Stage Play Research Articles

NHK드라마 「요시쓰네(義經)」에 나타난 영웅 서사구조의 원형과 변용 -조셉 캠벨의 영웅서사를 중심으로-

영웅은 TV드라마의 오랜 소재이다. TV드라마 속에서의 역사적 영웅은 대중의 욕망에 대한 대리자이자 그것의 집약체로서 기능하는데, 특정 시기 드라마가 형상화 해내는 영웅의 모습과 그것을 환영하는 시청자간의 소통은 당대 대중의식을 가름할 수 있는 장치가 되기도 한다. 본 연구는 오늘날 각종 문화 영역에서 환영받고 있는 일본의 역사적 영웅 '요시쓰네'를 주인공으로 한 드라마를 영웅의 서사연구, 스토리 분석에 있어서 중요한 위치를 차지하고 있는 조셉 캠벨의 17가지 영웅 서사 단계를 토대로 분석하여 원형과 변용을 알아보았다. 드라마는 캠벨의 17단계 중 11가지 단계를 적용하고, 2가지단계의 생략과 4가지단계의 변형을 보여주며, 대중문화 콘텐츠로 재탄생하기 위해서는 일정한 선택과 변형이 필요하다는 것을 알 수 있었다. The hero is in the TV drama's long. TV drama Heroes historical blip on the public's desire to delegate to the body and its functions as an intensive, which have a specific period drama that soars like a hero's welcome and it is the communication between the viewer a sense of contemporary popular devices that can be separated. This study today, the various cultural areas which are becoming popular in Japan's historical hero 'Yoshitune' a heroic drama, the hero's narrative research stories In the analysis occupies an important place in the Joseph Campbell's 17 steps of heroic narrative, based on analysis achetype and adaptation. Campbell, 11 of the 17 stage dramas to apply different levels, and the omission of two steps, and shows a variation of the four stages, in order to relaunch the popular culture as the content selection and a constant strain was able to find out that you need.

Examining Creative Drama Based Mathematics Course with Respect to Theory of Didactical Situations in Mathematics

The purpose of this study is to analyze mathematics teaching with creative drama, in the light of the theory of didactical situations in mathematics. In the study, 18 4th grade students was offered. In the conclusion of the study, it was found that the preparation-warming up stage of creative drama corresponded with the devolution stage for the didactical situations in accordance with theory of didactical situations in mathematics, whereas the animation stage corresponded with action, formulation, validation, and devolution stages in the theory of didactical situations in mathematics, and finally, the evaluationdiscussion stage corresponded with action, formulation, devolution, and institutionalization stages.

Heroic gay characters in popular film: Tragic determination, and the everyday

This essay discusses gay identity and notions of character construction relating to the concept of tragic determination in media representations. Issues of adaptation and the significance of the Dionysian and Apollonian drives within tragedy (relating to Nietzsche's foundational work) are explored. A key concept is the examination of tensions between civic usefulness and emotive potential. Through an examination of Alan Turing's disavowal as a gay icon (as a war time hero) in the Hollywood film Enigma (dir. Michael Apted 2001) in the substitution of a heterosexual romance, and conversely his sympathetic representation within the stage and television drama Breaking the Code (dir. Hugh Whitemore 1986), this essay reveals the problem of the gay hero in popular film, and its sensibility in diverse adaptations. In exploring the contemporary ‘heroic’ representation of gay political icons, Harvey Milk and Pedro Zamora, this essay also reveals a problem-oriented cinematic world where the spectre of the sacrificial/tragic gay self offers replacement for the historic subordinated and othered gay character. In this way, new stimulations of mainstream media commodity offer the potential of subaltern transgression, yet at the same time reinforce the periphery of diverse sexual identity.

Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama (review)

Reviewed by: Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama Susan Currell Tamsen Wolff. Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. 278, illustrated. $90.00 (Hb). The title of Tamsen Wolff's book comes from a mechanical display model called "Mendel's Theatre" that was used by the eugenic movement to teach theories of genetic inheritance to early-twentieth-century Americans. This performance was played to those who were to become the chief actors and directors in an offstage drama: potential field-workers who would go into communities to help direct future progress towards human betterment. As this audience was mostly female, eugenicists attempted to convey scientific concepts clearly; in order to make visible what was invisible, they relied heavily on performance and theatricality. "Mendel's Theatre" was shaped like a proscenium stage embedded with a rolling scroll on which three acts "detail[ed] with pictures and dolls the inexorable drama of the Mendelian inheritance of human hair and skin color" (61). The analogy between the eugenicist dramatization of the theories of inheritance and modern dramaturgy continues throughout Wolff's well-researched, fascinating, and extremely convincing book, which argues that the eugenic movement was inherently theatrical and that modern drama engaged with (and was enlivened by) both the ideas and the theatricality of that movement. The book is an original and compelling dramatization in both theme and style: tracing the origins of dramatic fascination with the theme of heredity, Wolff builds her own ancestral tree, beginning with a chapter on the "Predecessors" of American eugenic drama–Ibsen, Strindberg, and Shaw–and ending with a chapter titled "A Genealogy of American Theatre." Paying clear attention to the ambiguities, ambivalences, and downright contradictions of eugenic thought in the early twentieth century, Wolff shows how dramatists adapted and adjusted their stagecraft to present prevailing hereditarian ideas. For Ibsen and Strindberg (whose pre-Mendelian era plays connected them to a more confused or complex neo-Darwinism, such as environmental or Lamarckian eugenics), this was more a thematic concern to make visible in the present the impact [End Page 595] of an unseen past. Subsequently a major goal of modern drama, revealing the hidden (or recessive traits and genes) was a similar concern for eugenic pedagogy, as shown in Mendel's Theatre. Once Mendelian genetic theory was rediscovered in 1900, the shift in eugenic thought also emerged in a dramaturgical shift, most clearly in the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Developing his own theory of "Creative Evolution" (37), Shaw built on Ibsen and Strindberg to stage explicit dramas of eugenic idealism (however confused it may have been at the time), and those dramas subsequently influenced the American dramatists Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell, whose works and engagement with eugenics are the central focus of the book. The reception and production of hereditarian theatre in America was particularly strong, Wolff argues, because eugenic thought was widely accepted, along with progressive discourses about the future of the American population. In many ways, she correctly points out, America was the stage on which the eugenic drama would unfold. Wolff provides a useful outline of the development of the eugenic movement in America, and, while much of this development has been detailed before, she stays focused on its central relationship to dramatic developments. Chapters on Glaspell's The Verge (1921) and O'Neill's Strange Interlude provide close readings of both the themes and stage-craft associated with prevailing eugenic ideas and ideologies, showing that the very contradictions in such thought operated to make complex and ambiguous stage dramas. While inflected by eugenic thought, The Verge also dramatized and undercut a rhetoric that would deny women agency and put unsustainable faith in the evidence of the unseen and unknowable. Similarly, Strange Interlude–called by one contemporary critic the "Eugenic O'Neill Baby" (qtd. in Wolff 142)–enacted the production of a eugenic child and its consequences in a nine-act drama that was incredibly popular at the time (though never since). As in Ibsen and Strindberg, the problem of free will created a dramatic tension with the eugenic message of unseen forces directing human behaviour...

A Study on North Korea's Stage Drama Creation Methodologies-Centering on characters, speech, acting, and direction in the 1950s-

A Study on North Korea's Stage Drama Creation Methodologies-Centering on characters, speech, acting, and direction in the 1950s-

Staging Criminality and Colonial Authority

This essay examines the spectacular and stage-managed mass executions carried out during the East India Company administration’s campaign against thug criminals during the 1830s. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of the execution as an occasion for the demonstration of the authority of the state, it analyses contemporary accounts of the staging and reception of colonial executions, considering them as performances that fall on the boundary between social drama and stage drama, and arguing that such events can be seen as rituals of social negotiation rather than performances of state authority of the kind suggested by Foucault.

