Aspects Of Theatre Research Articles

W. S. Gilbert: Victorian Entertainer

Interpretive criticism applied to the plays of W. S. Gilbert verges upon self-parody, suggests Eric Midwinter. The musical plays to which Sullivan contributed his inimitable scores were careful and calculated blends of the theatrical resources which Gilbert could command with plot and character conventions of proven and sustained appeal – which could, moreover, attract to the theatre the respectable family audiences for which the Savoy became almost a home-from-home. Eric Midwinter analyzes the ingredients of the operas which contributed to this popular success, describes the veritable industry of spin-offs which they generated, and assesses their contribution to the development of the ‘musical play’ as distinct from the ‘musical comedy’. Eric Midwinter is a social historian and social policy analyst, whose books include Make 'Em Laugh: Famous Comedians and Their World (1979) and Fair Game: Myth and Reality in Sport (1986). He has published widely on social aspects of popular theatre and television, and is presently Director of the Centre for Policy on Ageing.

Theatrical Aspects of the Novel: A Study of Don Quixote (review)

Theatrical Aspects of the Novel: A Study of Don Quixote (review)

Feminist Theatre: An Introduction to Plays of Contemporary British and American Women by Helene Keyssar, and: Feminist Theatre: A Study in Persuasion by Elizabeth J. Natalle (review)

Book Reviews 119 We can now see where Archer belongs in the history ofIbsen criticism: very close to the throne itself! CHARLES LELAND, ST. I \UCHAEL'S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO HELENE KEYSSAR. Feminist Theatre: An Introduction to Plays a/Contemporary British and American Women. London: Macmillan 1984. Pp. v, 223, illustrated. £14: £4.95 (PB). ELIZABETH J. NATALLE. Feminist Theatre: A Study in Persuasion. Metuchen, N..J.; Scarecrow Press 1985. Pp. v, 155 . $15.00. With the recent resurgence of the women's movement has come not only a heightened interest in recovering lost or forgotten works by women writers but also a greatly . increased output and availability of works by contemporary female artists. As Helene Keyssar and Elizabeth J. NatalIe demonstrate in their very different looks at Feminist Theatre. this renewed creative activity is nowhere more evident than on the British and American stage. Based on personal interviews with theatre practitioners, first-hand experience of performances, and studies of published and unpublished scripts, both of their books testify to the vitality of feminist theatre. Keyssar's introductory study, published in the Macmillan (and Grove Press) Modem Dramatists Series, draws attention to the growing numbers of women now writing and having their plays produced in the United States and Great Britain. Natalie's work, published by the same house that brought out Janet Brown's pioneering Feminist Drama , highlights the collective and ideological aspects of feminist theatre by considering how theatre groups that began appearing across the U.S. in the late I¢oS have given "a dramatic voice to the new feminist movement." Both authors situate the emergence of feminist theatre in the context of this movement as well as of the general climate of political activism and theatrical innovation characteristic of the I 960s. They both recognize feminist theatre's debt to the strategy of consciousness-raising and to the women's movement's insistence that, "the personal is political"; both authors highlight feminist playwrights' efforts to rethink the hierarchical aspects of play production as well as play construction. But their very different perspectives lead them to paint contrasting pictures of feminist theatre's historical background. While she acknowledges the importance of "new theatre" groups' experiments with transformation teChniques and ensemble work, Kcyssar identifies the female playwrights catalogued in her second chapter as key precursors of feminist theatre. Invoking the names of the tenth-century Hrosvita,_ Aphra Behn, and Anna Cora Mowatt, Keyssar unfortunately goes on to dismiss these women's plays as mere "relics." But the remainder ofher second chapter, in offering an often pointed critique of plays from Susan Glaspell's Trifles to Doris Lessing's Play with a Tiger, convincingly traces the initial stages in the development ofa coherent genre offeminist drama. Natalie disagrees with Keyssar about whether such a coherent genre yet exists and cites 120 Book Reviews reformist or didactic playwrights ranging from Aristophanes and Henrik Ibsen to Bertoh Brecht and the Living Newspaper as precursors for an emergent feminist theatre. In contrast with Keyssar's wideA canging overview, she then focuses her historical discussion on the evolution of American feminist theatre groups over the past twenty years, examining their connections with other feminist organizations. Keyssar's book is thus much broader than Natalle's in scope and quite different in its methodology. The study ofa large numberofwomen's plays has led Keyssar to discover a specifical1y feminist dramatic aesthetic, based on the convention of transformations, or "the theatrical manifestation of metamorphosis of contexts, actions and, most crucially, ofcharacters," rather than on the recognition scene she sees as fundamental to traditional (male) theatre. Her suggestion that all traditional theatre utilizes the recognition structure is in keeping with the other sweeping generalizations that occasionally mar her otherwise sound commentary. But Keyssar's critique of the recognition strategy as essentially reinforcing the status quo and undermining the possibility of real change is a provocative and significant one for feminist theatre studies. Her gradual elaboration of transfonnations and related techniques in the plays she studies also adds up to a helpful catalogue ofbasic characteristics offeminist theatre. Keyssar applies this notion of transfonnation to the plays of some thirty playwrights. Chapters devoted entirely to the...

