Brechtian Theatre Research Articles

Symptomatic Acts, Experimental Embodiments: Theatres of Scientific Protest in Interwar Germany

The author builds on recent geographical approaches to the investigation of scientific experimentation. While a number of studies have explored the various sites of scientific practice and the role of space in the constitution of experimental matters of fact, far less attention has been directed toward the cultural geographies of experimental science and the extrascientific zones in which modes of experimental practice were themselves developed and contested. Drawing on the reception of professional psychiatry in interwar Berlin (1919–1933), the author traces an alternative set of ‘experimental systems’ which seized on and countered the credibility of psychiatric expertise. The focus is on a series of modernist experiments in interwar Germany which actively reconfigured psychiatric science as a series of critical aesthetic interventions themselves tasked with performing ‘scientific experiments’. The paper is triangulated around three case studies, which chart the multiple traffickings between psychiatric experimentation and modernist art. The first revisits the traumatic reenactments of Berlin Dada in the broader context of mechanized war, rationalized work, and metropolitan life. The second explores the psychotechnical techniques that were crucial to the operations of Brechtian epic theatre, and the third case study explores the relationship between clinical therapy and modernist fiction as it came to characterize the work of Alfred Döblin during the 1920s. The paper concludes with further reflections on the significance of the ‘modern experimental turn’.

Die Rekonstruktion der Dekonstruktion in Dea Lohers Dramen, oder: Die Rückkehr des politischen Dramas

Pitting Lohers aesthetics of theatre against Hans-Thies Lehmann's view of the postdramatic, this essay examines the various ways in which Loher overcomes the postdramatic theatre. Drawing on a vast range of examples from her work, the essay clarifies Loher's position in regard to mimesis. Whilst postmodernism features as a theme in Loher's œuvre, the form of her plays denies the idea of the radicalized V-effect that is typical of postmodern performances. As far as the dramatic form is concerned, Loher's plays do not adhere to a postmodern-postdramatic style. By contrast, Loher harks back to the tradition of the political theatre of Sartre and Brecht. This does not mean, however, that she merely replicates their aesthetics. Mimesis means that she employs both Brecht's not-but and Sartre's engaged theatre, thus distancing herself from the idea of radicalized Brechtian (i.e., postmodern) theatre. In this sense, her theater is derived from modernist ideas, namely the focus on the individual in an increasingly mechanized environment; an individual who—in contrast to the two-dimensional figures of the post-dramatic—is still open to communication with others through language, thus being able to negotiate his/her position. Loher does not teach her audience what to think; yet she offers a dramatic framework for the struggle of the individual. (BH; in German)

Huang Zuolin: Michael Chekhov’s Link to China’s Modern Theatre

The folllowing article is a revised and edited version of a keynote address given by Faye Chunfang Fei at the Michael Chekhov Symposium, ‘Theatre of the Future?’, in November 2005 – held at Dartington Hall, where the actor and director Huang Zuolin worked under Chekhov’s guidance in 1936, an experience which helped to shape his lifelong work in uniting the best in western theatrical traditions with those of his native China. Faye Chunfang Fei traces this formative influence, along with those of Stanislavsky, of Brechtian Epic Theatre, and of traditional and modern Chinese forms, in shaping some of the major productions of probably the most influential figure in the Chinese theatre of the later twentieth century. Faye Chunfang Fei received her doctorate in Theatre Studies from the Graduate Center of City University of New York in 1991, and taught theatre in the United States for nine years before taking her present position of Professor of English and Drama at East China Normal University, Shanghai. Her publications include Chinese Theories of Theatre and Performance from Confucius to the Present (University of Michigan Press, 1999), and she is also an internationally produced playwright.

Post-Imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, East and South

Loren Kruger's Post-Imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, East and South is an impressive transnational study of Brechtian theatre that is notable for its simultaneous breadth and depth. Kruger takes us far beyond nationalist frameworks, which have long dominated theatre studies. She also avoids the common pitfalls of “global” and comparative studies: sweeping generalizations that flatten historical specificity are not to be found in this book's 400 richly footnoted pages. Post-Imperial Brecht provides a precise and detailed study of the transnational flow of Brecht's ideas and plays between West and East Germany, and between Germany and South Africa, from the 1930s to the present.

