London Theatre Research Articles

Bernard Shaw and William Archer ed. by Thomas Postlewait

Reviewed by: Bernard Shaw and William Archer ed. by Thomas Postlewait Matthew Yde BERNARD SHAW AND WILLIAM ARCHER. Edited by Thomas Postlewait. Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017; pp. 552. Few professional relationships offer such a panoramic view of the emerging modern theatre as that of playwright Bernard Shaw and critic William Archer, as seen through their longstanding epistolary correspondence. Of course, to identify their two professions in this way is imprecise, as Shaw was himself one of the greatest critics of modern theatre and drama, only retiring from professional criticism in 1898 after the publication of his first seven plays concurrently in two volumes, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. And while it might be reasonably argued that Archer was the most important theatre and drama critic writing in the English language between 1880 and 1920, he ended his life as a successful playwright. Theatre historian Thomas Postlewait has spent decades hunting down the letters of the famous pair, never quite satisfied that there were not more letters to be found. The volume consists of 181 epistles, mostly from Shaw to Archer, and spans from January 6, 1885 to December 17, 1924, just ten days before Archer died. Although some of the letters have appeared elsewhere, many are being published here (unabridged) for the first time. Of particular note is one letter that Postlewait discovered, finding it enclosed in one of Archer's censorship-article scrapbooks in the now-shuttered British Theatre Association in London. The copy that he made of that letter—published in this volume—remains the only record of this missive, as the original somehow disappeared when Archer's archives were moved (83). More generally, Postlewait suggests that many of Archer's responses to Shaw are simply lost, most likely destroyed during World War II. What makes this book so compellingly readable, despite the gaps created by the lost letters, is Postlewait's extraordinary scholarship. He provides extensive headnotes, which "supply the immediate context and the connecting narrative for each letter." He also follows each letter with a comprehensive endnote, identifying "people, references, allusions, and quotations that Shaw and Archer mentioned in their letters" (lxxxiii). Rarely have headnotes and endnotes been so pleasurable to read and so enormously helpful. They complement the letters brilliantly, especially because Postlewait provides excerpts from the reviews, essays, and books by the two authors that fill in lacunae. He began his career with Prophet of the New Drama: William Archer and the Ibsen Campaign (1986), an important book, and Bernard Shaw and William Archer is a significant extension of that work. [End Page 426] In his lengthy introduction, Postlewait identifies "six major fronts" where the two men "battled for the birth, development, and fulfillment of the modern theatre: the new drama, the new theatre, the new criticism, the establishment of a national theatre, the revitalization of Shakespearean theatre, and the opposition to stage censorship" (xii). All of these topics are discussed in the letters, most of them at great length. For instance, Archer and Shaw were both deeply involved in the efforts to establish a national theatre in London during the early part of the twentieth century, Archer starting the Theatrical Reform Committee in 1902 and then composing, with Harley Granville Barker, A National Theatre: Schemes and Estimates in 1907. This was a decades-long conversation, turning eventually into an argument when the national theatre scheme transformed into a national Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. In fact, their discussions on Shakespeare make for some of the most interesting reading in the book, as Archer and Shaw frequently debate such issues as staging and cutting Shakespeare's plays; Shaw contended, for instance, that William Poel's spare and supposedly uncut productions with the Elizabethan Stage Society were the perfect model for Shakespearean production, while Postlewait notes that such "praise must have made Archer see red because he was a relentless critic of Poel's productions" (336). Both Shaw and Archer were fervent supporters of Ibsen and the new theatre (both are discussed frequently), but the two men differed throughout their forty-year correspondence on the topic of dramatic construction, which is a source of constant contention in...

“For the Sake of Fullness of Music in the Choir”—Performance Practice and the Double Bass at the Kroměříž Court

Most modern soloists have by now widely accepted the premise that surviving music notation from the baroque period does not tell us all we need to know in order to realize a historically informed performance. This same basic understanding has not been extended to the use of bowed bass instruments in basso continuo. Too often, when performers encounter a bowed bass part, they assume that the instrument specified (if they are so lucky as to have such a specification) must be capable of playing all of the notes on the page. Using source materials from the period, I will argue that this was not the case. Using central European and English sources between c.1670 and 1715, I argue that bowed basses at 16-foot pitch were being used to reinforce tutti passages as early as the 1670s, but that their presence was, in part, determined by the size of the ensemble and the size of the venue. In urging a reconsideration of how we conceive of the roles of basses at 16-foot pitch, I will also use the earliest surviving English “double bass” part to make a case for the use of the double bass in recitative in London theaters in the first decades of the eighteenth century.

'I knew him in Padua’: London theatre and early modern constructions of erudition.

This paper examines one aspect of the two-way cultural traffic between London and Padua: how the city of Padua figured in debates about the nature of masculinity in early modern London, especially its theatres. Invariably known primarily for its university—noted by Coryat and Moryson, a tourist attraction for Chaucer, Sidney, and Milton—the name “Padua” became synonymous with “erudition.” While learnedness was in theory a positive quality, the place of learnedness in a declining honor culture and its complex role in constituting masculinity remained a contentious subject. English writers by turns envied or scorned the learning acquired in Italy, and invocations of Padua and its link to rapier fencing resulted in a series of contradictory figures in the drama of Shakespeare and Webster: doctors, pedants, enlightened philosophers, lovers, murderers for hire.

