Contemporary Drama Research Articles

Caryl Churchill by Mary Luckhurst (review)

Mary Luckhurst. Caryl Churchill. Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Pp. xiv + 208. $39.95. Caryl Churchill has been writing plays half century, during which time she has constantly experimented with dramatic form. Equally, as Mary Luckhurst amply demonstrates in Caryl Churchill, her plays have always responded to new social, political, and cultural challenges, especially as they affect women and those who have been marginalized or oppressed. Luckhurst's division of her book into chapters that focus on work decade by decade and her focus on one in production each decade illuminate both changing style and enormous range and versatility of her work. She never writes same twice. In part 1, Contexts, Luckhurst provides an overview of plays in to her life, her thought, and critical and historical contexts in which her work has been received. She notes well-known influence on Churchill of Brecht and of second wave feminism but concludes that while Churchill's significance to development of feminist political theatre is unmatched, her work is also informed by science, ethics, war, terror, climate and masculinity (24). Of particular interest is Luckhurst's discussion of an essay Churchill wrote in 1960, when she was only twenty-two: Ordinary, Not Safe: A Direction Drama? In this essay Churchill attacks new wave of Royal Court realistic drama by male dramatists such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and Arnold Wesker and calls instead, in Luckhurst's words, for utopian quest to explore socialist agendas in ways that provoke change (12), using experimental forms and language, such as juxtapositions of song, prose and poetry, spectrum of emotional moods and cumulative effects of powerful stage pictures (13). Luckhurst demonstrates that throughout her career Churchill has followed her own agenda. In part 2 Luckhurst begins by reviewing Churchills early work, mostly radio plays, of 1960s, and also her six little-known plays television written between 1972 and 1981. Typical of political topicality of these plays is The Legion Hall Bombing (1979), documentary drama about boy accused without evidence of planting bomb in Northern Ireland. Churchill took her name off credits after BBC censored some of its content. Luckhurst's discussion of Churchills stage plays of 1970s begins with helpful account of The Hospital at Time of Revolution (1972, finally produced in 2013), based on writings of Algerian psychiatrist and political activist Frantz Fanon, whose complex self-knowledge Churchill admired; dramatizes the colonised victim's dilemma of complicity (50). Analyses of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) and Vinegar Tom (1976) follow. Luckhurst is very good at providing succinctly historical information that is essential to our understanding of carefully researched plays: example, concerning English Civil War and various religious and political movements that inform Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Given Luckhurst's care in providing such instructive background material, it is unfortunate that in her discussion of Vinegar Tom she focuses on reliance on Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English's polemical and essentialist Witches, Midwives and Nurses, which ties to 1970s feminism, and omits to mention at all use of Alan Macfarlane's Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, which underpins play's still-relevant socialist understanding of economic dynamics at work among different kinds and conditions of individual women. Luckhurst does offer critique of her chosen key production decade, Cloud Nine (1979), suggesting that from perspective of more recent views about gender, it may have become a history play as relation between biology, gender identity and sexual orientation is no longer assumed to be straightforward (80). …

Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance by Andrew Sofer (review)