Immigrating Fictions: Unfailing Mediation in Dictée and Becoming Madame Mao

* 1 * She originality of the Brechtian sign, Roland Barthes once said, comes from its always being read twice. What Brecht gives us to read, Barthes wrote in 1975, is, via a kind of disconnect, the look of a reader, not the object of that look; that object only reaches us through the intellectual (alienated) act of a first reader who is already on (Brecht 265; my translation). Barthes meant that objects on the Brechtian stage never appear on stage as themselves. They are instead objects-facts, things, people, situations-as someone has perceived them, elements of a story told by an actor who performs a relation to the objects of his regard that subjects them, in advance, to reading. From the edge of the proscenium, the audience sees the reading, not the objects, and sees simultaneously the possibility of the objects otherwise. The Brechtian theater thus shows that an object is always someone's object, that any given thing, person, or situation has already emerged, prior to any single perception of it, as the reading of someone else whose first was simply to make this object the object of a look, thereby differentiating it from the seamless fabric of the real. Like the Brechtian sign, a translated text appears before its audience only after passing through the alienated act of a first reader. There it testifies to the awkward and complex relationship between author and translator, between the translation that appears and the

O teatro dos "bóias-frias": repensando a antropologia da performance

Os escritos de Victor Turner referentes à antropologia da performance são sugestivos para a análise do que poderíamos chamar de "teatro dos bóias-frias". Mas esse teatro de canaviais e carrocerias de caminhões também é sugestivo: trata-se de um lugar privilegiado para se repensar um conjunto de questões que emergem nas interfaces da performance e antropologia. Tendo-se em vista a especificidade da "prática de calcular o lugar olhado das coisas" que caracteriza esse teatro, os seguintes tópicos pontuam o texto que vem a seguir: 1) dramas sociais; 2) relações entre dramas sociais e dramas estéticos; 3) símbolos e montagens; e 4) paradigmas do teatro na antropologia. Uma observação: nesse exercício de repensar algumas contribuições "clássicas" de Victor Turner, Erving Goffman e Richard Schechner, encontro "afinidades eletivas" entre, por um lado, o pensamento de Walter Benjamin e a dramaturgia de Bertolt Brecht, e, por outro, os princípios dramatúrgicos dos "bóias-frias".

BETWEEN BRECHT AND ARTAUD

This paper reconsiders the significance of the performing body in Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun by supplementing the well‐documented influences of Brechtian theatre and Sirkian melodrama with the rarely examined influence of Antonin Artaud's theatre of cruelty. In this analysis, the Brechtian and Artaudian perspectives emerge as complementary, rather than oppositional, models. I argue that in Fassbinder the Brechtian distanciation effect prevents his concern with emotions from sliding into clichéd sentimentality, instead fostering the emergence of a more confronting affective dimension in both the actors' performances and the viewers' experience of the film. Through a detailed examination of Hanna Schygulla's gestural and kinetic language in two crucial scenes, I suggest that Fassbinder reconciles historical/social and affective/individual concerns by blending the Brechtian concept of the body as intelligible social sign and the Artaudian concept of the body as irrational force exceeding social and linguistic boundaries.

Mother Courage and Its Abject: Reading the Violence of Identification

Fifteen years ago, Elin Diamond suggested that feminist theatre theorists could learn a thing or two from Bertolt Brecht and altered the course of an industry. "Brechtian Theory / Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism" (1988) revolutionized the way many of us talk about theatre, as Diamond imagined how femini st critics might "re-radical[ize]" such commonplace Brechtian techniques as the "not-but" and the Verfremdungseffekt for our performance theory and practice; her work promptly generated a number of inquiries into the productive potential of aligning Brecht's theory with contemporary feminist concerns. Diamond's own rejuvenation was expressly theoretical; she never intended to engage the prickly problem of Brecht's own dramas and the "too many saintly mothers" peopling them. Reading her work now, with the luxury of distance, this choice comes as no particular surprise.

Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, and: Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology And Performance In Contemporary Drama, and: Modern Drama And The Rhetoric Of Theatre Robert F. Gross Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology And Performance In Contemporary Drama. By Stanton B. Garner, Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994; pp. x + 260. $37.50 cloth, $14.95 paper. Modern Drama And The Rhetoric Of Theatre. By W. B. Worthen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; pp. x + 230. $38.00 cloth. Three decades ago, philosopher Paul Ricoeur observed that modernity was marked by a polarization of hermeneutic approaches: on the one hand, an iconoclastic hermeneutics of suspicion, led by Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, which viewed cultural productions as objects of mystification and guile; on the other, a phenomenology that sought to recapture meaning in all of its fullness. “Hermeneutics seems to me,” he observed, “to be motivated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience” (Freud and Philosophy [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970], 27). For Ricoeur, these two methods of interpretation worked best, not in opposition, but in complementarity. For evidence that this polarization still defines our intellectual landscape even in this so-called “postmodern” age, one need only to turn to these two erudite and stimulating volumes. Both cover much of the same canon of twentieth-century Western drama—Brecht, Beckett, Bond, Shepard, Pinter, Churchill, Fornes. But W. B. Worthen has taken Ricoeur’s vow of rigor, and approaches theatre with suspicion, while Stanton B. Garner, Jr., drawing on the insights of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, has taken the vow of phenomenological obedience. Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theatre investigates the processes by which plays constitute their spectators through material and ideological positioning. Worthen isolates three major rhetorical modes—realistic, poetic, and political drama—and analyzes them with a wealth of interesting examples drawn from playtexts, set design, directing, and theories of acting. Worthen is a sophisticated reader of a variety of texts, from The Silver Box, to Norman Bel Geddes’s set for Dead End, to reviewers’ uneasiness with the performance of the chorus in Murder in the Cathedral. Worthen views realism with aversion as the inherently conservative mode of a bourgeois sensibility, working to render its audience passive and invisible. Indeed, realism’s mystifying forces are so powerful that playwrights who seek to use realism for political ends find their plays hopelessly compromised. Poetic theatre begins by questioning the rhetoric of realism, but finally reveals, in the work of Samuel Beckett, an equally ruthless will to power, one in which the theatre becomes a torture chamber for actors and audience alike. With the final chapter on political theatre, however, Worthen breaks his vow of suspicion. Suddenly there is neither coercion nor mystification, but a theatre of “political agency” (147) in which plays always do precisely what their authors claim. It is here that the book reveals itself as a polemic in favor of Brechtian theatre, and this polemic blunts Worthen’s analytic sharpness. Since his polemic ultimately relies on an opposition of realism and political theatre, his treatment of The Entertainer, Saved, and The Churchill Play as political plays ignores the strong vestiges of realistic rhetoric in all three works. Pinero, Galsworthy, and Shaw, as realistic playwrights, are subjected to keen analysis for the rhetoric involved in their portrayal of women; Brecht, Osborne, and Stoppard, as political playwrights, escape similar scrutiny. The realm of political drama is the summit of Worthen’s ascent from his Inferno of realism through the Purgatorio of poetic theatre, and no flaws appear in the inhabitants of his Paradiso. Bodied Spaces is freer from polemic and thus more even-handed in its assessments. Garner is more interested in exploring the possibilities of phenomenology for the study of theatre than in advancing an argument in favor of a single style. Making no claim to a totalizing system, his method is more open-ended and less prone to the Procrustean temptations of categorization. Garner is able to recognize the aesthetic power of realism and can appreciate the indebtedness of Maria Irene Fornes’s plays to the realistic tradition. Less horrified than Worthen by Beckett’s behavior as a dramaturgical control freak, Garner can respond...

After Brecht: British epic theater

After Brecht: British Epic Theater is the first book to fully explore contemporary British drama in the light of the influence of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Focusing on the work of Howard Brenton, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Trevor Griffiths, and John McGrath, the book examines Brechtian techniques and style within the work of each playwright, while highlighting the divergent development of each.The book has been enriched by the author's in-depth conversations with the playwrights. The topics covered include contemporary politics and the theater, the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and such well-known fringe companies as Foco Novo, Joint Stock, Portable Theatre, and 7:84. Reinelt examines each playwright within an interpretive frame drawn from an application of Brecht's theories and practice to the historically specific situation of post-war British theater.The book will appeal to those interested in the relationship between politics and art and contemporary European theater and its antecedents.After Brecht represents the best and most detailed engagement with the contemporary British theater scene to date. --Stanton B. Garner, Jr.This fine study . . . confronts issues that are important to all students and practitioners of the theater. Sensitive to the uniqueness of each of the playwrights in her study, Reinelt demonstrates that Brechtian theory can be modified in many ways by those who share the belief that 'politics and aesthetics are inseparably linked.' --ChoiceJanelle Reinelt is Chair of the Department of Dramatic Art and Dance, University of California-Davis.

