Theatre Censorship Research Articles

“Repertoire Index” is the Only Source on Theatrical Censorship in the USSR

“Repertoire Index” is the Only Source on Theatrical Censorship in the USSR

Theatre Censorship in Spain, 1931–1985 by Catherine O'Leary, and Michael Thompson (review)

Theatre Censorship in Spain, 1931–1985 by Catherine O'Leary, and Michael Thompson (review)

הצנזורה על סרטי קולנוע ערביים במדינת ישראל, 1967-1948

This article examines government censorship of Arab films in the first two decades of the State of Israel, through extensive archival use of documents of the Israeli Film and Theater Censorship Board. The state authorities had wanted to ban altogether the import of films made in Egypt, where the majority of Arab films were produced, but this was impossible due to the entertainment needs of the Arab minority in Israel, and of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries. The article sheds light on the government's efforts to restrict as much as possible the showing of Arab films and censor their content. The censorship's dual purpose was to prevent Arab films from awakening the national and political consciousness of the Arabs living in Israel, and to distance Jewish immigrants from their Arab culture, in order to promote their assimilation into hegemonic Israeli culture. However, the censorship's attempts at political control over Arabs and cultural control over Jews was doomed to failure due to the emergence of a new means of communication and entertainment in the Middle East – television. This ended the cinema theaters' monopoly over the consumption of Arab films, and thus the Film and Theater Censorship Board's ability to censor them.

Fog-Clearing and the “Irish Dimension” in Oscar Wilde’s Three Society Plays

Despite growing scholarly interest in how Oscar Wilde’s Irish heritage shaped the form and content of his creative works, critics exploring this area have paid less attention to his three society plays than to his fiction and his final play The Importance of Being Earnest. In seeking to rectify that imbalance, this essay first addresses the analytical implications of Wilde’s suggestion in 1893 that his own performed and planned society plays, along with certain works by his countryman George Bernard Shaw, constituted an “Hibernian” or “Celtic School”, whose key goals were to celebrate Henrik Ibsen, to deprecate theatrical censorship, and to extirpate the English “intellectual fogs” of Puritanism and Philistinism. Examining Wilde’s depictions of Puritanism, London society, and English national character in the three plays, the essay argues that their Irish facets turn out to be relatively modest in scale, consisting not of the allegorically encoded political commentaries previous critics claimed to discover in Wilde’s fiction and The Importance of Being Earnest, but instead strategies of plot, characterization, and dialogue designed to alert England to the urgent need “to clear” away its “intellectual fogs”.

‘Playing at Bo-peep with the world’ The Author/Actor in Charlotte Charke’s Narrative

The article re-examines The Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke (1755), the first autobiography by a female actor (albeit one who consistently specialised in male roles) in terms of the strategies it deploys for showing, and hiding, the author’s physical person and authorial persona. As the youngest daughter of Colley Cibber, Charke was a member of London’s most influent theatrical family, and led a life marked by spectacular misfortune and neverending optimism. To claw her way out of the exclusion from acting that was the outcome of the Licencing Act, she undertook an extraordinary sequence of different careers, worked as a strolling player for nine years, and attempted a reconciliation with her father through her autobiography, which, deeply inscribed by the theatre in terms of both content and style, highlights the interaction between spontaneity and premeditation. Feelings seem not only expressed, but shaped through drama; memory becomes the bodily memory of interpreting a role, represented on the outdoor theatre of her many professional endeavours and ultimately in the pages of her book. Charke’s second ‘coming on the Stage’, her appearance, that is, in the guise of author, is marked by both gender and genre indeterminacy. As a ‘cartaceous’ remediation of her innate and unstoppable passion for the theatre it shows a precocious understanding of the newborn ‘cult of celebrity’ and the possibilities for self-promotion offered by the expanding print market. Ultimately, it aims to counter theatrical censorship by educating Charke’s audience/readership to a more critical awareness of the relationship between actor/role, gender/clothes and author/character.

The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History: From the Enlightenment to Anschluss by David S. Luft