Performing Urban Violence: Protest Theatre and (Semi-)Public Space in London and Cape Town

This article offers an account of two case studies of theatrical performance from London and Cape Town, both of which raise and interrogate the inter-related concepts of protest theatre and public space. A production of Tunde Euba’s play Brothers, by the Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theater (GLYPT) in London (2013/14), and the contemporaneous theatrical work and awareness-raising campaigns of the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) in Cape Town, both use theatrical performance to question, diagnose and protest multiple forms of violence perpetrated against marginalized urban populations, often at the hands of the state. In twenty-first-century neoliberal cities such as London and Cape Town, government and private forces collude to privatize their once public spaces, thus encroaching upon—if not entirely disappearing—venues that might be used for protesting against such forms of violence (see Garrett).i Meanwhile, those public spaces that do remain are, in the ongoing era of the “War on Terror,” increasingly subject to militarized policing strategies that place increased restrictions on large assemblies and free movement within cities, “particularly for members of darker-skinned groups” (Marcuse 264).

“Some Account of an Extraordinary Traveller”: Using Virtual Tours to Access Remote Heritage Sites of Inuit Cultural Knowledge

The use of panoramic images to transport viewers to remote geographic locations can be traced back to the panorama theatres of nineteenth-century Victorian London. More recently, Google’s World Wonders Project has utilized 360-degree panospheres to capture some of the world’s most famous heritage sites. Using arrows that demarcate a defined path of movement, users can virtually tour these sites by “jumping” from one panosphere to the next. Arvia’juaq National Historic site is located near the community of Arviat. Although the heritage value of the site is highly significant, Arvia’juaq sees few national and international visitors because of its remote location. For a variety of reasons, some local Inuit also find it difficult to regularly visit the site even though it is an important source of cultural identity. In this paper, we explore how panospheres can be used to create interactive virtual tours of heritage sites like Arvia’juaq. Although there are some caveats, we argue that virtual reality (VR) tours are potentially powerful tools for connecting people to heritage sites that might otherwise be inaccessible. This has important implications for raising awareness of polar heritage and its significance to Indigenous people, as well as national and international audiences.

Feeling in Counterpoint: A Playlist

Feeling in Counterpoint:A Playlist Broderick D. V. Chow The essay that this piece accompanies, which appears in the September 2018 issue of Theatre Journal 70, had a long and difficult journey to publication. It began as an invitation in 2015 to present work-in-progress research at the London Theatre Seminar. The invitation coincided with a contemporaneous obsession I had with a particular mode of Philippine digital-cultural production: basically, Filipinos performing American pop music and doing it really, really well. I did not know how to theorize what I was seeing, but I loved watching these videos. Ever the Icarus, I jumped at the invitation to submit this work to Theatre Journal. That 2015 talk was a mess. I leaned heavily on a body of Philippine theatre scholarship that was (at the time) totally unfamiliar to me and I threw everything in a paper about three YouTube videos. I tried to write a "grand theory" of Filipino performativity. With hindsight, my scholarly overreach had something to do with my complex feelings about being a Chinese-Filipino-Canadian academic in the historically white space of the academy. As an Asian person, I felt a strong desire to avoid being marginalized by the disciplinary labels of "ethnic studies" or "area studies"; but I also felt a responsibility to tell our stories, which raised more difficult feelings of guilt, shame, and being an imposter. Who am I to tell our stories? We are not supposed to talk about feelings in our research. Donatella Galella, in her article "Feeling Yellow," writes that "[w]hen I first began grappling critically with my emotional responses to musicals, I hesitated to narrate my experiences because I had been conditioned to think that theorizing my feelings did not constitute legitimate scholarship."1 But Galella's feelings turn out to be the very archive upon which she is able to launch a critique of the racist practice of yellowface. Similarly, in composing my essay, it is the complex feelings around race, diaspora, and authenticity that accompany my writing about the Philippines that I turn into performance theory. In the essay, I theorize what I call "feeling in counterpoint." The concept draws on Edward Said's idea of "contrapuntal reading,"2 which comes from music theory—two melodic lines moving in different directions at the same time—and that posits the necessity to analyze texts from the points of view both of the colonizer and the colonized. Feeling in counterpoint is spectatorship that describes the multidirectionality of "feelings" (by which I mean both affect, which I interpret as bodily response, and emotion, which is socially recognized), history, coloniality, and migration. It is about identifying a colonial and racialized formation—for example, what it means to call something a "Filipino performance"—but also showing how that formation is moving and dynamic. [End Page E-7] I apply this spectatorial lens to several performances of what has, in previous scholarship, been called Filipino "mimicry"—performances where Filipinos are perceived to perform like Westerners.3 The content of these performances (American pop songs and musical theatre) did not suggest anything Filipino, and yet they felt, to me at least, deeply Filipino. The performance went beyond mimicry—a term that suggested a oneway direction of colonial influence. And these performances resonated with me, as a diasporic Filipino person, in a way that I could not put my finger on. I could analyze them in materialist terms, in political terms, their place in a digital economy, and their relation to the Philippines' neocolonial relation to the United States. What I could not rationalize was how they made me feel. Thus feeling in counterpoint became a way to hold in mind both the historical, political, and material contexts and the feelings that the performance provoked; it was a way to listen for the lived experiences that often resist incorporation into a larger historical interpretation or narrative. Or, perhaps feeling in counterpoint was also a way of coming to terms with my own "bad objects"—those cultural objects we are attracted to but feel conflicted about.4 After all, these performances are meant to be evidence of a "colonial mentality"—the internalized oppression that Filipinos...

