Theatre Royal Research Articles

Popular Reception by Dramatic Adaptation: The Case of Walter Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian

The downmarket dissemination of the Waverley Novels in nineteenth-century Britain is usually considered in terms of collected editions, but adaptations for print and stage played an important role in placing the fictional works of Walter Scott at the centre of contemporary social tensions. There were thousands of performances in various forms at patent and non-patent venues throughout Britain for nearly every work of fiction. Melodramatic versions of The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818) in London, for the Royal Theatres Covent Garden and Drury Lane as well as minor theatres south of the Thames such as the Surrey, provide the basis for a case study that describes the participation of venue, performance, and audience in successful production and reception. The involvement of commerce and politics, print and theatre, upmarket and working-class audiences indicates the importance of Scott dramatized in the study of the Waverley Novels, Romanticism, popular culture, and national identity and group formation in the nineteenth century.

Ramblin' Jack Elliott: The Never-Ending Highway (review)

Reviewed by: Ramblin' Jack Elliott: The Never-Ending Highway Chris Durman Ramblin' Jack Elliott: The Never-Ending Highway. By Hank Reineke. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010. [xx, 397 p. ISBN9780810872561. $55.] Illustrations, bibliography, discography, index. Sometimes stories of "also ran" figures are more compelling than stories of "winners," and sometimes being an "also ran" is a sufficient accomplishment in itself. As [End Page 383] Hank Reineke tells, the life of American folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliott is just that, the story of a man known to the larger public, if at all, more for his associations and friends than for his many accomplishments. Good friend to generations of American and British folk and roots musicians such as Pete Seeger, Ewan MacColl, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, John Prine, and Emmylou Harris, Jack is most famous for his close friendship with his primary mentor, Woody Guthrie, and for the role he in turn played influencing a generation of musicians including Guthrie's son Arlo and Bob Dylan. Reineke, who assisted as a research consultant for Elliott's daughter, Aiyana Elliott, during the making of her documentary film The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack (2000), has written articles on American popular music for Aquarian Arts Weekly, East Coast Rocker, Blues Revue, and ISIS (the Bob Dylan Magazine). Ramblin' Jack Elliott: The Never-Ending Highway, Reineke's first book, traces Elliott—who was notoriously difficult to locate, let alone chronicle—throughout his life and long career. Reineke reveals that the book is built around the recordings Elliott made between 1954 and 2009 and that "there is purposefully little gossip or retelling of famously tall tales, real and apocryphal, to be found in this book" (p. xviii). While the book would have undoubtedly been made more colorful with the addition of more gossip and anecdotal Ramblin' Jack tales, Reineke, using hundreds of pre-existing articles and interviews, has written an engaging and comprehensive record of his life nonetheless. Ramblin' Jack's tale is the quintessential American story of a man who created himself in the image he wanted—an image that didn't necessarily correspond to the life into which he was born. Born Elliot Charles Adnopoz, Ramblin' Jack may have been the son of a Brooklyn surgeon, but he seems to have ridden straight out of the cowboy west. Reineke's biography begins appropriately at the 1940 World Championship Rodeo in Madison Square Garden, where interest in the cowboy was cemented into the nine-year-old Elliot Adnopoz. Fascination with the cowboy life would lead him to run away from home at age sixteen to join a traveling rodeo and to a life-long love of the rodeo, the cowboy life, and the songs of the cowboy. He taught himself to accompany his singing on guitar and at the age of seventeen landed right in the middle of the folk revival then burgeoning in Greenwich Village. Perhaps the American folk music scene was just very small at that time, perhaps it was particularly concentrated in New York, or perhaps Elliott was amazingly fortunate and persistent, but the list of American folk music and popular culture luminaries Elliott met there is simply amazing. The reader cannot help but be impressed by the wide range of celebrities Elliott meets and befriends throughout his life, and comparison is inevitable between Elliott and fictional characters who stumble through life bumping into great numbers of famous historical characters. By the time the nineteen-year-old Elliott met Woody Guthrie, he already knew many of the biggest names of the folk music revival. Through his friendship and apprenticeship with Guthrie, he came to know many more. Surprisingly, Elliott actually launched his career and may have left his most enduring legacy in Great Britain. Having arrived there with a new bride and the names of a few music contacts right at the height of the skiffle craze (roughly comparable to the American folk music revival), Elliott was soon making albums, singing in London clubs, and performing in the play The Big Rock Candy Mountain at the Theatre Royal in London's East End. His music appealed to many in Great Britain who were interested in American folk music, but "put off...