Toward a rhetorical/dramatic theory of instructional communication

This essay asks how teachers can communicate in such a way as to compel students to think critically about not only the content but also the inherent social relations and underlying ideology of a course. The question is explored by viewing the classroom as a dramatic, hence rhetorical, environment. Bertolt Brecht's theory of performance is used to explain how students become numb to pedagogy and teachers, thus failing to think critically about the “plot” of knowledge and pedagogy and the roles that teachers and students play in the learning process. The essay draws on Brechtian theory to suggest three communication principles for inciting critical thinking: alienation effect, historicization, and gest.

Against Commodification: Zuni Culture in Clarence Major's Native American Texts

Not too far gone are the days when any county museum served the naively colonial role of representing Native American cultures to all who ventured in. The centerpieces of such exhibits were the dioramas, all of which, no matter the tribe (if, indeed, any gestures toward tribal variation were made), seemed to ensure that every scout troop and picnicking family passing by would leave with a few central notions of what Native American life meant. The characteristics of the diorama are telling in regard to the dialectics of representation and colonization facilitated by commodification. The diorama is dependent upon freezing time and neutralizing distinctions in space, the always resemble no one but other diorama Indians and diorama cave-people. While freezing the latter in a specific time is viable due to the extinction of those ancient cultures, casting the former in similar pre-technological settings suggests a similar extinction or, at best (for the viewer), a delightfully nostalgic primitiveness. At the same time, temporal freezing isolates the figures in the diorama into single, typically stereotyped, actions, thereby containing and enabling viewers to generalize the whole of Indian life. The diorama, like so many Western films, levels the specificity of tribal location and, thus, of tribal identity and culture. For both, an exigence exists for establishing the stock-ness of the Indian. Motives for this leveling likely stem from a need to depersonalize the humanity of the Indian, though museums could be driven by such added material factors as a lack of artifacts or the inability to identify one culture from another. The diorama elicits the charm of an artifact masquerading as something built by invisible, supremely objective, quasi-divine hands. It suggests an unmediated and pristine correspondence between its subjects and what, within the terms of the epistemology operant in the production of the diorama, objectively exists in a real, outside world. Who but a god is capable of building life, let alone a whole village? The lack of any obvious nod to the subjectivity and interestedness of the maker is indeed suspicious. Its final quality, the erasure of any indications of construction and the illusion of objectivity implicit in such an erasure, makes the diorama a serviceable paradigm of the type of representation to which Clarence Major's two volumes built around the Zuni culture sit in opposition. In contrast to the dioramic paradigm, Clarence Major's Some Ob- servations of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of the Century and Painted Turtle.- Woman with Guitar resist commodification and what I would like to call dioramafication. In my examination of Major's Zuni texts, I will pay particular attention to the thematized subjectivities of the two texts, and the similarities of these two aspects to those that Walter Benjamin found in Brechtian theater. In so doing, I hope to describe Major's postmodern response to the artist's representational paradox: How is it possible to follow the will-to-represent, without falling into a colonial will-to-dominate? One way of approaching this reading is by looking at Major's work in light of the notion of authority. We can accept, at least in part on etymological grounds, the comingling of authorship with authority.(1) And certainly this sense of authority inherent in authorship is facilitated by the guises of objectivity created in so many texts. Major resists this connection in two ways: by insistently foregrounding the fundamental subjectivity of both his characters and himself in a way which suggests a certain hierarchical set of qualifications which condition the accuracy and value of a given character's, speaker's, or author's speech/writing; and by thematizing the obfuscation which occurs when those who aren't qualified to speak do so. To a large extent, both Some Observations and Painted Turtle engage a form of the question of subalternity. …

Beckett in performance by Jonathan Kalb (review)

