Dramatic Repertoire Research Articles

Poser, Norman S. The Birth of Modern Theatre: Rivalry, Riots, and Romance in the Age of Garrick.

Poser, Norman S. <i>The Birth of Modern Theatre: Rivalry, Riots, and Romance in the Age of Garrick</i>.

Mak Yong: World Heritage Theatre by Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof

Reviewed by: Mak Yong: World Heritage Theatre by Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof Patricia Matusky MAK YONG: WORLD HERITAGE THEATRE. By Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof. Penang, Malaysia: Areca Books Asia Sdn. Bhd., 2019. 9 10 in., 160 pp. Hardcover, US $22.76 (MYR95.00), ISBN: 9789675719356. Richly illustrated with some 130 drawings and photographs of actors, actresses, costuming, staging, and musical instruments, this exceptional book features the traditional Malay dance theatre known as mak yong (also, makyung) as performed in the State of Kelantan throughout the twentieth century (and still today in some limited contexts). The book discusses and illustrates this theatrical genre within a prelude followed by eleven chapters, an appendix comprising synopses of four selected stories from the mak yong dramatic repertory, a select bibliography, and a glossary of terminology. This story of mak yong may be seen from several different perspectives; the author details his introduction to and involvement with the mak yong theatre and focuses on the mak yong as it was known and performed throughout the twentieth century (and most likely earlier). Another perspective of mak yong is as a regional folk theatrical genre given the status of "world heritage" through the UNESCO Proclamation of the "Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity," issued in 2005. The prelude, entitled "Journey into the Heart of Mak Yong," is a reflexive narrative by the author focusing on his introduction to and immersion in the theatrical art of mak yong. The "journey" began in 1969 while watching a performance at the International Conference and Festival on Traditional Drama and Music of Southeast Asia. Ghulam-Sarwar's subsequent involvement with mak yong included his establishment of the first performing arts program (1970) at what [End Page 306] became the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, his contact (1971) with the newly established Kumpulan Seri Temenggung (The Mak Yong Temenggung Troupe) led by the famous performer the late Khatijah Awang, his collaboration with William P. Malm in a mak yong student production (1973) and later (1974–1975) acquisition of audio tracks of Malm's 1968–1969 field video recordings of the twelve main mak yong plays, his field research in Kelantan, and his doctoral dissertation (1976) in the theatre program at the University of Hawai'i. These events document the beginning of dedicated research and documentation of this theatre form that would remain with this scholar throughout his lifetime. The intricacy of mak yong and the deep ritual and spiritual significance of this theatre as entertainment and as an agent of healing is reflected in this book. The author notes that the "climax" of his research was the recording and study of the ritual performance known as berjamu—sembah guru ("feasting—paying homage to one's teacher") by the late Khatijah Awang in the 1970s. This three-night performance, with details of its spiritual aspects, performance structures, and other elements became embedded in the understanding of mak yong for this author, and are noted in detail in chapter 7. Chapter 1 offers a definition of mak yong and ventures into its history and origins, noting this theatre form most likely "predates the fourteenth century arrival of Islam on the Malay Peninsula" (p. 22), with roots in Southern Thailand and the northeast Malay Peninsula, especially the state of Kelantan. The subsequent early chapters relate the main elements of performance, background concepts, and conventions of staging this folk theatrical. The brief discussion on dramatic repertoire informs the twelve basic mak yong tales, but also notes that many other stories are related to other regional theatre forms such as the wayang kulit and Thai Menora dance drama. The subsequent chapter explains the components of the mak yong troupe, the musicians, and the principal role-types. The dance and hand movements are briefly described along with the stage structure, stage properties, costumes, and make-up. The musical repertory is noted along with the basic music ensemble of rebab bowed lute, two gendang double-headed drums, and a pair of tetawak large hanging knobbed gongs. All of these topics are well illustrated with drawings and photographs, most taken by the author during his field research in the 1970s. Conceptual background important to the form is noted; the author...

