bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Chronology of Australian Theatre, 1977–83
Authors: Fitzpatrick Peter
Published: January 2009

The increasing diversity of activity outlined in the introductory article to this feature creates some difficulties even for the factual enterprise which follows: the noting of significant events, and even the listing of first productions of Australian plays, is necessarily a selective one, determined partly by debatable criteria and partly by a lack of consolidated sources of information. The compiler was able to draw on the invaluable resources of the University of Queensland's theatre research project in compiling the list of first productions up to the end of 1983, when (lamentably) its funding was withdrawn; and the scale of the task of selection is indicated by the fact that those records, for the period 1977–83, include 4342 distinct productions of Australian plays. Often, of course, it takes a longer retrospective view than is possible in this feature to establish ‘significance’, and, regrettably, there are likely to be some notable omissions. The demise of Theatre Australia in 1982 and the aborting of the University of Queensland theatre research project in 1983 were disastrous for people involved with theatre, and for theatre research in particular; they leave a vacuum which must cause continuing concern, and will create mounting difficulties. Both were indispensable sources in compiling this chronology. The research assistance of Doreen Dougherty from the Monash University English Department was absolutely vital in its preparation, as was the co-operation of Veronica Kelly and Alrene Sykes from the University of Queensland, and Katharine Brisbane of Currency Press.
Promise and Participation: Youth Theatre in Australia
Authors: Gallasch Keith
Published: January 2009

If theatre-in-education achieved its impact by taking theatre to the young in the 'seventies, then the developing youth theatre movement might be seen as part of the reaction to that initiative in the 'eighties. Here Keith Gallasch, artistic director of the State Theatre Company in South Australia, himself a writer, recalls his first involvement with youth theatre, and goes on to sketch some of its dilemmas and prospects.
Feminism in the French Theatre: a Turn-of-the-Century Perspective
Authors: Aston Elaine
Published: January 2009

Even to sympathetic theatrical observers, ‘feminism’ in France at the turn of the century was often regarded as merely incidental to the larger concerns of the ‘social’ drama; and dramatic debate tended to focus on the issue of a woman's assertion of ‘freedom’ versus her presumably ‘natural’ functions as wife and mother. In this article, Elaine Aston illuminates such attitudes, utilizing both the texts of contemporary plays and discussion in journals current at the time. But she also detects early theatrical evidence of a slow shift towards a questioning of prevailing assumptions – and a belief (which today strikes her as enviable) in the power of theatre to effect social change.
Other People's Stories
Authors: Morton David
Published: January 2009

DAVID HORNBROOK has usefully helped us to ‘look back to the future’. He ends with a claim that drama teaching should be about ‘the making of meanings’ and ‘providing satisfactory interpretive structures’. That it should! And David H. leads by example, for he has ‘satisfactorily’ interpreted the short history of drama in education to support his argument. Nothing wrong with that, and he is more honest than most drama teachers. However, I fear they will ‘interpret’ much of his piece to suit their own ends – namely the continued development of drama syllabuses for examination.
Oppression, Resistance, and the Writer's Testament
Authors: Barker Howard
Published: January 2009

Of the generation of playwrights who began to write around 1968. Howard Barker came more belatedly than some to full critical recognition, but has emerged in recent years as a major voice in all the available dramatic media: thus, among his most recent work, Scenes from an Execution was for radio and The Blow for television, while The Castle was premiered by the RSC at The Pit in November 1985 – and last spring he contributed an updated final act of his own when adapting Middleton's Women Beware Women for production at the Royal Court. Malcolm Hay and Simon Trussler interviewed Howard Barker on his earlier work in Theatre Quarterly No.40 (1981), and now Finlay Donesky discusses with the dramatist the more recent development of his writing, as of the thinking about society and his own craft which underpins it. The interview was conducted in July 1985 while Donesky was in England on a fellowship from the University of Michigan, where he is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on the plays of Barker, Brenton, and Hare.
NTQ Checklist No. 2: Ödön von Horvath
Authors: Rosenberg James L.
Published: January 2009

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

In June 1985, a fortnight's discussions on ‘The Theatre in the Future’ were held as part of the Fools' Festival in Copenhagen. The seminars discussed the position of theatre and its possibilities in a rapidly changing society, often from deeply opposed positions – socially engaged versus wildly avant-garde, verbal versus imagistic, anthropological versus robotic, and so on. Participants were an exciting mix of professional performers of many kinds, plus theatre critics and ‘ordinary’ engaged people, who for two weeks exchanged experiences and visions of theatre in conjunction with other art forms, and with science and politics. The manifesto below was the contribution to these seminars of John Andreasen, a veteran of ‘sixties happenings, who has subsequently concentrated on street and environmental theatre, and for the past twelve years has taught and directed in the Drama Department of the University of Aarhus.
Theatre and Social Issues in Malawi: Performers, Audiences, Aesthetics
Authors: Kerr David
Published: January 2009