Reviewed by: Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance by Andrew Sofer Fran Teague (bio) Andrew Sofer. Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Pp. 229 + 2 b/w illus. $29.95. In Andrew Sofer’s Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance we have a fascinating, if mysterious, study. The second adjective is not a complaint. In his earlier study The Stage Life of Props, Sofer began by theorizing props and then examining specific props in different eras of theatrical performance; in this study, he follows the same structure, but instead of considering material objects, he examines absence. The Eucharistic wafer that he used as the prop to illuminate medieval drama is now replaced by Christ’s body that is gone from the tomb in the Quem Queritis trope. That dramatic moment in medieval drama opens this study and as Sofer suggests in the introduction, “the real presence of Christ is paradoxically guaranteed by his felt absence—an absence designed to move the crowd from theatrical wonder to reaffirmed faith” (2). This study is more than a collection of case studies, however, as Sofer juggles both problems in performance theory and an extended analogy between science and theater. Quantum physics and performatives mix with tomography and phenomenology. The case studies, as Sofer calls them, include the absent/present demons in Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Bottom’s offstage amusements in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the faces behind the masks in Aphra Behn’s The Rover, the dead Sebastian Venable in Tessessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer, the listening device in Arthur [End Page 228] Miller’s The Archbishop’s Ceiling, and trauma in a series of plays written in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The chapters conclude with Sofer’s remark that scripted or not, performance is always spectral. The paradox of dark matter is that something hidden is disclosed even as it eludes our sight. Whether hallucinated demons, offstage sex, masked women, self-consuming protagonists, invisible surveillance, or contemporary trauma, theatre conjures the unseen in the service of its imaginative poetics. (144–45) Whether a reader agrees with Sofer’s insistence that J. L. Austen is wrong to exclude speech on stage from the examination of speech-act theory, his critique of Judith Butler’s ideas about performatives, or his investigation of key concepts from such theorists as Marvin Carlson, Richard Schechner, Stanley Fish, or Joseph Roach, that reader should enjoy the way that Sofer investigates such ideas. He writes with grace, and his passion for ideas comes across clearly. While I liked this aspect of the book very much, I was less engaged by the accounts of scientific theories, which ranged from a comparison of Einstein’s physics with those of Neils Bohr to an explanation of dark matter and its effect on gravitational lensing and an account of psychology’s current ideas about trauma. But that response is a personal one—I was trained in a critical world that deeply mistrusted analogy— and other readers will find his observations satisfying and generative. The book has its own dark matter, and surely this present absence is no accident. The very questions that the book raises about the nature of theater seemed linked to absences within the works studied. Consider, for example, the convention of offstage action in Greek tragedy. Repeatedly, the chorus (and audience) hear a messenger describe horrific offstage mutilations and deaths. Many contemporary playwrights have turned to re-visioning classical Greek plays and these contemporary works deal with those moments in various ways: compare Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love with its enacted acts of sex and violence to Ellen McLaughlin’s Iphigenia and Other Daughters, which uses an enigmatic absence of action to create dramatic tension. Given what Sofer has to say about the masked women’s bodily presence and absence in The Rover or the intense consideration he gives to trauma plays, such a convention would seem to form a part of his discussion, but that part must take place extra-textually. Aside from a brief mention of the Greek messenger on 107 and...

Layers of Discourse in Preschool Block Play: An Examination of Children’s Social Interactions

Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophical orientation concerning dialogism offers a challenge to contemporary play theory. This study demonstrates the benefits of a Bakhtinian analysis of double voicing in early childhood programs. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, specifically Bakhtin’s ideas on genre and utterance, has received less attention in the analysis of play. Bakhtin’s conceptualization extends the notion of genre to all spoken utterances in play activities. The purpose of the present study was to examine the existence of Bakhtin’s typology of double voicing with preschool children as they talked and built structures with unit blocks. Bakhtin identified three basic varieties of double voice discourse: (a) unidirectional, (b) vari-directional, and (c) active discourse. The investigation took place in a preschool classroom that encourages a playful curriculum. Drawing on videotaped preschool classroom examples, preschoolers’ use of double voicing in the context of block play was analyzed. The data found the two types of passive double voicing: (a) unidirectional and (b) vari-directional, as well as active categories of hidden dialogicality, parody, and skaz. Bakhtin’s view of language acquisition is discussed by only a handful of early childhood play scholars, and this article suggests early childhood professionals use Mikhail Bakhtin’s double voicing typologies in classroom as a contemporary view for framing early childhood socialization and discourse.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Restoring Tennessee Williams’s Production of the 1950s Primal Scene

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Restoring Tennessee Williams’s Production of the 1950s Primal Scene” explores the productive exchanges between the domains of drama and psychoanalysis by removing the “primal scene” from its embeddedness within psychoanalytic theory and resituating it within a contemporary drama, Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which the playwright put the primal scene to the work of countering the dramaturgy of the Cold War state. Pease specifically resituates Freud’s theorization of the primal scene in the Wolf Man case within the dramatic context of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to restore what Pease calls the primal scene of 1950s masculinity constructions.