“Gallia and Gaul, French and Welsh” (MWW, 3.1.89): Transposing Shakespeare’s ‘Favourite’ Foreign Accents into French

The Merry Wives of Windsor has long been compared to a great babel of languages. The play contains a smattering of Spanish, Italian and Dutch and even a whole scene dedicated to the mistranslation of Latin. A large part of the play’s humour also heavily relies on the foreign accents of two characters: the French Doctor Caius and the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans. If Christopher Luscombe’s 2008/2010 production of The Merry Wives at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London bears testimony to the success of cross-language and accent-based comedy as a source of laughter on today’s English stage, it seems rather implausible, at first sight, that French translations, adaptations and stagings of these accents and linguistic idiosyncrasies should be greeted with the same degree of hilarity. Indeed, how should the Welsh and French accents, both representing real stumbling blocks for French-speaking translators of the play, be transposed into French? What translation strategies can the latter devise? And to what extent can some of those strategies be said to be politically correct? Focusing on Shakespeare’s ‘favorite’ (predominant) accents and the significance and impact of such linguistic comedy, I shall examine the question of their problematic translation through the analysis and comparison of a number of translations and stagings of The Merry Wives of Windsor into French.

Conscious artistic translanguaging onstage

AbstractThis article is drawn from field observations of deaf-led Deafinitely Theatre as they producedThe DREAMfor Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. Focusing on a goal of the company to ‘put BSL [British Sign Language] centre stage’, I examine the ways that different languages and modes (including signs, speech, gestures, text, music) co-existed in the same space in spontaneous, unexpected, and hybridised ways. I suggest that the carefully chosen arrangements of the languages employed in the production exerted particular messages that went beyond BSL translations of Shakespeare, establishing clear articulations of the artists’ understandings of the positions that signed and spoken languages hold in day-to-day British life. The aim of this article is to disentangle the translingual, multimodal imperatives born within ‘deaf-led’ theatre, where deaf people and sign language are maintained as key grounding forces. Of interest is both language choices utilised in praxis, as well as how these decisions prompted debates between signers and non-signers, triggering reconsideration of preconceived notions of what ‘being deaf’ means. In re-presenting for an audience different people’s translingual and multimodal resources and experiences, I argue that these artists intentionally harnessed a form of conscious translanguaging to advance both practical and political outcomes.

Bus journeys, sandwiches and play: young children and the theatre event

ABSTRACTTheatre for Early Years (TEY) audiences is a relatively new and growing area of practice. This article arises from empirical research with a group of children aged three and four, who made repeat visits to watch TEY performances at Polka Theatre in London. Drawing on literature from education studies, theatre studies and cultural geography, this article explores the pedagogy of TEY beyond the performance in isolation. By reflecting on our journeys to and activities at the theatre, I propose a contextually embedded understanding of the wider TEY event, as well as some of the ways that researchers and educators might seek to better comprehend or enhance this.

“Shakspeare, s’avançant”: A Bard, the Nineteenth Century and a Tale of Two Cities’ Theatres

ABSTRACTWhile much scholarship of the nineteenth century has been justly devoted to the Romantic veneration for Shakespeare, the elaborate stagings of his works and the professionalisation of Shakespeare studies during the course of the period, this article focuses upon Shakespeare himself onstage in the theatres of London and Paris. Many theatrical productions in both capitals offered scenes of characters reading, reciting and paraphrasing Shakespearean texts in dramatic, comic and/or burlesque settings; however, a number offered the figure of the dramatist amongst the dramatis personae. Often drawing inspiration from Alexandre Duval’s Shakespeare Amoureux (1804), both French and English dramatists exploited the rising cultural capital of the Renaissance dramatist to have him directly intervene in dramatic intrigues and sometimes to assume the role of protagonist. This discussion will focus upon some of the ways in which Shakespeare was called upon to tread the boards of Parisian and London theatrical and musical stages in the period c. 1830–1870.

La drammaturgia della partecipazione nel mondo digitale

The essay discusses the new book of Andy Lavender (Performance in the Twenty-first Century: Theatres of Engagement, Routledge, London & New York 2016) and focuses on the new perspective it opens on the contemporary theatre after the postmodernism and the postdramatic. In particularly it compares the notion of theatre engagement with the contemporary digital culture and entertainment. A brief consideration about methodology of interdisciplinarity concludes the article.

The ‘Cumberbatch’ Hamlet (1)

This essay reads Lyndsey Turner’s 2015 Hamlet at the Barbican Theatre in London against the production’s priorities, namely, being star, new audience and box office driven. It explores the negotiation of the script, space and politics at the heart of this production. Giving its due when discussing the cinematic employment of cuts, editing, lighting and freeze frames, it acknowledges that some of the special effects were lost to the theatre spectator, per force cast in a secondary role in a production that prioritized live-streaming across the world.