Theatre workers in the Third World have largely rejected both the outward trappings and the underlying aesthetic assumptions of the colonial styles they first inherited: but the impulse to evolve or rediscover indigenous forms has often involved the imposition of a would-be ‘popular’ theatre form by an elite of university-educated animateurs. David Kerr has described these as ‘induced’ forms, and here analyzes the process by which one such experiment, in Malawi, was both adopted and assimilated by villagers, for the better understanding of whose social problems it was conceived. From 1974 to 1980 David Kerr was artistic director of the Chikwakwa Theatre project in Zambia (described in the first series of Theatre Quarterly, III, No. 10), since when he has been teaching in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts in the University of Malawi, and serving as co-ordinator to the Travelling Theatre project there.
From Resistance to Revelation: the Contemporary Theatre in Chile
Authors: Boyle Catherine M.
Published: January 2009

Largely as a result of the experimentation and stability of the university theatres founded in the early 'forties, Chilean theatre is among the best-established in Latin America. But how far has its survival since 1973 depended on the regime's sense of the theatre's relative impotence to effect change? Little is known about Chilean theatre in Britain, few plays have been translated, and with rare exceptions those that have found their way here have been limited to ‘solidarity’ audiences. In this article. Catherine M. Boyle, who teaches in the Department of Modern Languages of the University of Strathclyde, considers the various kinds and qualities of theatre that have been produced in Chile since 1973, and draws some conclusions about the nature of freedom of expression and its repression.
Searching for a Satyr Play: the Significance of the ‘Parodos’
Authors: Polesso Paola
Published: January 2009

The parodos is the first appearance of the Chorus in a classical Greek drama, an occurrence common to tragedy, comedy – and that curious hybrid form, of which very few examples are extant, the satyr play. One of the two complete surviving, texts is the Ichneutai or Searching Satyrs of Sophocles: and in the following exercise in literary detection. Paola Polesso bases her investigation of the play not only on linguistic evidence but on clues which emerge from seeing the play in performance, to suggest the chronological context with in which the play may now be more precisely placed. Dr. Polesso, who presently teaches drama in the University of Bologna, has acted as assistant director to Luca Ronconi, and has been a contributor to numerous Italian theatre journals.
Searching for El Dorado: Performance and Ritual in Early Latin America
Authors: Versényi Adam
Published: January 2009

The quasi-theatrical kinds of performance-ritual which existed in pre-Columbian Latin America have been little investigated, and are almost entirely neglected by English-speaking theatre scholars. In NTQ 8, Robert Potter looked at ways in which the missionaries who followed in the wake of the Spanish conquistadores tried to adapt Aztec rituals to their own proselytizing purposes: and here, Adam Versényi, in the first of a series of articles on early Latin American performance, provides an overview of the ways in which the great pre-Columbian civilizations embraced performance into their often-unfamiliar world view – suggesting that in some cases the cosmogony expressed through the dramatic rituals made them particularly ill-equipped to confront the ‘otherness’ of the invading Spaniards. Adam Versényi is currently preparing a study which parallels recent developments in Liberation Theology and Liberation Theatre in Latin America.
Setting Up the Scaffolding: Howard Brenton's ‘Hitler Dances’
Authors: Boon Richard
Published: January 2009

Among the products of the theatre workshop run by Max Stafford-Clark at the Traverse Theatre – whose twenty-fifth anniversary is celebrated elsewhere in this issue – was Howard Brenton's Hitler Dances, on which the playwright worked with the director and actors late in 1971. Richard Boon sees both the play and the workshop experience as pivotal to Brenton's later development: here, he reconstructs the processes which led towards its eventual performance structure, and places the play with in the context of Brenton's earlier and subsequent work. Richard Boon, who also contributed an introduction to the Methuen Modern Plays edition of Hitler Dances, has recently completed his doctoral dissertation on Brenton's plays, and is working on a full-length study for publication by Methuen in 1990. He is currently Lecturer in Drama in the University of Leeds.
The Case of the Rhyming Couplets: the Sonances of ‘Richard II’
Authors: Bennett Kenneth C.
Published: January 2009

Among the infinite variety of critical approaches to Shakespeare, relatively little attention has been paid, even by scholars professedly concerned with Shakespeare's language, to the quality and nature of the sound of his words – despite the commonplace assumption that the young Shakespeare, in particular, was in love with language. One consequence is that such a major element of Richard II as its high proportion of rhyming couplets is either briefly (and negatively) dismissed, or ignored. Here, Kenneth C. Bennett, who teaches in the Department of English at Lake Forest College, lllinois, considers in detail the distinctive qualities and ‘sonances’ of language in the play, looking in particular at the couplets, whose use and significance he analyzes and defends.
Literary Drama in Africa: the Disabled Comrade
Authors: Lakoju Tunde
Published: January 2009

