Royal National Theatre Research Articles

Superstring Theory Is a Theatrical Hit

A play about a suicidal astrophysicist, based loosely on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is proving to be a critical and financial success at London’s Royal National Theatre. Humble Boy, Charlotte Jones’s new comedy, is a scientific fantasy and a tough family drama.Felix Humble, played by Simon Russell Beale, is a theoretical astrophysicist in his thirties who has returned home for the funeral of his father, a biologist and beekeeper. Like many scientists depicted in popular culture, Felix has bad fashion sense, although instead of the lab coat, he wears ill-fitting cricket whites. He discovers that his mother Flora (Diana Rigg) intends to marry George Pye, a suitor he loathes. Complicating matters, Felix earlier had an affair with George’s daughter Rose, who gave birth to a child he has never known.The play tries to convey Felix’s excitement about trying to work out, as the character says, “a unified field theory that will reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics,” and the split desire he feels for loneliness and companionship.“There aren’t many playwrights bold enough to relate personal relationships to cutting-edge theoretical physics,” Beale told the Guardian newspaper. All the actors had lessons in physics during rehearsals to help them understand superstring theory. Jones says that she decided to write a play about a physicist after she visualized a man pottering around the garden like a bumblebee, and “according to the laws of physics, the body shape of the bumblebee should make flight impossible.” The idea of incorporating superstring theory came after she heard string theorist Brian Greene from Columbia University in New York discuss his book, The Elegant Universe (W.W. Norton&Company, 1999), on the radio.“I have been surprised and gratified by the number of undertakings in the arts of late that have some connection to string theory,” says Greene. He points to a dance piece in New York, an independent movie being shot in Los Angeles, and a play called Calabi–Yau, which have all been inspired by the theory. “All these works really speak to the way these ideas about how the universe is structured strike a deep, resonant chord in the human spirit,” says Greene. “Many, if not all of us, are searching in one way or another for the truth.” Humble Boy is sold out through the end of November. After that, it’s expected to move to the center of London’s theater district, the West End. Further details are available online at http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk. Playbill for Humble Boy , which is causing a buzz in London.ROYAL NATIONAL THEATREPPT|High resolution© 2001 American Institute of Physics.

Desk Dreams

Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is former Poet Laureate of the United States. Thomas and Beulah won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Her seventh collection of poems, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, was published by W.W. Norton in 1999. Among the most recent of her many honors are the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, the 1996 National Humanities Medal, the 1997 Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1997 Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, the 1998 Levinson Prize for Poetry magazine, the 2000 Library Lion medal from the New York Public Library and the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award in the Literary Arts. Ms. Dove's song cycle Seven for Luck, set to music by John Williams and featured with the Boston Pops on PBS, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in July 1998, and her play The Darker Face of the Earth, has been performed at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Crossroads Theatre of New Jersey, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, and the Royal National Theatre in London.

The St Petersburg Imperial Theaters: Stage and State in Revolutionary Russia 1900-1920 by Murray s> Frame (review)