Building the stages of drama: Towards a Text World Theory account of dramatic play-texts

Abstract In this article we apply the cognitive theory of discourse known as Text World Theory to the study of one play – Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead. The result of this application is twofold. First, it extends the capabilities of Text World Theory by introducing two new world types to the framework which are necessary to enable the theory to account better for dramatic texts. Following Richard Hosley's separation of stage directions into theatrical and fictional signals, we suggest ways in which these signals may prompt readers to toggle between “staged worlds” and “fictional worlds”. Second, our paper enlarges the stylistic toolkit for the analysis of dramatic play-texts, offering a cognitively-oriented alternative to the more traditional discourse-analytical approaches to the genre.

Matthias Langhoff’s African Bacchantes as performed in Epidaurus

The staging of antique drama on the modern scene is always a challenge. In Germany, stage directors frequently try to take up the gauntlet, in a tradition established in this field by Max Reinhardt in the early 20th century. In Greece, where this type of theatre originated, there is an oppressive heritage in the interpretation of antique tragedy and comedy, which is torn between the German, French and Anglo-Saxon “schools” of thought and artistic expression. Stage director Matthias Langhoff, who trained at Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble and is well-known for his willingly irreverent work, was invited by the National Theatre of Northern Greece to propose an innovative look at tragedy through the staging of Euripides’ Bacchantes. For eight months, he worked with the local company on the production which was finally presented at the Epidaurus Theater in August 1997. The current study begins with a summary of the staging of antique drama in Greece. It then proposes an analysis of Langhoff’s production, giving special attention to the chorus, a pivotal theme of all performances of antique theatre. This production is compared to the representation of the Bacchantes staged by Klaus Michael Grüber, an achievement which stood out at the Schaubühne of Berlin in 1974 and to which Matthias Langhoff frequently made more or less explicit, reference.

La presencia del actor libertario en las luchas sociales en Argentina

In Argentina, theatre became a very efficient way of conveying Anarchist ideas, an ideology brought mainly from Europe by different inmigrant groups. This libertarian aesthetics was put into action by means of creative writing workshops as well as the staging of dramas and monologues where the influence of popular theatre forms was quite present.

The Heirs of Buffalo Bill: Performing Authenticity in the Dime Western

This article examines how the dime-novel western is affected by the predominance of performance westerns such as film, Wild West, and stage drama. The dime western compulsively describes the bodies of its characters to establish their social meanings within both particular dime stories and larger narratives of frontier history. Dime-western bodies are marked so that audiences can scrutinize their authenticity, assessing quickly where each body fits in the pantheon of western history and comparing each body's actions to the historical “script.” The dime-novel western is assiduous in its devotion to revealing the truth of the body; whether disguised, mistaken, lost, unknown, or de-racialized, the dime western renders visible the authentic body, and each body is invariably rewarded or punished according to its ideological role in promoting or impeding popular notions of frontier history.

The Heirs of Buffalo Bill: Performing Authenticity in the Dime Western

Abstract This article examines how the dime-novel western is affected by the predominance of performance westerns such as film, Wild West, and stage drama. The dime western compulsively describes the bodies of its characters to establish their social meanings within both particular dime stories and larger narratives of frontier history. Dime-western bodies are marked so that audiences can scrutinize their authenticity, assessing quickly where each body fits in the pantheon of western history and comparing each body's actions to the historical “script.” The dime-novel western is assiduous in its devotion to revealing the truth of the body; whether disguised, mistaken, lost, unknown, or de-racialized, the dime western renders visible the authentic body, and each body is invariably rewarded or punished according to its ideological role in promoting or impeding popular notions of frontier history.