Book Reviews 58r But before Wright can trace Brecht's post-modem trajectory and legacy, she delineates his place in critical modernity. The book's fine fourth chapter, "Placing the theory: Brecht and Modernity," explicates the Brecht-Lukacs dispute, the Brecht-Benjamin partnership, and the case of Adorno against Brecht. Wright concludes: Both Brecht and Benjamin were theoretically right in believing that the new technology would radically alter the production and reception of art, but they were over optimistic in hoping for the desired political effect. ." It was Adorno and Lukacs who proved to be historically right: technology increased rather than decreased art's vulnerability to commidification. In shon, "technology turned culture into kitsch." Along with Jean-Franr;ois Lyotard, Wright believes that "a work can become modem only if it is first postmodern." She explores the aesthetics ofearly Brecht in Baal and In The Jungle of the Cities and finds the "unrepresentable" as well as the " unsayable" theatricalized with even greater spectator complicity, for the "pressure is put on the audience to co-produce.'~ Such post-modern Brechtian presentations without representational significance eventually pave the way for the "phenomenon called performance; a theatre of shocks calling upon a new kind of spectator." In performance art, Wright uncovers Brecht's techniques used more radically than they are in his own plays. "The Brechtian Postmodem," the book's last chapter, examines the re-functioning of the Brechtian theatre through performances of recent work by Pina Bausch, Heiner Muller, and Robert Wilson. Here, of course, dialogue yields to discourse in a nonrepresentational theatre where "speech competes with music. sound effects, sets, props, lights, mime, mask, and costume." Wright ordains Muller the obvious successor to Brecht since Muller's Mauser, "a deconstruction of Brecht's The Measures Taken," goes further than most performances and recognizes the "terroristic nature of the revolutionary position." Wright also realizes that "where Brechtthought he was teaching the teachable, MUller teaches of the unteachable, getting the spectator to confront the uncompromising nature of contingency in history and the body....Furthermore. Wright suggests that post-modernism's greatest contribution resides in "the come-back of illusion.... and the only hope lies in having illusions that are replaceable, exchangeable. and adaptable." Once again. yet more fashionably this time, pipe dreams iiber alles. EILEEN FISCHER, NEW YORK CITY TECHNICAL COLLEGE OF CUNY JONATHAN KALB. Beckett in peiformallce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. pp.277. illustrated. $34.50. This interesting and very readable book begins from the premise that Beckett's plays can be profitably studied by examining performance rather than text fIrst. Citing the "dozens 582 Book Reviews of exceptional Beckett perfonnances within the past twenty·five years." Kalb addresses basic dramaturgical (in contradistinction to literary) questions: what effects do Beckett plays produce in the audience, and how are these effects created by actors and directors? Since Beckett was so vigorously opposed to directorial licence, and so adamant about his instructions for staging. these are great questions indeed, made all the greater by Beckett's recent death. The actors and directors who had been so dependent on and deeply allegiant to Beckett's help in production (Schneider, Whitelaw, and Warrilow, for examples) had advantages in achieving purist perfonnances faithful to the author's intention which no other actors and directors ever will. Thus Kalb's book, bolstered by (unrecorded) conversations with Beckett, may provide a unique contribution to theatre history as well as to our understanding of the plays. As Kalb inquires into whether there are great Beckett practitioners, and, if so, how their techniques differ from those ofother great actors and directors, he investigates vivid questions, and his answers are based, in part, on extensive conversations with those most intimately and famously connected to Beckett's work, as well as on his own assessment of productions (he teUs us he has seen "some seventy productions ... both live and on video, between 1978 and 1987"). He treats individual performances "with a critical seriousness [and close reading] usually reserved for texts." Since video-taping may now preserve performance, the problem of the "ephemerality of the theatre event" is obviated. This last assumption, that video recording provides an adequate theatrical experience to judge by...

Echt Brecht? ‘Mother Courage‘at the Citizens,1990

The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow has a long and honourable tradition of serving its neighbourhood and its city, and a directorial team which remarkably combines professional distinction with loyalty to their theatre. In view of its reputation for productions of great visual brilliance, it is surprising to be reminded that, of all British repertory theatres, ‘national’ or regional, it has also the strongest continuous tradition of playing Brecht. Margaret Eddershaw, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, outlines the history of this tradition, which stretches back even beyond the present triumviral management, and proceeds to look at the most recent encounter of ‘the Cits’ with Brecht, Philip Prowse's 1990 production of Mother Courage. This was significant not only for the director's attitude to Brechtian theory, theatrical and political, in the aftermath of the previous year's events in Eastern Europe, but for its inclusion of an international ‘star’, Glenda Jackson, within the Cits' usually close-knit ensemble – its consequences also, arguably, of ‘political’ as well as theatrical interest.

