Stage Play Research Articles

The Role of Tamil Nadu in the Development of Malaysian Tamil Stage Dramas.

Tamil stagecraft has retained its credentials even in the immigrant countries. This Paper deals with how Malaysian Tamil stage has its impact of Tamil Nadu. In the beginning, Malaysian Tamils adopted street drama in the rural Malaysia and stage drama in the urban areas. In the early days of the Twentieth Century so many stage artists with their theatre have visited Malaysia. These theatre artists have also trained the local artists in Malaysia. The Theatre artists in Tamil Nadu who later became Cine Artists also have contributed their part in the development of stagecraft in Malaysia. Therefore, there is a similarity in the stagecraft of Tamil Nadu and Malaysia. Though after the Second World War, Malaysian Tamil stage tried to establish its own base, it has the resemblance of Tamil Nadu stage. Before the Second World War, the themes were Puranas and later social themes after thirties. The plays of many are dramatists like Sankaradas Swamigal, Pammal Sambanda Mudaliar have been staged here and through them Malaysian stage was developed. . Key words: Tamil Nadu, Malaysia, Street Drama, Stage Drama, Actors, Stage, Stage, Stage Craft ஆயவுச சுருககம: குடியேறிய நாடுகளிலும நாடகககலை தமிழ மரபிறகேறபவும மணணின மணததிறகேறபவும தமிழரகளால வளரககபபடடுளளது. அவவகையில மலேசிய மணணில நாடகம வளரவதறகுத தமிழகம ஆறறியுளள பஙகினை இககடடுரை விவரிககினறது. தொடககததில மலேசியாவில நாடகககலை தோடடபபுறத தமிழரகளால தெருககூததாகவும நகரபபுறத தமிழரகளால மேடை நாடகஙகளாகவும வளரககபபடடுளளது. இருபதாம நூறறாணடின தொடககததில தமிழகததிலிருநது மேடை நாடகககுழுககள இநநாடடிறகு அதிகமாக வநது செனறுளளன. நாடக நடிகர, வாயபபாடடுக கலைஞர, ஆரமோனியக கலைஞர, நாடகப பயிறசியாளர எனத தமிழக நாடகககலைஞர பலரும இஙகு வநது உளளூரக கலைஞரகளுககு நாடகககலை ஆசிரியரகளாக இருநது பயிறசியளிதது, இமமணணில நாடகககலை சிறபபாக வளரவதறகுப பஙகாறறியுளளனர. தமிழகததில பிரபலமாயிருநத பல நாடகககுழுககளும தொடககததில நாடகநடிகரகளாக இருநது பினனரத திரையுலகிறகுச செனறு புகழபெறற திரைபபட நடிகரகளும இநநாடடிறகு நாடகததிறகாக வநது இஙகு நாடகககலை வளரத துணை நினறுளளனர. அதனால தமிழகச சாயலில பல நாடகககுழுககள இஙகு உளளூரக கலைஞரகளால தோறறுவிககபபடடன. இரணடாம உலகபபோருககுமுன உளளூர நாடகககலைஞரகள என ஒரு பரமபரை இஙகு உருவாகி விடடாலும, நாடகககதை, உரையாடல, அரஙக அமைபபு போனறவறறிறகுத தமிழகததையே நமபியிருநதனர. உலகபபோருககுமுன புராண, இதிகாசஙகளிலிருநது கதைகளைபபெறறு நாடகமாக அரஙகேறறினர. தமிழகததில மிகவும செலவாககுப பெறறிருநத நாடகஙகளையே இஙகும அரஙகேறறினர. முபபதுகளுககுப பிறகே தமிழகததைபபோலவே இஙகும சமூக நாடகஙகள அரஙகேறத தொடஙகின. தமிழக நாடக உலகில மிகபபெரும ஜாமபவானகளாயிருநத சஙகரதாஸ சுவாமிகள, பமமல சமபநத முதலியார ஆகியோரின நாடகஙகள இஙகுப பரவலாக அரஙகேறறபபடடு நாடகககலை வளரககபபடடுளளது. தமிழகததின இநதப பஙகளிபபினாலதான இநநாடடில மேடை நாடகககலை வளரநதது. குறிபபுச சொறகள: தமிழகம, மலேசியா, தெருககூதது, நாடகககலை, மேடை நாடகம, நாடக நடிகர, அரஙகு, நாடக நுடபம.

