
Published: January 2009

TARA presented its first production, Tagore's Sacrifice, in 1977, so this year marks the company's Sacrifice, in 1977, so this year marks the company's twentieth anniversary. How did it come into being?

It was, as with most companies, a mixture of accident and intention. The intention part of it relates to 4 June 1976, which was a day when this young Sikh lad in Southall, Gurdeep Singh Chaggar, was killed. It became very obvious within a day or so that this was a racist murder. In retrospect it doesn't seem to be a terribly significant thing, because we've had so many; but at the time it galvanized a particular generation of Asians.
Designing for Tara
Authors: Rubalcava Magdalen
Published: January 2009

I have worked with Tara Arts for over ten years, as the company's designer for most productions during that time. And one of the reasons that I enjoy working with Tara is that I can use my own mixed nationality both politically and artistically: I feel at home.
The Eritrea Community-Based Theatre Project
Authors: Plastow Jane
Published: January 2009

Following Jane Plastow's contextual history of Eritrean theatre in NTQ50, Paul Warwick gave an account in the following issue of its previously undocumented role during the thirty-year Eritrean struggle for independence, describing the efforts of the freedom fighters to create theatre for the first time in a rural context. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front not only deployed theatre as a propaganda weapon, but also recognized its value as an agent for educating the people in matters ranging from women's rights to the benefits of modern medicine and farming methods: and with victory came measures further to stimulate the growth and development of theatre as part of Eritrean culture. Jane Plastow, in this third and concluding article, takes up the story with the invitation issued by the new government to her and her colleagues to initiate the ‘Eritrea Community-Based Theatre Project’, in an attempt both to widen the perspectives of Eritrean actors and to draw upon all relevant traditions, African and European, in developing a popular but distinctive theatre for the people. In addition to her role as director of the project, Jane Plastow is a lecturer at Leeds University, having worked in theatre for some years in a number of other African nations.
Otherness: the Director and the Discovery of the Actor
Authors: Marowitz Charles
Published: January 2009

Charles Marowitz worked extensively as a director in Britain from the late 'fifties through the 'seventies, and was one of the editors of the influential Encore magazine in the formative years of the ‘new wave’. His free-lance work included the co-direction with Peter Brook of the seminal ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season, and the premiere production of Joe Orton's Loot. Later, in partnership with Jim Haynes, a season at the London Traverse Theatre led to the creation of his own, more enduring Open Space Theatre in a basement in Tottenham Court Road – one of the identifying events of 1968 and its theatrical aftermath. Since returning to his native United States, Marowitz has worked out of Malibu, and continued his parallel role as writer – in which he has become best known for his sequence of ‘collage’ Shakespeares ranging from Hamlet to The Shrew, and also as a self-professed ‘counterfeit critic’ and theoretician of acting and directing. The following article also forms the final chapter of his latest book, The Other Way: an Alternative Approach to Acting and Directing, to be published by Applause Books later this year. It represents, also, a concise charting of his own voyage of discovery – of the role of the director, and of the recognition of the autonomy and ‘higher calling’ of the actor that this has involved.
Theatrical Pillage in Asia: Redirecting the Intercultural Traffic
Authors: Brown John Russell
Published: January 2009

The potential and the problems of multicultural theatre have frequently been described and debated in this as in other theatre journals, but discussions of its value and viability have generally been in ethical terms – over how far it is possible for the West to ‘import’ or otherwise employ the theatrical traditions of other cultures without resort to an imperialist appropriation of what is found ‘consumable’, to the detriment of the culture thus despoiled. While not ignoring the moral arguments, John Russell Brown here deals also with the practical issues – notably, how far different kinds of theatre depend on being ‘site-specific’ not only in terms of the performers involved, but also in terms of audiences and their responses. He argues that, paradoxically, truly intercultural theatre is more often to be found where western influences from Hollywood films or pop music have become part of the lived experience of eastern cultures, or in western communities where (for example) British and West Indian or ‘Anglo’ and Latino-American traditions have become intertwined. He suggests that rather than trying to embrace the substance of ‘other’ traditions, western theatre might better benefit by exploring the conventions that modulate the relationship between actors and audience, or the approach of the actor to different kinds of ‘text’. He concludes: ‘By using overseas research to develop its own inheritance, a theatre might discover what it alone needs to create and encourage a more active and imaginative response from its local audience.’ A widely published writer on drama and theatre, John Russell Brown was first Head of the University of Birmingham's Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, and was subsequently an Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. Currently he is visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York.
Playing (with) Shakespeare: Bryony Lavery's ‘Ophelia’ and Jane Prendergast's ‘I, Hamlet’
Authors: de Gay Jane
Published: January 2009