Re-Interpreting Brecht: His Influence on Contemporary Drama and Film

Acknowledgements Notes on contributors 1. Introduction Pia Kleber 2. Questions concerning Brecht Manfred Wekwerth 3. The origins, aims, and objectives of the Berliner Ensemble Joachim Tenschert 4. Two generations of post-Brechtian playwrights in the German Democratic Republic Rolf Rohmer 5. Productions of Brecht's plays on the West German stage, 1945-1986 Klaus Volker 6. Ups and downs of British Brecht John Willett 7. Crossing the desert: Brecht in France in the eighties Bernard Dort 8. 'His liberty is full of threats to all': Benno Besson's Helsinki Hamlet and Brecht's dialectical appropriation of classic texts Paul Walsh 9. Blocking Brecht Maartern van Dijk 10. Some reflections on Brecht and acting Martin Esslin 11. Brechtian theory and American feminist theatre Karen Laughlin 12. The influence of Brecht on women's cinema in West Germany Renate Mohrmann 13. From anti-illusionism to hyper-realism: Bertolt Brecht and contemporary film Thomas Elsaesser 14. The influence of Brecht Eric Bentley Notes Index.

Viewing the Elephant Man

J OHN WEBSTER is not entirely correct: men in particular have stood amaz'd at their own deformity, as the production in 1979 of Bernard Pomerance's drama The exemplifies. Based on the life of John Merrick, a famous Victorian sideshow performer hideously disfigured by neurofibromatosis, the play garnered Tony Awards, Obies, the Drama Desk Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best play of the year; but its success in New York, and in London the previous year, can hardly be attributed to the reputation of its little-known author or to the drawing power of the actors in the principal parts.1 Moreover, some critics, an ungenerous minority, maintained that the play's merit did not originate in Pomerance's superior or even competent craft. John Simon, for example, found the structure imbalanced and accused Pomerance of suspending dramatic action in the later scenes to create a vehicle for anti-imperialist polemic.2 Pomerance indeed may be less skilled than Bertolt Brecht or Edward Bond at designing engaging drama that at the same time furthers an enterprise of social education, although he is quite obviously influenced by Brechtian theory. But even if Pomerance were Brecht, this metamorphosis would in no way account for the contemporary celebrity of John Merrick: American audiences have seldom given box-office support to materialist drama like Bond's, Brecht's, or John Arden's. Why then were most reviewers and large audiences captivated by the play? David Lynch's 1980 film The (in which Pomerance had no hand) increased viewers' knowledge of Merrick and, like the play, enjoyed both critical acclaim and considerable popular success. Although more filmgoers lined up to see The Empire Strikes Back, The Blues Brothers, and Smokey and the Bandit, Part Two, audiences were moved by this skillful black-and-white melodrama re-creating the gritty environment of late Victorian factories and back-alley peepshows.3 Lynch effectively represents industrialized London by deftly adapting the cinematic style of his earlier cult success Eraserhead (1977), a style punctuated by montages of urban mechanization, the constant hum of manufacturing noise, and motifs of burning gas jets and clouds of steam. By the early 1980s, largely because of Pomerance and Lynch, Merrick's story was widely known; but the play and film are only two examples of the flood of publications about Merrick that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s: Ashley Montagu's The Man: A Study in Human Dignity (1971), Fred Shannon's The Life and Agony of the (1979), a published version of the Lynch filmscript, Michael Howell and Peter Ford's The True History of the (1980), Christine Sparks's The Man: A Novel (1980), and so on. How does one explain this cultural rediscovery of the Elephant Man nearly one hundred years after his death in 1890? What characteristics of John Merrick and his life are most fascinating today? Further, though both Lynch's film and Pomerance's drama share some textual features, they are so different in crucial respects as to form opposing mythologies of Merrick's history. What differing attractions do the two offer, and how are these attractions bound up in theatrical and filmic spectating? We contend that Pomerance's and Lynch's versions of the history of John Merrick combine to provide an unusually wide variety of pleasures, some spectatorial and libidinal, others more intellectual or contemplative. That is, Merrick's story has been and can be shaped into various forms, each with its own array of audience expectations and satisfactions. We hope to illuminate these by positing three distinct, albeit at times related and overlapping, sources of pleasure in Lynch's and Pomerance's treatments of Merrick's life: the conventions of melodrama, the psychological gratifications of both cinematic spectating and the viewing of sideshow freaks, and the critique of powerful Victorian institutions and colonial 868

Bond: A Study of his Plays by Malcolm Hay and Philip Roberts (review)