Corpi estranei and Moving Stereotypes: Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Trauma of the Other in L'odore dell'India

Corpi estranei and Moving Stereotypes:Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Trauma of the Other in L'odore dell'India Silvia Valisa Naturalmente, quando si va a visitare un paese nuovo,si hanno già dei progetti d'interpretazione. E ogni scopertaè una lotta contro questi progetti, che piano piano cadono,e vengono sostituiti da altri, quelli reali. Perciò scoprireè sempre molto faticoso, in qualche modo disgustoso. —"Viaggio in Marocco"1 [End Page 269] In December 1960, joined by Alberto Moravia and later by Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini left for India. The pretext was an international conference on the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore in Bombay, but the three writers took the time to visit other Indian sites: New Delhi, Agra, Benares, Calcutta, Tanjore and Cochin. On their way back to Europe, they stopped in Kenya and Zanzibar for several days. Pasolini recorded his impressions in articles written weekly for Il Giorno (published between February 26 and March 26, 1961), later the same year gathered in a book, L'odore dell'India (Milano: Longanesi, 1961). Moravia, too, wrote several chronicles of India, published in the Corriere della sera (beginning February 19, 1961), and then gathered in Un'idea dell'India in 1962.2 In this essay I examine Pasolini's first trip to India through the written traces he left of it in his published travelogue. I analyze L'odore dell'India in the light of Pasolini's growing interest in the "Third World." This journey, as it has been pointed out, represented his first venture into non-Western countries, and indeed it was not by chance that his stay in India was coupled with a short visit to other "underdeveloped" countries with which he would become more familiar in the following years.3 I. Introduction There is a widespread agreement among Pasolini scholars on the "toni espressionistici—per non dire semplicistici" (Caminati 60) of L'odore dell'India, and, for many, of his entire tiermondiste production: Sam Rohdie, conflating Pasolini's experiences of the developing world in one gesture, writes that "Pasolini knew Africa, India, the Middle East, Calabria, the Rome borgate only poetically, not actually" (96) and argues that Pasolini was "fundamentally uninterested" in the Third World (252). Massimo Riva, in his analysis of Il padre selvaggio, [End Page 270] the "neo-colonial" script written immediately after L'odore dell'India in 1962, describes this text in words that apply to L'odore as well: "Il testo di Pasolini si accende di toni e tonalità (stilemi) che, se non se ne sottolineasse l'ingenuità provocatoria, il calcolato candore, sarebbero forse (e sono) imbarazzanti, dal punto di vista di un'analisi in chiave 'postcoloniale'" (253). Specifically concerning L'odore dell'India, Patrick Rumble writes that Pasolini's representation of India is a "self-subverting, non-positive figuration of difference" (199), and Chris Bongie deems it a "banal piece of journalism" (242, n. 23).4 Conversely, attention has also been given to the cracks and changes occurring in Pasolini's tiersmondisme between 1961 and 1975: Alessia Ricciardi outlines the ideological "dissonanza controllata" (already identified by Robert Gordon in Pasolini's cinema at large) that constitutes the internal, formal critique in Appunti per un'Orestiade africana (1968). She also contrasts the ideological failure ("esotismo regressivo") of such works to that of the stage drama Pilade, which is "molto più maturo da un punto di vista critico-ideologico" (514). Sergio Parussa, in an article co-written with Massimo Riva, outlines the illuminating reflections on (and the pessimism about) the encounter between cultures elaborated by Pasolini in several fragments of Petrolio. Additionally, in his recent excellent analysis of Pasolini's Third World cinema, Luca Caminati has contrasted L'odore dell'India, in which "l'Oriente" is "combattuto da subito e mai completamente accettato" (23), with Pasolini's later work Appunti per un film sull'India (1968), in which the critic finds a "rinnovata tensione verso il reale" (59); that is, an effective commitment to "know" the other.5 A full consideration of all these encounters is beyond the scope of this essay: my aim is to problematize the understanding of L'odore dell'India by explaining its defensive techniques and by outlining its ideological dissonances...