NTQ has given considerable coverage to forms of popular theatre for conscientization and development in the so-called Third World. By contrast with such community-oriented, audience-involving activities, is there a function for conventional ‘literary’ drama, on the western model, which can probably only reach relatively comfortable and literate middle-class audiences? Tunde Lakoju examines two such plays – I Will Marry When I Want by the Kenyan playwright Ngugi Wa Thiongo (London: Heinemann, 1982), and The Trials of Brother Jero by the Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka (Oxford University Press, 1964) – in terms of their success in measuring up to the needs they identify: and he considers, too, how those ‘needs’ may be variously assessed by theoretical and practical criteria. Tunde Lakoju is Senior Lecturer at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in his native Nigeria, having been awarded his doctoral degree from the University of Wales. His own play, The Last Saturday, has been broadcast in the BBC's African Theatre series.
Contaminated with Death': the Poetics of Szajna's Theatre
Authors: Źurowski Andrzej
Published: January 2009

In a companion-piece, and by way of a personal introduction to the interview and feature which follow. Andrzej Źurowski here offers an appreciation of the work of the Polish director and scenographer Józef Szajna. Andrzej Źurowski is a leading Polish theatre critic, who is also president of his national section of the International Association of Theatre Critics. He contributed a study of the theatre of Tadeusz Kantor to NTQ4 (1985).
South Africa's National Theatre: the Market or the Street?
Authors: Graver David , Kruger Loren
Published: January 2009

The original Theatre Quarterly devoted a large portion of one issue-TQ28 (1977—78) to the theatre of South Africa. It is, of course, important to relate new developments in the theatre of that troubled nation to the context of its changing political situation – considering, for example, how far a reflection of the realities of the urban black experience is now more typical than the ‘acceptable’ face represented by the once-popular ‘tribal musicals’. Here. David Graver and Loren Kruger contrast two approaches to the theatre of anti-apartheid. The internationally known (and now relatively stable) Market Theatre of Johannesburg, they argue, today largely reaches an educated, liberal, and elite audience, and sustains what is essentially a European literary tradition: but other plays written and directed by blacks — notably since the Soweto uprising of 1976 — have developed a more appropriately African style. Often, these, have emerged from the theatre companies within the black townships, such as the Bachaki Theatre Company - whose Top Down is here the focus of analysis. David Graver is currently Mellon Fellow in Drama at Stanford University: his articles have appeared in Theatre Journal and in NTQ, and he is now completing a book on the theory and practice of the avant-garde. Loren Kruger teaches in the University of Chicago, has published in Theatre Journal and the Brecht Yearbook, and is working on a study of theatres with national aspirations in Europe and the USA.
The Spectacle of Absent Costume: Nudity on the Victorian Stage
Authors: Davis Tracy C.
Published: January 2009

The recent revaluation and exploration of ninetenth-century theatre has gone almost in parallel with the development of contemporary feminist criticism: yet the one approach has all too rarely meshed with the other. Here, Tracy C. Davis attempts a feminist critique of that distinctively Victorian phenomenon, the display of naked and near-naked female flesh in the theatre – at a time when even the legs of pianos were discreetly veiled in respectable drawing-rooms. She questions how the conventions of stage costume were able to defy conventional proprieties, how that defiance ‘served the heterosexual male hegemonic aesthetic’, and how it related to ways of ‘seeing’ nudity during the nineteenth century. Presently teaching in the Drama Department of the University of Calgary, Tracy C. Davis has contributed widely to theatrical journals, and her study of ‘The Employment of Children in the Victorian Theatre’ was included in NTQ6 (1986).
Theory and Practice of the Indeterminate Theatre
Authors: Schechner Richard
Published: January 2009

Richard Schechner has recently come full circle back to the editorship of The Drama Review, which he earlier transformed from a quietly respected academic journal into the voice of American avant-garde theatre between 1962 and 1969. By this time, he had also joined the Drama faculty of New York University, where he still teaches, and created the Performance Group, for whom his productions included Dionysus in '69, Makbeth. The Tooth of Crime. Oedipus, and The Balcony. His early advocacy of environmental theatre, celebrated in his book of that name in 1973, developed into his present concern with theatre anthropology, the focus of his recent study. Between Theatre and Anthropology, discussed by Eugenio Barba in NTQ10 (1987). In October 1988 Schechner contributed to the Leicester conference ‘Points of Contact: Theatre. Anthropology, and Theatre Anthropology’, and there Nick Kaye discussed with him the relationship between his practical and theoretical work, its evolution, and the influences upon it–also looking in more detail at his most recent production, a performance combining Don Juan and Don Giovanni.
Community, Class, and Control: a View of Community Plays
Authors: Woodruff Graham
Published: January 2009

‘Community’ has, suggests Graham Woodruff, a friendly ring: yet it is also a weasel word, lending a stamp of often spurious togetherness to bodies politic or theatric. Thus, the use of ‘community’ in the geographical sense is often drained of any true meaning, where it is not a cover for the avoidance of contentious political issues. ‘Communities of interest’ had some success in speaking theatrically in the 'seventies, but now, Woodruff claims, the political situation is such that ‘community theatre’ can and should seek to express the common interests of the increasingly beleaguered working class, offering a way of extending the dramatizations attempted outwards from parochial to wider political concerns. Graham Woodruff was Head of the Drama Department at the University of Birmingham before becoming director of Telford Community Arts, on whose work he draws for the following article.
New Women in the New Drama
Authors: McDonald Jan
Published: January 2009