324 SEER, 79, 2, 2001 ethical engagement and worldly intervention, thus making it chime with Marxist political theory. Bakhtin seems to follow suit when he defines the Bildungsroman as a breakwith earlier idyllic narrativeforms, but his emphasis on Goethe's idea of an integralseeing allows him to reduce Bildung to the very idylliccontemplation it was supposedto transcend. A short review can't possiblydojustice to the subtletywith which Tihanov pursues his case, or even give a hint of the many compelling arguments generated in its wake. Nor can it even list the fascinatingintellectualhistories which Tihanov has unearthed through patient research (two examples for illustrationalone:he showshow Voloshinov'stheoryof languagedepended on Bukharin'swritingson ideology and the indebtednessof Bakhtin'sinterpretation of Goethe to books by Dilthey, Simmel and Gundolf). Up till now 'historical context' in books on Bakhtin has generally meant hazy and unprovable generalizations about 'Russian thought'; in Tihanov's study it means precise research -in five languages and carefulargument.In one fellswoop Tihanov has given us a brilliantanalysisof culturalargumentin the interwar period and set a new standard for the study of Bakhtin'swork in particular.We can only hope that otherswill follow his example. Department ofEnglishandAmericanStudies KEN HIRSCHKOP University ofManchester Frame,Murray. TheStPetersburg Imperial Theaters: Stage andStateinRevolutionary RussiaI900-I920. McFarland &Company, Jefferson,NorthCarolina, 2000. X+ 214 pp. Notes. Index. $39.95. AT a moment when the St PetersburgKirov (formerMariinskii)Opera and Ballet Company is receiving rave reviewson its currentworld tour and when critics are explaining its qualities of superlative ensemble in terms of a specificallySoviettraditionof statefundingwith itsoriginsin Russia'simperial past, the appearanceof the presentbook seems especiallyapposite. The theme of MurrayFrame'sthoroughlyresearchedand conciselywritten studyconcernstheinstitutionalidentityof the St PetersburgImperialTheatres and their relationship to the Russian state during the turbulentyears which included the revolution of 1905, the FirstWorldWar, and both the February and October revolutionsof 19I7. For the uninitiated, the status of the two major Imperial Theatres in St Petersburgmay be likenedto that of the two Royal Theatres (Covent Garden and Drury Lane) in England between i66o and I843, whilst the extravagant funding of the Aleksandrinskiiand Mariinskiiis not unlike that bestowed on the staging of allegoricallysignificantcourt masques by James and Charles I during the firsthalf of the seventeenth century. In this latter sense, the policy of the Bolsheviks in sustaining the cultural significance of the Imperial Theatresbeyond 19I7 seemspositivelyenlightenedwhen comparedwith that of its revolutionaryforebearsin England,where both the court and the public theatreswere crushed(somewould saypermanently)duringthe I640s. Again, it can be argued that prestigious institutions in British culture which have 'imperial' status, in so far as they attract a disproportionate amount of REVIEWS 325 centrally allocated funding, such as the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, occupy a political and cultural space in British society similar to that of their prerevolutionaryand post-revolutionaryRussiancounterparts. It is, however, at points where this study reminds the reader of historical similarities that the qualitative discrepancy highlights essential differences. When, for example, Frameis considering the nature of a repressiveImperial Directorate and its paradoxicallyenabling effects on the theatricalculture of the Russian Silver Age, he records the adventurous artistic policy of the incumbentImperialTheatre director,V. A. Teliakovskii(inmany respectsthe hero of this narrative)and the talentswhich his administrationnurtured.The roll-call of names includes Shaliapin, Karsavina, Pavlova,Nizhinskii, Petipa, Fokin, Meierkhol'd, Bakst, not to mention the dramatic talents of Savina, Varlamov,Iur'evand others. The book chartsthe backgroundto this extraordinaryphase by tracingthe rise of the Imperial Theatres as virtual departments of state during the nineteenth century, combining the characteristicsof a military culture with adherenceto the calendarof the Orthodox Churchaspartof theirofficialrole as celebratoryemblemsof the tsaristcourtand, after I882, as culturalbastions against the rise of commercial theatrical entertainment. The study then considers the relationship between the Directorate of the Imperial Theatres and its troupes, before going on to characterize the audiences of privileged and wealthy patrons who constituted a cultural elite closely associated with Russian imperial power. However, the section on the repertoire concludes that this was not narrowly court-based but had a much wider social and culturalsignificance.Interestingly,the most popularplays at the Aleksandrinskii during this period were Gogol"s TheGovernment Inspector and SukhovoKobylin 'sKrechinskii's Wedding, whilstthe most performedShakespeareanplay was TheMerchant of Venice...

Canadian Drama and Performance in the UK: Featuring Quebec and a Canon

According to Todd Marciniak, Cultural Industries Officer responsible for the performing arts in the Cultural Relations office at the Canadian High Commission, London, there is now three times as much production of Canadian drama and performance in Britain - by both British and Canadian companies - as there was ten years ago.2 Regularly visiting Canadian companies include theatre companies Ex Machina and One Yellow Rabbit, the circuses Cirque du Soleil and Cirque Eloize, dance companies La La La Human Steps and O Vertigo and children’s theatre companies Les Deux Mondes and Théâtre Sans Fil. British theatres that produce or host Canadian work regularly include the Traverse, Edinburgh; the Tramway and the Tron Theatre, Glasgow; the Royal Exchange, Manchester; and in London the Royal National Theatre, the Bush Theatre, the Battersea Arts Centre, Riverside Studios and the Finborough Theatre. Festivals that Canadian companies regularly participate in include the Edinburgh International Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Glasgow Dance Festival, New Moves, the Belfast Festival and BITE, the Barbican International Theatre Event in London. Writers whose plays are often produced in Britain include Michel Tremblay, Brad Fraser, Judith Thompson and George F. Walker.3

Play Review Remember This By Stephen Poliakoff, Royal National Theatre, London. October 15, 1999.