Portrait of justice: The spirit of Chinese law as depicted in historical and contemporary drama

Some scholars doubt whether China has much of a legal tradition, and others have opined that China lacks legal subjectivity from a Western legal perspective. However, various dramas have delineated a legal culture and form of legal subjectivity in China present since ancient times. Unfortunately, relatively less research has been conducted on legal themes in Chinese drama, and even less scholarship has explored Chinese legal tradition through an art perspective. This article takes a modest step toward filling this gap. Selecting multiple cases from the creative industries in China, including ancient stage drama, films, and contemporary television drama across the span of hundreds of years, this article looks into the representations of legal tradition in Chinese performing arts and explores the spirit of law in Chinese society.

Between Entertainment and Elegy: The Unexpected Success of R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End (1928)

AbstractDespite West End producers' and critics' expectations that it would never turn a profit, R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End (1928) became the most commercially successful First World stage drama of the interwar period, celebrated as an authentic depiction of the Great War in Britain and around the world. This article explains why. Departing from existing scholarship, which centers on Sherriff's autobiographical influences on his play, I focus instead on the marketing and reception of this production. Several processes specific to the interwar era blurred the play's ontology as a commercial entertainment and catapulted it to international success. These include its conspicuous engagement with and endorsement by veterans of the war, which transformed the play into historical reenactment; the multisensory spectatorial encounter, which allowed audiences to approach Journey's End as a means of accessing vicarious knowledge about the war; and a marketing campaign that addressed anxieties about the British theatrical industry. Finally, I trace the reception of this play into the Second World War, when British soldiers and prisoners of war spontaneously revived it around the world. The afterlives of Journey's End, I demonstrate, suggest new ways of conceiving of the cultural legacy of the First World War across the generations.

“Teach His People the Value of Unity”: Black Diaspora, Women, and Una Marson’s Pocomania

“Teach His People the Value of Unity”: Black Diaspora, Women, and Una Marson’s Pocomania Raj Chetty (bio) Caribbean women’s literature that does not fit male-centered regimes of blackness is often left out of genealogies of black thought. Such appears to be the case of the early-twentieth-century Jamaican poet, playwright, radio programmer, and activist Una Marson, who “altered London theatre history by bringing, for the first time, all-black casts to the stage in serious drama” and “directly confronted the double bind of colonial imitation.”1 Marson has been obscured by canonical Caribbean male writers who followed her and for whom she helped create a platform through the BBC’s Caribbean Voices, such as George Lamming, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, Victor Reid, and Derek Walcott, in the midcentury boom of anticolonial and postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean writers.2 Alison Donnell has been particularly critical of the “origin” stories of West Indian literature that begin with these writers, to the neglect of Marson, “a black Jamaican woman whose experiences and achievements provided a link to all these major movements and figures.”3 Denise deCaires Narain is even more direct: if Selvon’s 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners is “a text which is read as providing early examples of diasporic figures,” Marson’s work “provides a useful reminder that some of these migrants were women.”4 Marson’s literary works have also been obscured by the more pronouncedly black- and Afrocentric poetics and politics of Caribbean, African American, and black British women writers in the 1970s and 1980s.5 Donnell has noted that critical attention to black Caribbean women writers tends to “[concentrate] [End Page 20] on contemporary, diasporic, African Caribbean women.”6 Thus, much like the “emergence” of West Indian literature noted above, the constitution in the 1990s of a canon of Anglophone Caribbean women writers traces its origins to the 1970s, with writers like Merle Hodge, Erna Brodber, and Lorna Goodison figuring prominently at the expense of earlier writers like Marson.7 These early writers gain admission into this canon, it seems, so long as they can be conscripted into the kind of “Black Atlanticism” that has come to dominate literary studies and critical theory in the wake of Paul Gilroy’s work (and, ironically, at the expense of black diasporic feminist criticism and black feminist internationalism predating Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic). Or, earlier writers are admissible so long as they fit neatly within a postcolonial feminist framework.8 Meant to disparage neither women writers since the 1970s nor the critical approaches that coincide with their emergence into critical view in the 1990s, such an argument foregrounds the conditions under which certain texts are embraced in a postcolonial, diasporic, post-national now, and others left behind in a colonial, pre-diasporic, nationalist, pre-“third wave” feminist past. To be sure, Marson’s oeuvre is fraught with contradictions in both its feminism and its antiracism, one possible reason for her uneasy fit within dominant Black Atlantic and feminist molds. Nonetheless, rather than tailoring Marson’s work for a Black Atlantic or postcolonial feminist fitting, perhaps both black diasporic thought and black feminist thought should be reshaped around Marson’s work. Thus, taking a cue from deCaires Narain, I argue there is something apart from “the undeniable archival importance of retrieving” Marson from literary-historical obscurity: her work speaks not only to current conceptualizations of black diaspora but forces such conceptualizations to consider the place of black women like Marson within them.9 Marson’s 1938 play Pocomania dissatisfies those readers of black diaspora literature who see Afrocentrism as the effective or most effective counter to anti-African and antiblack racism. Without a doubt, the play is antiracist, as the vibrant religious life, complex subjectivities, and politics all are located in exclusively black and brown—that is, Afro-descendent—Jamaican social worlds. While the play connects the religious revivalism of the Afro-creolized Pocomania tradition with African traditions, its focus is not in authenticating the Africanness of Jamaican culture. Instead, Pocomania contrasts Jamaican yard life, and specifically the tradition of Pocomania within it, with Jamaican middle-class life and its emphasis on proper Christian behavior, belief...

