From the Theater of War to the Theater Stage: The Militarization of the State Theatre Pretoria (1981)

In his chapter on the ‘Theatre of War’ in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975, ch. 6), Paul Fussell notes a consanguinity between the participant’s view of warfare and of theatre: ‘Seeing warfare as theatre provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theatre, he can perform his duties without implicating his “real” self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place’ (p. 192). The participant’s position provides the fulcrum of Fussell’s discussion of theatre and the First World War from a range of perspectives: wartime audiences escaping the reality of war by immersing themselves in theatre, those with experience of war (the equivalent of soldier-poets) writing theatrically (but not necessarily only plays), representations of war participants in drama, the theatrical language of war participants (particularly class-conscious British soldiers). The catch-phrase ‘theatre of war’, in this view, is effective because it captures a double bind of location and participation in war. On the one hand, the war zone is like a stage and those in it become self-conscious performers who are displaced from the everyday life of ‘real’ selves and located in an ‘irrational place’. On the other hand, the theatre stage and actors materialize an experience which temporarily draws audiences away from their everyday existence and ‘real’ selves — and under those conditions the dislocations of war can be effectively represented and conveyed, even if war is distant or past. Of course, the same could be said of cinema or television drama. Theatre and war zone meet in the locations and dislocations of participation in Fussell’s view, and indeed that is the dominant sense in which a ‘theatre of war’ is understood both in literary terms and in the metaphorical plethora of the catch-phrase.

Iraqi Ghosts in the Heart of America:Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo Ana Fernández-Caparrós (bio) 1. Iraq and the Crisis in Representing War on the American Stage In the contemplative place theater provides, we might become citizens of the times in which we live. It is at the intersect between public moral dilemma and the individual capacity to understand and feel that theater of war and witness enters, useful and meaningful, to create a communal gathering space in which we might consider together the sorts of societal choices, their reasons and consequences, we fail to fully grasp in isolation. —Karen Malpede, Acts of War xvii Warfare, which might be considered the most radical expression of conflict and crisis, has been from ancient times a topic of theatrical representation.1 In fact, as Karen Malpede argues, dramatic art arose as a complement to and perhaps also as an antidote to war: "Athens, a warrior democracy, needed its great theater Festival to Dionysius (god of ecstasy and madness), in order to remember, reflect upon, and, perhaps, to somehow mediate if not actually redeem the multiple losses and sacrifices of its people" (xv). Over 2,500 years later, the ultimate reasons—if there can be any—that might justify the need to engage in the perversions, barbarities, betrayals, and pain produced by current wars that are so different from those ancient battles, and even from the military engagements of just a few decades ago, still need to be understood and negotiated. Drama might be thought of as an inevitably displaced and obsolete medium to understand war in the twenty-first century, amidst a mediatized reality of digital culture where the hegemony of images is hard to defy. Yet, despite its relegation to the fringe of American cultural imagination, I want to argue that drama and performative representations still have the power to engage with current military conflicts in ways that differ from traditional narratives and the manner in which conflicts are portrayed by mainstream media channels, thus opening up a space for the emergence of critical [End Page 35] assessment, ethical judgment, and resistance that should not be overlooked. In what follows I will focus on one of the most original responses to the Iraq war, Rajiv Joseph's Pulitzer Prize-nominated Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a play whose "use of an animal figure to explore something as troubling as George Bush's 'pre-emptive,' 'regime-change war' in Iraq, and the strange, unwanted alliances that it forced into existence" is turned into a surprising and powerful means to bring up "questions that arise from the radical displacements and dismemberments that characterize global warfare" (Chaudhuri 135, 136). Joseph's play, which premiered in May 2009 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California, is, to my knowledge, the only American play set in Iraq and openly portraying the Iraq War to have reached Broadway. In fact, it was the 2011 Broadway production directed by Moisés Kaufman and starring the late Robin Williams as the Bengal Tiger (in his last theatrical performance before his death in 2014) that put Joseph in the national spotlight.2 This unique achievement raises a few questions as to why a bizarre war play with a loquacious tiger in the leading role is likely to be the sole play set in war-torn Iraq that more conventional American theater audiences might have come across as well as to why Iraq has been generally neglected as an apt crisis to be publicly examined on the stage, considering the magnitude of the conflict. The invasion proved to be catastrophic, undermining, as Kitchen and Cox argue, "America's soft power appeal in several countries and causing immense damage to the international order more generally—damage that will take several years to repair, if of course it can ever be repaired at all" (65). The claim made by theater critic Alexis Solosky that "few would argue that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced any great American plays" could still be made, but that these wars have motivated some good pieces produced at regional not...

This chapter considers both the ways of transforming Shakespeare’s plays into opera librettos, and the staging practice of particular Shakespearean operas. It focuses on staging of two operas based on Shakespeare’s plays composed by Giuseppe Verdi—Macbeth and Otello. The topic is treated with special reference to operatic scenography, especially regarding the issue of creating innovative audio-visual metaphors on stage. One of the essential questions may be summarized as follows: how are these (stage) metaphors rooted in Shakespeare’s plays as such? In the investigation of this topic, many specific productions of Shakespearean operas are included, both from the Czech Republic (and former Czechoslovakia, especially from the State Theatre in Brno) and from prominent world opera houses. The chapter’s central aim is to consider what operas based on Shakespeare’s plays bring to the theatrical stage, from the point of view of (for example) theatrical aesthetics and semantics, especially in the area of scenography—which is treated here not just as a visual parameter, but as an audio-visual artistic discipline.

Cirque du Soleil and Its Roots in Illegitimate Circus

The world depicted in Shakespeare’s Histories is so unrelentingly, inescapably male that the women who do appear in it must inevitably be a disruptive force. The female characters who stake out a portion of the hyper-masculine political stage in this feudal theatre of war can work with or in opposition to the things that preoccupy the men, but cannot hope to modify the frame within which they must operate. The only proper place a woman could have in such chronicles of history would be as a stoic, silent breeder of doughty, legitimate sons and marriageable daughters of indisputable paternity. Instead of offering women like this, Shakespeare fills the chinks in male activity in his history plays with women who burst out of such a confined role in every direction. Should the women stand back and let the men get on with it? The disastrous results suggest that opposition is called for, though it may be futile. Constance, Kate, Jeanne and Margaret all appear in order to vocalize their opposition, not to war or dynastic conflict in themselves, but to how the men concerned are going about it. Criticizing decisions made by men is already bold enough behaviour to make a woman a shrew, exercising exceptional rhetorical power while doing so compounds the transgression. Several centuries before the phrase ‘the personal is political’ was coined, these characters demonstrate the way personal and political concerns cannot be separated into compartments.

Scholars are witnessing a dramatic confluence of faith, politics, and gaming. On the stage of this war theater, the players are indistinguishable, the simulations just one mission removed from real war. One is immersed in war as game, the other in war as eternal battle. The military has invested millions in developing games as strategic communications tools, hiring real soldiers and officers as consultants to ensure optimal realism in game play. Nowthat the harmonic convergence of faith, politics, and computer games has been graphically (and brutally) realized, specifically, made real in the dueling holy wars— ours and theirs (jihad)—what now? This article proposes a game modification of the god mode of the game, America’s Army, as a critical response to the reality ofwar and the use of computer games as military recruitment tools.