Aktrisens böcker: Beata Charlotta Ekermans bibliotek 1790

In this article I discuss a collection of books that belonged to Beata Charlotta (Charlotte) Ekerman (1758-1790), an actress at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm. Ekerman became the mistress of Prince Charles, brother of Gustav III. The prince dismissed her for another woman and she was suspected of infanticide and slander against the king. The governor of Stockholm, Carl Sparre, helped her to avoid the Spinning House, but she was exiled and lived in Paris between 1782 and 1786. In 1784 she travelled to Italy, where she had been invited by a Neapolitan duke. Thanks to Ekerman's letters to Sparre it is possible to follow her journey from the papal court in Rome to the royal court at Naples. She spent her last years in Stockholm, now mistress of the Dutch ambassador and accused of espionage. The aim of this article is to study the interrelation between the owner and her books, on the basis of a list of Ekerman's books included in the estate inventory drawn up after her death. A selection of these books is discussed with particular regard to language and genre. The collection, described in the inventory as consisting mainly of theatrical pieces and French novels, turns out to have had a wider range, thus revealing its owner's ambition to transgress the stereotypical image of the eighteenth-century woman.

Gwyn Thomas's Sap and Theatre Workshop's Oh What a Lovely War

In the autumn of 1962 Gwyn Thomas, author of The Keep and Jackie the Jumper, two plays already staged at the Royal Court, delivered to the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, his script of Sap, a play with songs about the First World War. In March 1963, Joan Littlewood premiered at the Theatre Royal Oh What a Lovely War. Subsequently, Thomas felt that his ideas and research had been stolen, and because of the success of Oh What a Lovely War, Sap was not staged for another eleven years. In this article Gwynne Edwards discusses the circumstances surrounding these events and outlines the similarities and differences between the two plays. Gwynne Edwards has written extensively on Spanish theatre, in particular on the plays of Lorca, which he has also translated. More recently he has written plays based on the lives and work of Dylan Thomas, Gwyn Thomas, and Richard Burton. Burton was staged in Hollywood in 2010.

Discoveries and Recoveries in the Laboratory of Georgian Theatre

For a four-month period in 2010 David Francis Taylor worked as a research consultant with the Theatre Royal at Bury St Edmunds, the only working Regency playhouse in Britain. In this article Taylor reflects upon the experiences and insights he acquired over the course of this collaboration. In particular, he indicates how the theatre's restaging of the neglected repertory of the long eighteenth century within the Georgian space of performance can aid theatre historians in understanding the intricate dynamics of the period's theatre architecture and, crucially, the position and agency of its spectatorships. David Francis Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His book Theatres of Opposition, which concerns the theatricality of politics in the career of the playwright-parliamentarian Richard Brinsley Sheridan, will be published next year by Oxford University Press. He has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies, European Romantic Review, and the Keats-Shelley Review, and is currently co-editing, with Julia Swindells, the Oxford Handbook to the Georgian Playhouse.

Exploring Partnerships with Common Roots: Two New Ways of Combining Classical Dance Tranditions in Mainland Southest Asian Performances

This article explores two different attempts to make partnerships for the today’s stage with teams of classically-trained Southeast Asian dancers in the last three years. Working in different conditions and toward different ends, the Cambodian and Thai dancers discussed in this paper combined their classical artistic training and interests into performances differently directed toward today’s diverse dance audiences. In particular, this paper will reflect on two classically-grounded partnering projects I helped to bring into being as a contemporary theatre artist and producer: the masked dance (khon) performances done at the Sala Chalermkrung Royal Theatre in Bangkok and the Revitalising Monkeys and Giants work-in-progress with Cambodian and Thai artists. By focusing on how these pieces evolved due to their distinct blend of external conditions and artistic aims, I will raise questions about the multiple and complex reasons that prompt traditional artists to work together across national and genre boundaries in order to make new pieces that are meaningful to them and to their audiences. The larger questions raised in this essay will address the identity of these traditional artists in these new settings and what grounds the varied choices of performance partnerships for their diverse contemporary audiences. I will also consider whether these new linkages can help to strengthen dance traditions and enhance the confidence of traditional performers on the stage today.