Reviewed by: The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History: From the Enlightenment to Anschluss by David S. Luft Katherine Arens David S. Luft, The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History: From the Enlightenment to Anschluss. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. X + 234 pp. David Luft, Horning Endowed Chair in the Humanities (Emeritus) at Oregon State University, has again proven himself one of the premier contemporary interpreters of Austrian intellectual history. The Austrian Dimension in German Intellectual History is an altogether magisterial presentation of a new, expansive approach to the great final chapter of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's intellectual life. [End Page 82] Luft begins by noting that the histories of Europe's nation-states simply do not accommodate a multilingual and multicultural region like Habsburg Central Europe. "National intellectuals," for example, are rarely seen as (at least) bilingual and bicultural—the precise status of many eminent names in a Habsburg monarchy never even seeking a single ethnic-national identity. Instead of contrasting "Austrians" and "Germans," Luft takes a broader view of Central Europe's German-language intellectual sphere. He begins with the late eighteenth century (before Prussia had claimed sovereignty over a united "German Reich") and situates an emerging Germanophone intellectual life in Cisleithania, the lands to the west of the Leitha River that became the Habsburg empire's heart after 1740: Bohemia and Austria (including Moravia). Luft rejects the idea of a single "Austrian" intellectual history for this region, set over and against "German" or European thought. He does, however, find a culture of "creativity and imagination" culminating in the 1905 generation: "The unifying themes of this tradition are a positive attitude toward the Enlightenment and modern science, combined with a resistance to reductionism and ideological polarization, the emphasis on ethics and inner experience, and respect for unconscious energies and what we cannot control" (139). Thus, Luft finds in Cisleithania a mainline of intellectual interests sustained in the two Habsburg capitals: Prague (until 1618) and then Vienna (for the final three hundred years of Habsburg rule). The book's first sections explain this map and how Austria and Bohemia became historically entangled, starting with the Holy Roman Empire. The Protestant Reformation brought the German language to the region. Bohemian resistance to the Habsburg Counter-Reformation led to the famous Defenestration at Prague (1618); the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 saw the defeat of the Czech-Bohemian armies (Hussite Protestants) by Catholic-Imperial forces. This forced Bohemia under Habsburg rule. After mapping the region's geography, Luft provides a timeline for Cisleithania's development, dividing it into four "modern" eras. The first was known as "Josephinism" (after Joseph II, son of Maria Theresa and the Holy Roman Emperor between 1765 and 1790, with his brother Leopold reigning for two years after that). A small group of state bureaucrats who were also intellectuals initiated a modern state. These ncluded Joseph von Sonnenfels (innovator in law and theater censorship), Joseph Dobrovský (contributor to establishing modern Czech and an advocate defining Bohemia as a joint [End Page 83] German-Czech cultural space), and the van Swietens (two educational reformers). Europe's disruptions—associated with the French Revolution, Napoleon, and their aftermaths—define the second era, between 1792 and 1866, marked by the conservatism of Metternich and the Congress of Vienna. This era's most significant Austrian figures are Stifter, Bolzano, and Grillparzer in letters, as well as historiographer František Palacký (part of the Czech revival) and Count Thun (of the University Reforms). The more familiar liberal era ran from 1867 to 1900, after the Austrian Empire became the dual monarchy in the Hungarian Ausgleich. The 1873 Börsenkrach braked its progress, feeding directly into growing antisemitism and nationalism among the Empire's ethnic-national populations. That liberal period nonetheless prepared the way for the final "Austrian" era beyond the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire proper: the era of modern intellectual life from 1900–1938/39, which was not an era of decline, as is sometimes thought, but rather one whose history has not been sufficiently appreciated. In the next three chapters, Luft tracks three major streams of intellectual life running throughout Cisleithania's existence. Chapter Three introduces philosophy and...

MANIFESTATION OF THANATOS IN EDWARD BOND’S SAVED

In the post-Freudian thought, the two driving forces of human beings are Eros and Thanatos. They are the pleasure principle and death drive, respectively. The derivative terminology of these two forces is originated in Greek mythology with Eros as the god of pleasure and Thanatos, on the other hand, as the personification of death. For a long time, the latter force was eliminated off-stage due to theatrical existential reasons. However, one of the few successful attempts to force Thanatos on-stage is detected in Edward Bond‘s Saved (1968). This paper approaches Bond‘s Saved (1968) aiming to show the poeticity in the Shklovskian defamiliarizing entries that forced the theatrical censorship into accepting the play despite the fact that the play promptly violated the censorship regulations. With these entries, the stage—once again—addresses human feelings while reshaping the Eros-oriented theatre. The result is residing tension in the audience after realizing the unexplored possibilities of the Thanatos-oriented stage and a consequent undoing of the prior anchorage of metaphor into a floating concept that involves the redefinition attempts into same-but-different perspective. The findings of the paper implicate that the employment of irregular techniques makes it possible to challenge people into the recognition of corruption by being charged with the responsibility of taking action concerning paratextual contexts through nondidactic plays.

Books Briefly

Books Briefly

The Insider's View of Beckett's Re-Generating Art

Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett's Decadent Turn places Beckett on the spectrum of post-Wildean decadent writers while also maintaining a vision of Beckett as a master of rediscovering and erasing himself through explorations of decay, absence, and loss. The book offers new material and analyses of key moments in Irish and European history, Irish postcolonialism, theatre censorship, boundary-changing publishing from the 1930s to 1960s, and performance activism. Gontarski creates an interconnected vision of the professional, theatrical, and philosophical strands of Beckett's work.