Play Review Remember This By Stephen Poliakoff, Royal National Theatre, London. October 15, 1999.

Copenhagen

Reviewed by: Copenhagen Peter B. Young Copenhagen. By Michael Frayn. Royal National Theatre, Cottesloe Theatre, London. 1 June 1998. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Matthew Marsh as Werner Heisenberg and David Burke as Niels Bohr in the Royal National Theatre’s production of Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, directed by Michael Blakemore. Photo: Conrad Blakemore. Michael Frayn’s new play Copenhagen explores the puzzling trip German physicist Werner Heisenberg took to Copenhagen in 1941 to see his Danish counterpart Niels Bohr. That the meeting of these two old friends took place is historical fact, but what they said to each other is not, despite the best efforts of colleagues and British intelligence to find out during and after the war. Why did the German physicist, who was not a Nazi even though he worked on atomic energy research for his government, go to see Bohr, his half-Jewish friend and mentor then on the opposite side and working in occupied Denmark? The Gestapo was watching both men. Whatever they said to each other made Bohr deeply angry. He later gave one version of their meeting, Heisenberg another, further clouding matters. How does one get an audience interested in such questions, and even heighten their involvement while having three characters discuss atomic physics? This problem was solved admirably by Frayn’s eminently playable script and by director Michael Blakemore and his cast, creating a riveting and theatrically intense production in this première of the play at the Royal National’s Cottesloe Theatre. The play works because Frayn is a competent dramatist who is able to keep his own voice from intruding upon that of his characters. They are each complete, independent creations and believable agents of the play’s events. Although Frayn is best known for his comic writings, Copenhagen should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with such works as Benefactors, Here, or the novel A Landing on the Sun. Frayn’s beautifully crafted play is not about the ethics of developing the atomic bomb, although it could be read that way. More fundamentally, the play concerns motivations for human actions and the uncertainty of even individuals knowing why they do what they do. As he said in a “Dialogue” presentation with Blakemore at the National Theatre on 1 June, “I thought what was said in 1941 might have some relation to uncertainty, at least in the theoretical limits on what we can know about [End Page 218] human thought.” Characteristically, Frayn does not solve the puzzle for the audience. He merely explores the situation in several permutations. The play is, in a way, a philosophical construction of another human attempt to make order and sense out of the world in which we find ourselves. Frayn’s Cambridge degree is in moral sciences, now known as philosophy, and he has frequently said that all his plays have a philosophical basis to them. The theatrical device framing the action is that, now dead, all three characters, Heisenberg, Bohr, and Bohr’s wife Margarethe, have gathered one more time to determine just what happened and why. Copenhagen explores the multiple memories and versions of what may have actually happened, much as his Benefactors examines the manifold aspects of benefaction. As in the earlier play, here Frayn frequently has his characters address the audience directly from their post-life presence, setting the stage for us as they move to their several re-enactments of the 1941 meeting, like variations on a theme. This technique is always made to seem perfectly natural in both Frayn’s writing and the actors’ portrayals. Peter J. Davison’s design is appropriately simple. He provides an arena setting at the center of which a large white circle with markings suggests a flattened and abstracted globe of the earth. At the rear is a steeply raised bank of four rows of seats, looking like either a lecture hall or an operating theatre. The sole entrance to the stage area, which thrusts into the globe design by means of a pointed wedge painted on the floor, bisects the bank. Three dark aluminum chairs, ironically designed for use on the Hindenburg dirigible, are the only other...