Some Current Publications

Some Current Publications Julia Fawcett Individuals APHRA BEHN Wilkerson, Virginia L. “Behn’s The Widow Ranter.” The Explicator 66.2 (2008): 73–75. Wilkerson notes that Behn’s choice of the title for her play is surprising, given that “the character of Ranter is almost a distraction from the story line” rather than its central figure, but she suggests that “Behn employs Ranter to illustrate the advantage gained by taking the wearing of men’s clothing to another level of representation, and thus she deemed her character important enough for the tragicomedy’s title to carry her name.” See also: SOUTHERNE (Jaher), GENDER & SEXUALITY (Wiseman), POLITICS & RELIGION (Visconsi), RACE & ETHNICITY (Doyle). ROBERT BOYLE Anstey, Peter, and Michael Hunter. “Robert Boyle’s ‘Designe about Natural History.’” Early Science and Medicine 13 (2008): 83–126. Anstey and Hunter cite a 1666 letter from Boyle to Henry Oldenburg in which he “elaborated in a sophisticated way the salient Baconian doctrine which thereafter formed the centerpiece of Boyle’s methodology in natural philosophy.” They read this letter as a turning point in Boyle’s career, as the first and most comprehensive explanation of Boyle’s “Designe about Natural History” and his debt to Sir Francis Bacon’s ideas about compiling and arranging a natural history, and as a key to understanding many of Boyle’s later works. See also: LOCKE (Walmsley), SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY (Peterfreund). MARGARET CAVENDISH Kellett, Katherine R. “Performance, Performativity, and Identity in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure.” SEL 48 (2008): 419–442. Kellett responds to the debate about whether Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure is a stage drama or a closet drama by shifting attention from the play’s performability [End Page 69] to its performativity, applying Judith Butler’s queer theory to argue that the play “highlights the instabilities of identity and of performance as a genre.” She describes the setting of the play as a “curiously immaterial space” that resists stabilization and “suggests that the subversive power of identity exists not merely in bodies, but in the discourse that produces those bodies.” However, Kellett questions Butler’s strict distinction between “performance” and “performativity”: noting that not only the identity but also the very materiality of the bodies within The Convent of Pleasure is “conspicuously ambiguous,” she claims that the play “resists corporal reification, complicating Butler’s contention that a subject is presumed underneath all performances by revealing that subjectivity can never be stable.” Mascetti, Yaakov A. “A ‘World of Nothing, but Pure Wit’: Margaret Cavendish and the Gendering of the Imaginary.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6 (2008): 1–31. Through her “wordy, intricate, and often self-contradictory writing style, combined with complex, paradoxical, regressive, reflexive, and counterintuitive conceptions of matter and motion,” Margaret Cavendish carves out a place for the female writer who deals in “wit, fancy, and imagination, as opposed to the patriarchal framework of objective truths.” Comparing Cavendish’s writings to those of Descartes, Bacon, and Hobbes, Mascetti claims that she constructed a female world not opposed against but rather “parallel to the masculine dominion of objectivity, where she manifested and realized the inalienable right of a woman to think within the intimacy of her mind and her house.” Scott-Bauman, Elizabeth. “‘Bake’d in the Oven of Applause’: The Blazon and the Body in Margaret Cavendish’s Fancies.” Women’s Writing 15 (2008): 86–106. Despite former scholars’ arguments that the recipe poems of Cavendish’s Poems, and Fancies feminize the language of science by combining it with the language of the kitchen, Scott-Bauman argues that the recipe poems “are an engagement with the (male) Cavalier poets as much as with the kitchen, and that the kitchen itself is no simple signifier of domestic femininity.” The recipe poems mimic the cavaliers’ use of the blazon and “combine food and natural philosophy images playfully to deflate seventeenth-century ideas about gender” and to transform “the female figure of Nature” from the dissected object of male experimentation” into “a cannibalistic and self-recreating power.” It is Cavendish’s interest in natural philosophy, Scott-Bauman concludes, that influences her focus “on the body’s vitality and function, rather than the allure...

Pandemic and Performance: Ibsen and the Outbreak of Modernism

"Pandemic and Performance: Ibsen and the Outbreak of Modernism": The case of Henrik Ibsen demonstrates that, in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century London, the theatre acted as a central circulatory system for the ideas, practices, and aesthetic innovations that would later be described as modernist. The staging and reception of Ibsen's dramas was stormy. Both the playwright and his critics used the language of disease to describe one other: for critics, Ibsen's art encouraged degeneracy; for the playwright, late nineteenth-century middle-class life was sick and in need of a cure. As Ibsenism took hold, influential members of counterpublics took a direct hand in introducing, translating, parodying, performing, and reviewing his plays. Feminists, socialists, sexologists, and suffragists, among others, used Ibsen's writing to perform a break with tradition and clear a space for their vision of the future. Later artists, such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., and Virginia Woolf, would also be drawn to Ibsen as the inspiration for their aesthetic and political experiments. Not only in the West but also in China and Japan, the plays of Ibsen have appeared at moments of progressive upheaval to signal a rejection of the past and a suspicion of official culture. Ibsen's work and its uses demonstrate the full range of lived experience that defined modern rebellion, and it reminds us that theatre and drama played a central role in making that rebellion visible and available to a wide public.