David Stuttard. Greek mythology: a traveller’s guide from Mount Olympus to Troy

Is there anything new to be said about classical mythology? Recent decades have seen a flurry of encyclopaedias, overviews of and introductions to the subject, and monographs on specific figures or themes. Any author wishing to enter the fray must, I imagine, suppress some queasiness at such competition. Not so David Stuttard (hereafter ‘S.’). S.’s book is of a very different kind and is perhaps best described as a Pausanias for our times. S. is a gifted and prolific populariser of Classics, renowned for (co)authoring and editing over a dozen books on various aspects of Classical civilization and producing a further dozen translations, half a dozen adaptations, and many a staging of Greek dramas. Greek Mythology is a perfect addition to his oeuvre. The dust jacket promises that this book is ‘[t]he perfect companion to the Greek myths and the landscapes and ideas that shaped them.’ As the introduction (12–13) and dust jacket freely admit, it is aimed at real and armchair travellers alike (the quality of the cover suggests the second category is the majority of the envisioned readership). While not written for the specialist, the book may be of interest to (armchair) scholars as well.

How (Not) to Write Broadcast Plays: Pinter and the BBC

This article situates Harold Pinter’s radio play A Slight Ache alongside the radio-playwriting protocols of its first producer, the British Broadcasting Corporation. In guidebooks for radio playwrights, the BBC’s Drama Department promoted a clear and coherent on-air style. Pinter challenged this standard by building his play around a silent character and thus refusing to let his audience fall back on familiar methods of listening. Having written a radio play that gestured toward the theatre, Pinter did the opposite in A Slight Ache’s stage adaptation, concealing visual elements as if glancing back at the airwaves. Both versions moved toward transcending the realism of The Birthday Party, whose blackout scene had already experimented with restricting stage drama to sound alone. The influence on Pinter’s later stage style can be seen as early as Aston’s monologue in The Caretaker, where complex lighting effects briefly transform a realistic setting into the “mindscape” of a radio play.

Parallels of alienation and industrial psychology: A critical analysis

The rapidly growing global market conditions and the corresponding expansion of various market and economic variables and the global stage dramas played by various world powers to accumulate capital and establish their economic control over other countries (i.e. economic imperialism) and widening growth of the income disparity of the developing world, sets a perfect platform to initiate a broad discussion about the “human factor” which works in industries who generate the necessary capital to make countries rich and poor. When some selected businesses get richer and richer marginalised workers continuously are confronted with the grave issue of Alienation. It is the author’s contention here to highlight the inadequacy of Industrial Psychology, the capitalist framework designed to deal with Alienation through a comprehensive discussion of Marxist principles and Industrial Psychology-proper. The paper will argue showing the evolution of Industrial Psychology as a distinct academic discipline that the persisting problem of alienation will continue to exist until political solutions are provided for wider class issues.

