Notion Of Theatre Research Articles

Theatre within the Theatre, Play within the Play— Self-Reflexivity in Jim Nolan’s Blackwater Angel

Jim Nolan’s Blackwater Angel (2001) employs a metadramatic approach, intertwining two types of play-within-the-play to enhance self-reflexivity. The external play portrays the fate of seventeenth-century healer Valentine Greatrakes, evoking the concept of theatrum mundi, while the inset play, The Broken Heart, influences the main characters and plot. Boundaries between the two plays blur as characters interact, emphasizing role-playing within and outside of theatrical reality. This dual reality reflects Ubersfeld's notion of theatre as a "(two-fold) referent," embodying both physical presence and symbolic representation. Play-within-the-play serves as a meta-theatrical strategy, facilitating self-reflection and exploration of identity, particularly relevant in the postmodern era's emphasis on intertextuality and self-reference.

FORCED ENTERTAINMENT: AND ON THE THOUSANDTH NIGHT (2000) HOW DO ACTORS DEVIATE FROM THE THEATRICAL CONVENTIONS IN AND ON THE THOUSANDTH NIGHT?

The performance "And on the Thousandth Night" by Forced Entertainment is a captivating exploration of endurance, storytelling, and the transformative power of narratives. Premiered in 2000, this production is characterized by its ambitious scope: an uninterrupted, improvised six-day performance where six performers undertake the daunting task of narrating stories continuously for 144 hours. Central to the performance is the notion of storytelling as a fundamental human activity—a means of making sense of the world, connecting with others, and creating meaning amid chaos. The endurance aspect of the performance reflects a profound investigation into the limits of storytelling and human resilience. The production's title, "And on the Thousandth Night," suggests a cyclical, endless narrative journey—an invitation to dive deep into the vast possibilities of storytelling. Each performer takes on the role of a storyteller, weaving together diverse narratives, genres, and characters over the course of the performance. This experimental format challenges traditional notions of theatre, inviting audiences to reconsider the boundaries of performance art and the nature of spectatorship. The absence of a fixed script or narrative arc foregrounds spontaneity and improvisation, emphasizing the raw, unfiltered nature of live storytelling. Moreover, the performance underscores the communal aspect of storytelling, highlighting the symbiotic relationship between performers and audiences. As spectators witness the unfolding stories in real-time, they become active participants in the creative process, co-creating meaning through collective engagement. "And on the Thousandth Night" exemplifies Forced Entertainment's signature blend of innovation, risk-taking, and conceptual rigor. By pushing the boundaries of duration and improvisation, the production challenges conventional norms and offers a profound meditation on the transformative potential of narrative.

Inside the Theatre of Business: Performance and Corporate Presentation Training

How are theatre-techniques used in business training? Do theatre-making skills represent a unique field of knowledge? In this case study, I consider the National Institute of Dramatic Art’s (NIDA) ‘Executive Presenter’ two- day course in Sydney, Australia, and attempt to counter a simplistic notion of theatre as magical practice. Performance techniques are complex, historically and culturally-contingent processes for making and sharing meaning (McAuley 2008). I describe exercises from the course in some detail ‒ including elements of space, voice, body, structure, awareness, spontaneity, and rehearsal ‒ and suggest that we can understand these presentation skills in a relationship of continuity with everyday meaning-making, rather than as a magical art form. On the one hand, NIDA trades off and reinforces the popular mystique surrounding acting. On the other hand, the course introduces simple and effective techniques of verbal and non-verbal communication. Ultimately, my investigation considers the claim made in marketing the course that ‘public speaking can come naturally to you.’