Some Aspects of Popular Theatre

It is a matter for pride that the old TQ was one of the first English-language journals to include material by and about the Italian dramatist Dario Fo. Our ‘Theatre Checklist’ on Fo in 1978 provided the first full reference guide to his plays (notably to his work since 1970 with the theatre collective La Comune), and Tony Mitchell contributed a documented study of Fo's one-man show Mistero Buffo to TQ 35 in 1979. In between, Belt and Braces had established Fo's British reputation with their long-running productions of Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can't Pay, Won't Pay – while in TQ40 Fo's leading American director, R. G. Davis, looked at some of the problems of presenting Fo in the USA. Now, Trumpets and Raspberries looks set to repeat the success of its predecessors at London's Phoenix Theatre. What sustains Dario Fo's unique ability to create political comedy which is at once hard-hitting yet widely accessible? As he suggests in the first of these articles (which originally appeared in Italian as an introduction to a volume of his plays), the answer lies in part in Fo's very rejection of the label ‘political’. Here, he analyzes some of the features by which he would rather distinguish his work as popular theatre, notably its traditional dependence on situation rather than character. In the second article, published in Italian in 1978, Fo examines the way in which this kind of theatre also fuses the elements of past culture with a critical examination of the present. Tony Mitchell, who translated both pieces, has just published a study of Fo. People's Court Jester, in the Methuen Theatrefiles series.

Bhuta Worship: Aspects of Ritualistic Theatre

Bhuta Worship: Aspects of Ritualistic Theatre

Re-viewing the Play

The most obvious way to start considering the theatrical aspects of a Shakespeare play is to study a production of it. But this is easier to say than to do. If the critic detaches his mind at a performance, so that it is free to question, compare, and analyze, the production immediately changes, because the forward pressure of events is lost. The critic must see the same production many times, and ask most of his questions afterwards. 1

Baroque or Burlesque? Aspects of French Comic Theatre in the Early Seventeenth Century

Baroque or Burlesque? Aspects of French Comic Theatre in the Early Seventeenth Century

The force of reportive narratives

Abstract Narratives are a genre of speech such as speech acts. In the same way that speech acts have a semantic meaning (referential, propositional), and a pragmatic meaning (illocutionary force), narratives have referential and evaluative structures. The force or evaluative character of a narrative is conveyed by clauses with quotations. Reported speech is, therefore, the central cogwheel in narrative structure. In this article, narratives and reported speech are studied in their inter‐relations. Furthermore, quotations of speech events confer to narratives a theatrical aspect. However, narratives strongly resemble the process of history. The genre of speech narrative is, consequently, regarded as something in between theater and history. (Narrative; reported speech; speech acts; oral discourse.)