This article considers ways in which contemporary feminist theatre-makers respond to Shakespeare by reviewing the performance and production histories of two recent theatre pieces – a new play by Bryony Lavery, and an innovative staging of Hamlet by Jane Prendergast. Drawing on interviews with participants and observation of rehearsals for Ophelia, Jane de Gay looks at the practical issues faced by performers and directors as they explored issues of gender in Shakespeare's plays and characters. She also builds on her own research interest in intertextuality to look at the issues which arise when women writers attempt to ‘rewrite’ Shakespeare, whether by adapting his plays for performance or by writing new texts which allude and respond to them. Jane de Gay is Researcher with the Open University ‘Gender, Politics, and Performance’ Research Project, with whose chair, Lizbeth Goodman, she has edited The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance (1998). She was also a major contributor to Feminist Stages, edited by Goodman, a collection of interviews with women in contemporary British theatre, published by Harwood in 1996.
Complex Theatre: Science and Myth in Three Contemporary Performances
Authors: Gargano Cara
Published: January 2009

Today, argues Cara Gargano, we are at the cusp of a scientific paradigm shift which is having a profound influence on the way we construct our art and our identity. Like the shift from an oral to a literary mode of communication, or from a geocentric to a heliocentric world view, the movement from a Newtonian to a quantum world view has altered not only the way we understand our universe but the way we write and perform it. In recent years, critics David R. George, Natalie Crohn Schmitt, David Porush, and William Demastes have used terminology and concepts from the ‘new science’ to theorize about theatre. In this article Cara Gargano explores three new works that premiered in the 1995–96 New York City season –Rent, Interfacing Joan, andThe Universe(ie, How It Works) – and discusses the way these performances rely, consciously or unconsciously, on this paradigm shift. She proposes that all three plays, while different in style, venue, and narrative, have at their base an assumption of a quantum universe – that is, they create a holistic mythology that gestures toward the theatre's origins as a ritual interaction with our world, and moves from a postmodern to a pre-millennial stance. Cara Gargano is Chair of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. She has published inModern Drama, L'Annuaire Théâtrale, New Theatre Quarterly, andDance and Research. Her recent article inReliologiquesdeals with the myth of Orpheus as a model for the quantum world.
Dr. Kastan, the Freie Bühne, and Audience Resistance to Naturalism
Authors: Blackadder Neil
Published: January 2009

An acknowledged feature of the late nineteenth-century reinvigoration of theatre is the frequency with which new styles of writing – and, more often, innovative themes – affronted the public, both in print and performance. Yet the turbulent initial audience reactions to taboo- and ground-breaking plays have often been represented as self-evident confrontations between progressive creative artists and philistine theatregoers. By closely examining one apparently typical case of resistance to the new drama – the uproar at the 1889 premiere in Berlin of Gerhart Hauptmann's Before Sunrise – Neil Blackadder demonstrates the complex relationship between production and reception in the early modern theatre. He considers the behaviour of one offended spectator in particular, along with the response of the independent theatre society which staged the production, and a court's verdict on the validity of his protests. Beyond marking an important turning-point in the history of German theatre, the premiere of Before Sunrise encapsulates several key facets of the modern theatre during a period when its practitioners were becoming more bold and experimental, while changing norms of conduct were, paradoxically, rendering audiences more restrained. Neil Blackadder is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Drama at Duke University, curently visiting at Knox College. He is writing a book on modern theatre scandals.
Post-Colonialism and Contemporary Hong Kong Theatre: Two Case Studies
Authors: Luk Yun Tong
Published: January 2009