And Give US the Shadows

And Give US the Shadows

Otto Brahm's Ibsen cycle at the Lessing-Theater in Berlin

In 1909, an Ibsen cycle comprising all of Ibsen’s thirteen contemporary dramas, from The League of Youth to When We Dead Awaken, was presented at the Lessing-Theater in Berlin. The plays were performed consecutively, in chronological order, in the course of six weeks. The cycle was theatre director Otto Brahm’s grand summing-up of his enduring efforts of promoting Ibsen and his works in Germany. The paper examines this performance cycle from different angles. Why did Brahm present the plays as a cycle? What happens when a cyclic pattern is applied on Ibsen’s works? Research has revealed a great number of Ibsen cycles in German-speaking theatres in the period before World War II. Brahm’s Ibsen cycle was the most prominent, but not by far the only of its kind. The paper points out how thoroughly Brahm planned the cycle, his clever media strategies and how he in the end designed the cycle as a monument of Ibsen and – not least – of his own achievements as the foremost German champion of Ibsen. How was the critical reception of the cycle? Measured both by audience response and critical reception, the cycle was a success. The cycle concept as such, however, was not judged critically. The cyclic take on Ibsen’s works was neither confirmed nor rejected.

Deconstructing adults’ and children's discourse on children's play: listening to children's voices to destabilise deficit narratives

This study used discourse analysis to compare the language adults use to discuss contemporary children's play and children's narratives of their own play experiences. Adult discourse was analysed to determine whether they positioned children through deficit or strength and the attributions of responsibility embedded within their language choices (e.g. assuming responsibility is with the child, family or society). Interviews were completed with 98 children (3–17) living in the USA and interviews and surveys were completed with 135 adults (18–88) from 21 different countries. Children emphasise interconnection with others, being outdoors and using open-ended toys to imagine and explore when discussing their play with little mention of technology. A majority of adults (78%) used deficit discourse and few used strengths-based language to discuss children's play (21%). Adult discourse differed significantly from children's descriptions of their own play. Findings suggest the importance of including children's perspectives in research on children's play.

Race at This Stage: Shepherdstown 2014

Race at This Stage: Shepherdstown 2014 Jack L. B. Gohn (bio) Race at This Stage: Shepherdstown 2014 It has been two years since the last mention in these pages of the Contemporary American Theater Festival, held each July at Shepherdstown, West Virginia. But I had a chance to see it in 2013 as well, and again this year. This year broke from earlier patterns. The saying goes that if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it. Shepherdstown had a mostly winning formula; I’m not sure the tampering was a good thing. [End Page 119] The underlying model has not changed: CATF stages five legitimate dramas with small casts by contemporary American playwrights. The casts are largely interlocked, so that there is in effect one small company presenting five shows. But this year CATF did a couple of things differently. In each of the two previous years, there had been one play by a big name (Neil LaBute in 2012, Sam Shepard in 2013) and four plays by lesser-known playwrights. And I thought in each of those years that the big-name plays were the runts of very strong litters. This year, there were no big names, and in a departure from former practice, of the five playwrights, three were African American, and in addition the “company” was predominantly African American. And, sad to say, there were only two real successes among the plays and two failures—although I should hasten to add that both success and failure here were color blind: black and white playwrights numbered equally at both ends of the quality range. The acting of course was superb, as always at Shepherdstown, regardless of race. Nonetheless, race was a constant undercurrent at this year’s edition, and one worth addressing explicitly. And let me start with what may be paradoxical, in light of the things I have just said: it was striking how unstriking the un-whiteness of the casts often was. There still exist certain irrational assumptions at the back of our theater-going minds, whether we like it or not. One is that the default setting for any character is white, and that if the part (and hence usually the actor) is anything else, there must be a reason for it, while no reason is required to make a character white. Yet in one of these plays, Charles Fuller’s One Night, a play about our military—an institution which seems to have attained the greatest color-blindness of any in our society—the script says (with justification) that the characters can be “of any color or ethnic group.” What dictated the racial composition of the Shepherdstown cast for this play, then, was the more race-specific casting in other plays coupled with the need to limit the size of the overall company. In consequence, despite the race of its author and that of most of its cast, the play simply was not about race, and could have been written or played by anyone. Instead, One Night was about the complex of issues surrounding rape in the military. This is a huge and important subject and we need dramas about it. And one of the many reasons it is an important subject is that it often brings lifelong consequences in its train. But these things must be handled carefully. The act of rape itself and the consequences of rape are inherently melodramatic, and a playwright must take care not to overplay them. Too much melodrama can distract attention from the subject to the treatment of the subject, and not in a good way. And that unfortunately appears to have happened in One Night. I remarked, when I wrote of CATF 2012, that it seemed to have been drilled into contemporary playwrights that the de rigeur form of exposition is the revelation of the characters’ secrets. That standard operating procedure is on full display here. [End Page 120] There is nothing wrong with making a secret at the outset the rape of Alicia G, the former servicewoman at the center of the play (Kaliswa Brewster), since rape is the kind of thing a victim might wish to conceal, even as her life...