Cholesterol Embolization Syndrome

Cholesterol embolization syndrome refers to embolization of the contents of an atherosclerotic plaque (primarily cholesterol crystals) from a proximal large-caliber artery to distal small to medium arteries causing end-organ damage by mechanical plugging and an inflammatory response. Synonyms used in the medical literature include atheromatous embolization, cholesterol crystal embolization, and atheroembolism. Cholesterol embolization syndrome should be distinguished from the related and much more common syndrome of arterio-arterial thromboembolism in which fragments of a thrombus that forms atop an atheromatous plaque in the aorta or a large artery travel distally and occlude medium to large arteries.1 Cholesterol embolization syndrome is generally characterized by a multitude of small emboli (showers of microemboli) occurring over time. This is in contrast to arterio-arterial thromboembolism, which is usually characterized by an abrupt release of 1 or a few large emboli, leading to severe ischemia of target organs. Cholesterol embolization syndrome has a variety of clinical presentations. Cholesterol emboli originating in the descending thoracic and abdominal aorta may lead to renal failure, gut ischemia, and emboli to the skeletal muscles and the skin. Dermatologic manifestations (most commonly livedo reticularis and blue toe syndrome) are usually confined to the lower extremities but may extend to the abdomen and the chest. Cholesterol emboli originating in the ascending aorta may in addition cause neurological damage that is typically diffuse and due to small infarcts. Cholesterol embolization syndrome is also characterized by a nonspecific acute inflammatory response leading to constitutional symptoms (such as fever and malaise) and abnormalities in laboratory tests (such as hypereosinophilia and elevated erythrocyte sedimentation rate). These manifestations will be discussed in detail later in the text. Danish physician Fenger and his colleagues appear to have provided the first description of atheroembolism in the Danish medical brochure Ugeskrift for Laeger (Doctors’ Weekly).2 In 1844, they …

Fictional, Factual, and Flying Space: Throwing at the Theatre in The Author on the Wheel

The anonymously-written one-act play The Author on the Wheel, or, a Piece Cut in the Green Room premiered at Theatre Royal Drury Lane on April 18, 1785 (The Daily Universal Register April 18, 1785). It follows a theatre manager with an awful, yet necessary task on his hands: to substantially revise and cut down a play in between the play’s first and second performances. The opening night performance of the play was such a failure that it provoked the audience to throw fruit at the actors to show their disdain; therefore the cast refuses to perform until the script is substantially changed. The revision session in the green room does not go according to plan, and after much insult and humiliation from the manager, cast, and crew, the arrogant author storms out with his manuscript, ready to inflict his awful dialogue on another unsuspecting theatre company.Spaces in the theatre, due to their dynamic and potent properties, offer a way to examine meanings created by spectators and performers in terms of physical space, fictional space, and even textual space. Through my study of The Author on the Wheel, I consider a part of performance that complicates the idea of physical stage space to an extreme (and sometimes even dangerous) degree while somehow managing to avoid much historical and theoretical scrutiny: the thrown object. I investigate the movement between and amongst spaces made by the thrown object. The thrown objects to which I am referring are the apples, pears and oranges hurled toward the stage by the fictional audience in The Author on the Wheel. The incident of the thrown object occurs only as a memory in the play, recounted in the after-performance discussion in the green room. Through this dialogue, the characters tell tales of acting on the stage whilst enduring a barrage of fruit.