PSYCHOLOGICAL PLANE: SIGMUND FREUD’S SUBCONSCIOUS MIND IN SIMON STEPHENS’S “BLUEBIRD”

From the rituals demonstrated with masks and nature-inspired costumes to epitomise supernatural beings to a church-based dramatization in the Early Middle Ages focusing solely on commemoration of Christ with a theatrical rite on Easter, or even to Shakespeare, where characters in disguise fill the scene at a time when Elizabethan notion of visceral force was replaced by intrigue, theatre has always been the shadow of a changing society. What, in fact, goes under a change is not the notion of theatre per se, but the idea of relating to people from all walks of life. In this sense, theatre, which has a structuring power that has managed to infiltrate deeply within the society, has sustained its existence in parallel with the developing and shifting social dynamics. For theatre, change is bound to happen if one retains his/her permanency. Theatre, which is in a continuous motion, allows interaction between the audience and the actor. Though the dimension of this interaction is multifaceted, one of the most broadly known is indubitably the reflection of Freud's concept of psychoanalysis on the characters of the play, which is based on the view that certain situations that take place in human consciousness and especially in the subconscious have a great role in their daily lives. Simon Stephens, who reflects this change and interaction to his works by going beyond the traditional understanding of theatre and by including the post-dramatic elements with music and abundant visuality, stands out as one of the important playwrights of contemporary British theatre in recent years. The play Bluebird (1998), which he wrote on a level reminiscent of the cinema scene, presents sections from the lives of postmodern individuals who are struggling to hold on to life in the grip of the developing and globalizing world, which Stephens himself personally experienced and observed. The author tries to reflect the psychological disorders of today's individuals and Freud's subconscious concept to the audience with his play Bluebird. This study deals with the characters in Stephens' Bluebird within the context of Sigmund Freud's personality theories.

Estrangement, epochē, and performance: Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt and a phenomenology of spectatorship

During his period of exile in Scandinavia, Bertolt Brecht wrote “I don’t think the traditional form of theatre means anything any longer. Its significance is purely historic; it can illuminate the way in which earlier ages regarded human relationships […] [but] a modern spectator can’t learn anything from themz” (Brecht in Brecht on theatre: the development of an aesthetic. Trans. John Willett., Eyre Methuen Publishing, London, p. 66, 1964). To create a modern theatre fit for a modern audience, Brecht holds that not only would the content of plays have to change, but the experience of theatrical spectatorship itself. To fully capture how Brecht’s work differs from that of previous playwrights, a close analysis of spectatorial experience and perception is required. In this paper, I compare the aesthetic techniques used in Brecht’s epic theatre to the genetic phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Reading Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (or estrangement effect) through a Husserlian lens, I argue that Brecht mobilizes phenomenological methodology in order to suspend the audience’s preconceived notions of theatre and to cultivate self-conscious, critically aware, and socially motivated spectatorship. Just as Husserl describes phenomenology as a presuppositionless science, so too does Brecht offer epic theatre as a way to free “[…] socially-conditioned phenomena from the stamp of familiarity” (Brecht 1964, p. 192).

The Theatre of Moral Sentiments: Neoclassical Dramaturgy and Adam Smith's Impartial Spectator.

The oft-cited theatricality of Adam Smith's impartial spectator is contentious and rests on a generalized notion of theatre. This essay argues both that Smith, like his predecessors in sentimental moral philosophy, thought of spectatorship theatrically and that Smith's spectatorship framework is rooted in French neoclassical dramaturgy. Smith's formulation of sympathy in the Theory of Moral Sentiments bolsters this view, as does the correspondence between Smith's definition of impartiality and the neoclassical formal isolation of spectators from the interests of protagonists. These facets of spectatorship are the basis of an impersonal mode that prevails in Smith's social theory of morals.

Compost and Air-conditioning

Drawing on Bruno Latour‘s Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018), this essay links compost, and the biological and cellular processes of growth, flow and disintegration, to contemporary responses to climate politics through performance. I elaborate on the notion of theatre of things: a dramaturgy of networks, of atmospheres, actors and affects; in order to reconstitute the relation between climatic conditions across the world and stage.

Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500–1900: Democracy, Discourse and The State by Tony Fisher

Reviewed by: Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500–1900: Democracy, Discourse and The State by Tony Fisher Jim Davis THEATRE AND GOVERNANCE IN BRITAIN, 1500–1900: DEMOCRACY, DISCOURSE AND THE STATE. By Tony Fisher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017; pp. 290. Tony Fisher's monograph provides a new and original way of looking at the relationship between theatre and governance in Britain between 1500 and 1900. Through a series of case studies and an ongoing analysis of the philosophical basis for the perspectives he examines, he untangles the complex relationship between theatre and the state. While he covers familiar territory, he also offers new ways of reading Britain's theatrical past in a study that is well-grounded in both contemporary and historical discourses pertinent to the topics of government and theatre. In particular, he provides a valuable insight into Platonic notions of theatre and their impact on European thought. In Fisher's view, theatre was seen by government not only as a symptom of social corruption, but also as a potential instrument of reform. Consequently, as public theatres evolved alongside the expansion of the population in early modern Britain, so perceptions of the relationship between theatre and governance also changed. We move from the notion of theatrum mundi, wherein men and women are players on the stage of the world, to the "theatre of the multitude," focused more on the material conditions of everyday life. Within this context, Fisher suggests that anti-theatrical prejudice has less to do with puritan and moral opposition to the stage and is based more on a fear of disorder, sedition, and the instability and potential idleness of the common people. Insofar as theatre calls into question the authority of government by questioning the legitimacy of social and political order and hierarchy, it therefore represents the growing self-assertion of the laboring classes and their right to leisure. Thus two notions of community are at loggerheads: an ordered, unified community on the one hand, and a community of individuals (the multitude) on the other. The discourses around the threat of the [End Page 401] multitude and the threat of theatre coalesce, indicating the necessity of political governance over both common life and theatre. As new forms of power emerge in the late 1600s, the Restoration stage comes to represent an important moment in the development of theatre's relationship to governance in Britain. While anti-theatricalism, especially as represented by the opinions of Jeremy Collier, continues, freedom and conduct are more central to discourses of governmentality. In Restoration drama, this emphasis on freedom and conduct (and the possible tensions between them) is embodied by the character of the libertine, enabling a satirical emphasis on the public dimension of private conduct (in civil society rather than politics). Dramatists are not necessarily endorsing libertine conduct; rather, they could be seen as advocating appropriate governance (and self-governance) within the family through correct conduct. While Restoration comedy takes place in a predominantly upper-class milieu, it hints at the wider social consequences when liberty is not restrained by governance. Within this context, Collier's anti-theatricalism in this period can be seen as a social rather than moral critique of the theatre. In the early eighteenth century, as liberal governance absorbs the autonomous freedom of the individual, through various techniques of influence that curtail personal liberty, the question arises around the optimum license the theatre should be allowed within the public sphere. In his analysis of the events leading up to the Licensing Act of 1737, Fisher concludes that the emphasis is on keeping politics off the stage, and that the legislation aims to discipline rather than suppress theatre. Central to this discussion are the political satires of Henry Fielding, but whereas Fielding believed the stage should instruct through example and hold the powerful to account, the government believed that his satires, which often disparaged political figures, were a misuse of the stage. Fisher, however, suggests that another concern of the act was to regulate for appropriate behavior in the public sphere, and to prevent corruption and incivility among the lower orders. Prior to the act, the theatre was beginning to provide moral lessons in relation to...

Struttura non-matrixed e teatro delle immagini

The term performance generally refers to actions both in experimental art and in theatre; two different areas by tradition, but determined by certain common elements that make it difficult to link the word to the former or the latter. Although versatility and diversity are the its main aspects, the performative language has progressively imposed its own form determined by the autonomous complex relationship between word and image. Taking into account this aspect and retracing the Michael Kirby’s concepts of non-matrixed structure and the Bonnie Marranca’s notion of theatre of images, this essay aims to envisage the performance as an art form that could bring attention to the value of the experience and to re-establish a link between the aesthetics of the authoring and the aesthetics of perception.