While considerable attention has been paid in recent years to the work of women dramatists during the wave of proto-feminist activity in the early years of the present century, the way in which women characters – whether created by male or female writers – were presented has been less adequately investigated. Here, Jan McDonald, Head of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies in the University of Glasgow, explores the work of well-known and largely-forgotten playwrights alike, discussing the ways in which the ‘new drama’ – the subject of Jan McDonald's recent book for the ‘Macmillan Modern Dramatists’ series – reflected the concerns of the ‘new woman’.
The World Theatre Festival, Nancy, 1963–88: a Critique and a Retrospective
Authors: Looseley David
Published: January 2009

Unlike Avignon, still active after more than forty years, the once notorious Nancy Festival has slipped unobtrusively into history. David Looseley sets out here to trace this itinerary. After reviewing the festival's origins and its importance for the experimental theatre of the 1960s, he examines what became of it in the bleaker decades which followed, and assesses the meaning of its decline. David Looseley, who teaches in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Bradford, is currently engaged in research funded by the Leverhulme Trust into the politics of culture in contemporary France. His published work includes a book on the theatre of the twentieth-century French dramatist Armand Salacrou.
‘Scandals to the Neighbourhood’: Cleaning-up the East London Theatres
Authors: Davis Jim
Published: January 2009

Sustaining the long, initially pioneering concern of TQ and NTQ with popular aspects of nineteenth-century theatre. Jim Davis looks here at the men and the methods involved in improving the reputations of the neighbourhood theatres of the East End of London. Usually noticed for its effects on the licensing of theatre buildings, the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 also brought the newly ‘legitimate’ theatres under the direct control of the Lord Chamberlain. Particularly around the mid-century, the Examiner of Plays, William Bodham Donne, responded to public concern (some genuine, some worked-up by interested parties) by commissioning police reports on theatres, and on occasion requiring appropriate action – from the limiting of performances to one per evening, to the erection of public urinals. Here, Jim Davis, who contributed an article on ‘Images of the British Navy in Nautical Melodrama’ to NTQ14 (1988), and is the author of several books and articles in related areas, offers the first documentation of a little-explored subject.
A History of Stanislavski in Translation
Authors: Benedetti Jean
Published: January 2009

Stanislavski has become a minor industry, both in theatre training and in publishing, with courses and related books endorsing, elaborating, or questioning his ‘System’. But how much of the System is really accessible to an English-speaking readership, and how full a view of Stanislavski's fully-formed ideas does it represent? Even the order and timing of the appearance of his works in English has, argues Jean Benedetti, determined our reception of his thought, and left us ignorant, sometimes wilfully, of the real development of his thinking: and in the following article, he traces the complicated and often fraught history of the translation of Stanislavski's works into English, revealing how (sometimes from the best of intentions) a slanted and incomplete view of the System still dominates our perceptions. Following a career in the theatre, film, and television. Jean Benedetti was Principal of the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama from 1970 to 1987, and since 1979 has been chairman of the Theatre Education Committee of the International Theatre Institute. In 1982 he published Stanislavski: an Introduction, and his biography of Stanislavski, the first in the West in forty years, was published in the autumn of 1988, and in paperback earlier this year. He is currently working on a documentary history of the Moscow Art Theatre.
Report from Holstebro: Odin Teatret's ‘Talabot’
Authors: Shoemaker David
Published: January 2009

In previous issues, NTQ has paid close attention to the theoretical work of Odin Teatret founder and director Eugenio Barba, publishing several of his articles relating to the actor's scenic presence and the manipulation of his or her performing energies. Indeed, as a result of his work with ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, Barba is perhaps better known today as a theatre scholar than as a director: but he insists that virtually all of his research originates in his work with the actors of Odin Teatret. Here, David Shoemaker, who is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, on the relationship between Barba's work as theoretician and practitioner, describes his encounter with the Odin's most recent performance piece, entitledTalabot.
The Gender of Rosalind
Authors: Kott Jan
Published: January 2009

In this issue, we present two contrasting views on the issue of gender in Shakespeare – specifically, the gender of the heroine-hero ofAs you Like It, Rosalind-Ganymede. Both articles relate the character to conventions of acting and of sexuality in Shakespeare's England and our own: but in this first essay Jan Kott connects the play also with another ‘historic moment’ when androgyny became a recurrent theme, the period following the Revolution and the Restoration in nineteenth-century France – notably as reflected in Gautier's novel,Mademoiselle de Maupin, in which an amateur performance ofAs You Like It, and the sex of its leading player, assume a central significance. Jan Kott has been an advisory editor ofTheatre Quarterlyand of NTQ since the journals began publication, and a regular contributor to both – most recently, on the current preoccupations of Grotowski, in NTQ23. Since the seminal publication ofShakespeare Our Contemporaryin 1965, he has been a leading exponent of a critical approach which links the study of drama, the practice of performance, and the forms of culture in which both have their roots.
Subverting Rosalind: Cocky Ros in the Forest of Arden
Authors: Soule Lesley Anne
Published: January 2009