Children's play in the Australian Indigenous context: the need for a contemporary view

Despite an extensive search, very little literature was found on Australian Indigenous children's play, and more specifically pretend play. Most of the literature found was written in the period from 1840 to the 1950s and was primarily descriptive. We argue that the literature found on Australian Indigenous children's play could be interpreted through the prominent classical theories of the day. These theories emphasized the value of play in preparing children for adulthood. The literature is silent in regard to the value and significance of play in Indigenous Australian culture and on the contribution of play to children's developmental skills such as language, cognition, problem-solving, literacy and learning. This paper presents a review of the available literature and argues for an analysis of contemporary Australian Indigenous children's play which values play in the development of the child and interprets play behavior within an Indigenous cultural framework.

OVERTHROWING THE STATUS QUO: INTERPRETING WOLE SOYINKA`S THE BACCHAE OF EURIPIDES FROM A MARXIST PERSPECTIVE

Certain critics of contemporary Nigerian drama represented by Abiola Irele, for example, seem to place the plays of Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel laureate on literature, squarely within the confines of ritual aesthetics, in terms of dramatic taxonomy. Although ritual, especially Ogunism, exerts a huge influence and, no doubt, constitutes a major master code for interpreting a play like The Bacchae of Euripides , this paper argues that the religious elements in this transnational play merely serve as a camouflage for the exploration of class struggle. Class consciousness, though expressed through religious symbolism, is given much force and weight in the play from its beginning to the end that it seems to be the principal theme of this play. In the text, the masses knowledge of their position as not given, constrains them to remain steadfast and pushful until they overthrow the status quo through mass revolution, thereby securing unfettered freedom for themselves. In the light of the foregoing, this paper will attempt to interpret The Bacchae from Marxist perspective in order to show that not all Soyinka`s plays lack solid class ideology. Keywords: Overthrowing, Bacchae, Marxist, Soyinka

Ambivalent Pathways of Progress and Decline: The Representation of Aging and Old Age in Joanna McClelland Glass’s Drama

In the last fifteen years, various projects and publications in the interconnected areas of theatre studies, theatrical pedagogy, and literary criticism have highlighted associations between theatrical creativity and constructions of age and aging. Despite a thriving “theatrical gerontology,” the work of contemporary dramatists, especially those outside European and American canons, remains scarcely analyzed. Núria Casado Gual looks at the dramatic work of Joanna McClelland Glass, a Canadian writer born in 1936 in Saskatoon, and who currently lives in Florida. Despite the recognition that McClelland Glass has received in North American academic and theatrical circles, her plays written between 1984 and the present remain unexamined and a more complete study of her playwriting career is yet to be developed. Through the double lens of cultural gerontology and dramatic criticism, Casado Gual offers an overview of McClelland Glass’s theatricalization of old age, based on the main characters and secondary figures that can be associated with this stage of the life course in her work. The composite characterization of McClelland Glass’s older figures ensures not only the complexity of the author’s portrayal of aging-intoold-age, but also its verisimilitude and, therefore, its meaningfulness. McClelland Glass combines notions of progress and decline in the dramatic depiction of her aged characters, generating an ambivalent narrative of aging that re-presents this essential human experience in a truthful and dignified way. Ultimately, McClelland Glass’s recreation of old age is shown to contain the main defining traits of her theatre, as well as the insights that it offers on the complexities and mysteries of the human life course.