Court Culture and Pageantry of the ‘Spanish Nation’ in Florence

The organization of Florentine life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, following the marriage of Alexander and Margaret, daughter of Emperor Charles V, and the subsequent union of Cosme and Eleanor of Toledo in 1539, was characterized by a high level of exchange between the Spanish Habsburgs, the imperial line, and the Medici dynasty. This article highlights some emblematic aspects of these relationships, such as the spectacles staged for the weddings of Eleanor, Joanna of Austria and Maria Magdalene respectively, the numerous Spanish comedy actors in Florence and their theatre in the old market, and the participation of the Spanish nobility (the ‘Spanish nation’) in the spectacles at the Medici court. We offer a case study of the family of Don Antonio Ramírez de Montalvo, largely uninvestigated till now, who with his sons was involved in staging public court spectacles. The discovery of an unknown dramatic repertoire of scenes from the Commedia dell’Arte, preserved in an administrative register of the Montalvo estate, not only reinforces the evidence on the presence of Spanish comedy actors in Florence but also opens the hypothesis that the Palazzo Montalvo also housed a theatre and an academic association of high-level performance.

Ukrainian subjects in the theatrical repertoire of Right-Bank Ukraine in the first half of the nineteenth century

The purpose of the article is to detail the repertoire trends of the theatrical life of the Right-Bank Ukraine in the aspect of intercultural dialogue and the clarification of national specificity. The methodology of the Ukrainian theatrical culture of the mentioned period research is the application of the historical-chronological method with the use of a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach, as well as elements of the techniques of the related humanities. It is also appropriate to apply a comparative method, methods of complex analysis and scientific reconstruction, etc. The scientific novelty consists in the systematization of information about the repertoire presented on the stages of Right-Bank Ukraine in the first half of the nineteenth century. His genre composition, living conditions, performing tradition of this period theatrical practice is one of the most important directions of research in the contemporary historiography of Ukrainian musical culture. Particular attention is paid to the place and role of Ukrainian subjects in the prevailing conditions of the Polish and administrative introduction of Russian theatrical traditions. In the context of repertoire trends, information about little-known works. Conclusions. The complexity of the study of the dramatic repertoire of the first half of the XIX century is due to the inaccessibility of texts of a large part of his samples, as well as the practice of creating numerous stage versions of the work – performances adaptations, which often differed significantly from the original. However, even according to available sources, we can conclude that the works of Ukrainian subjects are viral. Subsequent sources of scholarly research in this promising direction will provide much more material in the study of repertoire features that largely determined the faces of Ukrainian theatrical culture of the first half of the nineteenth century and also influenced its further development.

Laboratory, Library, Database: London's Avant-Garde Drama Societies and Ephemeral Repertoire

How did London’s avant-garde drama societies shape the performance repertoire? Dedicated to the discovery of new or sometimes very old plays, these subscription societies were experimental coterie clubs composed of members whose annual fees financed, and secured tickets to, a season of private productions. In 1891, J. T. Grein founded the first such group in Britain, the Independent Theatre Society, in order to stage a performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts, which the Lord Chamberlain had banned from the public stage. Over 140 subscription societies followed; the Stage Society (1899–1939) ran longest and most successfully. This essay begins by quantitatively analyzing a database of over 23,000 London productions from 1890–1959 in order to determine the extent to which subscription societies introduced a modern dramatic repertoire to the public stage, otherwise known as the commercial theater. Then, it argues that subscription societies virtually assembled the very idea of a modern dramatic repertoire using ephemera such as prospectuses, programs, annual reports, and tickets. The methodological aims with respect to the study of repertoire are two-fold: to demonstrate the potentials and limitations of digital databases, and to make a case for integrating them with book history. The essay expands on previous analyses of the relationship between page and stage by articulating the role of ephemera, an under-theorized print genre but one of importance to institutions generally and to theater specifically. It contends that the rise of digital databases further invites us to think about how theatrical collectivity is conditioned by media both new and old.

Un centre international de la traduction théâtrale, pour quoi faire ? Histoire et enjeux de la Maison Antoine Vitez

Maison Antoine Vitez was founded in 1991 as a centre for linguists and people working in the theatre who seek to promote the translation of plays and enable audiences to discover the global dramatic repertoire. Translating plays undoubtedly requires the same skills and art as the translation of poetry and literature, but it also demands constant attention to the realities of staging and acting. The notion of orality is important. The dramaturgy developed by the director and the way that the actors “ convey the text” are intermediate stages between play and audience that must be borne in mind by any translator of plays. Developing an international network of centres of theatre translation would encourage both the circulation of plays, which have traditionally been marginal to networks of book publishing, and the recognition of a profession in which excellence is too often synonymous with invisibility.