The Cripple of Inishmaan, and: Tarry Flynn (review)

Reviewed by: The Cripple of Inishmaan, and: Tarry Flynn Michael C. O’Neill The Cripple Of Inishmaan. By Martin McDonagh. Royal National Theatre, Lyttelton, London. 12 June 1997. Tarry Flynn. By Patrick Kavanagh. Adapted by Conall Morrison. Abbey Theatre, Dublin. 16 June 1997. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Helen (Aisling O’Sullivan) in Royal National Theatre of London’s production of Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Lyttelon Theatre. Photo: Gautier Deblonde. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Billy (Ruaidhri Conroy) in Royal National Theatre of London’s production of Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Lyttelon Theatre. Photo: Gautier Deblonde. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. James Kennedy and Pauline Flanagan in Abbey Theatre of Dublin’s production of Patrick Kavangh’s Tarry Flynn, adapted and directed by Conall Morrison. Photo: Amelia Stein. The legacy of Irish provincial life casts a long and sometimes flickering shadow across two deeply felt comedies staged in the national theatres of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland last summer. At the center of both Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan and Conall Morrison’s adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh’s novel Tarry Flynn are young, misfit heroes who, like countless others in Ireland and its fiction, try to escape the rural existence that has defined them. Cripple Billy Claven, the title character of McDonagh’s widely praised play, seeks his refuge in the movies; Tarry Flynn composes poems to wildflowers and insects as he works the thankless fields of County Cavan. Informing each of their struggles, however, is the cultural legacy from which both McDonagh and Morrison have drawn, which is embodied in startlingly different styles in these two highly literate and insightful productions. The play is set on the remote island of Inishmaan, which John Millington Synge described in 1903 in The Aran Islands as possibly the most primitive place left in Europe. The Cripple of Inishmaan contrasts Synge’s portrayal of a pure, almost prelapsarian Irish life with a petty and comic existence suddenly—and deceptively—given meaning when Hollywood film director Robert Flaherty and his crew of Americans arrive to shoot Man of Aran on location in 1934. McDonagh’s characters see in the filming only an opportunity to escape to Hollywood and the good life in America. To the islanders’ amazement, Cripple Billy, the outcast and orphan of Inishmaan, is hired by Flaherty and travels to Hollywood for a screen test bursting with [End Page 257] Irish clichés and stereotypes about the disabled that sends Billy packing for the reality of home, where in turn he unmasks the lies surrounding his birth and the death of his parents. McDonagh has created a range of richly defined characters, all of whom are recognizable relatives of the Irish types that Synge helped reinvent in The Playboy of the Western World and that Patrick Kavanagh satirized in Tarry Flynn. The two maiden aunts, Kate and Eileen Osbourne, raise Billy Claven as their own son, smothering him with their good intentions and their worries for his health; under stress, Kate begins speaking to stones, and Eileen, to cope with her Irish fatalism, sneaks sweets from behind the counter of her shop. Johnnypateenmike, the local bachelor busybody, trades gossip for eggs, and still tends to his ninety-year-old mother, who has a habit of drinking so much she cannot climb the stairs to bed and taunts her son by calling him “the most boring oul fecker in Ireland” (The Cripple of Inishmaan [London: Metheun, 1996], 35). Bartley, Billy’s dim-witted friend, expresses his need for adventure by begging for a telescope to look at the cows and rocks. The National Theatre has assembled a brilliant cast for The Cripple of Inishmaan, most notably Aisling O’Sullivan as the beautiful and foul-mouthed Helen whom Billy adores, and Owen Sharpe as Bartley, the younger brother Helen torments. Fine character performances are turned in by Ray McBride as Johnnypateenmike and by Anita Reeves and Dearbhla Molloy as Billy’s aunts. In the title role, Ruaidhri Conroy is so convincing as the...