The Passive Gaze and Hyper-Immunised Spectators: The Politics of Theatrical Live-Broadcasting

Article The Passive Gaze and Hyper-Immunised Spectators: The Politics of Theatrical Live-Broadcasting was published on November 1, 2015 in the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (volume 3, issue 2).

Powerful and Resonant: Native and First Nations Women's Filmic Presence

WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 7 WE ARE ALL painfully aware of the dominant cinematic representations of Native women—the princess, the sexualized maiden, the work drudge (sq**w). Following a hundred years of cinematic tropes, films like Avatar (2009) utilize the Native woman as an exotic accoutrement to the white male hero, an access point into another culture, a way of claiming “Nativeness.” In others—The Searchers (1956), Little Big Man (1970), and Deer Woman (2005), for example—the woman’s symbolic death reinforces and validates America’s ongoing violent and colonial action against Native peoples. It’s a legacy that continues to haunt us all—but one that Native American and First Nations women have taken on full force for over one hundred years as actors, independent filmmakers, and producers. The vibrancy of their work resonates with the power and tenacity of Indigenous communities and Native women’s voices. In front of the camera, Native and First Nations women work within the Hollywood system and outside it, countering these age-old tropes with realistic portrayals of Native women and cultures. Lillian St. Cyr (Winnebago) stands in the heraldic position as the first Native American woman to star in a major film (Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man, 1914) and to work within the industry against these tropes. Her performance as Nat-U-ritch, the young mother who commits suicide when her son is taken from her, so powerfully portrayed the grief Native peoples suffered under the boarding school and adoption programs that it forced her co-stars to rethink their assumptions about Native people. Such ability to effect change in how we depict and perceive Native women is manifested throughout the industry and characterizes the more contemporary work of other actors whose work deconstructs Hollywood’s Indian woman and represents Native women as contemporary, resilient, powerful, and nuanced or complex mothers , sisters, aunties, lovers, and friends. Some of my current favorites across a variety of approaches highlight strong female subjects, a process of bearing witness through film, and the power of Indigenous storytelling in media. They include My Name Is Kahentiiosta (dir. Alanis Obomsawin , 1995), the sensitive documentary about a resilient Kahnawake woman’s participation in the Oka Crisis of 1990; Honey Moccasin (dir. Shelley Niro, 1998), the first Native American detective story that includes original artwork, performance art, and suspense; Older Than America (dir. Georgina Lightning, 2008), a powerful contemporary drama about the historical trauma of boarding schools; Fry Bread Babes (dir. Steffany Suttle, 2008), a documentary about Native women’s responses to dominant media representations of them; and Magic Wands (dir. Elizabeth Day, 2009), a bilingual (Ojibwe and English) and intergenerational short story about the “magic” of sticks used to harvest wild rice. M. Elise Marubbio is an associate professor at Augsburg College (Minneapolis). Her first book, Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film, won the Peter C. Rollins Book Award. world film Powerful and Resonant Native and First Nations Women’s Filmic Presence by M. Elise Marubbio above A still from Shelley Niro’s Honey Moccasin. Visit the WLT website to view trailers for the films listed here. Marubbio will give a keynote talk at the 2015 Native Crossroads film festival at the University of Oklahoma (March 5–7). Notebook ...

Postfeminist construction of women's sexuality in The village bike by Penelope Skinner

Penelope Skinner's drama The Village Bike deals with issues ranging from pregnancy to sexuality, pornography and sexual exploration. In this article I focus on the way these issues are presented and explain why pornography and sexual exploration belong to the postfeminist ideology. Namely, the author uncritically deals with these issues, objectifies a woman's body and favours gender constructs. Contemporary British drama by women playwrights is not marked by its engagement with feminism even though it might declare itself as pro-feminist or feminist. Penelope Skinner is one of the contemporary playwrights. I try to present that even though her drama seems to appear provocative at first sight this is not really the case. The provocation does not offer a critical insight and distance. I argue that this drama is postfeminist because it mainstreams pornography and presents a peculiar view on the part of sexual liberation, which is very limited.