The foregoing article by Jan Kott explored the nature of gender inAs You Like Itlargely by looking forward to later analogues of androgyny: but here Lesley Soule examines the character of Rosalind in close relationship to traditions of popular theatre and performance on which Shakespeare himself could draw. She points out how our own two-centuries-old love affair with an idealized heroine has, despite some recent feminist modifications of the character-myth, distorted our reading of the play, obscuring the fact that the text describes a performance in which the controlling presence is not a female performer but a male adolescent – a figure whose long theatrical antecedence she explores. This portrayal by a pert boy Roscius of Shakespeare's boy-girl character the author dubs ‘Cocky Ros’ – a figure who first represents and then subverts the feminine fiction of ‘Rosalind’, thus providing a paradigm of character-actor interplay. Only by giving authority to such subversive, gender-free performers, she argues, can we challenge the power wielded by theatrical illusion over our ideas of identity, gender, and love. Lesley Soule, who has taught at the University of British Columbia and at Polytechnic South West, is currently completing a study of theories of the character-actor relationship.
Peter Brook and the ‘Two Worlds’ of Theatre
Authors: Cohen Paul B.
Published: January 2009

The ‘two worlds’ of Peter Brook's theatre are its audience and its actors. According to Brook, the actors bring their ‘world of the imagination’ to meet with the audience's ‘world of the everyday’: but instead of the temporary suspension of belief in the ‘everyday world’ which a western audience has traditionally forced upon itself, Brook conceives the true theatrical experience as an interaction between the two modes of reality – those of the ‘imagination’ and the mundane. In the following article, Paul Cohen assesses the importance of this basic philosophy to Brook's productions since 1968, paying particular attention to the tour of Africa withThe Conference of the Birdsand the recent epic production ofThe Mahabharata, attempting to show that Brook's theory still directly informs the methodology and the performance orientation of his productions. Paul Cohen originally presented this paper as an MA dissertation for Vanderbilt University, and is currently on the Professional Writing Program of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Sexuality and Structure: Tensions in Early Expressionist Drama
Authors: Nicholls Peter
Published: January 2009

In the first of two essays, Peter Nicholls explores connections between ideas of an ‘absolute’ or non-representational theatre and the forms of narrative and discursivity which have traditionally invested dramatic forms. In one of the earliest Expressionist plays – Oskar Kokoschka's Murder, Hope of Women – the tension between these ideas is powerfully in evidence. Nicholls shows how Kokoschka's formal experimentalism is grounded in contemporary polemics about gender and sexuality, tracing the ways in which theatrical innovation seeks to evade the Oedipal constraints of plot and narrative. That tension, he believes, informs subsequent Expressionist drama, where an almost obsessive preoccupation with the working-through of family histories is contested by forms of theatrical ‘affect’ which undermine structure from within. Peter Nicholls's second essay will pursue the ‘anti-Oedipal’ implications of Dada and Surrealist theatre. The author teaches English and American literature at the University of Sussex, and his publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing, and articles on postmodernism, contemporary poetry, and French Cubism. His Modernisms: a Literary Guide will be published by Macmillan later this year.
The Gospel of Rags: Melodrama at the Britannia, 1863–74
Authors: Davis Jim
Published: January 2009

We are happy to return to the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, the subject of pioneering studies by Clive Barker in the original Theatre Quarterly, where he used the ‘Brit’ as focus for an overview of the problems of researching nineteenth-century popular theatre in TQ4 (1971), proceeding to a detailed analysis of our knowledge of the nature and composition of the theatre's audiences in TQ34 (1979). Jim Davis now turns to the repertoire of the theatre, and, for one representative decade from 1863 to 1874, explores the sources of the melodramas presented there – a great many of them specially written or adapted by popular ‘house dramatists’. He also examines the values which may be discerned to underlie the most popular plays, and in the process, by going to manuscript sources rather than to the inevitably more ‘respectable’ plays that reached print, uncovers a more radical repertoire than previous authorities had assumed. Jim Davis, who currently teaches in the Theatre Department of the University of New South Wales, has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century theatre, including a survey of nautical melodrama in NTQ14 (1988) and a study of the ‘reform’ of the East End theatres in NTQ23 (1990).
Educational Drama and Radical Theatre Practice
Authors: Lacey Stephen , Woolland Brian
Published: January 2009