Lighting in Theatrical Performance as a Dynamic Medium

Designing for the theatre is a tasking endeavour, particularly at an amateur level with a restriction of resources, time, and past experience. The question of where to draw inspiration, what research can be done, and the interplay between theories of stage lighting becomes a central issue for an aspiring lighting designer in an unfamiliar or, in some cases, an entirely new setting. With the majority of impactful lighting theory originating from the advent of electrical lighting at the turn of the twentieth century, most of its concepts derive from the staged realism from Belasco and, in direct opposition, Appia’s notions of theatre transcending reality with lighting providing depth and description of space. With opposing concepts and an intangible media, creating mood, tone, and mise en scène through light requires significant forethought, as well as the ability to perceive a stage language lacking corporeality. With all of these present challenges, I attempt, through theory and practical examples, to describe the process of lighting a theatrical performance as well as what constitutes lighting in the theatre. I will attempt to examine the use of colour, texture, motion, and contrast as a vehicle for stage dialogue, as well as question the importance of lighting in performance and its place in the hierarchy of mise en scène, as defined by Appia in his research of Wagnerian opera and Eurhythmics.

Del Solís a Flor de Maroñas: Ubú de Enrique Permuy y el teatro desde la travesía y la frontera

The 2005 adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Rey by Enrique Permuy and Polizonteatro in Flor de Maronas, a working-class neighborhood in the outskirts of Montevideo, did more than transform the play into a street spectacle. This article explores the connections between the event, which was later replicated in La Teja and other working-class neighborhoods, and a series of poetic and theoretical considerations, including theatre as “journey” and the physical translation of the play to “the border” of Montevideo. This relocation was also a journey to “a cultural frontier,” to the limits and the outside of our lettered, middle-class notions of theatre and theatricality. The author recurs to the notion of “transmodernity” as an alternative to the modern and postmodern aesthetic that predominates within academic circles and renders transmodern theatre invisible. The article also examines the convivial and place-time-specific quality of theatrical productions and the ways in which a long, deep and lively carnivalesque theatrical tradition within working-class neighborhoods makes possible an effective social encounter, exchange, and communication.

Parálisis, parloteo y performance en Potestad de Eduardo Pavlovsky

From the perspective of time and space, this essay analyzes the way in which Eduardo Pavlovsky’s Potestad (1985) transforms the outrageous speeches of the protagonist and his excessive bodily movements into signs of physical, psychological, and moral paralysis. Such an approach serves to reveal the dialogic, proxemic, historical, and temporal schemes of the play. The author examines the dialogue and tension established between the protagonist’s harangues, his obsession with the positions of the characters, and his closely timed bodily activity and the relation between these discourses and an audience forced to harmonize the contradictions between what it hears and sees and the places occupied by people and objects. Through the theatricalization of silence and paralysis, Potestad questions the traditional notion of theatre as dialogue and action, thus creating an ambiance of ambiguity, trickery, and emptiness.

Publicising the Private: Dressing Room Performances in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus

As liminal spaces between the public and private, women’s dressing rooms are often represented in literary texts as sites within which gender constructs are contested. By engaging with notions of theatre, performativity, carnival and the grotesque, this article examines the ways in which the social fictions of women’s duality are dispelled in Fevvers’ dressing room in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.