Book Reviews MALCOLM HAY AND PHll.JP ROBERTS. Bond: A Study a/his Plays. London: Eyre Methuen 1980. pp. 319, illUSlIated. Edward Bond is quickly becoming one of the most prolific of England's contemporary playwrights. Twenty-one of his works, including translations and adaptations, have been perfonned, and he has recently completed three other pieces: Restoration, The Cat. and Summer. At present, he is working on a new play for the National Theatre. As can be expected, such productivity has led to an increasing number of critical studies of Bond's work (in both book-length studies and in books containing chapters devoted to Bond). The first book-length study was Richard Scharine's The Plays of Edward Bond (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, (976), a book which covers Bond's work up through The Sea (1973). Simon Trussler's Edward Bond (Harlow: Longman for the British Council, 1976) is an excellent monograph on the plays up to Bingo (1973), and Tony Coult's The Plays ofEdwardBond(London: Eyre Methuen, 1977) is a short but competent study of Bond's major themes up through A~A~America! (1976). There are even two books in Gennan on Bond, afact which comes as no surprise in view afBond's popularity on the Continent: Peter Wolfensperger's Edward Bond: Dialektik des Weltbildes und dramatische Gestaltung (Bern: Francke, '976), and Peter Iden's Edward Bond (Ve!ber: Friedrich, 1973). ]n spite of their considerable strengths, however, none of these studies can equal the comprehensive, authoritative study that Hay and Roberts have provided in Bond: A Study of His Plays. The authors are already well~known to Bond admirers far two previous works: Edward Bond: A Companion to the Plays (London: Theatre Quarterly Publications, 1978), and Edward Bond: Theatre Poems and Songs (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978).The fonner is aplaygoer's guide consisting ofquotes by Bond, aselect bibliography. and an assortment of Bond's letters;and.the latter is acollection of pieces which Bond wrote as partofhis preparation for many oftheplays. These two works give the new critical study added authority, but the real source ofauthority is that the authors have had unrestricted access to Bond's papers. Hay and Roberts make good use of over seventy letters written by Bond to various actors, producers, and directors, and also use 558 Book Reviews over thirty letters that these people have exchanged among themselves. Hay and Roberts also draw amply upon nine taped interviews of Bond that they conducted, as well as a long list ofinterviews ofBond's associates. Just a glance at the bibliography reveals that these authors have done their research, a job so well done that the bibliography is the best for Bond studies currently available. What particularly distinguishes this study from others, as mentioned, is that Hay and Roberts had total access to Bond's notes, rough drafts, and unpublished plays (fifteen before The Pope's Wedding) and poems. Indeed, the two authors have had so much cooperation from Bond, especially in his comments on some of the difficult scenes in the plays, that one may say only half in jest that Bond is actually the third author of this critical study. The book offers abundant information on Bond, facts concerning his education, his first exposure to Brechtian theatre in 1956, his association with the Royal Court Theatre beginning in 1958, and his battles with the Lord Chamberlain over the censorship of Saved (1965) and Early Morning (1968). More important, however, are Hay and Roberts's observations on Bond's division of his work into three cycles, his themes, and his theories of dramatic method. The first cycle of plays runs from 1962 to 1973 and includes The Pope's Wedding, Saved, EarlyMorning, Narrow Roadto the DeepNorth, Lear, and The Sea. The second is a trilogy written between 1973 and 1977: Bingo, The Fool, and The Woman. The third is the current cycle, consisting of The Bundle, The Worlds, and some of the new plays just completed. Devoting separate chapters to most of the plays, Hay and Roberts examine in detail the concerns within each cycle, the difficulties of bringing most of these plays to actual perfonnance, the relationship of the minor...

"Zamhaltn muSS man dann." Reassurance Displays in Franz Xaver Kroetz's Oberosterreich