Inviting the Breach: Confronting Homophobia in the Name of Social Justice

In 2008 California was divided over Proposition 8, a measure designed to prohibit same-sex marriage. In this article, we focus on a university classroom setting to explore how discussions about Proposition 8 and homophobia led to what Turner (1986) termed a social drama. Drawing on student personal narratives as they moved through the stages of social drama, we provide a poignant example of the conflict that may erupt when homophobia and heteronormativity are part of the curriculum. After documenting the social drama, we offer pedagogical strategies and note the strategic ways Christian, hegemonic discourse is utilized during discussions about homophobia.

Stage Drama with Reference to Some Personal Experiences

Stage Drama with Reference to Some Personal Experiences Intizar Husain Translated by Asif Farrukhi (bio) In talking about playwriting, I am in a difficult situation. It is considered appropriate for someone to talk about his personal experience in an art form only after he has accomplished some worthy feat. But in my case, each time I made an attempt to write a stage play, the outcome was the result of many circumstances outside my own efforts. So with reference to stage plays, if I have any claim to speak at all, I must say that I got into writing plays very much by accident. I became a dramatist in quite a run-of-the-mill manner. I was a writer of short stories and following that path; writing plays was a side step. To explain, I will quote a contemporary of mine, Ashfaq Ahmed, who became famous writing not for the stage, but for television and other media. He said—and he was a master at composing quotable quotes—that the chicken knows how to lay an egg, but has no knowledge of how to prepare an omelette. So stage production, when I came along, was such that there were many who knew how to prepare omelettes, but there was no chicken to lay an egg. What I mean is that theatre groups in Lahore kept forming and then breaking up, even though they included many good actors. And many members of the groups understood the art of directing. But there were no playwrights. This is what it means to have experts in preparing omelettes but no chicken: without the egg, there can be no omelette. It’s the same with staging a play: without a script, what good is it to have skilled actors and directors? Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen—God be praised—were wonderful dramatists. As a result, their plays have been adapted and staged many times over the decades. But you cannot do anything creative by simply borrowing other people’s ideas; you must bring to them something of your own. However, the theatre groups in Lahore had the notion that the plays of Ibsen and Molière were right at their fingertips and could be readily produced. Furthermore, there was the belief that no one around could hold a candle to these Western playwrights. Now, this assumption about the quality of Ibsen, Molière, and others like them was more or less correct. What the theatre groups weren’t considering was that these playwrights had conceived of and written their plays in the context of a particular society and culture. If there were no playwrights in our eager theatre groups who could write original plays, then it might have been enough to have someone with the skill to transplant the Western dramas from their cultural and social contexts into our own. However, if even [End Page 202] this could not be done, then our cart would not move forward. Meanwhile, there was much noise to the effect that we’d had enough adaptations of plays from the West. So attempts to create original plays were made, and that’s when I got involved. When one theatre group approached me, I decided to take up the role of the egg-laying chicken. After all, I would be trying to write a stage play and not a television serial. Naturally, it took me some time to write. Meanwhile, as the group was waiting for me to finish my play, its members started quarrelling passionately among themselves. By the time I’d finished writing the play, the group had disbanded. About eighteen months later, Kamal Ahmed Rizvi came to ask if I had written a play. Yes, I had. So if you saved a copy of the manuscript and have it with you, then give it to me. I handed him the manuscript and didn’t think anymore about it. After about two months, he returned, livid with anger. He said that the Scrutiny Committee of the National Arts Council, where he had taken the play to have it produced, had disapproved because the play’s dialogue was in the vernacular language (boli tholi) of Delhi and Lucknow. Here...