Conversations with Ayckbourn by Ian Watson (review)

114 Book Reviews IAN WATSON. Conversations with Ayckbourn. London: Macdonald 1981. Pp. 189. illustrated. £8.95. Failed businesses, failed maniages, mental breakdowns and death by drowning - these quiet horrors fonn the basisofBritain'sdarkest comedies since the plays ofShakespeare. Yet the work ofAlan Ayckbouro, Britain's most prolific and popularplaywright, has not been subjected to serious critical scrutiny. Perhaps the reason - according to Ian Watson, a free-Jance journalist and arts administrator who has taken the first steps toward correcting the situation - lies in the impossibility of pigeonholing Ayckboum's work. Pinter is menacing, Orton is anarchic, Bond is politically committed and Stoppard is a word-juggler extraordinaire, but Ayckboum has not yet been forced to extricate himself from the added pressures of artificial labels. As a result, a critic might possibly find elements ofthe Pinteresque, the Ortonian, the Bonded and the Stoppardian in a body of work which remains recognizably that of Ayckboum - no adjective needed - in which the tribal rituals of the English middle class are mercilessly dissected with outrageous humor and breathtaking stagecraft. In some shorter earlier pieges as well as a brief section of his current book, Watson demonstrates that he may very well be the one to take on thejob of revealing to the world the true worth of Ayckboum's too lightly regarded canon, but he has a different purpose in mind here. In a series of taped interviews, Watson questions Ayckboum about his background, his schooling. his theatrical apprenticeship as assistant stage manager and actor, and his eventual development as dramatist and director. Ayckboum was fortunate from the beginning. His mother, a successful women's magazine short-story writer, encouraged his own early pecking away at the typewriter. A schoolmaster at Haileybury recognized his passion for theatrics and urged him on as actor, even helped him to his first job with Donald Wolfit's company at the Edinburgh Festival. From there Ayckboum moved from rep to rep, eventually finding his way to Stephen Joseph's theater-in-the-round in Scarborough, Yorkshire, as ASM. What seemed especially appealing at the time was that the lack of a proscenium stage meant a minimum of scenery to shift and store. But Ayckboum was most fortunate, he tells Watson, in coming under the tutelage of the fanatical Joseph, who believed that everyone in the company ought to be familiar with every aspect oftheater- not only to be able to act, but to know how to work the lights and the sound, even to be able to write a play on the side. And with the impetus ofcreating good parts for himself, that is exactly what Ayckbourn found himself doing. Soon Ayckhourn the actor lost ground to Ayckboum the dramatist, and after Joseph's death he found himselfin the unique position ofrunning a company which relied on him not merely to direct the productions but to write at least one new playa year as well. Not since Shakespeare, perhaps, has a dramatist worked under such favorable conditions, for Ayckboum is working with an excellent company which has been well received on occasion by the London critics, in an in-the-round theater which challenges his ingenuity to the full, for an audience of locals and holiday-makers at Yorkshire's seaside resort which is as much a microcosm as was Shakespeare's venue. After twenty-five years in Scarborough, Ayckboum is still thriving, and what is more important, still developing. Watson himself once worked at the Scarborough theater as "a bloody useless stage manager," according to Ayckboum. and their longstanding acquaintance has enabled the interviewer to evoke from his subject a relaxed humor, a telling candor and even, in a Book Reviews 115 discussion of the possibility that the Scarborough theater company will not outlast its writer~director, a certain justified arrogance. Ayckhoum adds hilarious tales to the growing Wolfit mythology but admits having learned something useful from him: "that theatre is show business." His account of the opening night of How the Other HalfLoves in Palm Beach, Florida, during which a serving trolley rolled off the raked stage covering "two of the most beautiful American people" with frigadella, and Phil Silvers required prompting from the audience, is...

Theatrical Clubs of the Nineteenth Century: Tradition Versus Assimilation in the Acting Community

One of the more enduring images of actors is that they are a highly sociable, gregarious people. Perhaps less so today, but in the nineteenth century this characterization had solid basis in fact. The origins of this trait are easily understood. It was encouraged by the cooperative aspect of the theatre and the closed nature of the acting fraternity, which resulted from both the constant travel and the social proscription that actors had always faced. It also was based in the acting personality itself which, though varied and incapable of stereotyped description, often contains an extra measure of extroversion and companionability.