The immensely prolific, controversial, and imaginative writer, Franz Xaver Kroetz, has reintroduced neo-realism as an appropriate form of dramatic representation in our time. The play Oberisterreich (1972)' aptly demonstrates how Kroetz's milieu plays address contemporary preoccupations and values. In Oberdsterreich the experience of the workaday world is defined by stress, boredom, and anonymity, and the dreams of acquiring better models of automobiles and better gadgets threaten the very spirit of the characters involved. The focus on substantive issues, however, does not explain the compelling legitimacy of this genre at this time. This can be explained by the interconnection between three crucial aspects of his work: the stylization of his mimesis, the demonstration of language-use as it is conditioned by class experience, and a presentation which espouses the necessary imminence of social change. Kroetz, in fact, seems to be a synthesizer of Brecht and naturalism. The scenic structure of Oberosterreich has a closed, framing quality; the brief speeches, the lack of significant scenery, the artificial restriction to two characters, and the antidramatic touch is reminiscent of the stripped-down theater of Brecht. The sealed-off, analytic presentation of typical characters in typical situations serves as a demonstration model without Brecht's fairy-tale overlay. In fact, the representational quality in Kroetz is the carrier of the Brechtian message. The alienation clues embedded in the dialogue force the audience to take a stand also somewhat in the manner of Brecht. Throughout this play, the Brechtian critical stance is implied, but Brecht denied the possibility of generating a socially critical reaction in his audience by means of milieu portrayal and the precise realization of the speech of ordinary people. The gaps in the dialogue which produce a disrupted, disruptive text is another aspect not envisioned by Brecht. Kroetz's postBrechtian method is not unlike Brecht's, but it differs by utilizing a naturalist idiom and by closing in reality rather than opening it up. While Brechtian theater does not allow ambiguity, the dimension of meaning in Kroetz's plays is frequently withheld. The dialogue between the husband and wife in Oberisterreich is non-directed, and the ending is

Sastre on Brecht: The Dialectics of Revolutionary Theatre

Alfonso Sastre is one of a very limited number of postwar Spanish dramatists who have attracted attention outside Spain. He is also the only contemporary Spanish writer who has developed a dynamic, lucid theory of the drama. Since 1949, in hundreds of essays and two books, Sastre has explored virtually every aspect of the dramatic art in a sustained effort to find a theoretical basis for a valid contemporary theatre. 1 This search has been informed by Sastre's own revolutionary values and has centered around the concept of realismo profundizado: penetrative realism, a realism which is not illusion-of-life naturalism nor unilateral socialist propaganda, but rather a clarification of the existential and social tensions that define contemporary man. Sastre's theatre, in practice and theory, is essentially Aristotelian in its form and revolutionary in its ideology. Its aims are testimony, illumination, and agitation of consciences. Its dramatic tension derives from the dialectical confrontation of opposing realities which Sastre perceives as fundamental to the modern human condition: man as existence and man as history, despair and hope, thought and action, individual integrity and political necessity. In moral terms this dialectic becomes relativism. In philosophical terms it represents a search for reconciliation and synthesis, a desire to reintegrate modern man, alienated from himself, from his fellows, and from the forces that control his life. In social terms, Sastre's dialectic calls for a socialist transformation of the world. And in dramatic terms it implies tensions, conflicts, painful decisions, and ambiguous resolution of complex entanglements. Sastre's theoretical probing has taken him through the work of some modern giants of the theatre: Strindberg, Lenormand, O'Neill, Miller, Sartre, and Beckett. His essays on these figures are significant attempts to expand the cultural horizons of Spain, whose intellectual and artistic life has been seriously limited, since 1939, by stultifying circumstances. Somewhat belatedly Sastre discovers Bertolt Brecht and undertakes an energetic examination of the assumptions and practice of the Brechtian theatre. In addition to giving diffusion in Spain to Brecht's thought, Sastre's theoretical encounter with the great German artist is interesting because of the perspective it brings to the dramatic theories of both Sastre and Brecht.

Brechtian Theater as a Model for Conjoint Family Therapy

Family ProcessVolume 5, Issue 2 p. 218-229 Brechtian Theater as a Model for Conjoint Family Therapy ROBERT E. KANTOR PH.D., ROBERT E. KANTOR PH.D. Research Associate, Mental Research Institute, 777 Bryant Street, Palo Alto, CaliforniaSearch for more papers by this authorLYNN HOFFMAN, LYNN HOFFMAN Research Associate, Mental Research Institute, 777 Bryant Street, Palo Alto, CaliforniaSearch for more papers by this author ROBERT E. KANTOR PH.D., ROBERT E. KANTOR PH.D. Research Associate, Mental Research Institute, 777 Bryant Street, Palo Alto, CaliforniaSearch for more papers by this authorLYNN HOFFMAN, LYNN HOFFMAN Research Associate, Mental Research Institute, 777 Bryant Street, Palo Alto, CaliforniaSearch for more papers by this author First published: September 1966 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545-5300.1966.00218.xCitations: 3Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume5, Issue2September 1966Pages 218-229 RelatedInformation