English

Associating knowledge with daily life leads to permanent knowledge, which increases students’ success in school. Drama is viewed to be one of the most effective methods that serves a purpose, and many researchers have determined that this method must be included at all levels of education. There are not much studies on social studies teachers’ knowledge, opinions and suggestions about drama method. Hence, the purpose of this study is to seek social studies teacher’ opinions on implementing drama as a teaching method. Phenomenology, one of the qualitative research designs, was used to collect data in the study. The research was carried out with 16 Social Studies teachers out of 22 Social Studies teachers working in 15 out of 39 secondary schools located in the city centre of Kirsehir. They were chosen on a voluntary basis in 2012-2013 education year, with simple random sampling.  The data were collected with semi-structured interview form in the study. The semi-structured interview form used in the research consists of six open-ended questions which include the knowledge, opinions and suggestions of Social Studies teachers about drama method. Inductive analysis, one of the content analysis, was used to analyse the data obtained in the research. It was revealed in the research that the teachers were not aware of the stages of drama, and they only implemented drama method as  a method in which students memorize the roles they are assigned, act the roles on the stage in front of the audience either by reading from a piece of paper or reciting. It can be stated that the teachers only used the enacting stage of drama method. The teachers stated the problems which they encountered while implementing drama method as follows: lack of course hours, too much noise and overcrowded classrooms. For using drama method more effectively in Social Studies teaching, the teachers suggested that first classrooms for social studies should be established. Key words: Social Studies teachers, drama method, Social Studies lesson.

English

INTRODUCTION: Unwanted pregnancy places a women at additional risk, if she seeks abortion and safe services are not available. Poverty, ignorance and non-availability of trained personnel are important causes of septic abortion in India. OBJECTIVE: To study the knowledge and practices of septic abortion in women. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A Longitudinal study was conducted in the indoor of obstetrics and gynaecology department of M.G.M. Medical College & L.S.K Hospital, Kishanganj, Bihar from the period of Feb-2014 to April-2014. A total of 100 cases of septic abortion were selected by simple randomization. Informations of these cases about their knowledge and practices of septic abortion was obtained by conducting interview and studied. OBSERVATIONS: Out of the 100cases studied, majority (i.e 60%) were having no knowledge of contraceptive devices. Rural women were having lesser knowledge of contraception than urban women. Majority of the cases got the knowledge of contraception through media, like television (20%), radio (25%), stage drama (15%), nautankee (12.5%). Urban population of women had a greater knowledge of MTP Act than rural population. In majority of the cases (i.e 65%), there was a history of dai intervention. Among 100cases studied, in 51cases (i.e 51%), instrumentation was used for procuring the septic abortion. CONCLUSION: Present study shows that poor knowledge of contraception and MTP Act particularly in rural women and conduction of abortion by untrained personnel like dais, quacks, local practitioners are important contributing factors for high incidence of septic abortion in India. So, there is the need to strengthen good quality abortion services.

Angry Young Playwrights With Respect of Three Representatives

Angry Young Men led a movement on the post-war English drama stage in 1956, expressed a mood of restlessness, disorganization and frustration that was not limited to the working class but was shared by young people throughout English society. This essay briefly introduces the Angry Young Men from three representatives: John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and Alan Sillitoe, who brought an important fresh element into the literature by their subject matter and attitudes.

The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin by Rebecca Rovit (review)