Frank Hoff (1932–2013)

Frank Hoff (1932–2013) Cody Poulton Frank Hoff taught Japanese theatre at the University of Toronto from 1973 to 1996. I took both undergraduate and graduate courses from him, and I remain his student. He whetted my own interest in Japanese theatre, and I discovered that we shared a similar background in what used to be called Classics (now called Greek and Roman studies at my own university). Born in Los Angeles on 31 January 1932, Hoff graduated summa cum laude from the University of Southern Califor¬nia in 1954 and made his first trip to Japan, from 1954 to 1956, as a lieutenant in the US Navy. He received an AM in classical philology from Harvard University in 1958, but as a result of his experiences in Japan switched to comparative literature, and he received his PhD, also from Harvard, in 1966. Frank taught at Princeton University (1965–1968), Sophia University (1968–1972), and Tokyo Women’s College (1972–1973) before joining the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. In Tokyo, he became a good friend of David Goodman’s. With Willi Flindt, Frank published “The Life Structure of Nō,” an introduction to Yokomichi Mario’s analysis of nō theatre “as a performance event, and not as a genre of literature,” in David’s seminal magazine Concerned Theatre Japan (Hoff and Flindt 1973: 212). Frank’s work anticipated the “performative turn” taken by scholars like Karen Brazell and Monica Bethe, but like Goodman he was equally interested in the ways in which Japanese theatre and culture of the 1960s were overturning Western ideological hegemonies and our own assumptions of what theatre was or should be. My own understanding of drama [End Page 606] had been largely text-based, but Frank’s lectures—which ranged from scripts for plays to the popular songs of Japan’s middle ages, newspaper clippings of police raids on the Victory Burlesque House in Toronto, rock concerts, Lou Reed, and Mick Jagger—were a heady and intoxicating brew. Frank also introduced me to the work of Richard Schechner, now considered the “father” of performance studies. Both Goodman and Schechner were featured in this journal’s “Founders of the Field” series last fall, so it is fitting that we honor Frank Hoff here, too, for his contribution to our understanding of a wide range of Japanese performing arts, from folk song to shamanistic dance, from classical theatre to the avant-garde (see Hoff 1976; 1977a; 1977b; 1981; 1982a; 1982b; 1992; in addition to other works discussed below). Click for larger view View full resolution Frank Hoff in 1988. (Photo: Courtesy of Christopher Yohmei Blasdel) A real intellectual trendsetter, Hoff was erudite, but an exceptionally good listener, sincerely interested in what he could learn from others; his tastes were discriminating but catholic. Having lived through much of the cultural ferment of the Japanese 1960s, he had both a keen understanding of the contemporary zeitgeist and a deep knowledge of the roots of Japanese culture. From his ongoing studies under Honda Yasuji at Waseda University in Tokyo, first as a Fulbright scholar (1961–1964), Frank learned the extent to which folk performance (minzoku geinō) has influenced the course of Japanese culture since earliest times. He drew a clear distinction between geinō and engeki, the latter being a more recent and restrictive term, closer to the Western notion of theatre. Writing in his introduction to a translation [End Page 607] of Honda’s essay on Yamabushi kagura and bangaku (both folk forms of ritual dance unique to Akita and Yamagata prefectures), Hoff states that “Honda’s scholarship has laid the groundwork for what I feel is a shift in theatrical values” (Hoff and Honda 1974: 192). Inspired by Honda’s research, Frank’s interest in ethnology paralleled the work of American scholars like Victor Turner and Richard Schechner. Yet the work of other Japanese theatre scholars like Omote Akira, Gunji Masakatsu, and Dōmoto Masaki, as well as practitioners like the nō actor Kanze Hisao, with whom he became friends in 1972 during seminars on Japanese theatre sponsored by Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret in Denmark and at the Biennale in Venice, had an equally...