Modern British Drama (Goldentree Bibliographies) by Charles A. Carpenter (review)

440 Book Reviews On the whole. then, the essays in this volume represent an uneven mixture in Chekhov criticism of the old and the new, the stodgy and the perceptive. Even so, the fourhest by Karlinsky, Nilsson, Bristow and Barricelli make this a book worth reading and pondering. JAMES M. CURTIS, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA CHARLES A. CARPENTER. Modern British Drama (Goldentree Bibliographies). Arlington Heights, Illinois: AHM Publishing 1979. Pp. x, 120. Professor Carpenter should be given credit for dealing with a span of over 100 years in a space of little over 100 pages. He has even broken up the period into eras: to the 18905; 18905to 19305; 19305 to 19505; and 19505 to 19705. There is also a section dealing with the "Modem Scottish and Welsh Drama and Theatre" and another on the "Modem Irish Drama." Furthennore, he has tried to distinguish between drama and theatre by including separate sections on "Theatre in England" and ''Theatre in Ireland." These ambitious divisions and subdivisions, however, do not seem to suit a bibliography of this size. Many books dealing with the above eras overlap: and perhaps it would have been easier if there had been only two periods: Modem (to the 1950s) and Contemporary (from the 19505 to the present). The same overlapping occurs in the sections dealing with the theatre and the drama. For instance, under ''Theatre'' we find such books as Hogan, The Modern Irish Drama and Kennedy, The Drama in Ulster; whereas under "Drama" we have: O'Driscoll, Theatre and Nationalism; Robinson, The Irish Theatre; and Wilson, Edwardian Theatre. All of these deal exclusively with drama. Since ProfessorCarpenter himselftells us that "the emphasis has been placed on literary rather than theatrical aspects of the field," the subdivision was unnecessary and might even be confusing to students. The compiler must also have had a hard time deciding on his selections. Since we are told that "the listing is deliberately selective," Professor Carpenter might have had his reasons, for example, for excluding Terence Rattigan from the Jist of individual dramatists. The deliberate selection might also explain the absence from the "Reference Works" ofsuch guides as John Gassner and Edward Quinn, The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama; Helen H. Palmer and Anne J. Dyson, European Drama Criticism; James M. Salem, A Guide to Critical Reviews; and Gordon Samples, The Drama Scholars' Index to Plays. Again, Professor Carpenter might have intentionally excluded the following items from the "Anthologies of Modem British Plays": B.A. Cerf and V.H. Cartmen, Sixteen Famous British Plays; Donald Fitzjohn, English One·Act Plays of TodaYi and Robert Warnock. Representative Modern Plays. However, since he included an Irish anthology under "British Plays," i.e., Curtis Canfield, Plays of Changing Ireland, because it deals with "the early thirties," perhaps he should have included as wen an English one that reflects the same period, such as J.M. Charlton, Plays ofthe Thirties, 2 vols. The deliberate selection also affects the "Modem British Dramatists" section. Why, for instance, has J.W. Stedman's edition ofW.S. Gilbert's earlier plays, Gilbert Before Sullivan, been omitted from the list of "editions of significance"? The most serious limitation of the book, however, is the entire absence of Book Reviews 44[ hibHographies of several individual dramatists. Professor Carpenter's statement in the headnote to this section makes it clear that he will include under each dramatist "bibliographies and reference material if any." Failure to include a bibliography of any dramatist under his name, therefore, implies that a bibliography of this dramatist does not exist. This, however. is not always the case. For instance, there are two known bibliographies of 1.B. Priestley which are inexplicably absent: L.A. Jones, "The First Editions of Priestley," Bookman (London), 80 (193[); and L.J. Teagarden, ''The J.B. Priestley Collection," Library Chronicle oj the University oj Texas, 7 ([963). There are at least three bibliographies of Austin Clarke, none of which is'given: Gerard Lyne, "Austin Clarke: A Bibliography," Irish University Review, 4 (Spring 1974), 137-55; M.L MacManus, "Bibliographies of Irish Writers, No.8: Austin Clarke," Dublin Magazine, 10 (Apr.-June 1935), 41-3; and Liam Miller, "The Books of Austin Clarke...