Reviewed by: The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin by Rebecca Rovit Christine Korte The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin. By Rebecca Rovit. Studies in Theatre History and Culture series. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012; pp. 304. Rebecca Rovit’s The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin establishes in both its title and cover image (a production still taken from Ferenc Molnár’s The Play’s the Thing in August 1935) the perplexing fact that an all-Jewish theatre existed at all during the Third Reich. Founded by Dr. Kurt Singer in August 1933, the company was permitted by the Nazis in order to employ Jewish artists who had been ousted from state theatres. It operated under the auspices of the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden (Cultural Association of German Jews), which emerged as an organizational response to the measures taken against German Jewish artists after the Nazis took power. Goebbels approved the endeavor on the condition that the theatre would be a closed, subscription-based enterprise, with the involvement or attendance of non-Jews forbidden. SS-Kommandant Hans Hinkel was the Ministry of Propaganda official appointed to act as the theatre’s direct overseer and production censor, working closely with Singer to scrutinize content and enforce Nazi directives. For the artists, the theatre initially represented a much-needed opportunity to continue their livelihoods after Germany’s 1933 racial laws effectively removed them from public life; for performers and spectators alike, it provided a space where, as German Jews, they could temporarily escape increasingly hostile daily conditions. For the Nazis, on the other hand, the theatre served the strategic purpose of partitioning two hitherto connected spheres of German and German Jewish cultural life and was used to promote a notion of Jewish culture as foreign and non-Aryan. This agenda forbade the staging of most classical German dramas and necessitated the importation of Yiddish- and Hebrew-language plays, which were indeed foreign to the majority of assimilated Kulturbund members. Rovit has previously written an article for a museum catalog on “Theatrical Performance at Auschwitz-Birkenau,” as well as coedited a collection of essays on Theatrical Performance during the Holocaust, but The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin is her first monograph and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of theatre under dictatorship. As Rovit demonstrates, the paradoxical partnership that emerged between the Kulturbund theatre and the Nazis is emblematic of the complexities and concessions that mark the broader phenomenon of “art-making under duress” (3). The Nazis “protected” the organization and [End Page 615] simultaneously enforced the cultural ghettoization of German Jews. At the same time, a “Jewish theatre” repertoire was suddenly thrust into existence in Germany, often featuring ominous themes of exile and persecution. Rovit accounts for the historical forces and ever-changing Nazi directives that informed the Kulturbund theatre’s selection of plays and dramaturgical decisions, and demonstrates how they produced competing conceptions of “Jewishness” (for example, Zionist, conservative, or assimilated) that existed within a highly diverse German Jewish community. As she shows, these identities were taken up by the three Jewish newspapers permitted to operate under the Third Reich (up until 1939) to influence the reception of productions, with each newspaper showing preference for productions that idealized a specific Jewish milieu (namely, Yiddish shtetls, Zionist Palestine, or bourgeois Germany). Before emigrating to Holland in 1938, Singer proved a formidable force in navigating Nazi strictures about content, as well as intra-Jewish debates about the theatre’s purpose, such as whether, under the circumstances, it ought to promote a distinct Jewish culture or provide entertaining plays of high artistic caliber and intellectual substance. Although keen to promote Jewish cultural identity, Singer was most strongly committed to a humanist, idealist ethos—one that had determined his own cultural formation as an assimilated German Jew during the Weimar Republic. For Singer, the main challenge was negotiating the Nazi directives that prohibited the staging of German bourgeois literary classics. The “pure Jewish culture” that the Nazis expected from the theatre simply did not exist (40). Furthermore, the Nazis prevented not only productions they deemed too “assimilatory” to German culture, but also those they regarded...

Sarah Bernhardt on Stage and Screen

Silent film accompaniment owes much to the musical practices of nineteenth-century theater. Yet if we are to fully acknowledge these debts, we must first embrace theater music as a complex entity in its own right. Analyzing the eclectic sixty-year career of legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) is one way to approach these connections between theater and film. Bernhardt employed a great deal of music in her theatrical performances, and by the early twentieth century embraced the new medium of film as well, appearing in a number of motion pictures. Drawing on scores, newspaper accounts, production materials, and advertisements, I examine how music for Bernhardt stage dramas such as Théodora, Cléopâtre, Phèdre, and La belle au bois dormant compares and contrasts with accompaniments for her silent films such as Camille, Queen Elizabeth, Jeanne Doré, and Les mères françaises. Through this case study, I hope to provide a more nuanced perspective of the historical lineage between nineteenth-century stage music and early cinema practice.

Gay Theatre, AIDS, and Taboo: Reconsidering Robert Chesley

Theatre was among the first popular culture forms to address HIV/AIDS and did so memorably in such works as The Normal Heart, As Is, Love! Valor! Compassion!, and March of the Falsettos. As a response to criticisms of stage dramas focusing on HIV/AIDS in the main as undifferentiated and melodramatic, the author suggests critical consideration of two works by playwright Robert Chesley. In her analysis of Night Sweats and Jerker, the author argues Chesley offers an alternative perspective that is both liberatory and sex-positive.