The case of Hong Kong – acquired by the British under treaty, and restored to Chinese sovereignty in what some perceived as merely a shift from colonial to neo-colonial rule – always seemed a special case in the debate over post-colonialism. In NTQ53 (February 1998) Frank Bren looked primarily from an artistic and administrative viewpoint at the connections between film and theatre in the former colony: in the article which follows, Yun Tong Luk explores the social and cultural significance of two influential local productions, staged almost a decade apart – one, We're Hong Kong, shortly after the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, the other; Tales of the Walled City, coinciding with the moment of Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese rule. He points out the uniqueness of post-colonial experience in the territory, and examines the ambivalent attitudes of the Hong Kong people before and after the change of sovereignty.
Revisioning the Woman's Part: Paula Vogel's ‘Desdemona’
Authors: Friedman Sharon
Published: January 2009

InDesdemona, Paula Vogel's revision of Shakespeare'sOthello, we have a Desdemona who is Othello's worst nightmare, the transformation of lago's fiction into reality. Why has Paula Vogel created a Desdemona who, though ostensibly inside out, still appears to be Othello's projection? Sharon Friedman argues that although Paula Vogel's raucous Desdemona draws on many of the conventions of feminist revisioning, it marks an important shift in the feminist critical perspective in drama – as characterized by Lynda Hart, ‘from discovering and creating positive images of women … to analyzing and disrupting the ideological codes embedded in the inherited structures of dramatic representation’. In a deconstructive parody, Vogel dislodges the convention of the intimate scene between women in Shakespeare's theatre and expands it into an entire play. Decentering the tragic hero, she foregrounds and enacts the threat of female desire that incites the tragic action, and disrupts the familiar categories of virgin, whore, and faithful handmaiden by forging links with gender ideology and class status. The author, Sharon Friedman, is an Associate Professor in the Gallatin School of New York University, and the author of several articles on American women dramatists, including Susan Glaspell and Lorraine Hansberry.
Cross-Dressed Actors and their Audiences: Kate Valk's Emperor Jones and William Shakespeare's Juliet
Authors: Brown John Russell
Published: January 2009

Male cross-dressing in leading female roles in the Elizabethan theatre has, at different extremes of modern stage practice, been either ignored as a no longer relevant convention or appropriated to make some kind of sexual-political statement. In either case, at issue is the ‘lifelikeness’ or otherwise achieved, and how far modern deployment should or should not be taken to challenge our own assumptions. John Russell Brown takes a recent production by the Wooster Group, in which Kate Falk played the eponymous male lead in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, to suggest that cross-dressing can engage us with other perceptions of reality altogether – and demand, in relation to Shakespearean performance, a reading of the text that responds to resonances more often ignored or avoided. He illustrates his argument with close reference to the presentation and representation of sexuality in Romeo and Juliet. John Russell Brown was the first professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham and, subsequently, Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. More recently he has taught and directed in the USA, New Zealand, and Asia. He is now based in London, and is Consultant in Theatre at Middlesex University. His most recent book is New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (Routledge, 1999) and his most recent theatre work a production of Surrena Goldsmith's Blue for the Wandsworth Arts Festival (November 1998) and an acting and Living Newspaper workshop for the National School of Drama in Delhi (March 1999).
A Theatre of Uncertainties: Science and History in Michael Frayn's ‘Copenhagen’
Authors: Stewart Victoria
Published: January 2009

A recurring strand over the past few years in New Theatre Quarterly has been the relationship between the nature of theatricality and scientific conceptions rooted in quantum mechanics – notably Chaos Theory and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This approach is questioned by scientists, who doubt the possibility of bridging the scientific and the literary uses of the metaphorical language being deployed. Michael Frayn's recent play, Copenhagen, used the crucial wartime visit paid by Heisenberg to Niels Bohr, his fellow architect of the Uncertainty Principle, to explore the scientific concepts involved through the work's own form and content. Victoria Stewart here assesses the nature and the success of Frayn's techniques in relation to the wider uncertainties of live theatrical performance as well as to the relationship between the scientific and artistic use of metaphor. The outcome, she concludes, is ‘a dialogue between two fields of discourse – science and theatre – which reveals that both necessarily deal in ambiguity and uncertainty of outcome’. Victoria Stewart lectures in English and Drama at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
Making the Word Count: towards an Analytical Database of Theatre Reviews
Authors: Roberts David
Published: January 2009