British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick

British Drama of the Industrial Revolution by Frederick Burwick Victor Emeljanow British Drama of the Industrial Revolution. By Frederick Burwick. Cambridge UP, 2015. Cloth $99.99. 320 pages. It is perhaps no coincidence that the term "melodrama" began its groundbreaking journey toward cultural and theatrical significance during the throes of the Vietnam War, which contributed to making the boundaries between high and low art irrelevant just as much as the emergence of the postmodern condition. As long ago as 1964, Michael Booth, Brooks McNamara, and Eric Bentley were some of the critics and theatre historians responsible for bringing to our attention the rich [End Page 130] values of popular entertainments among which melodrama proved to be an enduring dramatic genre. Since then critical works have proliferated exponentially, starting with examinations of the content of melodrama and its various manifestations to a status in which theatre historiography has recognized the conditions which gave rise to melodrama and, more importantly, the social and cultural seedbed out of which it sprang and which the genre never forgot. It is in this context that Frederick Burwick's recent book should be placed: it both reinforces the contemporary scholarly interest in melodrama as social documentation, and positions the form as a demonstration whereby the conditions of living could be made immediately accessible to both metropolitan and provincial spectators. Those conditions were of course inextricably tied to the consequences of the Industrial Revolution between 1780 and 1840 in particular. Jane Moody's volume, Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770-1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Burwick's Playing to the Crowd: London Popular Theatre 1780-1830 (Palgrave, 2011) both focus on theatres in London, the magnet city that drew those who had been deracinated by the turmoil of industrial change in the British provinces during the period under discussion. Burwick's new book, however, charts a journey that starts in London as players joined provincial theatre companies to perform plays with which they had become identified in the metropolis. As well, that journey enabled theatre practitioners to select their vehicles, which they regarded as appropriate for the particular venues and towns where they toured. In so doing, they were able to support the need for solidarity by performing plays that might reflect the immediate concerns of their audiences, whether they comprised out-of-work handloom weavers (who were part of the cotton, wool, or carpet industries), steel workers, miners, or even the tradesmen and members of the Friendly Societies who sponsored individual performances. Burwick's contention is that "the meaning of a play changes with every change in the performance location" (10), which reflects the protean nature of melodrama and its progeny and is one of this book's most valuable contributions to the discourses around genre, theatre venues, and the composition of audiences during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Burwick compellingly develops the theme that London's illegitimate theatre became the "dramatic newsreel of the modern metropolis" by re-emphasizing the significance of "the theatre as an agency of reform directly involved with the labour movement" (7, 16). Such comments affirm the immediacy of a changing theatre culture that mirrored the struggle for political reform and social stability, both of which would elude most of the population throughout the period. Nevertheless, Burwick clearly illustrates the role of the theatre in the period as providing a dynamic and influential forum that gained its strength and relevance in tandem with the growing demand for social reform. This demonstration of the theatre's close engagement with the concerns of its audiences is very welcome. Burwick's book does this with great skill. He identifies some of the key documents that recur as their lifespan was being extended by the numerous revivals in the provinces. For example, Samuel Foote's The Mayor of Garratt, or, The Election was first performed at the Haymarket theatre in 1763, [End Page 131] but the elements of political satire kept it very much alive in provincial centers such as Huddersfield (1826) and Belfast (1837), among others. James Sheridan Knowles's The Hunchback, depicting the faults of the aristocracy, was originally produced at Covent Garden in 1832, just as the 1832 Reform Bill...

“The forms of things unknown”: Shakespeare and the Rise of the Live Broadcast

“The forms of things unknown”:Shakespeare and the Rise of the Live Broadcast Erin Sullivan “This has never happened before. The immediacy, the sense of being there, is unlike any experience you have ever known. This is the theatre of the future, taking shape before your eyes today.” —Richard Burton, promotional trailer for his “Electronovision” Hamlet, 1964 What is theater, if not the experience of “being there?” Of sharing the same space as the actors, of merging oneself into an audience, of enacting the rights of ritual? Such performance, Peggy Phelan has famously argued, “occurs over a time which will not be repeated” (146). It is fundamentally about what is happening now, right here, so much so that we might even say that it becomes a verb: theater is an act of doing, and we are part of it. But what happens when the very notion of “being there” starts to shift, when it is possible to stay in one place and yet move from here to the theater and back again with the push of a button or the tap of a screen? Are we there, and is what we’re doing still theater, or are we experiencing something so different that the form itself begins to rupture, producing what can only be thought of as new performances and “new texts” (Parsons 101)?1 Such questions have taken on new urgency in recent years with the rapid rise in theater broadcasting worldwide. Since 2009, the National Theatre in London has beamed a selection of its season to cinema audiences across the globe, resulting in what can only be thought of as a paradigm shift in theatergoing practices. Thousands of people still flock to the Southbank every month to see an NT production live and in person, but at least as many head to movie theaters around the world to [End Page 627] experience the NT’s offerings closer to home. The very first NT Live broadcast—a June 2009 performance of Nicholas Hytner’s Phèdre, starring Helen Mirren—attracted a global cinema audience of more than fifty thousand people, roughly equivalent to the total in-house audience for the production’s entire three-month run (Bakhshi and Throsby 2).2 More recently, Lyndsey Turner’s blockbuster Hamlet at the Barbican, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, not only became the fastest-selling theater production in London history but also set a new record for global cinema viewing, with more than 225,000 people in twenty-five countries seeing it broadcast in October 2015 (Hawkes). In the UK alone, it was shown in 87% of cinemas, generating national ticket sales of £2.93m by the end of the year. By way of comparison, Justin Kurzel’s feature film of Macbeth, released in the UK in the same month and starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, brought in £2.82m during that time (Gardner, “Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet”; Hutchinson, “Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet”). The picture that is emerging, then, is one of steady and even rapid growth, with the development of live broadcasting affecting not just the surrounding theater ecology but potentially the cinematic landscape, too. From seventy cinemas in the UK in 2009 to two thousand worldwide by 2017, the NT Live franchise has swiftly expanded and inspired further broadcasting programs from other major theaters (Rosenthal 793; “Key Facts”). These include Shakespeare’s Globe in 2010, the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2013, and the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival and the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company (KBTC) in 2015, not to mention the growing number of smaller companies that are experimenting with online broadcasting, such as Cheek by Jowl, Complicite, and Talawa.3 Such initiatives have provoked spirited debate among theater critics, practitioners, and audience members, many of whom have questioned whether such relays can really count as theater, but sustained academic investigation into the nature and impact of live broadcasting is still in its infancy.4 Martin Barker has emphasized the importance of audience research to the field and outlined key questions for the event cinema industry as a whole, while John Wyver has mapped the early history of theater broadcasting in the UK and offered invaluable insights into the technical craft behind twenty...