In the early issues ofNew Theatre Quarterly, David Hornbrook initiated a debate on the role and techniques of drama-in-education to which several other notable practitioners subsequently contributed. Since then, the continuing need to defend the very existence of drama within a curriculum-oriented system has perhaps disinclined drama-in-education workers from a theoretical exploration of their methods and purposes. But the argument that the subject should be concerned with theatre practice has, suggest Stephen Lacey and Brian Woolland, overlooked the reality that drama-in-education, in important and fundamental ways, alreadyreflectsat its own level certain kinds of innovative theatre practice – and they illustrate their arguments from the work of Brecht, Boal, and Paulo Freire, comparing the models they offer with a drama-in-education project as realized by a class of twelve-year-olds in a typical comprehensive. The article concludes with the authors' own analysis of the approaches to character and to dramatic structure employed, and how these reflect a ‘radical theatre practice’ with which practitioners in present-day ‘mainstream’ theatre might profitably engage.
The Weyward Sisters: towards a Feminist Staging of ‘Macbeth’
Authors: Helms Lorraine
Published: January 2009

Shakespeare's plays have long been subject to deconstruction and reconstruction – some would argue, since the moment the words left his pen and entered the arena of theatrical intervention; some, more conservatively, dating the process to the attempts during the Restoration to rewrite him according to new tastes and old ‘rules’. More recently, of course, the long search for an almost platonic ideal of ‘authority’ has been giving way not only before new ideas of what this constitutes in theatrical terms, but through conscious attempts to subvert a play's meaning – not necessarily as ‘intended’ by Shakespeare, but as received in the prevailing culture. Feminist directors and critics have of course been prominent in this process – but the following study of the role of the witches inMacbethis distinctive not so much for applying twentieth-century ideologies to Renaisssance plays, but for its exploration of the ‘problem’ of the witches in the light of conventions which, still current in Shakespeare's times, are hard to recover in the practical theatre of our own. The author, Lorraine Helms, is currently Mellon Fellow in Theatre Arts at Cornell University. She has published several articles on renaissance drama, and is working on studies of gender and performance in both contemporary and historical interpretations of Shakespeare.
Questions of Life and Art: Recollecting Harold Clurman
Authors: Rotté Joanna
Published: January 2009

When Harold Clurman died in 1980, he was almost as old as the century, but still in harness – perhaps the most venerable as well as the most versatile polymath of the American theatre. His life in the theatre extended from acting with the Theatre Guild in the ‘twenties, through his creation and direction of the Group Theatre in the ‘thirties, to a distinguished post-war career as free-lance director, highly respected theatre critic – first for the New Republic, then since 1953 for The Nation – and also theatre historian and university teacher. It was in this last role that, as a student, Joanna Rotté met Harold Clurman in 1969, and in the article which follows she blends personal recollections of an enduring friendship with a wider-ranging assessment of the qualities that distinguished Clurman as a critic and a human being. Joanna Rotté presently chairs the Theatre Department at Villanova University, Pennsylvania.
The Actor and the Breath of Chaos
Authors: Mirzoev Vladimir
Published: January 2009

In addition to being a theatre director, Vladimir Mirzoev is a novelist, poet, critic, and artist. Born in Moscow in 1957, he enrolled at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute in 1975, and in 1981 graduated from the Faculty of Directing at the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatrical Arts in Moscow, where he studied with Mark Mestechkin, a disciple of his teachers Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Before he emigrated to Toronto, Canada, in May 1989, Mirzoev was known in Russian theatre as an iconoclast and a leading figure of the avant garde. His productions of Voltaire, Pushkin, Gogol, Büchner, Strindberg, Claudel, Weiss, and Howard Barker became renowned for the plasticity of the actors' movement and the use of metaphor to convey meaning, and Russian critics hailed his extraordinary ability to sculpt a unique theatrical language, which blended the ironic and the grotesque. Rita Much interviewed Mirzoev in the autumn of 1991, between the abortive coup and the breakup of the Soviet Union.
A Theatre of Pre-Depression: Economics and Apathy in New York
Authors: Loney Glenn
Published: January 2009

In an article in NTQ22 (May 1990), Glenn Loney clarified, with special concern for a British readership, the many ‘Factors in the Broadway Equation’. In NTQ 30 (May 1992), he took a closer look at the productions of the 1990–91 season, with its glut of musicals, from the lavish to the just plain lousy, economic ‘single-person shows’ – and the sometimes more challenging products of the off-Broadway and not-for-profit sectors. Here, he continues to trace the long decline of the ‘fabulous invalid’ through the season of 1991–92 – a season overshadowed by the death of Joe Papp, the mourning for a great showman mixed with concern for the future of his Public Theatre enterprises. The paucity of productions on Broadway – where, while one show could lose its backers four million dollars overnight, Peter Pan took American audiences happily back to the traditions of English pantomime – continued to contrast with signs of life elsewhere, and new productions marked milestone-anniversaries for La Mama and the Manhattan Theatre Club. Glenn Loney, is a widely published theatre writer and teacher based in New York.
The Healing Space in Psychotherapy and Theatre
Authors: Elsass Peter
Published: January 2009