Reviews are an indispensable resource for the theatre historian – records not only of individual productions and performances but of broader cultural attitudes. However, the few attempts to account for the review as a form are compromised by outmoded models both of authorship and, in particular, of language itself. This article describes the rationale, development, functionality, and initial results of an electronic database of theatre reviews which permits analysis of the form according to the principles of corpus linguistics. Such an approach, argues David Roberts, can track across a large body of texts questions of conceptual vocabulary, reader-orientation, and – as the expansion of the corpus permits – generic variation and historical change. Initial searches demonstrate the embedding of much mainstream reviewing in neo-Aristotelian assumptions about dramatic form and effect, derived from the New Critical backgrounds of many reviewers, and suggest the means by which readers are made complicit with such partial representations. David Roberts teaches English and Drama at University College Worcester. His publications include three volumes in the World's Classics series for Oxford University Press, and a monograph on seventeenth-century audiences.
Theatre Quarterly, 1971–1981
Authors: Trussler Simon
Published: January 2009

In commemorating the one-hundredth issue of New Theatre Quarterly, in continuation of Theatre Quarterly, we wanted to reflect the concern of the journals with offering a referenced record and retrospect of the performing arts – so here we offer a record and retrospect of the journals themselves. We hope it will provide a useful source of reference, and intend that in due course the indexes will be incorporated and updated on the NTQ pages of the Cambridge University Press website. A consecutive, issue-by-issue listing of contents is followed by author indexes – these latter separately indexing each journal, as it was our feeling that many present readers will not have easy access to the original journal, and that a cumulation might also prove confusing since the numbering sequence started afresh with NTQ. References are to these ‘TQ’ and ‘NTQ’ numbers rather than to volumes and parts, but annual volumes can be quickly identified from the list at the start of each index. The compiler, as author of A Classification for the Performing Arts (British Theatre Institute, 1974), is aware of the irony of failing to offer a subject or classified listing, which resources of time at present do not permit: he would be happy to make available on disk the material presented below to anybody interested in undertaking such a task, with a view to future publication.
The Theatrical Biosphere and Ecologies of Performance
Authors: Kershaw Baz
Published: January 2009

In what would a postmoderntheatrum mundi, or ‘theatre of the world’, consist? In an ironic inversion of the very concept, with the microcosm issuing a unilateral declaration of independence – or of incorporation? Or in a neo-neoplatonic recognition that it is but a cultural construct of an outer world that is itself culturally constructed? In the following article, Baz Kershaw makes connections between the high-imperial Victorian love of glasshouses, which at once created and constrained their ‘theatre of nature’, and the massive 'nineties ecological experiment of ‘Biosphere II’ – ‘a gigantic glass ark the size of an aircraft hangar situated in the Southern Arizona desert’, which embraces all the main types of terrain in the global eco-system. In the Biosphere's ambiguous position between deeply serious scientific experiment and commodified theme park, Kershaw sees an hermetically-sealed system analogous to much contemporary theatre – whose intrinsic opacity is often further blurred by a theorizing no less reductive than that of the obsessive Victorian taxonomists. He offers not answers, but ‘meditations’ on the problem of creating an ecologically meaningful theatre. Baz Kershaw, currently Professor of Drama at the University of Bristol, originally trained and worked as a design engineer. He has had extensive experience as a director and writer in radical theatre, including productions at the Drury Lane Arts Lab and as co-director of Medium Fair, the first mobile rural community arts group, and of the reminiscence theatre company Fair Old Times. He is the author ofThe Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention(Routledge, 1992) andThe Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard(Routledge, 1999), and co-author ofEngineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook(Methuen, 1990).
Bodies, Rest, and Motion: from Cosmic Dance to Biodance
Authors: Gargano Cara
Published: January 2009

Ancient myth and modern science share a common, cosmic perception of dance as the formulating principle of the universe – whether through metaphor, in the perception of a ‘biodance of life’, or in the closeness to actuality of the ‘dance of the electrons’ at a sub-atomic level. A line of articles in NTQ has explored such connections, with theatrical examples deriving from and illuminating the scientific theory under discussion – but with dance, strangely, relatively neglected as a source of such examples. Here, Cara Gargano takes a number of major modern dance events from the span of the twentieth century to show the interaction between dance and scientific theory, from Loïe Fuller's work at its beginning to Maguy Marin's Coppélia towards its end. The latter, she argues, ‘brings quantum mechanics and chaos theory into the sociological realm’ as it demonstrates ‘how consciousness and social relations are tied to the new physics’. Cara Gargano is Chair of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. She has published in Modern Drama, L'Annuaire Théâtrale, and Dance and Research. In New Theatre Quarterly, her earlier contributions on plays which construct their world to reflect the new science were published in NTQ51 and NTQ54.
Characterization in Stand-up Comedy: from Ted Ray to Billy Connolly, via Bertolt Brecht
Authors: Double Oliver
Published: January 2009