Diaspora, Nation, and the Failure of Home: Two Contemporary Indian Plays

Diaspora, Nation, and the Failure of Home: Two Contemporary Indian Plays Aparna Dharwadker (bio) Locating the Indian Theatre of Diaspora We may speak metaphorically of the “drama of the diasporic” in the writing of displaced Indian authors, but in a literal sense the genres of drama and theatre are nearly absent from it. This is increasingly evident in the bibliographical and critical work that has begun to chart the field of diaspora literature. In his editor’s preface to Writers of the Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (1993), Emmanuel S. Nelson lists fiction, poetry, formal essay, travelogue, biography, and autobiography as the forms in which “the artists included in the study express themselves,” excluding theatre altogether. 1 Among the fifty-eight “representative” figures profiled in Nelson’s sourcebook, only two Indo-British authors—Hanif Kureishi and Farrukh Dhondy—have produced a recognizable body of plays for stage, radio, and television. Both, however, are better known for their work in other genres, and neither can be strongly associated with a “theatre of diaspora.” 2 In North America, anthologists and critics [End Page 71] have approached immigrant theatre through such categories as multiculturalism, ethnicity, diversity, and color, and in the resulting descriptions playwrights of Indian origin are either missing or eclipsed by their Afro-Caribbean, East Asian, and European counterparts. 3 When the focus is exclusively on writers of South Asian origin in a specific host country, the subordinate position of drama in relation to poetry, short fiction, and the novel becomes even clearer. 4 Jatinder Verma’s London-based Asian performance group, Tara Arts, and his directing work at the Royal National Theatre may well be the best examples of sustained work in the theatre by an immigrant Indian practitioner, though ironically Verma emigrated to England not from India but from the embattled Indian diaspora in East Africa. Given the large scale of Indian emigration to Britain, North America, Australia, and West Asia since the 1960s, and the success with which authors of the new diaspora have practised the genres of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in English, the marginality of theatre to diasporic experience suggests a complicated relation between genre, language, and location. Major contemporary Indian playwrights and theatre directors have remained unusually resistant to the possibilities of departure, choosing instead to develop lifelong associations with particular Indian cities, theatre groups, and academic institutions. 5 Most of them write and direct plays not originally in English—which “travels” best by virtue of being both an Indian and a Western language—but in one or more indigenous languages that address local, regional, and national rather [End Page 72] than international audiences. 6 Over the past four decades, their practice has also followed a nationalist (though not necessarily a pro-nation) agenda, focusing on the invention of a characteristically “Indian” theatre that assimilates indigenous textual and performative traditions particular to various regions within the country while maintaining the qualities of modernity appropriate to a contemporary urban performance genre. Conversely, migrant authors appear to have chosen the privacy and relative self-sufficiency of print genres like fiction, non-fiction, and poetry over the complications of a collaborative, public, commercial, and performance-based medium like theatre. Theatre’s dependence on institutional networks and validating cultural contexts may in part explain why leading Indian practitioners have not identified with the diaspora, and why diaspora authors have only sporadically turned to theatrical genres. In the Indian case, the fundamentally double-edged experience of migrancy—with the loss and recovery of home as its central figures—may be easier to narrate than to perform. However, the features of modern diaspora, mediated further in the case of India by a complex postcolonialism and a contested nationhood, suggest a need for rethinking the relation between diaspora and the postcolonial nation-state, which would also lead us to reconsider the sites of performance. The dialectic of “longing” and “belonging” which often defines diasporic relations misrepresents the experience of diaspora as well as the status of the nation-as-home. Peter van der Veer argues that “the theme of belonging opposes rootedness to uprootedness, establishment to marginality. The theme of longing harps on the desire for change and movement...