This article is a comparative examination of the relationship of audience and actors on the one hand, and of a client and his psychotherapist on the other. Peter Elsass argues that in order to describe both relationships as of a healing nature, one also has to identify a ‘healing space’ beyond the consulting room, instead of focusing on the healing relationship itself. Employing an analogy with shamanism, he describes this ‘healing space’ as a ‘pinta’, or vision from an extra-contextual frame. The history of psychoanalysis shows this need for a ‘pinta’ as a driving, rebellious force, and he suggests that without a ‘pinta’ of its own, the theatre also dies. Peter Elsass is a Professor of Health Psychology in the Medical Faculty of Aarhus University, Denmark, and chief psychologist at the Psychiatric Hospital, Aarhus. In addition to writing a large number of articles within the medical and psychological fields, he has also worked in the field of cultural anthropology, and in Strategies for Survival: the Psychology of Cultural Resilience in Ethnic Minorities (New York University Press, 1992), he describes his many periods of residence with Indian tribes in Colombia. Peter Elsass has been an associate of Odin Theatre, and has taught at the International School of Theatre Anthropology, directed by Eugenio Barba.
Resituating Fugard: South African Drama as Witness
Authors: Walder Dennis
Published: January 2009

The recent work of the South African dramatist Athol Fugard has addressed the present realities of a country undergoing traumatic change. But on whose behalf does it speak today? The common claim of critics has been that his work ‘bears witness’: but what does this claim amount to in the context of current debates about culture in South Africa? Central to these debates is the contextualizing work which has arisen out of the neo-Marxist emphasis on previously marginalized black dramatic forms: tending to supplant the liberal, universalizing approach which helped promote Fugard, this is fast becoming a new orthodoxy, diminishing his contribution and historic influence alike. In this article, Dennis Walder looks more closely at the European origins among the liberal-left of the idea of ‘bearing witness’, and considers its continuing potential as taken up by Fugard himself at a turning-point in the development of his plays – the moment from which sprang both Boesman and Lena and the collaborative Sizwe Bansi and The Island. These plays can still be understood to offer a voice to the voiceless – above all to Lena, the ‘Hotnot’ woman, an outcast among outcasts, who affirms her identity through her body and her language. Dennis Walder, who was born and brought up in South Africa and educated at the Universities of Cape Town and Edinburgh, is now Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Open University: a Dickens scholar, whose Dickens and Religion appeared in 1981, he also wrote the first book-length study of Athol Fugard (Macmillan, 1984), and is currently editing Fugard's plays for Oxford University Press.
Collaboration, Translation, Interpretation
Authors: Lepage Robert
Published: January 2009

Robert Lepage, the innovative French-Canadian director whose production of A Midsummer Night's Dream last year joined the repertoire of the National Theatre, developed his working methods out of the resource-based technique of improvisation and creation devised by Anna and Lawrence Halprin at the San Francisco Dance Workshop. His devised shows, widely acclaimed for their arresting visual imagery, include The Dragons' Trilogy, Vinci, Tectonic Plates, and Opium and Needles. Here he discusses in interview his ideas on interculturalism and how these influence his approach to Shakespeare. He was interviewed at the National Theatre in London by Christie Carson, a doctoral student at the University of Glasgow, who is working on a dissertation which compares the approach taken to intercultural projects by the theatre communities of Scotland and Canada. A graduate of Queen's University, Kingston, and the University of Toronto, Christie Carson has also recently been a contributor to a commemorative publication analyzing the work performed as part of the C. P. Taylor retrospective at the 1992 Edinburgh Festival.
Invisible Theatre: Reflections on an Overlooked Form
Authors: Kohtes Martin Maria
Published: January 2009

The paratheatrical form here described as ‘Invisible Theatre’ has been little investigated by the English-speaking academic world, beyond a nod in the direction of the work of Augusto Boal. In the following article, Martin Maria Kohtes suggests that the silent interlacing of art and life in ‘Invisible Theatre’ has historical and theoretical implications which extend beyond the specifics of ‘theatre for the oppressed’ or ‘guerrilla theatre’, to call into question our understanding of what constitutes the act of theatre itself. In tracing the history of the concept back to the Weimar Republic, Kohtes develops a hypothesis to explain the visibility of ‘Invisible Theatre’ at specific historic moments – and in so doing he hopes also to illuminate for a wider audience some of the ideas and research methods of German Theaterwissenschaft. Martin Maria Kohtes, who presently lives and works in Berlin and Cologne, studied Theatre Arts at the Freie Universität Berlin, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. His study of Guerilla Theater: Theorie und Praxis des amerikanischen Strassentheaters was published by Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, in 1990.
Why Did Antigone Kill Herself?
Authors: Kott Jan
Published: January 2009