Playing Life and Death in Provincetown:

Playing Life and Death in Provincetown:

The Politics of a Theatrical Event: The 1509 Performance of Ariosto's I suppositi

The Politics of a Theatrical Event:The 1509 Performance of Ariosto's I suppositi Sergio Costola Ludovico Ariosto is traditionally considered the founder of new vernacular comedy, but this title has in some ways been detrimental to a full understanding of Ariosto's plays.1 In general, sixteenth-century Italian comedy has enjoyed few critical accolades from the seventeenth century down to our own, and is often faulted for being "formulaic, immoral, socially pointless, stereotypical, and repetitive."2 Although Ariosto's comedies are rich in interpretative possibilities, studies generally have not taken into account the plays' proper context, which links Ariosto's work to a theatrical practice rather than only to literary genres and traditions.3 These plays were not primarily conceived of as literature, and their principal destination was not the printed text. In fact, Ariosto's La cassaria and I suppositi were published in Florence, without the author's approval, only after they had been performed.4 Since the nature of these plays was not strictly literary, they require consideration as elements of a more complex and composite event. Graham Holderness has claimed that drama has too often been treated—in literary and cultural analysis—as written text; he argues for the need to reconfigure critical analysis with a different conception of Renaissance drama, as theater: "as dramatic materials that were devised specifically for performance . . . as 'texts' that have a performance history often separable from their history as written texts," and "as cultural products that are designed for mobilization in theatrical rather than literary-critical ways."5 If this is so, how can one do justice to texts that were designed for mobilization in theatrical ways? How is it possible that texts or events that were relevant for their coeval audiences have become "socially pointless" when historians understand them as a series of writings? To put it another way, how can one recover those synchronic factors that once made these texts so relevant?6 As Thomas Postlewait [End Page 195] has recently pointed out, theater studies today too often fail to give adequate consideration to the ways in which political factors, values, and forces are at work in the theater.7 In the study of theater and drama, he argues, the idea of the political has been too simply defined and dealt with in two ways: We can investigate the political topics, themes, issues, viewpoints, and agendas that get expressed in plays, productions, theatre groups, and artistic movements. Or, by shifting the focus, we can describe the political conditions within the historical matrix that shape dramatic literature, the theatrical arts, performance events, and cultural practices . . . In the first case, we usually locate the politics in the dramatic text . . . or the theatrical event . . . In the second case, we situate the politics within the shaping environment or culture which the work or event supposedly reflects, embodies, expresses, realizes, fulfills, resists, or subverts.8 Both cases set up a familiar polarity between text (or event) versus context: one defines the relationship as an opposition, and the other implies some kind of correspondence through mimesis or representation. Thus, an artist of the Renaissance such as Ariosto, usually operating in and writing for a court, is seen either as a "royal apologist" or a "crypto-subversive" critic.9 So, again, how can one do justice to these plays critically? How can one move beyond the basic polarity between event and context? In order to illustrate the ways in which courtly theatrical performances are related to structures of power and resistance, it will be useful to explore them by taking into consideration a specific event. The event I consider here is the performance of Ludovico Ariosto's I -suppositi that took place in the Ducal Palace of the Este court during the 1509 carnival celebrations. Following Thomas Postlewait's suggestion that "the idea of location [of politics] needs to be multiple,"10 I will investigate four possible critical perspectives for this theatrical event. First, I will investigate the frame. The word theater, during the early modern period, designated two simultaneous and distinct actions, seeing and being seen; thus, any critical understanding of the "visions" of this notion of theater must first articulate the structure...

TRI's Cambridge Years: A Retrospective

As first senior editor of Theatre Research International when it moved to Cambridge Journals in 2001, I had the privilege of being involved from the outset in the reconfiguration of its aims and objectives, moving the subject from essentialist notions of theatre towards a much broader conception of what constitutes performance in differing world contexts. It was a move that mirrored the shift in the discipline since the beginning of the 1990s that saw the rise of performance studies and the influence of the concept of performativity on our reading strategies of all types of performance, but particularly of performance with intended social agency.