Stand-up comedy is often distinguished from straight acting by its apparent lack of characterization – the comedian appearing onstage apparently as him or herself. But within gags and routines, comics often briefly take on the voice and posture of the characters they describe. Here Oliver Double contrasts the approach of two comedians of different generations – Ted Ray and Billy Connolly – to this technique of ‘momentary characterization’. He notes the links between Connolly's conversational approach and Brecht's notions of acting, and goes on to examine the broader questions of comic personae, representation of the self, and the changing performance conventions within British stand-up comedy. Oliver Double is an ex-comedian who now lectures at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
Ways of Understanding the Culture: Re-examining the Performance Paradigm
Authors: Watson Ian
Published: January 2009

The tendency for ‘performance studies’ to embrace and even supplant ‘theatre studies’ can usefully enlarge our perceptions of the relevance of theatricality to other disciplines and activities – but fully extended into the ‘performativities’ of everyday life can be counterproductive when definitions are so loose as to be redundant. Here, Ian Watson considers the boundary-crossing qualities of two variants on the ‘performance paradigm’ – Eugenio Barba's bridge-building concept of ‘Barter Theatre’ and Augusto Boal's deliberately provocative ‘Invisible Theatre’. He proceeds to relate the characteristics identified to an event no less clearly staged, though less often discussed as such: the set-piece political speech, in this case President Clinton's acceptance of his renomination as Democratic candidate at his party's Chicago convention in 1996. Ian Watson is an Advisory Editor of NTQ who teaches at the Rutgers campus of the State University of New Jersey. The last of his several contributions to the journal was his report on the Ninth International Gathering of Group Theatre in Ayacucho, Peru, in NTQ58 (May 1999).
The Funding of Drama Student Training in Britain
Authors: Marchant Graham
Published: January 2009

The National Council for Drama Training represents the drama sector of the British performing arts industry and is responsible for the accreditation of the standard and content of the courses at vocational drama schools for professional actors and stage managers, to ensure their relevance to the industry. The Council has three wings: the employers (Society of London Theatre, Theatrical Management Association, the BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5, and ITV), the trades union (Equity), and the leading professional training providers. The purpose of the report which follows was to provide as objective as possible an assessment of the workings of the government's new Dance and Drama Awards scheme, to assist the industry in discussions with Government on improvements to the scheme. Its author, Graham Marchant, is an arts consultant with an exceptional breadth of knowledge and experience, particularly as theatre administrator, senior Arts Council officer, and principal of a vocational school for professional dancers. The NCDT was enabled to commission the Report through the generous provision of funds from the Mackintosh Foundation and the Society of London Theatre.
The Street as Political Space: Walking as Protest, Graffiti, and the Student Carnivalization of Belgrade
Authors: Dragićević-Šešić Milena
Published: January 2009

Western assumptions of unthinking Serbian support for the policies of Slobodan Milošević were upset by the success of popular protest in securing his removal in the autumn of 2000. In fact, just three years after his accession to power in 1989, there had already been massive student protests against the Balkan War, and these were repeated and surpassed in the winter of 1996–97, when Milošević tried to disregard the success of the opposition in the local elections of that November. The student protests quickly took a theatricalized form, and their recurrent modes – graffiti, banners, street processions – were successfully carnivalized, to become popular performative events. This feature provides a chronology of the main developments to complement the more analytical study by Milena Dragićević-Šešić of the nature of this organic but ironic response to an authoritarian regime, which gave old traditions a late twentieth-century voice.
Joseph Goebbels: Expressionist Dramatist as Nazi Minister of Culture
Authors: Barnett David
Published: January 2009