Chiaroscuro in the Eighteenth‐Century Ballet d'Action

AbstractThe use of the term chiaroscuro by choreographers and commentators on the ballet d'action was part of a deliberate strategy, in the context of controversy surrounding this innovative art. De Piles's emphasis on the use of colour rather than the geometry of line is analogous to Noverre and Angiolini's emphasis on body language in mime dance rather than formal step vocabulary. The rationale for using such terminology was to show that the ballet d'action was a hybrid genre and to redefine the nature of contemporary drama, just as the coloristes had sought to redefine the nature of painting a few decades earlier.

The Theatre: A Place of Memory

This article looks at the question of transnational memory in the work of contemporary Spanish playwrights, Juan Mayorga and Antonio Álamo. It analyses and interprets the theatrical devices employed by each playwright respectively and the construction of a poetics of memory. It then goes on to consider the multidirectional potential of the intertextual references to other authors, histories and events – most notably the Holocaust – in plays of Mayorga and Álamo. It is via these intertextual engagements that the plays confront the limits, or (im)possibility of representation and it argues that the authors dive into a vast network of European memory, which in turn serves as a ‘screen’ for the memory of Spanish people, as it throws light on the Civil War and Francoist Spain. Thus, experiences such as Stalinism, the Holocaust, and the Warsaw ghetto become icons of a transnational memory that places the reader/spectator in the position of co-participant in an introspective exploration designed to unsettle.

How to Watch Television EthanThompson and JasonMittell, Editors. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

How to Watch Television Ethan Thompson and Jason Mitteil, Editors. New York: New York University Press, 2013.Imagine you've just purchased a new TV. You haul it home, open the box, set it up. You may or may not glance at the instruction manual. But once you've got the power on, chances are you never think about how to watch TV again. It just happens. Yet the way in which one watches matters deeply, both to individual viewers and to our collective culture. In their 2013 book, How to Watch Television, editors Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell offer a new kind of guide, one that explores different ways of watching, methods for looking at or making sense of television (1). This book, unlike the manual that comes with your TV set, is utterly readable, highly engaging, and worth referring back to, long after you've switched on your favorite channel.Where other collections have considered emerging genres (Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture [2004]), the global functions of (Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders [2011]) and the changing nature of the medium in the digital era (Television After TV: Essays On a Mednetwork ium in Transition [2004]), Thompson and Mittell's collection attends to specific shows, old and new. Each of the volume's forty chapters begins with a brief summary, introducing the author, program, and a particular analytical framework. Throughout, the reader is presented with a diverse group of narrativesfrom the Disney cartoon Phineas and Ferb, to telenovelas and Monday Night Football, to contemporary dramas such as House and 24. Essays are organized into five thematic sections, which discuss form, representation, politics, industry, and practice, although many chapters skillfully weave these strands together in ways that transcend categorization.A number of the collection's contributors position the narrative and stylistic nuances of programs within a historical context. For instance, in his essay on The Wonder Years (ABC, 1988-1993), Daniel Marcus writes that the bildungsroman served as an expression of nostalgia for the countercultural 1960s during the Reagan era. Similarly, Noel Murray links MMWs (CBS, 1972-1983) depiction of the Korean War to social commentary on war writ large in the 1970s, as public dissatisfaction with US involvement in Vietnam intensified. Evelyn Alsultany's critique of the more recent 24 (FOX, 2001-2010) unpacks the show's depiction of terrorism in a post-9/ 11 landscape. …

Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist by William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker (review)