The Theater of Teaching and the Lessons of Theater (review)

Reviewed by: The Theater of Teaching and the Lessons of Theater Miriam M. Chirico THE THEATER OF TEACHING AND THE LESSONS OF THEATER. Edited by Domnica Radulescu and Maria Stadter Fox. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005; pp. xx + 215. $75.00 cloth. Theatre studies, as it is currently practiced and taught, persistently defies simple definition due to its broad scope and interdisciplinary nature. Because of the multiplicity of approaches in the field, practitioners and teachers must often articulate our particular methodologies in order to explain the discipline, justify its significance and value, and accurately position it among related fields and practices. Originating from papers given in October 2001 at the fifth National Symposium on Theater in Academe at Washington and Lee University, The Theater of Teaching and the Lessons of Theater successfully delineates a number of approaches in theatre while it effectively defends the field and its various practices from marginalization. Co-editor Domnica Radulescu acknowledges that the collection represents “different approaches to theatre as text, as pedagogy, and as performance” (xii) and attempts to integrate many practitioners’ voices in their uniform belief that theatre provides the means to challenge public perceptions. Radulescu indicates that her own understanding of theatre as a force of political and aesthetic subversion developed while living under a communist dictatorship in Romania during the 1980s. Thus, as an actor, teacher, and scholar, she has always conceived of theatre as a tool for resistance. This oppositional posture is present throughout the book, as writers confront preconceived notions of theatre that are often held by colleagues, students, or the general public. The volume as a whole stands as testimony against any totalizing view of theatre scholarship and/or practice. The variety of methodological approaches presented in the book showcase the interdisciplinary makeup of the field. For example, Laura Vidler utilizes visual analysis when she examines a series of carved wooden blocks, called tacos, used for printing illustrations in novels, as pictorial evidence of the kinds of costumes, props, and gestures used in Spanish commedia. Radulescu provides an account of Isabella Andreini’s performance of a hysterical character at a Medici family wedding and then contextualizes it within social history in order to interpret this sixteenth-century performance as a rebellious gesture against the dictates of marriage. Ralph Alan Cohen describes how the Shenandoah Shakespeare Company applied historical and architectural knowledge to build a reconstructed Blackfriars Playhouse. Less Essif’s historical narrative depicts a practical, step-by-step rehearsal process for a college production of Ubu Roi in French. When presented in total, the reader gets a sense of the broad spectrum of practices that shape the field of theatre studies. These essays maintain the ideal attributes of conference papers: concise arguments offering germs of ideas that are well-supported with key examples. Essays about teaching comprise half of the collection. Janet Gardner’s useful research documenting current pedagogical trends at universities opens the collection. Based on her survey of 83 syllabi, she discovers that the selection of plays taught is more conservative than the kind of research currently produced. The average syllabus, according to Gardner’s findings, “assigns ten plays, seven by European playwrights and three by Americans,” one of which is usually female and nonwhite (8). Gardner concludes that we must do more to subject our own teaching practices to more honest scrutiny. Other writers emphasize the indeterminate nature of the scripted text as fundamental to the teaching of drama. David Worster, in “Performance Options and Pedagogy: Titus Andronicus,” shows how the textual ambiguities of Shakespeare—the very elements that editors like to “fix” into determined meaning—can play a large role in stimulating student inquiry and interpretation. Making a similar argument about a staged production of The Libation Bearers, Amy Cohen observes that the choices student actors made regarding the textual lacunae in Aeschylus’s play demonstrated the pursuit of some common objectives for [End Page 249] liberal arts education: research, argument, and invention. By demonstrating that the open-ended nature of the play script lends itself to the broader educational practices of critical thinking, these essays argue for the unique place of theatre study and practice within the academy. Some of the best articles...

Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre (review)

430Comparative Drama aged fifty-eight, played Regan, Queen Katherine, Portia (Julius Caesar), and replaced PeggyAshcroft as Beatrice.Although her stage career ended in 1970,she did filmworkthereafter.Herlast rolewas die dowager in a Conan Doyle adaption for television in 1992, aired less than a month before herdeath at the age of 101. Forever Juliet is published by Larks Press, a small operation, devoted to works by East Anglian authors or books dealing with the region. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies qualifies because ofher cottage in Essex,boughtjointly with Marda Vanne in 1934 and her home during retirement until her death in 1992. The Press has the exemplary goal of publishing at affordable prices. At £9.50 this bookisworth its price for the photographs alone,the publicity shots forthe plays in which Gwen starred as well as snapshots with friends and acquaintances . Ranging from Thomas Hardy to Ivor Novello and her many co-stars, the photos suggest the range ofher friendships. My favorite photos are those taken with Nigel Hawthorne at Tagley Cottage. Hawthorne, who seems to have been the moving spirit behind the production of a retrospective on Gwen's career, acted as presenter for the 1988 award-winning Omnibus program aired by the BBC. Martial Rose is tobe thanked forselecting from the Ffangcon-Davies archive so much fascinating material. Forever Juliet is, in a sense, its own "omnibus." Ann Eljenholm Nichols Winona, Minnesota Alan Filewod. Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre.Textual Studiesin Canada.Kamloops,B.C: UniversityCollegeoftheCaribooPrintServices,2002.$12.00 (Canadian). Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre is a series of five extended and disparate essays contextualized by an introduction and conclusion that enact Filewod's critical preoccupations. In his typically iconoclastic style,he challenges the pervasive critical interpretation ofthe"development" of Canadian drama as a seamless narrative accompanying the political and cultural growth ofthe country. Instead ofan historical overview, Filewodjuxtaposes radically different "case studies," affording variant ways of considering the slippery notion of theater as an expression ofwhat he terms the "totalizing ideologies of Canadian society" (16). For Filewod, theater has an inherently political significance: "it transforms experience into a community narrative; Reviews431 and it materially constructs in the audience the community it addresses in its texts" (xvii). In die introduction Filewod boldly proposes his intention to offer"a radical rethinking of the conceptual foundations of Canadian theatre, and, by extension , the Canadian nation which that theatre performs. At the same time, [he] attempts to reconceive the critical norms through which the theatre has been understood" (x). His argument is that "Canadian nationhood is a constantly changing historical performance enacted in an imagined theatre" (x). But on this unstable ground,Filewod erects an elegant,complex,and imaginative critical structure, which resists generalized summary. He scrutinizes theoretical theatrical vocabulary and points to its complicity with the imagined construction of a "national identity."And beginning at the beginning he illustrates the precarious nature of such an enterprise by pointing to the conventionally accepted origins ofCanadian drama in Marc Lescarbot's The Theatre ofNeptune in New France, purportedly performed on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in 1606 by French explorers and"savages"to welcome backto Port Royal the Sieur de Poutrincourt. Filewod questions the accuracy and authenticity of this important historic moment, including the inclusion of aboriginals in the performance , as represented in an iconic illustration by CW. Jefferys in 1942. He also locates the event in a wider theatrical context—that of the court masque, which celebrated and reified authority through elaborate spectacle. For Filewod, the political implications ofthis imperial appropriation are chilling: In this moment of racial impersonation and colonial masquerade, Lescarbot had claimed the new world in a newwayby enlisting the spectating bodies and appropriated voices of its inhabitants in his imagined theatre, and he had established the principle that the colonialism of spectacle is the necessary precondition of imperial invasion. As an intellectual ofthe new humanism, he could not foresee that the colonizing of the cultural imaginary is also a precondition of genocide, (xv) In the following chapters, Filewod examines four formative stages of English Canadian theater: the nineteenth-century"literary" and closet dramas ofCharles Mair and Sarah Anne Curzon...

Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers

Closet Stages examines theater theory produced by middle- and upper-class British women-playwrights, actresses, and spectators-between 1790 and 1840. Shifting the focus away from the Romantic male writers to the journals, letters, and play prefaces in which women framed their relationship to the theater arts, Catherine Burroughs reveals how a concern with the performative aspects of daily life and the movement between public and private spheres produced a notion of theater that complicates the Romantic opposition between closet and stage.