Images of America: Wilson, Weller and Horovitz

American playwrights are fascinated by the 4th of July and their attempts to articulate its significance are among the most intriguing aspects of the contemporary theatre. It would be convenient to attribute this fascination to the influence of Eugene O'Neill whose Ah Wilderness! explored the dramatic possibilities of Independence Day fifty years ago, but it probably has more to do with the recent Bicentennial celebration. Since the close of that euphoric national party, American dramatists have produced Israel Horovitz's Alfred Dies (1977), Lanford Wilson's 5th of July (1978) and Talley's Folly (1979), Michael Weller's Loose Ends (1979), and Tom Eyen's Independence Day (1979) all of which are set in part or fully on the 4th of July. To this list we could also add Archibald MacLeish's The Great American Fourth of July Parade (1975), John Guare's In Fireworks Lie Secret Codes (1980) and, with a bit of stretching, Ernest Thompson's On Golden Pond (1979) which draws from the same kind of mid-summer nostalgia that infuses Ah Wilderness!

Vaudeville and Narrative: Aspects of Chin Theater

Vaudeville and Narrative: Aspects of Chin Theater

Friedrich's ‘Lulu’

On 16 February the complete Lulu was heard in a live performance in Great Britain for the first time. It was heard, not seen. What was shown on the stage of the Royal Opera House was a farce by Götz Friedrich, superimposed on Alban Berg's music and libretto. Friedrich is an outstanding example of a type characterized by Arnold Schoenberg more than fifty years ago: ‘Producers who look at a work only in order to see how to make it into something quite different’. Operatic production today seems increasingly to be based on the assumption that composers—who are inept, naïve, and indifferent to the dramaturgical aspects of the operatic theatre—compose music in a vacuum which it is the producer's responsibility to fill. But the music of an opera is not composed in a vacuum. The productive aspects of the work—entrances, exits, lightings, groupings, curtains, movements, the very thoughts and feelings of the characters—have their correspondences in the music. This is what it means to compose an opera.

Two Stratfords

At the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, England a gentle slope of audience looks up at a steeply-raked proscenium stage. At Canada’s Stratford Festival, a sharply descending audience looks down on a more-or-less flat stage. One wonders from time-to-time how much of the differences between the two Stratfords come down to the dynamics of auditorium. The English Stratford is at bottom a traditional enough box, within which the actors hurl themselves at the audience with an intensity and élan that constantly revilatize the old form. Our Canadian Stratford, on the other hand, has a vividly exciting auditorium, and yet — with the audience slope its most pronounced feature — the happenings on stage, for all their colour and movement often remain oddly flat. The Canadian Fesival Stage, with all its virtues, is clearly a vehicle for display, but there are other aspects of theatre it can lose. One felt this at Stratford’s Third Stage this season, where Pam Brighton’s version of Henry VI had some of the excitement and danger the Festival stage lacked. The English analogue to the Third Stage is The Other Place, where indeed there is great intimacy, and the claustrophobic sexual drama of the Jacobean/Caroline court works superbly there. Intimacy, and a rough kind of sweaty danger: that is what the workshop theatres have to offer, and what one has to give up on the senior stages.

Art Versus Business: The Role of Women in American Theatre

In the decade or more since the women's movement began, a number of books on the female experience in literature, art and architecture, film and dance have been published, but no comparable attempts have been made to identify a women's tradition in the complex art of theatre. Some excellent volumes of plays by women and some about women, some interesting articles on individuals and on the new feminist theatres, a symposium or an interview here or there have appeared. With the exception of the reissue of Rosamund Gilder's classic, Enter the Actress, however, no overall study has tried to see how women have used and have been used in theatre.Yet questions about women's participation in all aspects of theatre have become more insistent.