In suggesting an answer to the question which forms the title of this article, Jan Kott seeks relevant connections between the rites of a past civilization and the history of the twentieth century – each age sharing across the millennia the capacity to hate those it chooses to make its victims. Since the publication of his seminal study, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, in 1964, Jan Kott has published in a wide range of fields, always displaying a characteristic combination of critical perception, insight into performance potential, and open sensibility towards the cultures of past and present. Jan Kott has also from the first been an Advisory Editor of Theatre Quarterly as of New Theatre Quarterly. He will be eighty in 1994, and in NTQ40, due for publication in November of that year – as it happens, also the eightieth issue of this journal and its predecessor – we plan a special issue by way of celebration. Although a number of contributions have already been commissioned, further ideas for articles of a kind appropriate to the occasion are welcome.
Varieties of Monologic Strategy: the Dramaturgy of Len Jenkin and Mac Wellman
Authors: Castagno Paul C.
Published: January 2009

Playwrights, directors, and theatre teachers interested in understanding the theatrical possibilities and functions of monologue soon discover that critical analysis in this area is limited alike in extent and depth. In the following analysis of contemporary dramatic monologue, Paul C. Castagno therefore begins by exploring its more expected or traditional uses, and proceeds to examine its present expanded function with particular reference to the plays of two contemporary American playwrights, Len Jenkin and Mac Wellman – both multiple Obie Award-winning writers, whose dramaturgic techniques have been highly influential yet who remain largely overlooked in the critical arena. He concludes that monologue in the new dramaturgy is actually moving in various and often complex ways back towards a kind of dialogism. Paul C. Castagno, who is himself a practising playwright, is director and dramaturg of the New Playwrights' Program at the University of Alabama, where he has developed a number of new playscripts for award-winning productions. He has published articles in theJournal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Text and Presentation, Theatre History Studies, andTheatre Topics, among others, and will shortly be taking on the editorship of the journalTheatre Symposium. His studyThe Early Commedia dell'Arte, 1550–1621: the Mannerist Context isdue for publication by Peter Lang in 1993, and he is is currently preparing a playwriting text that explores elements of the new dramaturgy.
The Intercultural Experience and the Kathakali ‘King Lear’
Authors: Awasthi Suresh
Published: January 2009

The idea of merging western and Indian performing traditions through the performance of King Lear by a Kathakali company promised to be a viable experiment in intercultural practice – yet it proved entirely alien to Indian audiences initiated in Kathakali, and baffling when brought before the cosmopolitan throngs of the Edinburgh Festival. Here, Suresh Awasthi, former chairman of the National School of Drama in Delhi, analyzes the misconceptions which, in his view, fatally flawed the production – setting it within the context of its parent performance tradition, which permits development and change within a framework of basic thematic stability, but is unable to appropriate new texts. When, as in this case, the attempt is made, what results is a mistranslation of performance codes between two cultures. In the course of his argument, Suresh Awasthi provides a useful summary and analysis of traditional Kathakali conventions, and in conclusion describes some productions from the ‘classical avant-garde’ which have successfully explored an intercultural approach without detriment to either of the traditions involved.
Three Plays by Deborah Levy: a Brief Introduction
Authors: Charitou Irini
Published: January 2009

DEBORAH LEVY wrote Pax as the result of a commission from the Women's Theatre Group to write an ‘anti-nuclear’ play. In her own words, she detests ‘those last-two-minutes-in-a-bunker-type scenarios’, so she decided to write an epic play with Europe in the twentieth century as a focal point. Pax takes on board Europe's past, present, and future. There are four women characters in the play, The Keeper, The Hidden Daughter, The Mourner, and The Domesticated Woman. In the published edition of Pax (Plays by Women, Vol. VI, ed. Mary Remnant, Methuen, 1987), Levy describes how she envisaged these characters:

I found four archetypes, who represented twentieth-century Europe for me.
Revolution as Self-Expression: the Folklore Ballet of Nicaragua
Authors: Abud Ronald
Published: January 2009

Early in 1986, the Ballet Folklorico Nacional de Nicaragua was invited by the London Borough of Camden to play a season at the Shaw Theatre. Its founder and director. Ronald Abud V, taked to Elaine Turner, with the assistance of the company's translator Margaret Clark, about the work and aims of a company which has become closely identified with its country's revolution, and about the means of expressing a rediscovered national identity through the performing arts.
The Act, the Role, and the Actor: Boy Actresses On the Elizabethan Stage
Authors: McLuskie Kathleen
Published: January 2009

Recent feminist criticism has led to a reassessment of women's roles in the Elizabethan drama, especially in such ‘difficult’ plays asThe Taming of the Shrewor Shakespeare's problem comedies. Yet this has often been with an implicit belief in the appropriateness of ‘psychological’ or ‘interpretive’ approaches to character and gender quite alien to the period in which the plays were first performed. In the following article. Kathleen McLuskie. who teaches in the Department of Theatre at the University of Kent, looks at the different, often conflicting approaches to the sexuality of performance in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, at how these were reflected both in theatrical conventions and in contemporary attitudes to the plays and the ‘boy actresses’ – and at some possible implications for modern productions.