"Hilda, Harnessed to a Purpose": Elizabeth Robins, Ibsen, and the Vote

When Elizabeth Robins died in 1952 her obituary in the Manchester Guardian described her as the last of that little phalanx which let Ibsen loose on the English stage ... with the most shattering results. (1) Robins came to be remembered by the theatergoing public for her pioneering performances of Ibsen, to whom she introduced audiences for the first time, after moving to England from the United States in 1888. Robins's first big Ibsen part was as Mrs. Linden in a matinee of A Doll's House, in January 1891. She then staged the first English production of Hedda Gabler at the Vaudeville Theatre in April to May 1891 in collaboration with the young Philadelphian actor Marion Lea. Robins, who had worked with William Archer on the translation from the Norwegian, took the leading role. Archer was impressed with her acclaimed performance as Hedda and called the production the finest piece of modern tragedy within my recollection. (2) Robins secured another personal triumph as Hilda Wangel in the first English production of The Master Builder (1893-94), which she co-produced with the actor Herbert Waring at the Trafalgar Square Theatre. Her other successes in the West End of London were as Martha Bernick in The Pillars of Society (1889), Rebecca West in Rosmersholm (1893), and Ella Rentheim in John Gabriel Borkman (1896-97). After she had acted in a series of Ibsen plays at Ellen Terry's Opera Comique, financed by private subscription in May-June 1893 and jointly managed with Marion Lea, Oscar Wilde wrote to Robins styling himself one of her warmest admirers and made a guinea subscription toward the silver tea service that was presented to her by appreciative audiences: she deserves an offering indeed: a very imaginative artist. The English stage is in her debt. (3) Acting the parts of spirited protagonists politicized Elizabeth Robins and had a profoundly ratiocinative impact on her consciousness. As John Stokes puts it, Ibsen's consistently dominating heroines offered these actresses images of themselves which intensified their sense of personal involvement. (4) Like other sexual and political radicals such as Olive Schreiner, Eleanor Marx (one of translators), and Havelock Ellis, all drawn to the radical individualism and self-actualization with which drama became synonymous, Robins regarded Ibsen as a bearer for her own dreams of a future in which equality between the sexes would be achieved. Late Victorian and Edwardian society came to associate work with progressive attitudes to contemporary sexual and social issues (divorce, the marriage laws, the double standard women's desire for autonomy, etc.) ventilated in the natural-sounding dialogue in the plays of his middle period. Ghosts (1881) did much to consolidate his reputation as a courageous taboo-breaking dramatist. The play intimates the tragic consequence of venereal disease for women and children and was privately performed in London on a subscription-only basis to the Independent Theatre Society at the Royal Theatre in March 1891, in order to avoid censorship from the Lord Chamberlains office. The Ibsenism that Robins espoused represented both a challenge to moral convention and a repudiation of the idea of womanly duty, disturbing some of the most firmly rooted assumptions of late Victorian Britain and dividing literary and theatrical circles into impassioned detractors and defenders of his work. While the Ibsenite gospel was to a large extent preached by women, (5) own relationship to the reform movements and to the Norwegian Women's Rights League in his own country was complicated. As loan Templeton suggests, much-quoted disavowal of feminist appropriations of The Doll's House reflects his desire to prevent himself and his work from being co-opted by any cause or persons and is not a precise reference to the dramatist's purpose in writing A Doll's House twenty years earlier. …

Don't Give Up the Strip!: erotic performance as live entertainment in mid-twentieth century Australia

From 1949 to 1959 Brisbane's Theatre Royal presented a variety show with a weekly change of name, such as Grin and Bare It (1951), Nudes and Blushes (1952), Don't Give Up the Strip (1957), Hips Hooray (1958), Bareway to the Stars (1958) and Don't Point, It's Nude (1959). The show reportedly attracted a family audience; its highlight, according to one commentator, was the moment when ‘Carmelita, the great striptease of the company … and her four attendants coyly removed their bras’. Yet, in 1961, when the show was recreated in the television studios of Brisbane's BTQ7, striptease was not among the acts broadcast onto the city's television screens. This article explores the fate of erotic performance as live entertainment in mid-twentieth century Australia. Burlesque-style performances with showgirls in bustier and fishnet stockings were occasionally seen on variety shows in television's first decade in Australia, although such performances were more readily televised when framed by theatrical convention. While television's claim on the mass production of respectable variety for a suburban audience rendered the performer's eroticism innocuously nostalgic, new metropolitan niches for the live presentation of nude revue were emerging in Sydney and Melbourne.

Waiting for Godot, directed by Sean Mathias, Theatre Royal Haymarket, London Cast: Sir Ian McKellen as Estragon, Patrick Stewart as Vladimir, Simon Callow as Pozzo, Ronald Pickup as Lucky, Theatre Royal Haymarket Company, London, UK, 2009.

<i>Waiting for Godot</i>, directed by Sean Mathias, Theatre Royal Haymarket, London Cast: Sir Ian McKellen as Estragon, Patrick Stewart as Vladimir, Simon Callow as Pozzo, Ronald Pickup as Lucky, Theatre Royal Haymarket Company, London, UK, 2009.