Malawian Popular Commercial Stage Drama: Origins, Challenges and Growth*

This article explores the factors that influenced the birth and development of popular commercial stage drama in Malawi. It analyses the origins and changing political relations of the main popular drama groups, examines the social networks that linked key artists and emphasises the important role of formal educational institutions. It also investigates the production methods used by different groups at different times, their directing styles and aesthetics. The study focuses on Chichewa and English language drama groups operating from Blantyre, whose dynamics are different from those in other regions, which also use Yao and Tumbuka. My sources comprise commentaries by David Kerr, Chris Kamlongera, Joyce Kumpukwe and Steve Chimombo, complemented by in-depth interviews with actors, directors and university lecturers, and reflections on my own personal experience. I argue that despite the restrictive environment created by the Banda regime in the 1960s and 1970s, popular commercial stage drama began to interact with University drama in the early 1980s and became a significant force in Malawian political culture, given its capacity to shape popular opinion and influence ordinary people's understanding of politics and politicians. It has proved a powerful medium for artists to bring aesthetic and moral commentary to broad audiences.

"White World. Not a Sound": Beckett's Radioactive Text in <i>Embers</i>

"White World. Not a Sound":Beckett's Radioactive Text in Embers James Jesson A common starting point when considering Samuel Beckett's radio pieces is the author's 1957 letter to his American publisher, Barney Rosset, urging him to prevent theatrical adaptations of his radio play All That Fall.1 Critics frequently cite Beckett's insistence that "we . . . keep our genres more or less distinct" and that staging this radio play "will be destructive of whatever quality it may have and which depends on the whole thing's coming out of the dark" (qtd. in Zilliacus, Beckett frontispiece). Lost amidst analysis of these strictures concerning genre has been the fact that Beckett avoids calling All That Fall a play: "All That Fall is a specifically radio play, or rather radio text, for voices, not bodies" (qtd. in Zilliacus, Beckett frontispiece). Why, we might ask, does Beckett back off from the term "radio play," opting instead for "radio text"? One possible answer is that Beckett's radio works bear less relation to his stage drama than their inclusion within collections and studies of his dramatic works suggests. Hugh Kenner writes that, in the middle of Beckett's experiments with radio writing, in April 1958, "The Unnamable and the Textes Pour Rien had placed him in an impasse where he could not possibly write another novel" (Samuel Beckett 25), implying that during this period of dramatic fecundity Beckett was also contemplating the limits and possibilities of his fiction (and, indeed, he soon resolved his novelistic impasse, though painfully, with Comment C'est, begun eight months later). Kenner does not go as far as to link Beckett's radio pieces with his prose writing, but he hints at a connection when he writes, "Beckett turned to radio drama at a crest of preoccupation with the fact that for him to live was to make stories, creating with words beings not himself, but perfecting his own identity in perfecting their words" (Samuel Beckett 168). "Stories," here, does not necessarily refer to Beckett's prose fiction—those works designed to be read on the page rather than performed theatrically. If we look closely at Beckett's radio pieces, however, we find that texts—in the sense of objects containing writing—play a significant, if sometimes subtle, role [End Page 47] in them. Whether or not these texts-within-the-plays warrant a change in classification from "radio plays" to "radio texts," they do suggest that Beckett's wireless writings gave him an opportunity to explore the potential of textual representation and that, therefore, his radio plays may be as relevant to discussions of Beckett's fiction as to those concerning his dramatic canon. The most significant texts in Beckett's radio pieces appear in Pochade Radiophonique (called Rough for Radio II in its English translation) and Embers, the former written in the early 1960s and the latter in 1957.2 These works bracket Beckett's writing of Comment C'est (1958–60), his first novel in roughly a decade, and Krapp's Last Tape (written 1958), a stage play related to Beckett's radio work through its use of sound-recording technology. While this article will focus on Embers, a play with one very short but, I will argue, very significant mention of a text, Rough for Radio II will serve to introduce Beckett's exploration of the characteristics and possibilities of the written word, which he undertook in a purely aural medium that by its nature effaces the visible text. Rough for Radio II tells the story of a male-female pair, Animator and Stenographer, engaged in the arduous and apparently futile effort of constructing a story by precisely transcribing the words of a captive character named Fox, with the help of their silent, whip-wielding partner, Dick, who "functions" as a goad to keep Fox talking. The scenario of a victim performing under duress is fairly common in Beckett's oeuvre, but Stenographer's old-fashioned pencil-and-paper recording of Fox's words is somewhat surprising, especially in a new-media work written after Krapp's Last Tape had placed a tape recorder in a central role on stage. But while a...