Shakespeare in Edinburgh Playbills: The Theatre Royal, 1810–1851

In the National Library of Scotland under R.283.C. (bound volumes) and pressmrk Mus.Box.250 (boxes of loose materials) are collections of long-neglected playbills—a mine for detailed study of many aspects of theatre in Edinburgh. No printed catalogue of these ephemerae exists, though they provide valuable information that J. C. Dibdin chose to omit from The Annals of the Edinburgh Stage. The collections of Edinburgh playbills are uneven. Sixteen of forty-two Theatre Royal seasons between 1810 and 1851 are not represented by any bills.

Interview: Of Masks, Mirrors And Lindsay Kemp

British Mime Lindsay Kemp studied dance with Marie Rambert, mime with Marcel Marceau and his link with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes is indicated by the presence of Anton Dolin in his company. His work is a synthesis of many different aspects of modern theatre from French farce, British Music Hall, Buster Keaton and the pop music scene to Japanese Noh and Kabuki Theatre, Cocteau, the Surrealists and Anlonin Artaud. His repertoire, which includes Woyzeck, The Maids, a children’s pantomime, a clown mime, Cruel Garden (a piece dealing with Lorca’s vision of life and death created for the Ballet Rambert), Salomé and Flowers (a spectacle based on Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers) reflects these stylistic inspirations on the thematic level. In recent years, Kemp and his company have been performing not only in England but world-wide. This past March, for the first time, the company performed in Canada at Toronto Workshop Productions and the run had to be extended several times. Two Kemp works were produced in Toronto — Salomé and Flowers. It was Flowers, particularly, with its violent homosexual themes and transvestite dancers, its powerful technical effects and the way it put Artaud’s ideals into practice with the actors consciously exploring the limits of experience as “athletes of the senses” that caused theatre people to take note that a true “original” was in their midst. The following exclusive interview with Kemp and his associate director and fellow mime David Haughton was conducted in May by Christopher Innes especially for CTR. In it, Kemp speaks of many aspects of contemporary theatre art including the relationship of the artist to himself, the artist to his audience and the artist to society at-large. As such, it would seem to be of genuine interest not only to theatre people in Canada but to theatre people everywhere.

Stage Production and the Greek Theatre Movement: W. B. Yeats's PlayThe Resurrectionand His Versions ofKing OedipusandOedipus at Colonus

‘What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Genoa and Michael Angelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two buttends of a seesaw?’ Christ and Oedipus, the contrasting images inA Vision, were central figures in W. B. Yeats's theatre work in the late 1920s. Following the publication ofA Visionin 1925, Yeats completed his versions of Sophocles' two plays of Oedipus. Designed for the main stage at the Abbey Theatre,King Oedipuswas produced in 1926 andOedipus at Colonusthe following year. During that time Yeats wrote a play on the death of Christ based on his work with the Sophocles plays but designed for the smaller Peacock Theatre, the Abbey's new experimental stage. Yeats's play,The Resurrection, was produced there in 1934. Those three productions were the culmination of Yeats's long involvement in two aspects of non-naturalistic theatre – the relation between stage performance and audience in the amphitheatre, and the nature of the poetic and dramatic image produced in that type of theatre.

ProVisional Theatre's XA: A Vietnam Primer

The ProVisional Theatre from Los Angeles performed two of the three works in their repertoire at the Experimental Theatre Festival in Ann Arbor. In addition, they gave a workshop, conducted by Steve Kent, a non-performing director of the group. It consisted for the most part of animated body work and theatre games. Exercises from Viola Spolin's canon as well as sound and movement exercises developed by Joseph Chaikin and The Open Theater were demonstrated, as well as improvisational games of their own. It was obvious that, in addition to the political aspect of The ProVisional Theatre's work, there was a desire to experiment with developing the actor's technique.The ProVisional Theatre is an eleven-member group and, although they consider themselves highly political, they refuse to identify themselves with any specific philosophy.