A Conversation with Brooke Ciardelli

Brooke Ciardelli was the founding artistic director of Northern Stage, a regional nonprofit theater located on the border of Vermont and New Hampshire, where she directed over sixty productions. Brooke has been honored by the New England Theatre Conference's Moss Hart Awards for Excellence in Theater three times, for All My Sons (2004), Les Miserables (2008), and Hamlet (2009). She directed a staged reading of Arthur Miller's then-unpublished Resurrection Blues with the playwright himself in residence. She has directed Patrick Stewart and Lisa Harrow in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and worked with playwright Sonja Linden on the American Premiere of The Strange Passenger.Ciardelli has also directed regional premieres of Wit, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Pride's Crossing, and No Orchids For Miss Blandish, as well as a significant number of large-scale musicals. As a creator, Ciardelli has adapted a number of classical pieces for the stage including Ovid's Metamorphoses, O Myths, and The Shrew Tamer by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. She is working on a stage adaptation of Boccaccio's Decameron for international production.Ciardelli received the Miller Estate's permission to create and direct a Muslim/Syrian version of A View from the Bridge. The production received its world premiere in a staged reading on Saturday evening, October 17, 2015, at the Arthur Miller Centennial Conference at St. Francis College. This interview took place February 6, 2015.Stephen Marino: Welcome. On behalf of the readership of The Arthur Miller Journal, I would like to thank you for your willingness to be here today to discuss your insight in directing Miller plays, particularly this exciting, new version of A View from the Bridge.I would like to start with your experiences as the founding artistic director at Northern Stage. You certainly cast a wide net in the plays you selected up there. I don't know if eclectic is quite the right word, but you staged classic tragedies from Agamemnon to Macbeth; many other plays are drawn from the twentieth-century dramatic repertoire, and you have done a fair share of musicals. I would like to know how, as an artistic director, you select those plays. Then how does that affect your work as a director working in such a mixture of styles and genres?Brooke Ciardelli: I do plays that I love. What I call great plays. If you are an artistic director, you are hired for your taste, your personal taste. So you have to start there, read the plays, and wow-give this as a present to the audience every night. It's a feeling of when you buy someone a really special birthday gift and it's wrapped up in the box. You know what's in it; you know how much they're going to like it, but they haven't opened it yet. So that's what I want to find in a play. To have that feeling about it. I ran the company for sixteen years and we did between seven and eight shows every year.SM: That is a lot of shows.BC: Yes, that is a lot of shows. They all ran three weeks; some of them ran as long as five. The area where the theater is located is fairly rural with a very large subscriber base. It is only one of four theaters in America that has such a small population density yet produces its own work at this level, which some may argue doesn't work. You don't have quite enough people.SM: So how do the preferences of your rural, but engaged, audience affect your choices?BC: It's a very smart community. My audience base did not grow up in the area. They maybe went to Dartmouth; maybe they wintered and did ski vacations in Vermont. They went out, lived their lives all over the world, and chose to come back and retire. Many of them are fairly young. It meant that they had seen world-class culture offerings and had established levels of expectations. When you deal with a subscriber audience-we had a very large subscriber base-that is very good for a theater. One person buys every show in the beginning of the season so the plays are not reviewed. …

A case of art imitating life in Paul Slabolepszy's angst - ridden Pale Natives (1994)

Pale natives is one of the gems in Slabolepszy’s dramatic repertoire. The play focuses on the surviving clan of white males in South Africa, with South Africa’s imminent changeover of government as a backdrop. With typical machismo, Rabelaisian (Rabelaisian humour refers to vulgar use of bodily (scatological), sexual humour through exaggeration and suspension of disbelief (Walter-Barden, October 6:2010; accessed on 31 May 2012: http://voices.yahoo.com/rabelaisian_humor-7058140.htm) and comic humour, Slabolepszy relates the personal angst of his five forty-plus male characters facing and handling their lives, in a turbulent South Africa. By poignantly combining pathos, satire and comic humour, Slabolepszy enables us to empathise with them. The positive note on which the play ends suggests hope for the future, but this hope is ambiguous. The comic mirror Slabolepszy holds up to his audience ultimately questions the fate of present-day South Africa’s disillusioned “pale natives”. Key words: Comedy, South Africa, imitation.