A Choice of Programs

This article considers the shifting nature of theatre programs from their nineteenth-century origins as playbills to the expansive documents collected by 21st-century audiences, offering a selective overview, limited to productions of Hamlet , of a period that commences at the moment which saw Godfrey Tearle in the title role at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 1931, and concludes at the early 1960s, where the program stabilized into the format that remains with us today. It offers a close, contextual reading of the program as the bearer of evidence of aspects of theatre history that exceed-and sometimes interrogate-the merely taxonomic. In doing so, it considers theatre programs not only as repositories of information, but as texts which can illuminate the changing practices and habits of theatregoing itself, through their management of the relationships between spectator expectations, experiences, memories, and desires. The article considers the ways in which the program, as something to be consulted before, during and after a performance, also provides evidence of how productions facilitate or determine the responses of their audiences, providing a species of performance documentation that, operating in the space between the artistic, the commercial, and the instructive, often vividly evokes the milieux, both extraordinary and everyday, in which theatrical encounters take place.

"The Athens of England": Norwich as a Literary Center in the Late Eighteenth Century

The massive increase in provincial urban culture in Britain in the eighteenth century, long recognized by social historians, has only recently begun to register in literary scholarship. Norwich was then one of the leading provincial cities in England and this essay selects it as an exemplary test case for investigating the ways and means in which a city with only a very limited literary tradition could develop itself as an important literary center in this period. The intellectual culture of the Dissenting Octagon Chapel, the Norwich Theatre Royal, and the local newspapers are seen as central to Norwich's literary flowering.

Erfaringsfattigdom

The lecture ”Poverty of Experience – Performance Practices after the Fall” by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll was presented at the international seminar ”After the Fall”, held at The Danish Royal Theatre in 2009 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The author has kindly permitted Peripeti to print a translated version of his lecture. Deploying Walter Benjamin’s concept of Poverty of Experience Müller-Schöll conducts an analysis of the crisis in not only experience but also the world of ideas as such in the time following the era of the cold war, the disastrous development of the (Western) financial markets and thereby the last great ideology remaining after the fall of the Berlin Wall, namely capitalism. Following this, he analyses a number of European performance practices, namely those of the performance group White Horse, the director duo Hofmann &amp; Lindholm and Phillip Quesne’s group Vivarium Studio, exploring how these practices address the circumstances “after the fall” in an manner where they expose their own “poverty of experience” whilst very consciously dedicating themselves to an unspectacular scenic poverty.

Dancing to Darwin

I have been given the opportunity of a lifetime: to work with Mark Baldwin, the artistic director of Rambert Dance Company, on the creation of a novel contemporary dance piece to celebrate the life and work of Charles Darwin in his bicentennial year. The original idea came from Stephen Keynes, Chairman of the Charles Darwin Trust and one of Charles Darwin's great grandsons, and it is he who introduced me to Mark. The Comedy of Change is a collaborative project that combines my knowledge of evolution and animal behaviour with my research on the cognitive capacities of corvids (the crows and jays) and my passion for dance. I have always been fascinated by the showy displays of clever birds and their extravagant dances but this opportunity has inspired me to think in new ways. As the Scientific Advisor of Rambert Dance Company's Creative Team, my role has been to distill Darwinian ideas about evolution into key principles that inform and inspire movement, energy and musicality. It has also resulted in a film, ‘Bird Tango’, which can now be viewed on Cambridge University's website as part of their 800th anniversary campaign (http://www.800.cam.ac.uk).Working with Mark, who happens to share my love of birds and dance, not to mention shoes and sports cars, has been tremendously rewarding. It is a huge honour and pleasure to be part of his exciting project in which exuberant courtship displays are combined with nature's elaborate use of camouflage, enhanced with music and design by some of the best contemporary artists in Rambert Dance Company Creative Team, composer Julian Anderson, visual artist Kadir Attia and taxidermist and costume designer Georg Meyer-Weil.In rehearsal with Mark Baldwin at the Rambert Studio in tango embrace. For me, tango is the dance of the shoes. (Photo: Kevin Hull, Cambridge Ideas.)View Large Image | View Hi-Res Image | Download PowerPoint SlideDarwin and dance? For me the connection is clear, thanks to the birds, with their dazzling visual and acoustic displays. Steve Pinker referred to the songbirds as “Charlie Parker with feathers” but some male birds have dancing skills that rival even the most impressive of professional dancers. The styles of dance they perform vary enormously. The male Bee Hummingbird (Mellisuga helenae) lives in Cuba, and perhaps it comes as no surprise that, tiny though he is, when he dances he creates the gorgeous swirls of salsa, sparkling like an iridescent sapphire. By contrast, male Blue Manakins (Chiroxiphia caudata) can be found in the forests of Argentina, where they can spend 90% of their waking day dancing an ‘avian tango’ in which an expert leader and an apprentice follower perform a male double act. As only top-notch dancers get to mate, they are a powerful illustration of ‘Darwinian principles’.Even more remarkable perhaps, are the Birds of Paradise, of which there are 42 species on the island of New Guinea alone. My favourite is the six-plumed Bird of Paradise (Parotia sexpennis). The idea of camouflage really comes to the fore — one minute they are concealed in the forest undergrowth, but when they dance they reveal their true colours; they jete across the stage, and then make the most amazing head and neck isolation movements. They have an inflatable ‘tutu’ which they use to great effect when wooing the ladies, who watch the performance with a critical eye. Despite their similarities in plumage, males vary greatly in their dancing skills, and time really matters because, just like the Blue Manakins, it takes years of experience to become the principal male.It is these three principles — namely how the natural world can conceal and yet reveal, of how individuals vary because they are both similar yet different, and of how the future becomes the past — that allow females to be so particular in their choice of males, leading to increasingly elaborate and exaggerated dancing displays. That is the nature of change — and why it can be so comical.The Comedy of Change will premier at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth on 16–19 September, and at Sadler's Wells in London on 3–7 November 2009 (further details can be found at http://www.rambert.org.uk/comedy_of_change/tour_dates).