The Woman Saint in Spanish Golden Age Drama (review)

Bulletin of the Comediantes • 2008 Vol. 60 No. 2 161 Reviews____________________________________________________________________ Gascón, Christopher D. The Woman Saint in Spanish Golden Age Drama. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006. 203 pp. The Woman Saint in Spanish Golden Age Drama is an ambitious and relevant piece of scholarship that synthesizes two areas of interest in comedia studies: the representation of women on the early modern Spanish stage and hagiographic theater. Diverging from previous critical tendencies, which typically mythologized the legendary qualities of the saint, Gascón examines the female religious figure through her specific characterization within the play and analyzes how this depiction interrogates contemporary society. For the purpose of his analysis, the author proposes three categories to describe the female saint: as a desiring subject, as the object of desire, and as the mediator of desire. Acknowledging the mutability of such a classification, he also points out how the character may correspond simultaneously to more than one of the categories or how she may start in one and end in another. Gascón’s introduction briefly discusses recent scholarship on hagiographical studies and gender issues in the comedia. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical frame used to analyze the plays. In the Baroque comedia de santa, he explains, the woman saint’s relationship with desire—either her own or that of others—is at the center of the conflict that drives the plot. She represents the point “where worldly and religious desires collide” (23). The female ascetic’s situation is more complex and precarious than her secular counterpart because she must face not only the unique set of challenges tied to her holy vows but also those that all women confront as a result of their gender. It is necessary, therefore, to examine the character in terms of her function within religious and social contexts. Gascón then asserts that “[b]aroque religious drama brings passion and intensity to its exploration of the potential of worldly desires to cause personal or societal schism and of the power of religious desire to redeem humanity and establish peace” (31), an undeniable conclusion based on the careful contemplation of the dramatic texts—and the genre as a whole. Using as a point of departure Victor Turner’s conception of the similarities between ritual and theater, Gascón points out the ritualistic features of the comedia de santa, highlighting in particular the “liminal processes and self-reflexivity” caused by religious crisis (26). He notes how Turner’s four stages of social drama: breach, crisis, redress, and restoration, also structure the comedias de santa. Gascón recalls Peter Brooks’s theory of textual energetics to explain how the comedia de santa helped to resolve personal 162 Bulletin of the Comediantes • 2008 Vol. 60 No. 2 ____________________________________________________________________ Reviews religious conflict (32-33). Finally, René Girard’s conception of religion describes the social function of religion in society that is represented on the stage (36-37). The remaining chapters develop his arguments and are divided by the different roles assigned to the saintly woman in the plays. Chapter 2, “The Woman Saint as Desiring Object,” examines sor Marcela de San Félix’s Muerte del apetito and Félix Lope de Vega Carpio’s Vida y muerte de Santa Teresa de Jesús. Gascón’s analysis skillfully demonstrates how the playwrights present the protagonists in a state of conflict. To varying degrees, the women are troubled not only by their inner struggle with passion but also with external, societal forces that attempt to influence them. This struggle with desire is resolved as they embrace Christian virtue as the foundation of their identity. The third chapter, “Woman Saint as Forbidden Fruit and Christ Figure,” explores the woman saint’s relationship with society in her attempt at self-definition. Here he looks at Ángela de Azevedo’s La Margarita del Tajo que dio nombre a Santarén and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El mágico prodigioso. In both cases the women characters are objectified, and metaphorical parallels between the “forbidden fruit” and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ become evident. Once again, she is the point of contention, this time of others’ worldly desires, and her sacrifice is the...