A Bença: The Blessings of the Bando de Teatro Olodum

This article centers on the major, self-identified Afro-Brazilian theater group in Salvador da Bahia, the Bando de Teatro Olodum. The Bando, it contends, establishes a performative trajectory from which to question and challenge the dominant esthetic signifiers in Brazilian society. It aims to realign the racial and cultural markers that define Africanness and blackness, regenerate affirmative constructs for both signifiers through its dramatic repertoire, and create alternative performative and esthetic forms that draw from the Candomblé religious matrix. The Bando's most recent play, A Bença, is the focus of analysis in its simultaneity as a hyper-visual homage to the elders and a metaphysical treatise on the vagaries of time. A Bença transforms the reality of aging into a surrealistic interpolation of Bantu spiritual conceptualizations of the circularity of time and the interrelation of the human and the ancestral. Ultimately, the Bando and the play transform notions as to what is theater in Brazil.

The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice (review)

Reviewed by: The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice Amy Muse (bio) Judith Pascoe . The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 160. $50.00. Romanticism is famous for its obsession with loss: of unenclosed pastures, wild forests, innocence. Romantics can even feel loss for things they anticipate losing, such as the sound of their greatest actress's voice, which "thrilled the air with melodious tones" (7), transported audiences into the realms of the sublime, and induced swooning in the theater stalls. As Judith Pascoe brings to our attention in The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice, the Romantics were the last generation to live without recording devices. If you weren't around to hear Sarah Siddons in the flesh, you never heard her. And you never will. Thus, from the start, Pascoe's quest to listen to the voice of Sarah Siddons is doomed: how is a scholar to go about studying voice in the age prior to mechanical reproduction? Joining forces with what she dubs the "society of retrospective listeners" (14), an influx of studies attentive to the soundscapes of places and past eras that counter the visual turn in recent Romantic scholarship and in theater history more generally, Pascoe conducts her journey, ill-fated as it must be, with gusto and returns with insights into eighteenth-century dramatic repertoire and acting technique, theater architecture, and theatergoing practices re-examined through sound rather than sight. And, in a valuable reversal of the usual hierarchy of poetry and theater in the Romantic era, she finds that the much-maligned theater shaped Romantic poets' aural aesthetic. Richly informed by archival research and theories of new media supplemented by first-hand experimentation, and written in a lively, first-person voice, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files is a vibrant and sure-to-be-influential work of scholarship. Pascoe, the author of Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Cornell University Press, 1997) and The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Cornell University Press, 2005), had frequently encountered the figure of Sarah Siddons while writing about Romantic-era performativity and cultural obsessions. Yet, she confesses now, she had secretly wondered what all the hype was about. The fawning praise and unabashed adulation of Siddons's admirers seemed out of proportion to the hulking and haughty, if majestic, appearance of the woman in the portraits, until Pascoe began noticing, in the process of reading fans' comments, that it was Siddons's voice that mesmerized them—a voice that is silent to her. Taking a page from the immersion journalism playbook, she enrolls in a "Voice for Actors" class in an attempt to get closer to Siddons's voice by imitating her breathing technique and vocal inflections, and alongside comical discoveries of her own shallow breathing and nasal voice, Pascoe narrates archival findings [End Page 103] about Siddons's voice over the course of her career. The failure of her 1775 debut at Drury Lane, for instance, can be attributed in part to Siddons not having a voice strong enough to fill the house. (The increasing size of theaters throughout her career would be a burden to her and a rare source of complaint from her audiences, as Siddons declared she would not ruin her voice to be heard in the distant galleries of the cavernous new halls.) If she did not naturally possess a powerfully loud voice, she would figure out a way to create a uniquely compelling one. This leads Pascoe to consider the "aural architecture" of theater spaces, considerably changed since then, so that even when we produce plays from the era, we cannot know how the voices in them were experienced: "the kind of reverberation that once gave theaters like Drury Lane distinct acoustic signatures has been reconceived as noise and erased by acoustic materials aimed at stopping sounds from careening around a room and reinforcing a voice with echoey ghost versions of itself" (64). Consider that failed Drury Lane debut again: the role was Portia in The Merchant of Venice, never one of Siddons...