The Aims and Genre of Colley Cibber's Apology (1740)

An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian, has almost always been viewed as a conceited and vainglorious self-celebration of the prominent, highly successful, and much-hated actor, playwright, and manager (1671–1757). It has been variously read as a confessional baring of his soul, denounced for failing to reflect Cibber's "inner life," treated as a "fabrication of a role" (with much difference of opinion as to what that role is), and praised for its contribution to our knowledge of theater personnel and management in Cibber's time. The book actually tells us little about Cibber. By my count, of the 592 pages in the standard Lowe edition (1889) only 17% are "personal" and 83% "impersonal," and I classify only 30 pages (5%) as strictly biographical. About two-thirds of the "personal" material occurs in the first three chapters (of sixteen total). The subtitle, suppressed in modern editions, is a truer indication of the point of the enterprise: With an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time. Regarded analytically, what seems chatty and wandering is actually a carefully organized account of theater in London from 1690 to 1734, with detailed commentary on principal performers, discussion of good and bad management, and assessment of regulatory issues—a radically original enterprise unprecedented in English. In the generic terms of the time, it is part "secret history" and part "history with a design." Cibber believes in the cultural importance of theater, and in its potential force for moral good. He documents the rising social and economic status of actors and presents a case for "Good Practice" in management and regulation. Why then open with outrageously provocative flaunting of his pseudo-Foppingtonian self? I suggest that Cibber knew the book would be attacked by Fielding, Pope, and a host of others. So he created a diversionary target which duly got savaged from all sides. The history that was his real point turns out to be remarkably accurate insofar as it is checkable. The Apology is nothing like an autobiography in the modern sense, but it is a work of something like genius that makes a huge contribution to our knowledge of theater and performers in Cibber's time.

Greek Tragedy and the Celtic Tiger: The Politics of Literary Allusion in Marina Carr's Ariel

Greek Tragedy and the Celtic Tiger: The Politics of Literary Allusion in Marina Carr’s Ariel ISABELLE TORRANCE ARIEL, a play by contemporary Irish playwright Marina Carr, premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in October 2002, in a production directed by Conall Morrison, during the Dublin Theatre Festival. It is one of a number of plays written by Carr that are inspired by Greek tragedy, the most famous of which is her earlier By the Bog of Cats . . . , loosely based on Euripides’ Medea. First produced in 1998, By the Bog of Cats . . . went on to become a major international success, with productions starring Academy Award Winner Holly Hunter at the San Jose Repertory Theatre in 2001 and at Wyndhams Theatre in London during the winter season of 2004–2005. The play has now been translated into several languages. More recently Carr has returned to the Greeks after a hiatus, writing Phaedra Backwards, which was produced at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton in 2011, and Hecuba, which premiered at the Swan Theatre in Stratfordupon -Avon in 2015. Both plays received mixed reviews. Carr’s Ariel, however, received overwhelmingly negative reviews, and within the ever-increasing volume of scholarship on Marina Carr’s plays, Ariel is often referenced only briefly, if at all, and is infrequently addressed in its own right. Carr was interviewed about the play by Melissa Sihra prior to Ariel’s completion. Later, Cathy Leeney discussed Ariel’s reflections on the relationship between human beings and the planet. Then Rhona Trench approached the play through the lens of Kristeva’s theory of abjection in a chapter of her book on Carr, while Zoraide Rodrigues Carrasco de Mesquita observed some broad similarities and differarion 25.3 winter 2018 ences between Ariel and Greek tragedy and drew connections with the essay entitled Ariel by Uruguayan author José Enrique Rodó. At the same time, Danine Farquharson briefly offered a negative scholarly analysis of Ariel, concurring with negative reviews of the performance.1 Among the reviews of the 2002 production of Ariel, Marianne McDonald, a leading expert on Greek tragedy and its modern adaptations in Ireland, has written the most detailed and informative piece.2 McDonald notes that some of the director’s decisions impacted negatively on the production, compounding problems in the performance of an already difficult play. As McDonald so insightfully observes, one of the challenges posed by the play is its plethora of literary echoes ranging from the Old Testament, to Hamlet and Faust, and into contemporary Irish dramas by Martin McDonagh and Sebastian Barry, all in addition to the collection of Greek tragedies on which the main plot elements are based. Although such complexity of allusion seems to have contributed to the difficulties of performance, I argue here that, as a text, Ariel rewards re-reading precisely because of its sophisticated intertextual depth and breadth and for its accompanying reflections on Irish society at the turn of the millennium. In addition to the primary framework of Greek tragedy, I discuss references to the Bible, to Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Eugene O’Neill, Sylvia Plath and Pier Paolo Pasolini, on which rest a series of weighty themes and images. Central thematic concerns of family, religion, and politics are adopted from the Greek models and transposed into a twenty-first century Irish context. First, I will outline how Ariel announces itself as a complex intertextual work, not only through its obvious engagement with Greek tragedy but also through the multiple literary allusions created by its title. In three subsequent sections, I discuss how the themes of politics, family dynamics, and religion have been adapted from Greek tragedy and made pertinent to an Irish audience. Finally, I offer some conclusions on the relationship between Ariel, Greek tragedy, and the Celtic Tiger phenomenon. greek tragedy and the celtic tiger 70 1. what’s in a name? from iphigenia to ariel: aeschylus, isaiah, shakespeare and plath ARIEL presents an Irish couple, Fermoy and Frances Fitzgerald , and their three children, Ariel, Elaine and Stephen. The eldest daughter Ariel disappears on her sixteenth birthday. The disappearance coincides with Fermoy’s meteoric rise and success as a politician. It is eventually discovered that Fermoy had actually murdered his...