Adapting Shakespeare from Western Drama to Chinese Opera

Two hundred and forty years after his death, Shakespeare was introduced to China. It was in 1856 that the British missionary William Muirhead mentioned the Bard of Avon in his Chinese translation of British history. In 1878, the first Chinese ambassador in Britain, Guo Song-tao, saw a performance of a Shakespeare play at the Lyceum Theatre in London. He was very impressed and recorded this in his diary.1 Today, the Chinese people can not only read Shakespeare in English and Chinese, but can also enjoy his plays on stage. There are two major performative modes in which Shakespeare appears in China. Each of them has about one hundred years of history. One is Huaju or ‘spoken drama', influenced by Western drama; the other is Xiqu or ‘Chinese opera', based on the indigenous theatre. Adapting Shakespeare into Huaju is easier because the transfer takes place within the same art: however, adapting it into Chinese opera is much more complicated because they are entirely unrelated. In spite of this, since the early twentieth century Chinese practitioners have been brave enough to meet the challenge. So far, there are more than twenty indigenous operas in different genres that have been adapted from Shakespeare. Parallel to that, Shakespeare's plays were also adapted into Chinese stage drama (Huaju). Li Ruru, scholar of Chinese theatre, has discussed these attempts in her book Staging Shakespeare in China.2 Though there exists an early silent film adaptation made in 1931, two years ago the first contemporary Chinese film adaptations from Shakespeare were realised: The Banquet and Prince of the Himalayas, both of which are based on Hamlet (I have analysed them in my recent book Shakespeare's Images).3 Whether as operas or theatre plays or films, these adaptations are the subject of continuous debate. Shakespeare in Southern Africa Vol. 20 2008: pp. 1-11

Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama (review)

List of illustrations Preface List of contributors Introduction Lukas Erne and Margaret Jane Kidnie Part I. Establishing the Text: 1. The two texts of Othello and early modern constructions of race Leah S. Marcus 2. 'Work of permanent utility': editors and texts, authorities and originals H. R. Woudhuysen 3. Housmania: episodes in twentieth-century 'critical' editing of Shakespeare Paul Werstine 4. Addressing adaptation: Measure for Measure and Sir Thomas More John Jowett 5. The New Bibliography and its critics Ernst Honigmann 6. Scholarly editing and the shift from print to electronic cultures Sonia Massai Part II. Presenting the Play: 7. 'Your sum of parts': doubling in Hamlet Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor 8. The perception of error: the editing and the performance of the opening of Coriolanus Michael Warren 9. Modern spelling: the hard choices David Bevington 10. The staging of Shakespeare's drama in print editions Margaret Jane Kidnie 11. Open stage, open page? Editing stage directions in early dramatic texts John D. Cox 12. Two varieties of digital commentary John Lavagnino 13. New collaborations with old plays: the (textual) politics of performance commentary Barbara Hodgdon Index.

Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema

During the first half of the twentieth century, new mass media practices radically altered traditional cultural forms and performance in a complex encounter that incited much debate, criticism, and celebration the world over. This essay examines how the new sound media of gramophone and sound cinema took up the live performance genres of Tamil drama. Professor Hughes argues that south Indian music recording companies and their products prefigured, mediated, and transcended the musical relationship between stage drama and Tamil cinema. The music recording industry not only transformed Tamil drama music into a commodity for mass circulation before the advent of talkies but also mediated the musical relationship between Tamil drama and cinema, helped to create film songs as a new and distinct popular music genre, and produced a new mass culture of film songs.