Politics in the context of the “Opera question” in the national theatre before the first world war

Part of the history of the National Theatre in Belgrade in the decade before the First World War relates to processes of discontinuity in the professionalization and modernization of the musical section in this institution and its repertoire. It had to do with abrupt changes reflected in three short-lived phases: improvements in musical ensemble and opera performances (1906-1909), the annulment of these efforts and results with a return to the old repertoire, and then again a new beginning once more with a fresh attempt to establish the Opera (1913-14). These dynamics were affected by the social and political context. It was dependent on frequent changes of the Theatre?s management staff whose main representatives had mutually conflicting views on important questions concerning the functioning of their institution. Relations between them were strongly marked by contested political motives. Theatre managers were appointed by ministers of education who could also be relieved of their posts, and members of the management staff were always active in political parties. These facts acted as a decisive factor in their communication which was similar to the behaviour and customs of public political life where an opponent is seen as an enemy, not as a partner in solving common problems. Critical and polemical discourses on important aspects of organization and programme strategy of the Theatre were burdened by political rivalry which also found its place in discussions on the cultivation of music. Questions relating to music were considered in a declarative way, so that music was instrumentalized as a means of political empowerment. The facts about music in the National Theatre raise many issues related to aspects of modernization, national identification, transfers of ?high? and popular musical cultures as well as to other problems of social, historical and cultural contexts that were intertwined in the operation of the Theatre. The context of political problems in the National Theatre opens some important topics discussed in the text: the discontinuous process of the development of the musical ensemble and its repertoire in conditions of changing management staff; prominent musical professionals and ideologists of cultural life and their relations to the musical and dramatic repertoire as well as to their audiences; potential Belgrade audience reception and their reactions to the musical and dramatic repertoire of the National Theatre. An integral analysis of these may show inconsistency between ideological and artistic intentions of individuals and the needs of the audience during the course of modernization.

Of Africa and things African (in Canada)

Africa and things African only rarely show up on stages in other parts of the world. Take the plays of Athol Fugard away from the African dramatic repertoire abroad and precious few African scripts can be found that manage to get themselves productions anywhere. Occasionally one will find a Femi Osofisan play put on in the US or England or Germany. And occasionally one will find a new play by, say, a Congolese writer like Sony Labou Tansi put on in France. Even the Nobel Prizewinning dramatist Wole Soyinka is more revered than produced these days. Which makes the fact that four African-based productions done in a single season in a single city outside of Africa is an occasion worth celebrating, and worth reporting to those with an interest in such intercultural exchange.

Theatre in the Combat Zone: The Military Theatricals at Philadelphia, 1778

AbstractThis paper will consider the connections between different types of theatre and theatricality under conditions of war in Philadelphia in 1778 during the British occupation. The ethical cleansing of the title refers to the Mischianza, the giant medieval tournament and naval regatta on the Delaware organized by the British on the eve of their departure in May 1778. Staged theatre, improvised by the personnel of both sides with army and navy soldiers performing texts from the regular British 18th-century dramatic repertoire, was also a feature common both to the winter encampment in Valley Forge and to the British in their conventional theatre in Philadelphia. The Mischianza was an extension of these types of theatricals. What I will be arguing is that a study of the connections between theatre, performance and theatricality allows us to model the disparate forces at work in a society experiencing the irreversible social and political changes of war. The kinds of theatrical modelling I am suggesting will attempt to describe a distributed, dialogic, set of performance inscriptions out of which Philadelphia emerged as an urban space in the post-colonial phase. In short, both the theatricals on both sides, the Mischianza included, were attempts at territorializing space, inscribing ownership, allegiance and cultural value through the repetition of performance. The most promising theoretical model for analyzing these complex cultural interactions arises from the synthesizing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Manuel DeLanda in A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity.

Selective loss of dominant low affinity CD4 T cells during memory differentiation (85.6)

Abstract Antigen-specific memory T cells are crucial for conveying protection against pathogens upon vaccination. The evolution of the CD4 memory T cell repertoire is not fully understood. We analyzed CD4 memory T cell differentiation of a diverse, private and broad affinity CD4 T cell repertoire that developed in draining lymph nodes of mice 7 days after immunization with moth cytochrome c peptide (MCC88-103) in MPL-based adjuvant. 30 days after primary immunization we found a dramatic remodeling of the repertoire. The initially diverse repertoire evolved into a focused and public repertoire expressing high affinity T cell receptors. Importantly, 30 days after primary immunization we observed a selective loss of one particular low affinity clonotype that dominated the primary response at day 7. Absence of this clonotype in draining lymph nodes was not due to recirculation through the animal, since we could not detect this clonotype after re-challenge of mice with the peptide 30 days after primary immunization. Additionally, when we immunized mice with yet another peptide of high peptide-MHCII stability we observed a dramatic repertoire focusing towards high affinity clonotypes to the same extent as in MCC88-103 immunized mice. Thus, after primary immunization only public, high affinity CD4 T cells differentiate into memory CD4 T cells.