Reinventing Drama with Toni Negri: Fragments from Two Working Sessions on Swarm with Barbara Nicolier

Antonio Negri's theatrical collaborators Barbara Nicolier and David Tuaillon situate Negri's recent turn to stage drama, which has so far produced the Trilogy of Resistance (Swarm, The Bent Man, and Cithaeron) and the Trilogy of Critique (The Laughing Man, Renzo the Partisan, and Prometheus), in relation to classical Greek tragedy and recent political theater (Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller). In a transcription of their free-form working sessions on Negri's first play, the three discuss a number of intersecting themes and methods: dreams as a source of critical or creative thought and militant organization or action, Buenaventura Durruti and the Spanish anarchists, contemporary forms of alienation and exploitation, the differences between writing Empire and writing drama, typologies of militancy, Brecht's The Measures Taken (also known as The Decision, Die Massnahme), and Müller's Mauser.

Selected Film Essays and Interviews by Bruce Kawin

164 Mississippi Quarterly Selected Film Essays and Interviews. Bruce Kawin. London: Anthem Press, 2013. 215 pp. $40 paper. BRUCE KAWIN, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND FILM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF Colorado-Boulder, has been writing elegantly and rigorously (one of his mantras is “getting it right”) about film for around forty years and across an impressive number of books, chapters, articles, and interviews. The most significant of these have now been collected in one volume for the first time, and together represent the breadth and depth of Kawin’s interests and scholarship: American, British, and European film and literature; film, television, and video; and genre and art-house film. Faulkner scholars will already be familiar with Kawin via his trailblazing scholarship on Faulkner’s screenplays and cinematic fiction —for Kawin, Faulkner is the most cinematic of authors. Not even a handful of scholars had taken seriously Faulkner’s relationship to film before Kawin’s initial foray into the field in 1977 with “A Faulkner Filmography.” He subsequently produced further essays, a book (Faulkner and Film, 1977) and a scholarly edition (Faulkner’s MGM Screenplays,1982)onthiscinematicFaulkner,concludingwiththe2002 publication of excerpts from his 1976 interview with Howard Hawks not long before the director’s death. It was Hawks, of course, who first enticed Faulkner out to Hollywood where they collaborated on numerous projects over the course of two decades. This interview is published here in its entirety for the first time along with Kawin’s 1978 interview with silent-screen star Lillian Gish, who discusses, among other things, her collaboration with D. W. Griffith on Intolerance(1916) and Broken Blossoms (1919). What Hawks has to say here about Faulkner’s and his own use of “opposites” (114-15) in their respective creative practices is particularly intriguing when read alongside Kawin’s arguably most important contribution to Faulkner studies, his 1979 essay “The Montage Element in Faulkner’s Fiction,” also collected here. Kawin’s insight is that Faulkner, in his “greatest novels and stories,” deployed the specifically cinematictropeofmontage,evidenced in his use of “oxymoron,dynamic unresolution, parallel plotting, rapid shifts in time and space, and multiple narration” (136). To put it simply, Faulkner “was doing something that the cinema also did” (136). As incisively, Kawin observes that “Faulkner recognized a difference between the terms ‘Hollywood’ and ‘film,’ although many of his biographers, critics and colleagues seem 165 Book Reviews to have missed that particular boat” (141). In one fell swoop and over thirty years ago, Kawin writes back to those scholars who even today disavow or dismiss the cinematic Faulkner, be it the screenwriter, the avid movie-goer, or the cinematic novelist. Indeed, it has only been in this century that the implications of Kawin’s cutting-edge readings of Faulkner have been fully appreciated and pursued. SelectedFilmEssays and Interviews.also includes a tribute to another Southerner, Horton Foote, whom Kawin characterizes as “a legend” of television’s golden age. Unlike Faulkner’s teleplays and screenplays, Foote’s have seemed less controversial subjects for discussion, and include his original screenplay Tender Mercies (1983) for Australian director Bruce Beresford; his redaction of To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962); and teleplays such as redactions of Faulkner’s “Tomorrow” (Tomorrow, 1960; film, 1972), the “Old Man” sections of The Wild Palms (Old Man, 1997), and “Barn Burning” (Barn Burning, 1980), and also of Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” (The Displaced Person, 1977). I was tantalized by Kawin’s description of Baby the Rain Must Fall (Mulligan, 1965), for which Foote wrote the screenplay, as “Foote’s answer to Faulkner’s Light in August.” (152). As Kawin reminds us that Foote “spans the gap between the studios and the shoestring independents” (150), he also places him in direct dialogue with Faulkner and O’Connor in—who would have thought?—the televisual field. And this is what is so valuable about Kawin’s collection, particularly the manner in which it has been curated. The essays on two significant Southern litterateurs, better known for fiction or stage drama, are situated within the field of the visual (cinematic, televisual, video) and the scholarship that obtains there. The bulk of Kawin’s Selected Film Essays and Interviews, as...