Sparrows Can't Sing: East End Kith and Kinship in the 1960s

Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) was the only feature film directed by the late and much lamented Joan Littlewood. Set and filmed in the East End, where she worked for many years, the film deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. Littlewood’s career spanned documentary (radio recordings made with Ewan MacColl in the North of England in the 1930s) to directing for the stage and the running of the Theatre Royal in London’s Stratford East, often selecting material which aroused memories in local audiences (Leach 2006: 142). Many of the actors trained in her Theatre Workshop subsequently became better known for their appearances on film and television. Littlewood herself directed hardly any material for the screen: Sparrows Can’t Sing and a 1964 series of television commercials for the British Egg Marketing Board, starring Theatre Workshop’s Avis Bunnage, were rare excursions into an area of practice which she found constraining and unamenable (Gable 1980: 32). The hybridity and singularity of Littlewood’s feature may answer, in some degree, for its subsequent neglect. However, Sparrows Can’t Sing makes a significant contribution to a group of films made in Britain in the 1960s which comment generally on changes in the urban and social fabric. It is especially worthy of consideration, I shall argue, for the use which Littlewood made of a particular community’s attitudes – sentimental and critical – to such changes and for its amalgamation of an attachment to documentary techniques (recording an aural landscape on location) with a preference for nonnaturalistic delivery in performance.

Acting Spaces and Carpenters' Tools: from the Fortune to the Theatre Royal, Bristol

Against the received wisdom, Mark Howell-Meri argues here for a continuing tradition between Elizabethan and Restoration (or ‘long eighteenth-century’) playhouses. He bases his argument in part on measurements which suggest the common use of traditional building methods and relationships between measurements and spaces based on ad-quadratum geometry, as shared by theatre builders across the centuries; but also on his own experience as a performance-practitioner specializing in an historiographical approach to making sense of eighteenth-century plays for today's audiences in surviving (or reconstructed) eighteenth-century spaces. He was the first director to restore a three-sided stage front to the Georgian Theatre (now Theatre Royal) in Richmond, Yorkshire, in 1987 with his hit production of Garrick's Miss in her Teens (1747), and other research productions have included Robert Dodsley's The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737), Colman the Younger's Inkle and Yarico (1787), Inchbald's The Midnight Hour (1787), again at the Georgian Theatre in Richmond, and Lillo's The London Merchant (1731). He is now completing his doctoral thesis, ‘Theatre and Liberty: Eighteenth-Century Play Production on the Three-Sided Stage’.

Theatre Workshop's Translations of Three Spanish Plays

In 1936 Joan Littlewood staged Lope de Vega's seventeenth-century play, Fuente Ovejuna (The Sheep Well); in 1945 Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden; and in 1958 Fernando de Rojas's sixteenth-century La Celestina. There were also plans to produce Lorca's Blood Wedding in 1948. The English versions of Fuente Ovejuna, Don Perlimplín, and Blood Wedding have been preserved in the Theatre Workshop archive at Littlewood's former base, the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and in the following article Gwynne Edwards compares these translations with the original Spanish plays, considers the changes which were introduced in the process of adaptation, and assesses the merits of each. Gwynne Edwards is a specialist in Spanish theatre. Eleven of his translations of the plays of Lorca, as well as translations of seventeenth-century Spanish and modern Latin American plays, have been published by Methuen, and many have been given professional productions. He has recently completed the libretto of an opera on the last days of Dylan Thomas.