Dionysus: The Victorian Outcast

185 Dionysus:TheVictorian Outcast J. Mich a el Wa lton • The plays of a period offer one of the best guides to the tastes, mores, and preoccupations of their time.The Victorian theatre in England may have been a vibrant source of entertainment for all classes, but, until its latter years, it was not especially distinguished for its dramatic repertoire of original plays or European imports.The nineteenth century did prove a hugely fruitful period for translation of the classics of the Greek theatre—comfortably over two hundred separate publications from the tragedies alone—but virtually none had any prospect of production or, indeed, much awareness of the performance imperative of the original Greek texts. In the light of such a bias toward the drama as literature, it should not be surprising to find marginalized the god Dionysus’s Athenian function as god of the theatre. It is that function that I wish to revisit here, initially by considering some of the history of the plays’ translation and then by concentrating on the one Greek tragedy in which Dionysus features as a central character, Euripides’ Bacchae. During the nineteenth century, particular Greek tragedies became increasingly popular in print—a popularity that owed nothing to their performance potential. Until the arrival of the Potsdam Antigone (in English translation, with music by Mendelssohn) at Covent Garden in January 1845, there had been only a single “direct” translation of a Greek tragedy on the English professional stage, as opposed to original dramas invoking a classical source. That direct translation, Richard West’s Euripides’ Hecuba, was performed at Drury Lane in 1726. “I foresaw there would be some Difficulty in making it agreeable in its original Purity, to the taste of an English Audience,” stated West in his introduction to the printed version. How right he was, with the curtain coming down prematurely as a result of “a Rout of Vandals in the Galleries” (West iv).This is not to suggest any lack of interest in classical themes within the English theatre from the Restoration onward, details of which have been thoroughly catalogued by Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh (2006), but, asWest anticipated, it was to be a long time before any taste was cultivated among English audiences for actual translations from the Greek. In contrast, the early history of published translation of the classical repertoire boasts a strong pedigree for the complete tragedies, from Sophocles (Adams 1729), Aeschylus (Potter 1777), and Euripides (Potter again, exclud- victorian review • Volume 34 Number 2 186 ing Cyclops, 1781 and 1783, andWodhull 1782), all complementing numbers of single translations that reach back as far as the mid-sixteenth century, with Lady Jane Lumley’s TheTragedie of Euripides called Iphigeneia translated out of Greake into Englisshe.The then-known canon (the first complete Menander dates from as recently as 1957) was not completed until 1837, when publication of Charles Wheelwright’s The Comedies ofAristophanes coincided, surely serendipitously, with Victoria’s accession to the throne.To describe these two volumes as the“completeAristophanes ,” however, is to ignore the fact thatWheelwright was decidedly uncomfortable with much of the material, as had been more eclectic earlier translators or adapters of individual plays.Wheelwright’s Lysistrata resorts to lines of asterisks to mark, in the name of decency, expurgated passages of up to twenty-five and thirty lines.At line 883 in his version (his line numberings overrun the original Greek), he can stomach the naughty bits no longer and simply announces,“Omitted from line 828–1215” (original numbering).This is approaching a third of the entire play, though such bowdlerization is hardly surprising for 1837, bearing in mind that the main scene in this missing section occurs between Myrrhine and her husband and revolves in graphic detail around his sexual frustration. During the years of Victoria’s reign, translation of the classical tragedians took off. Between 1837 and 1901, there were at least twenty-six new Agamemnons with which to compare “The Browning Version” of 1877.1 The same period saw almost as many new translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and of Euripides’ Alcestis. The most popular plays were those that have always been regarded as the plums of classical drama...