History, Religion, and the Dramaturgy of Victimization and Betrayal. Wole Soyinka’s and Ngũgũ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgũ wa Mirii’s

Stage drama, with its added dimension of public performance, bears directly on the socio-cultural and political realities of a given society. Through performance, most social ills have not only been articulated but also exposed with the aim of creating a safe, sane society. This essay engages the ‘dramaturgical intent’ in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) and Ngũgũ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgũ wa Mirii’s I Will Marry When I Want (1982) as plays that use stage drama and performance to critically appraise the colonial experience with regard to issues of language and religion. The essay contends that when colonial writings dwarf the cultural voice, they counteract self-assertion and cultural ideology in which (representatives of) the traduced oftentimes stand up to correct a misrepresentation that has occurred in their history. The essay further examines how the two scholars, Soyinka and Ngũgũ wa Thiong’o, address issues of exploitation, betrayal, and victimization from the self-reified Western societies and their African proteges in their plays. Both Soyinka and Ngũgũ, I argue, are more successful in using drama to articulate the ‘revolutionary ideal’. In so doing, they participate in an ongoing reinvention of the full humanity of the slighted in the “corporonial” (Ngũgũ, Wizard of the Crow) era.

The Early English Passion Play

This discussion challenges the common understanding that biblical drama in England was dominated by ‘mystery plays’, narrowly understood to be cycles of short pageants, by drawing attention to the evidence for large-scale Passion Plays comparable with those better known from France and Burgundy. In so doing, it makes no apology for standing on the shoulders of Peter Meredith's work on the N-Town manuscript, and with John Tailby on the texts and documents illustrating the variety of staging of religious drama across Europe, as well as Meg Twycross's work on devisor Felsted of London, all of which demonstrate that this material has been available in the public domain for some years. Just as the N-Town Plays were still believed in some quarters to come from Coventry as late as the mid-twentieth century, although Francis Douce knew they did not almost 150 years earlier, so too the domination of modern understandings about English mystery plays has remained wedded to the model of four ‘cycles’ promulgated in the 1970s, despite the accumulation of evidence to the contrary. Peter Meredith's edition of The ‘Passion Play’ from the N. Town Manuscript is now all but unobtainable, and the volumes of Records of Early English Drama are the chosen bedtime reading of few, so here we revisit some texts and records to explore afresh one aspect of an already shifted paradigm.

Dramatic Text, Music Text:

Even in the midst of their dubious claim that “philosophers did not go to the opera very often,” Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar cannot escape acknowledging the combination of “the splendor of court spectacles, the pomp of national myths, and the sentimental melodramas” that have traditionally driven opera in its social contexts (1).1 Discussions of the Restoration dramatic stage follow the same tripartite preoccupations—they also typically focus on the return of theater to London after the Interregnum, the appearance of women on stage in drama, and the increasing importance of music to theater life before the full arrival of opera seria in the eighteenth century with Georg Friedrich Handel’s appearance in London. However, the specifically interactive relationship between English nationalism, literature, theater, and music is often overlooked. In particular, the role of musical form in these displays of nationalism, especially in conjunction with patriotic libretti, is largely ignored, despite its ability to bridge the divisions between each disciplinary field. Textual studies of libretti rapidly recognize the pro-Imperial feeling that followed the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, the Exclusion Crisis’s attempts to prevent the Catholic James II from ascending to the throne in 1685, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when James (the last Catholic monarch of England) was displaced by the Hanoverian Protestant William III and Mary II (formalized in 1689). This is readily seen in the histories of John Dryden, Nahum Tate, John Crowne, and many others. Moreover, anti-Papist sentiments frequently appear in an only vaguely coded form as resistance to tensions based on the French and Italian influences via Catholicism on James II and Charles II.