On Stage

'"é3Sí£(í&JUDITHFISHER STAGE?=^ "^^fine«'J University There's bound to be an adaptation of A CHRISTMAS CAROL playing at a theatre near you, but because most of them close before the end of December 1997, Tve not included many. But I have included several productions in major U.S. cities, should you be travelling south during the upcoming conference season. CANADA: SASKATCHEWAN Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens Globe Theatre, Regina· 18 - 30 April 1998 · A new adaptation by Richard Ouzounian. UNITED STATES: ASHLAND Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekov Oregon Shakespeare Festival· 22 April - 31 October 1998 · ATLANTA Candida by George Bernard Shaw Actor's Express·20 February - 5 April 1998 · The Turn of the Screw by Henry James· 24 April - 31 May 1998 · Actor's Express Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher. CHICAGO The Seagull by Anton Chekov Josephine Louis Theatre, Northwestern University · 24 April - 3 May 1998 · This production by the Theatre Department ofthe University is being presented as part of the international conference "Chekov in Performance" to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the Moscow Art Theatre's first production. DALLAS An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde Dallas Theatre Centre· 14 January - 8 February 1998 · 300 Victorian Review NEW YORK Jekyll and Hyde Plymouth Theatre, NYC· still running · This musical adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel by Leslie Bricusse and Frank Wildhorn, directed by Robin Phillips, now stars Robert Cuccioli, Linda Eder and Christine Noll. A Flea in Her Ear by George Feydeau Roundabout Theatre, NYC· 1 1 February - 3 May 1998 · Adapted by Jean-Marie Beset: translated by Mark OOonnell. Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw Irish Repertory, NYC 7"Ae Heiress by Henry James Syracuse Stage, Syracuse Adapted by Ruth and Augustus Goetz. PHILADELPHIA Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen Arden Theatre Company SAN FRANCISCO Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller American Conservatory Theatre SEATTLE Great Expectations by Charles Dickens Bathhouse Theatre Adapted by Gale Fury Childs. An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde Seattle Repertory Theatre • opened 24 November 1997 · - 27 February - 8 March 1998 · • 22 January - 8 March 1998 ·¦26 March -26 April 1998· 21 April -31 May 1998·¦ 7 March - 12 April 1998 · ENGLAND: LONDON Oliver by Lionel Bart London Palladium· still running · This musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' novel now stars Jim Dale as Fagin. The Magistrate by Arthur Wing Pinero Savoy Theatre Stars Ian Richardson.¦ opened 9 December 1997 · On Stage301 An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen Olivier, Royal National Theatre· until 22 January 1998 · Adapted by Christopher Hampton, designed by John Napier, starring Sir Ian McKellan. Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmond Rostand Lyric Theatre· opened 27 November 1997 · A new version by Anthony Burgess, starring Anthony Sher. Little Eyotf by Henrik Ibsen The Pit, Barbican Centre· until 7 February 1998 · Royal Shakespeare Company's production, directed by Adrian Noble. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens Springfield Theatre, Bounds Green road· until 1 1 January 1998 · David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Greenwich Theatre· until 24 January 1998 · ...

An Interview with Patsy Rodenburg, Head of Voice, The Royal National Theatre of Great Britain

An Interview with Patsy Rodenburg, Head of Voice, The Royal National Theatre of Great Britain

The Honourable Beast: A Posthumous Autobiography (review)

REVIEWS 303 faulty date and naming of Lawrence's mother on Lawrence's birth certificate, errors he convincingly explains as misunderstanding (1155 n. 3). Here Wilson relies on the facts as otherwise established, not on the document. Like the rest of us, Wilson must choose what to believe—which document to accept as true, which to consider "veneer" or "misunderstanding." And his choices often seem idiosyncratic. Why accept a source that sounds self-serving, and doubt another that seems disinterested; what supports each opinion, are questions a good critical biographer like John Mack, in his A Prince of Our Disorder (1976), takes pains to answer. All these Wilson considers silenced by his claim of historical objectivity. Much can be learned from the formidable bulk of material presented in this mammoth tome, though too frequently the selections repeat well-known published material without fresh insight. Rather than rehash the old classics, Wilson might have proffered more gems from the hoard of documents to which he had access. Despite unique access to people, documents, and time, Wilson has not written the biograpy to incorporate and supersede all others. A novice would find more readable any of the recent introductions to T. E. Lawrence. Those familiar with Lawrence will receive a broader vision of the politics of his age, but little about the man who is this biography's ostensible subject. Regrettably, Wilson's flawed comprehension of the nature of his genre and subject strands him with those who, he complains, "have ignored, distorted, or suppressed large parts of the evidence in order to give their preconceived theories an illusion of credibility" (13). Victoria Carchidi Massey University John Dexter, The Honourable Beast: A Posthumous Autobiography. New York: Routledge, 1993. 340 pp. $25.00. There is something right about the form and content of The Honourable Beast. There is also something amiss. John Dexter probably would have liked it that way. As an experiment in autobiographical form, the work yields promising results. As an appropriate testing ground for its particular subject, the experiment falters. The promise resident in the work's innovative posthumous autobiographical form does not overcome the overriding difficulty of its arguably obscure author. John Dexter's thirty—year theatrical career witnessed his tenure as director for London's highly regarded Royal Court Theatre and National Theatre as well as Director of Productions for New York City's Metropolitan Opera House. In numerous ground-breaking productions, including Equus, M. Butterfly, Amadeus, and Dialogues of the Carmelites, Dexter's stage work and highly influential approach to theatrical production are generally acknowledged within the theatrical communities while remaining largely unrecognized by those outside. Overshadowed by the cult of the actor, the director is generally obscured in the public's eye by the star's shine. "Written" after his death in 1990, the innovative form suggested by the work's subtitle , A Posthumous Autobiography, is constructed through 15 sections comprised of selections from Dexter's diaries, correspondence, and work notes. Diligently compiled by Dexter's long-time companion, Riggs O'Hara, the posthumous autobiography allows its belated subject to "author" his own story while numerous gaps and inconsistencies in this narrative must necessarily remain unexplored. 304 biography Vol. 17,No. 3 Addressing the work's inherent form/subject friction by arranging the selections around major productions or periods of Dexter's life, O'Hara craftily shapes the materials . While true to the strictures of autobiography (Dexter did write the book's contents ), the imposed form does not allow gaps in either the related information or in the reader's knowledge to be filled in. For theatre scholars familiar with Dexter's productions and theatrical ideology, the book's assumption of a general familiarity with its author may not prove a hurdle. For a general readership it can only be highly confusing. When selections of Dexter's writings accomplish a complete narrative or ring with a reader's association or knowledge, the insights gained are always penetrating. However , when the reader is confronted with previously unknown facets of Dexter's life or work, the form frustrates more than informs. Dexter's reputation as a theatrical artist is twofold: known for the high standards and innovative interpretations...