Reviewed by: Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist by William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker Laini Kavaloski (bio) William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker. Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist. Plymouth, United Kingdom: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 149. $65.00. Bernard Kops: Fantasist, London Jew, Apocalyptic Humorist is a welcome addition to the small but growing number of critical works on twentieth-century Anglo-Jewish writers. Indeed, this is the first book-length study of the works of Bernard Kops, the understudied contemporary playwright, poet, and novelist. In this new volume, William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker make the case that Kops is important to the so-called new wave of British drama as well as to the [End Page 315] historical and social critique of Jewish life in twentieth-century London. So too, much of his work details the London Bohemian subculture of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s of which he was a part. As surely as this is a study of Kops the innovative contemporary writer, it is also a study of Kops the social critic, the activist, and the careful chronicler of London’s Jewish East End. Baker and Shumaker’s approach to Kops’s work explores not only his techniques but also “the subjects that inform his work” (xv). Kops’s texts are examined within chapters that are organized according to themes and issues of identity. For example the first three chapter titles (of seven total) are titled, “The Writer’s I,” “The Role and Function of Family,” and “Identity Formation, Self-Discovery, and Aging.” While these chapter titles are useful for exploring the central themes of Kops’s work, they make locating specific works difficult. Due to the inevitable complexity of themes in any given work, the discussion of a play or novel may be scattered throughout several chapters. For example, The Hamlet of Stepney Green is found in chapter 3, “Identity Formation, Self-Discovery, and Aging,” under the subheading “Breaking Bonds, Skinning Cats, Talking Animals.” It is also discussed in chapter 4, “Jewish Identity within British Culture.” While these titles make navigation of the text confusing, the authors do provide a useful set of subsections within each chapter: “Fiction,” “Non-Fiction,” “Plays,” “Radio Plays,” and “Poetry.” These subheadings remain consistent in each chapter, making browsing within the chapters more efficient. Bernard Kops is well known for his depictions and critiques of Jewish London, and the authors are careful to include discussions of the places and events that inspire Kops’s writing. Central to the setting and political contexts of many of Kops’s works are the marginalization of Jewish writers, the experiences of the war years in London, and the shifting populations of the East End community. For example, Kops reconstructs the world of the London Blitz in his radio play The Lost Love of Phoebe Meyers (2006). Though the play is set in Whitechapel in 1994, Baker and Shumaker suggest that flashbacks to the destruction of 1940s bombed-out London (created in part through the skillful use of sound and music) mirror the lost world of the once-vibrant Jewish community in the East End (xiv). The many historical connections made by the authors throughout the text sharpen their focus on Kops’s portrayal of his own identity, and on Jewish identity more generally. The authors claim rightly that “Kops’s plays, poems, and novels express this poignant quest for meaning,” particularly in a demoralized post-Holocaust world (xviii). Critical volumes such as this generally include at least one critical reassessment of an author’s work. Baker and Shumaker’s analysis of one of Kops’s most well known plays, The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1956), though an astute interpretation, may finally oversimplify the play. The authors approach this rich text by comparing the characters to those of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Baker and [End Page 316] Shumaker suggest that the Hamlet figure, David Levy, is a portrayal of “the era’s so-called angry young man” (35), a character caught in the languishing Jewish East End and burdened by the Jewish legacy of the Holocaust. David struggles with his father’s ambiguous accusation that David’s mother has...

Maria Irene Fornes. By Scott T. Cummings. Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists. London and New York: Routledge, 2012; pp. xxiv + 208, 18 illustrations. $125 cloth, $31.95 paper, $31.95 e-book.

Maria Irene Fornes. By Scott T. Cummings. Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists. London and New York: Routledge, 2012; pp. xxiv + 208, 18 illustrations. $125 cloth, $31.95 paper, $31.95 e-book.

Towards contemporary play: Sociocultural theory and the digital-consumerist context

This article introduces the notion of ‘contemporary’ play in relation to existing ideas about children’s play, learning and development from a sociocultural perspective. The need to think about the nature of contemporary play is considered in response to arguments suggesting that the quality of children’s play has declined in line with their increased access to digital technologies, digital media and consumer-based products. In this article, the notion of the digital-consumerist context is explored as a way of thinking about how the increased availability of these technologies, media and products has evolved and converged to create a particular site for development which connects with existing understandings about play as a leading activity and the role of mature play in children’s development. Rather than positioning technologies, media and products as causes of deficiencies in children’s play, it is suggested instead that the digital-consumerist context promotes a form of direct cultural participation for young children (0–8 years of age) with the potential for realising multiple ways of participating in a continuum of digital to non-digital experiences. These experiences are framed as a form of cultural connection that aligns with existing sociocultural accounts of play as a process of cultural interpretation. This raises questions regarding the role of contemporary play in the digital-consumerist context, particularly in terms of the relationship between play and development in the early years.