&lt;i&gt;Decency and Disorder: The Age of Cant, 1789-1837&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Decency and Disorder: The Age of Cant, 1789-1837 Alistair Heys Decency and Disorder: The Age of Cant, 1789–1837. By Ben Wilson. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. Pp. 544. ISBN 978 0 571 22468 5. £25. Decency & Disorder 1789–1837 is the best book on a Byronic topic that is not primarily about Byron. I write this because Ben Wilson is a historian rather than a Byronist and his concern is with the recorded use of 'cant' in Georgian society. But as readers of this journal will appreciate, cant is a word with strong Byronic associations. The main thesis of the book is that life in Napoleonic England was much more fun than it was during the staid reign of Victoria, and that what the Romantics slightingly refer to as cant marks the beginning of a titanic slide towards a reactionary ethos. Wilson's book is of great interest to Byronists and Romanticists in general because Byron's carnivalesque cry against hypocrisy and cant represents the prime example in Wilson's introduction and is later awarded a very readable chapter all of its own. Wilson defines cant as 'societal clichés which platonically infect the mind', while its merry-andrew enemies prefer the more natural discourse of the body. 'Cant is so much stronger than Cunt nowadays', as Byron notes in a private letter. In Wilson's skilled hands cant refers to moralising social energies that hijack ethical language in order to bully the labouring classes by depriving them of their boisterous pastimes. Wilson precisely realises what Byron describes as Britain's primum mobile, or those who can only cantingly repeat the fashionable tone of the time, and identifies this puritanical hypocrisy as distinctly unBritish. Although Wilson does not draw a direct parallel with political correctness one wonders whether the spirit of the present age does not connive in the writing of a book dedicated to the canting spirit of the pre-Victorian; the figures that Wilson allies with the unabashed individuality of the Byronic are naughty but nice. Byron is aligned with a whole catalogue of social reprobates whose rebellious and lively behaviour offended the virtuous and drew the fire of Georgian moralists. For instance, Wilson regales his reader with the biography of Dr Samuel Solomon, who, by successfully marketing the Balm of Gilead, became one of the richest men in the country. Evidently, Solomon's quite specious A Guide to Health could transform the heartiest into a whinging hypochondriac; naturally the prescribed cure-all for ailments real or imagined was a dosage of the doctor's must-have nostrum. Unfortunately for the sick, the 'primary ingredient was half a pint of brandy, infused with cardamom seeds, lemon peel, tincture of cantharides and perfumed with Sicilian oregano'. Cantharides was the very beetle crushed to make Spanish Fly: in effect the balm enflamed the urethra to such an extent that the ensuing soreness allowed the quack doctor to stake the claim that the balm cured adolescents of the ravages of onanism. As Wilson notes, when the Edinburgh Review devoted an essay to Keats, Byron inquired 'why don't they review and praise "Solomon's Guide to Health"? It is better sense, and as much poetry as Johnny Keats'. The doctor of the noxious nostrum that apparently cured immoral self-pollution in adolescents was eventually unmasked by campaigning journalists. Yet Wilson reveals the canting hypocrisy of journalists too; a striking example being the fate of Kean, who was hounded by the ostensibly cant-hating Thomas Barnes because the actor was an adulterer. Despite the fact that Barnes was living in sin with a certain Dinah Mary Mondet, under his stewardship The Times repeatedly savaged Kean for outraging public decency. Whilst London audiences mostly refused to condemn their darling, after an ill-fated tour of the provinces the broken actor was finally driven to seek refuge in America. Wilson is a breath-taking narrator of the puritanical enmity of the opposition to the sheer exuberance of Regency life. The chapter on the rebuilding of the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden includes the no less startling information that when Kemble ventured on stage 'he was instantly drowned in a...

The Performance of Anti-Theatrical Prejudice in a Provincial Victorian Town: Nottingham and its New Theatre Royal, 1865

The Performance of Anti-Theatrical Prejudice in a Provincial Victorian Town: Nottingham and its New Theatre Royal, 1865