Symbol of a nightmare society

Royal National Theatre Angels in America: “Millennium Approaches” In repertoire In her book AIDS as Metaphor the New York critic Susan Sontag deplores the habit of endowing disease with all manner of symbolic qualities: Medicine and moralising must not be mixed. Tony Kushner's play might almost have been written in direct defiance of her dictum. For it is a wrenching dramatisation of a generation of America shaken to its core by the experience of AIDS: explicit suffering and waste, the anguish and anger that AIDS has generated, and its tragic tendencies to betrayal and blight. “Millennium Approaches” focuses on a gay couple, Louis and Prior, whose relationship breaks up when Prior develops the first signs of Kaposi's …

Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor: "The Actors Are Come Hither" the Performance of Tragedy in a Secure Psychiatric Hospital

Part 1 Dramatis personae: audience - Broadmoor patients and staff, Trevor Walt actors - The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Royal National Theatre, Wilde Community Theatre Company title roles - Hamlet and Romeo, King Lear, From Gertrude to Regan directors - in search of Hamlet, Men of Stones, A Giant's Strength. Part 2 Stage directions: the setting - Broadmoor hospital, Harvey Gordon the set and stage management, Ian Bayne. Part 3 Tempest in the Mind - a collage of criticism. Part 4 Wilder horizons: projective aspects of performance, Alice Theilgaard the place of drama in custodial settings - responsibility, opportunity, risk, Dominic Barber the nature and limits of dramatherapy, Sue Jennings. Epilogue - reporting to the Yet Unknowing World, Murray Cox.

Current Issues in Art and Design Education: the Professional Arts Organisation

Journal of Art & Design EducationVolume 6, Issue 2 p. 139-147 Current Issues in Art and Design Education: the Professional Arts Organisation SUE ROBERTSON, SUE ROBERTSON SUEROBERTSON is Director of Education Programmes at the South Bank Centre (comprising Royal Festival Hall, Hayward Gallery, National Theatre and National Film Theatre), and was formerly Senior Education Officer at the Arts Council. She is a graduate of York University, trained as a teacher at the University of Nottingham and in Arts Administration at the City University. She has taught English and Drama, and worked with several arts organisations including South Hill Park Arts Centre and the Young Vic. Correspondence address: South Bank Centre, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 8XX.Search for more papers by this author SUE ROBERTSON, SUE ROBERTSON SUEROBERTSON is Director of Education Programmes at the South Bank Centre (comprising Royal Festival Hall, Hayward Gallery, National Theatre and National Film Theatre), and was formerly Senior Education Officer at the Arts Council. She is a graduate of York University, trained as a teacher at the University of Nottingham and in Arts Administration at the City University. She has taught English and Drama, and worked with several arts organisations including South Hill Park Arts Centre and the Young Vic. Correspondence address: South Bank Centre, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 8XX.Search for more papers by this author First published: June 1987 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1476-8070.1987.tb00235.xCitations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume6, Issue2June 1987Pages 139-147 RelatedInformation