Oil by Ella Hickson

Reviewed by: Oil by Ella Hickson Kimberly Skye Richards Oil. By Ella Hickson. Directed by Carrie Cracknell. Almeida Theatre, London. October 21, 2016. From the Indigenous resistance at Standing Rock to artist-activist groups like Platform and Liberate Tate staging interventions in global arts institutions to protest sponsorship by oil corporations, dramatic conflicts over oil production and its transportation have saturated our media in recent years. Despite the theatricality of petro-politics, conflicts of resource extraction have seldom found their way to the stage. In her new play Oil, Ella Hickson transforms oil’s global history into a human story, one that asks audiences to suspend their disbelief across 200 years of action to follow a mother and daughter from the birth of the petroleum industry to the end of the age of oil. Directed by Carrie Cracknell at the Almeida Theatre in London, the play’s premiere production prompted serious reflection on fossil capitalism’s seductions and costs. Oil moves away from clichés about male oil executives as cutout villains of fossil capitalism to spotlight the journey of a single mother determined to better the situation of her child. Hickson sets the play in 1899 at a remote smallholding near Cornwall at the Singers’ family farm, the image of a premodern agrarian society focused on simple reproduction. When the family dismisses an American oil dealer’s offer to buy their property—despite the lifestyle that the sale would afford them—May, who is pregnant and wants a better future for her child, decides to leave during the night, traveling “through lands, through empires, through time” on a journey fueled by maternal love. Played brilliantly by Anne-Marie Duff, May embodied the pioneering spirit reinvigorated by the neoliberal order. Her journey saw her go from carrying out domestic duties, to working as a server at the British imperial headquarters in Persia in 1908, to making executive decisions for a multinational oil corporation in London in the 1970s, to serving as a Member of Parliament in the twenty-first century. As she gained more powerful positions in society and was better able to provide for her child, she became more deeply enmeshed in geopolitical petro-violence. Through May’s associations with the oil industry, the play illuminated how petro-imperialism operates through the decisions of individual people acting in their best interests. The fascinating trajectory of Oil is that it reminded those audience members aligned with the anti-fossil fuel movement of the cruelly optimistic passé of oil, energy, and capitalism. The performance also offered commentary on the limitations of women’s independence, as Hickson crafted the codependency of May and her daughter Amy’s relationship into a [End Page 582] metaphor for the codependency of the British Empire and its colonies. Three scenes dramatized the birth, peak, and imagined demise of Britain’s efforts to explore, discover, develop, and transport oil in Iran, Libya, and Iraq. They represented the transformation of “infantile” oil-producing countries into mature, rebellious, independent nations that resent supervision and insist that they be freed from its oppression. Increasingly desperate to maintain access, the parental figure was increasingly willing to make ethical compromises and unleash misfortune on less powerful others. Click for larger view View full resolution The dawn of the age of oil in Oil. (Photo: Richard Hubert Smith.) The end of Oil projected a bleak image of our prospective “tough oil” future, with May and Amy once again living on the Singer farm, struggling to stay warm, and arguing about whether they can afford to charge the car or take a hot bath. May yearns for intimacy and physical contact, but her relationship with Amy has deteriorated beyond repair, and men across time, even men who are caring and respectful, have never been able to satisfy her needs. The wreckage of Amy and May’s relationship, captured brilliantly through the nonnaturalistic time signature of the play, left us to contemplate if loneliness and disappointment are the excruciating costs of progress: in what ways must powerful women be willing to compromise? Would we be happier if we demanded less of ourselves? Oil is indicative of a new form of epic theatre that aims to...