The young Joseph Goebbels, caught up in the heady mix of ideas and ideals permeating German artistic circles during and after the First World War, expressed both his convictions and his confusions through writing plays. None of these deserve much attention as serious drama: but all shed light on the ideological development of the future Nazi Minister of Culture. While also developing an argument on the wider relationship between Expressionism and modernism, David Barnett here traces that relationship in Goebbels' plays, as also the evolution of an ideology that remained equivocal in its aesthetics – the necessary condemnation of ‘degenerate’ art tinged with a lingering admiration, epitomized in the infamous exhibition of 1937. David Barnett has been Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Huddersfield since 1998, and was previously Lecturer in German Language and Literature at Keble College, Oxford. His Literature versus Theatre: Textual Problems and Theatrical Realization in the Later Plays of Heiner Müller was published by Peter Lang in 1998, and other publications include articles on Heiner Müller, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Rolf Hochhuth, Heinar Kipphardt, Werner Schwab, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Peter Handke.
Dramas of the Performative Society: Theatre at the End of its Tether
Authors: Kershaw Baz
Published: January 2009

The emergence of new performance paradigms in the second half of the twentieth century is only now being recognized as a fresh phase in human history. The creation of the new discipline, or, as some would call it, the anti-discipline of performance studies in universities is just a small chapter in a ubiquitous story. Everywhere performance is becoming a key quality of endeavour, whether in science and technology, commerce and industry, government and civics, or humanities and the arts. We are experiencing the creation of what Baz Kershaw here calls the ‘performative society’ – a society in which the human is crucially constituted through performance. But in such a society, what happens to the traditional notions and practices of drama and theatre? In this inaugural lecture, Kershaw looks for signs and portents of the future of drama and theatre in the performative society, finds mostly dissolution and deep panic, and tentatively suggests the need for a radical turn that will embrace the promiscuity of performance. Baz Kershaw, currently Professor of Drama at the University of Bristol, trained and worked as a design engineer before reading English and Philosophy at Manchester University. He has had extensive experience as a director and writer in radical theatre, including productions at the Drury Lane Arts Lab and with the Devon-based group Medium Fair, where he founded the first reminiscence theatre company Fair Old Times. His latest book is The Radical in Performance (Routledge, 1999). More recently he wrote about the ecologies of performance in NTQ 62.
The Ethics of Indeterminacy: Theatre de Complicite's ‘Mnemonic’
Authors: Freshwater Helen
Published: January 2009

Theatre de Complicite was founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden, and Marcello Magni, and has since established its reputation as one of Britain's leading experimental physical theatre companies. Here, Helen Freshwater discusses the construction, performance, and implications of one of their recent works, Mnemonic, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1999, and has since toured to London's National Theatre and the John Jay College Theatre in New York. The work questions our metaphorical conceptualization of memory, displacing the conventional model of retrieval with an understanding of memory based upon a performative paradigm. This is memory as an act of imagination: transient; grounded upon narrative; open to interpretation; intrinsically corporeal. Freshwater interrogates the impact of the performance's incompletion, addressing the ethical issues raised by recognzing the indeterminacy of the past. Under Simon McBurney's direction, the original cast comprised Catherine Schaub Abkarian, Katrin Cartlidge, Richard Katz, Simon McBurney, Tim McMullan, Kostas Philippoglou, and Daniel Wahl. Helen Freshwater is currently completing her PhD on performance and censorship in twentieth-century Britain at the University of Edinburgh and will shortly be taking up a post as Lecturer in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. She is a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and the forthcoming anthology Crossing Boundaries (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).
Meetings by the Lake: on the Tenth Anniversary of the Malta Festival
Authors: Obrębowska-Piasecka Ewa , Tyszka Juliusz
Published: January 2009

The Malta of this feature is not an island surrounded by sea but a lake surrounded by land – the artificial lake created near the Polish city of Poznań for the World Kayak Championships of 1990. However, since that event, and the momentous political changes with which it coincided, the lake has become the annual focus for a quite different event: a festival of theatre that has earned a reputation for both hosting and initiating important experimental work which is none the less rooted in the need to maintain close contact with its ever larger and more enthusiastic audiences. A range of illustrations of some of the oustanding productions accompanies retrospects by two regular members of those audiences – Juliusz Tyszka, who outlines the origins and development of MALTA, and Ewa Obrębowska-Piasecka, who offers a personal response to the achievements of the festival and to the philosophy of theatre underlying them.