Stage directions: Valuable clues in the exploration of Elizabethan performance practice

There is no clear consensus regarding the importance of early modern stage directions in the writing, reading, or, arguably more importantly, the acting of sixteenth-century plays. It is an area of study that has been dominated, well into the twentieth-century, by literary critics of drama. As a result, the stage directions in this early drama have been (and, it may be argued, still are) treated as sub-literary, often beneath notice or remark. But no theatrically minded critic can ignore the importance of these stage directions to the actual staging of a play. The significance of these stage directions is that they date from an early, no-holds-barred stage in the development of the English dramatic repertoire, and the plays of the often overlooked ‘Jack of all trades’ Robert Greene (1558–1592) provide us with a rich and provocative source. Although Greene was, in many ways, a highly sophisticated Renaissance writer, he was, in other ways, a ‘primitive’ (just as Marlowe was), because he was writing for a theatre that had not yet learned to smooth its rough edges. Greene's ‘texts’ provide an extreme example of the textual instability of much surviving early modern drama. The plays I treat are indisputably ‘early’ in the evolution of Elizabethan drama, and that is important here. They offer a provocative insight into Elizabethan stage practices during the formative years of the newly professional theatre. Greene was writing drama before the professional theatre had learned its limitations, and while it was establishing its conventions. This gives Greene's published texts a special value: conventions were still being formed, rather than, as was largely the case when Shakespeare's plays came to be published, and wholly by the seventeenth century, fully established.

Michel Ouellette, Stitch by Stitch: Introduction

This collection of articles results from a session on Franco-Ontarian literature that Patrick Leroux and I organized inMay 2005 at the University ofWestern Ontario and that was presented during a conference held under the auspices of the Association for Québec and Canadian Literatures and the Association for Theatre Research in Canada. What was striking about this panel was that all the papers that were presented, covering the drama of Michel Ouellette, examined his play Le testament du couturier with particular insistence. It seemed to me that this play marked a turning point in the elaboration of a Franco-Ontarian dramatic repertoire and this collection of articles is published in order to underline its significance.Viewed in this light, the three articles and the self-critical analysis that follow constitute a kaleidoscope of readings that centre upon this play.

JEU, #70 mars 1994, Prornethée Enchaîné, Carta de Ajuste ou Nous N’Avons Plus Besoin de Calendrier, Original Soundtracks of Theatrical Performances

Over the past decade, translations of plays by Michel Tremblay and Robert Lepage have given Québécois theatre a firm international foothold. The Guid Sisters(the Scots translation of Tremblay’s Les Belles Soeurs) earned critical praise at the Edinburgh Festival (1987); equally enthusiastic reviews supported Lepage’s Dragon Trilogy at the Los Angeles Theatre Festival (1990) and his Needles and Opium at the Chicago International Theatre Festival (1994). As the renown of this identity-conscious region’s dramatic repertoire has grown abroad, Quebec’s theatres have been producing plays by overseas authors and artists from Quebec’s international and immigrant communities. The recent Festival de Theatre des Ameriques brought theatre professionals from five continents to Montreal. Far from abdicating its noteworthy support for homegrown dramatic talent, Quebec’s theatre community is striving to nurture its own as it evolves towards new ethnic and global crossroads.

Collaborators

In 1985 I wrote an article for this journal entitled “Why We Don’t Write” in which I looked at some of the reasons for the underrepresentation of women’s work in the dramatic repertoire. The situation has not changed a great deal in this country since I wrote the article; it has, if anything, worsened, although a few women have achieved prominence, and their plays are widely produced, thus swelling the percentages of productions in what would, otherwise, be a very dismal scene. At a recent meeting of the Women’s Caucus of the Playwrights’ Union, it was decided to take yet another survey of the situation across the country, in the hope that the figures might give ammunition to begin to redress the balance. Statistics didn’t help much in 1983 when Rina Fraticelli produced her report on the status of women in Canadian theatre, and we were doubtful that they would help now; however, those present at the meeting were at a loss to know what more they could do. This led me to think that we really don’t have an understanding of the dynamics of present-day theatre in Canada. All the women present agreed that they were writing plays and feeling frustrated that they were not produced; or, if they were, that they rarely generate more than one production. None of us was able to come up with an analysis of exactly what is going wrong. Is it that audiences are not interested? There’s no evidence that women’s plays are less well attended than those written by men. Is it quality, as the artistic directors contend? We’ve heard the argument that quality is the eye of the arbiter, and that when men are the arbiters, they bring their own values and prejudices to deciding what measures up. While this is certainly true, I want to play devil’s advocate and suggest that the men may be right; perhaps women’s plays are qualitatively not as good as those written by men. If this is the case, what is the reason?

The Marginalization of the Canadian Popular Theatre Alliance in the Discourse of Canadian Theatre History

The discourse of Canadian theatre history assigns priority and value in terms of the evolution of the theatrical profession and the dramatic repertoire. The example of the Canadian Popular Theatre Alliance suggests that alternative models which repudiate the ideological terms of that course are disallowed as insignificant.