Introduction

Introduction Sara Freeman Theatre History Studies is an annual journal. We print one issue per year, and we assemble it almost a year in advance. I write this introduction in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election and I find it hard to project what commentary might be the most applicable in the fall of 2017. The scholarship in this issue resonates with several developments that dominate the global political sphere, such as upheaval in conservative and liberal social positions and tactics, ongoing debates about national identity, new contours of generational conflict, upsurges in student activism, and resistance to or embrace of change, in any format. Laura Ferdinand Feldmeyer's documentation and analysis about a key line of dialogue in the play adaptation of Peter Pan—"to die will be an awfully big adventure"—unfolds J. M. Barrie's history of writing war propaganda during World War I and his change of heart about the project of war in relationship to the Western cultural imaginary about masculinity and adventure. Feldmeyer tracks how the line was included or excluded from performances of the play and the treatment of the line both onstage and off while investigating the great generational divide operative in both the experiences of the Great War and its aftermath. Attending to that divide transforms Peter Pan from a delightful, uplifting piece of theatre to an elegiac one. That unsettled, simultaneously childish and mournful status of Peter Pan is still reflected in contemporary theatre made in adaptational dialogue with Barrie's tale, including Peter and the Starcatcher, Sarah Ruhl's 2016 play For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, and Sally Cookson's production of Peter Pan appearing at the Bristol Old Vic and the National Theatre in London across the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017. It is still unclear, in the wake of a UK vote to "Brexit" the European Union and of the election of [End Page 1] Donald Trump to the US presidency, what masculinity means and if our societies are willing to grow up. Feldmeyer begins her article by considering a 1922 address Barrie gave to students at St. Andrew's University about youth and age. La Donna Forsgren's Schanke Award-winning paper from the 2016 Mid-America Theatre Conference also takes college campuses as the loci of its analysis and makes a diachronic link between black student activism in the 1960s and the 2010s, especially as such activism used performative demonstrations at Northwestern in 1968 and the University of Missouri (Mizzou) in 2015. In doing so, Forsgren also recovers the history of Black Folks's Theatre at Northwestern University, which was formed as the artistic branch of For Members Only, the Northwestern black student union founded in the wake of 1968 campus protests. Forsgren connects Black Folks's Theatre to the Black Arts Movement, strengthening our theatre-historical sense of how the artistic branches of social movements participate to bring about institutional change. Julie Jackson's article explicating the practices of "Chicago-style theatre" and what the phrase denotes about acting technique, approach to staging, or audience experience follows not only how theatre interacts with institutional change but also how insurgent theatres become institutions. Her history of the Chicago theatre as "not just rock 'n' roll" gives new depth of understanding to the style characteristic of the artist-operated ensemble theatres that define Chicago's scene. At once a close reading of press discourse about Chicago theatre, a personal history drawn from four decades of watching and making theatre in Chicago, and a cataloging of key companies in Chicago theatre beyond the highly mythologized Step-penwolf, Jackson's scholarship provides a sophisticated analysis of the dynamics of realism and artifice at work in Chicago theatre aesthetics. Likewise, Gabrielle Houle wrestles with "style"—a combination of realism and artifice in performance techniques—while revealing the struggles with mask work experienced by twentieth-century commedia dell'arte star Marcello Moretti. Houle's masterful set of propositions about the challenges a mask presents a performer and her materialist attention to the role of mask-makers and mask-making techniques in helping performers reclaim the mask culminates with insight about the role...

Shakespeare's Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage by Kurt A. Schreyer

Reviewed by: Shakespeare's Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage by Kurt A. Schreyer Ruth Morse (bio) Kurt A. Schreyer. Shakespeare's Medieval Craft: Remnants of the Mysteries on the London Stage. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 258. $49.95. This is a first book, with all that that implies: the courage of discovery, wide reading, an assurance about putting past (and not so past) scholars right while approving the methodologically congenial, as well as confidence in its argument. The risk is always that in the search for support in like-minded books, scholars fail to consider the assessments of and reactions to those books; it is difficult not to believe what we want to be true, and perhaps we don't talk enough with people from other disciplines. The title is clear: it belongs to the growing chorus that insists upon continuity between an undemarcated "Middle Ages" and a "Renaissance" that focuses on Shakespeare in order to claim for him immediate experience of the Mystery Plays, those cycles that made summer holidays attractive for pageantry. Although Schreyer certainly knows that he should be careful, he cannot help slipping into making Shakespeare the center. Writing about how theatre audiences might have learned to recognize the below-stage trap as a door to Purgatory, he claims that "before and during Shakespeare's boyhood, the teachings, objects, and practices associated with Purgatory underwent a profound repudiation" (114), using Shakespeare as a proxy for a period of confusion as well as change. He forgets the huge variety of the population. His major success is to have used the succeeding announcements known as the Chester Banns, official documents now available in the REED (Records of Early English Drama) volume for Cheshire, which supported the continuation of cycle plays for the civic pride of Chester, their guilds, and people who came to watch them. That is, they resisted attempts to suppress old-fashioned religious plays in order to support a complex and popular civil activity based on tradition and historical precedent. It is amusing to find Ranulph Higden, the fourteenth-century translator of Bartholomeus Anglicus as well as a certain amount of historiography, being referred to as one of the Ancients of the city. But it must be [End Page 116] understood that Schreyer's title begs the question and reproduces the narrowing of view which is the name "Shakespeare." The book is not mainly about Shakespeare, but Shakespeare serves as a proxy for proof. The core of his work lies in the three central chapters of examination of the material continuities from the cycle plays to early modern London drama: the ass's head prop, Purgatory, and the Harrowing of Hell. His three rather different examples say much about the research that has gone into the making of the book but are, perhaps necessarily, diffuse. In chapter 3 (the "Ass's Head" chapter) he tells us a lot about anti-Catholic mockery of the Pope, but does not seem to know what to do with what he's found. The ass is a protean trope for many things, not least a huge phallus, but—like the dunce, mumming, and mummery—the sexual importance of the Ass and its Bottom make no clear contribution. He jumps past other manifestations of popular drama in the Middle Ages to construct a line of descent from the Mysteries to the death of Shakespeare. The REED series has, as time has gone on, performed a phoenix-like self-destruction and reconstruction, demonstrating how many false starts there were in the project that have been self-corrected by the evidence as it has accrued. But problems continue to arise. Not least is the usual problem of assuming that the documents in the REED volumes were read by numerous people, believed by many, or likely to represent widespread current views. It is the same mistake often made about the polemics against the London theatre and its actors. Right at the beginning he chides E. K. Chambers for glorifying Shakespeare at the expense of a little-studied Middle Ages, but many of the documents we now take for granted were unavailable, though Chambers and Bentley...

Recruit to Revolution: Adventure and Politics during the Indonesian Struggle for Independence by John Coast

Reviewed by: Recruit to Revolution: Adventure and Politics during the Indonesian Struggle for Independenceby John Coast Howard Federspiel (bio) John Coast. Recruit to Revolution: Adventure and Politics during the Indonesian Struggle for Independence. 2nded. Edited by Laura Noszlopy. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS), 2015. 362 pp. John Coast provides us with a true adventure story that moves across countries and continents, centering on Siam (Thailand), Indonesia, and England, with side trips to Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines. He tells of meeting important people and others who are less so, from presidents, prime ministers, and high state officials to airplane pilots, mechanics, and even some highly unprincipled characters trying to profit from unsettled political conditions in Southeast Asia. He is at home in Siam, where he keeps a residence, because he likes the lifestyle, has close friends in Bangkok, and is known to many of the country's leading politicians. Although not a dancer himself but rather a connoisseur and impresario, he arranges for a Javanese dance ensemble to visit London, apparently the first in the post-World War II era, and thereby enhances his reputation among the London theater crowd. In the long run he is to become closely identified with theatrical work, especially as an agent and a seeker of talent. But in the adventure recounted in Recruit to Revolution, Coast is committed to assisting the emerging Indonesian state gain its independence, and goes all out in his efforts to help the Indonesians reach that goal. His engagement with the Indonesian cause began during an earlier adventure, when he served with the British army and was taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1942 and forced to work on a railroad bridge in Burma. He met and became friends with Indonesian prisoners, learning Malay-Indonesian phrases and becoming familiar with Javanese dance forms and styles. This identification with those prisoners was transformed into sympathy for the Indonesian republican cause at war's end, when he was released by the Japanese and sent home by British army officials. For Coast, it became almost an obsession thereafter to be identified with Indonesian independence in a personal and meaningful way. He never regarded the Dutch effort to regain colonial control over the Indonesian area as anything but an unjustified attempt to reinstitute a system of exploitation for Dutch economic benefit. Consequently, he lambasts the Dutch continually, regarding their efforts as guided by motives totally inimical to the Indonesian populace. On the other hand, he embraces Indonesian officials' corruption, incompetence, and bumbling efforts to govern as understandable and even endearing. He began his service with the Republic of Indonesia as a blockade runner, arranging air flights from southern Siam, usually Songkhla, via Singapore over Bukit Tinggi in Sumatra, and on to Yogyakarta in central Java. The flights had to be unscheduled, as the Dutch patrolled the area and occasionally intercepted them. Because the service was used primarily by businessmen and government officials, the [End Page 193]flights concentrated on passenger service and did not haul much cargo. Coast then moved on to public relations, giving advice to officials of the Republic in Yogyakarta about how to build and exploit sentiment among Europeans concerning the Republic's challenges. Eventually he was allowed to make English-language radio broadcasts and distribute printed flyers. He went abroad to look after the airline situation just prior to the Second Dutch Military Action in late 1948 and, consequently, was not swept up by the Dutch when they invaded Yogyakarta. He became a propagandist for the republican cause the next year—he contacted foreign officials and urged responses against the Dutch military action and campaigned for the release of incarcerated Indonesian officials. In particular, he visited London during this period and coordinated with the Subandrio husband-and-wife team in working for British support for the Republic. He later was part of Indonesia's support-staff delegation at the Dutch–Indonesian Round Table Conference in The Hague (August–November 1949). He returned to Southeast Asia for the final events conveying and marking Indonesian sovereignty at the end of 1949. The list of Indonesians with whom he became acquainted is impressive. He went on an all-day...