ЛИЛИАН ХЕЛЛМАН В СОВЕТСКОМ ТЕАТРАЛЬНОМ МИРЕ

The article examines the contacts of the American playwright Lillian Hellman with the Soviet theatrical world. It focuses on Soviet productions of her plays, recollections of actors involved in those productions, critics’ reviews of the premieres. Hellman’s more than 20-year career in the USSR helps to trace back the changes of Soviet cultural and ideological agenda. Acting as a cultural emissary during the Second World War, Hellman visited Moscow where she was greeted as a dear guest, and her plays were staged by two lar­gest Moscow theaters. With the beginning of the Cold War, her dramas The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine disappeared from the repertoire. Surprisingly, Hellman’s play with a conspicuously Western title Ladies and Gentlemen circumvented theatrical censorship amid an anti-American propaganda campaign, although the production received negative reviews from magazine critics. In the 1960s Hellman returns to Moscow again, where she meets Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev. Cultural and political landscape of that period was deeply influenced by struggles of the dissident movement, which Hellman deeply sympathized with. She considered Kopelev and Orlova to be people of remarkable courage and integrity since they refused to leave their native Russia despite the risk of being imprisoned and persecuted. That is why the case of Anatoly Kuznetsov who fled to the UK from the USSR infuriated Hellman who publicly disapproved his decision to flee. Hellman wrote and spoke about dissidents back at home in the United States, and she continued to correspond with Orlova almost until her death in 1984. Thus, Hellman’s creative biography represents the trajectory of defecting from the ranks of Soviet sympathizers: starting her career as a pro-Stalinist, she subsequently refused to support Soviet socialism.

Teatro em silencio: onde foi parar o Jubileu de Amores, de Gil Vicente (c.1465 - c.1536)?

O texto propõe uma revisitação da inquisição literária e da censura teatral no século XVI em Portugal, em uma época de fausto e cultura, promovida pelos gigantescos lucros do colonialismo, que proporcionou à corte lisboeta a presença de Gil Vicente (c.1465- c.1536): Ourives, dramaturgo, encenador e artista, ele escreveu, desde o ano de 1502 até 1536, cerca de 45 peças teatrais, algumas das quais foram silenciadas pela máquina de censura do Tribunal do Santo Ofício, instalado em 1536. O objetivo do artigo é delinear, principalmente, um momento histórico que selou o destino de uma obra vicentina: Em Bruxelas (Flandres), no dia 21 de dezembro de 1531, foi apresentado um auto de Gil Vicente, Jubileu de Amores, por ocasião das comemorações do nascimento de D. Manuel, filho do rei D. João III. Presente estava o cardeal Girolano Aleandro, diplomata enviado pelo Papa para persuadir o imperador Carlos V a intervir contra a heresia alemã, desencadeada por Martim Luther. Em carta enviada para o secretário papal, Aleandro teceu severas críticas à comédia vicentina, a qual recriminava o sistema de indulgências de Roma. A peça foi encenada na corte lusa, mas não foi incluída na Copilaçam de Todalas obras de Gil Vicente de 1562 e desapareceu sem deixar vestígios.

«Я над голой музыкой хохотал, как угорелый…». Оперетта Бородина «Богатыри» в письмах Виктора Крылова Николаю Савицкому

The article is the first publication of 22 letters by playwright Viktor Krylov to Nikolay Savitsky, Stage Director of the Moscow Opera Сompany. The letters were discovered in 2020 in the State Historical Museum. The preparation of the article included dating and commenting on the letters. All the letters date from 1866 to 1867. Most of them are devoted to Heroic Warriors (1867), an operetta by Alexander Borodin based on the libretto by Krylov. The discovered documents allow to trace back how the operetta was composed, beginning with the emergence of Krylov's idea. The article clarifies the chronology of Krylov's work on the libretto as well as Borodin's work on the music of Heroic Warriors. It also reveals some previously unknown details of the composer's concept. Krylov writes in detail about passing two stages of theatrical censorship. It allows to establish the correct date of the final approval by the Theater and Literature Committee: July 29, not June 29 as previously thought. This fact explains why Borodin did not have enough time to compose fully original music for the operetta as well as why he was so often forced to parody works of other composers.

Political Theatre in the Age of Brexit: The State of Nation in Monologues

Abstract On the British stage, political theatre, which emerged in the twentieth century, has been linked with the problems of the working class as initiated in the 1920s until the early 1960s. With the end of the official censorship of theatre in 1968, political theatre in Britain experienced a period in which socialist works marked the stage. Nevertheless, the 1990s challenged the association of political theatre with the conditions of the working class. Considering the current political and social events in Britain and around the world, it is appropriate to underline that political theatre is not only in a constant flux, but its definition has been once again challenged. In this regard, Brexit can be considered as one of the most significant movements to influence the understanding of political theatre in the twenty-first century. Consequently, this study aims to analyse Brexit Shorts: Dramas from a Divided Nation (2017), a co-production by the Guardian and Headlong Theatre Company and discuss their contribution to the changing definition of political theatre. Brexit Shorts will be further explored regarding their influence on the popularity of monologues as a mode of performance.

Nõukogude tsensuuri mehhanismid, stateegiad ja tabuteemad Eesti teatris [Abstract: Mechanisms, strategies and taboo topics of Soviet censorship in Estonian theatre

Nõukogude tsensuuri mehhanismid, stateegiad ja tabuteemad Eesti teatris [Abstract: Mechanisms, strategies and taboo topics of Soviet censorship in Estonian theatre

Sending out a message in a bottle: Actor Neil Pearson, who shot to international fame as the sexist boss in the Bridget Jones’ films, talks about book banning and how the fight against theatre censorship still goes on

Sending out a message in a bottle: Actor Neil Pearson, who shot to international fame as the sexist boss in the Bridget Jones’ films, talks about book banning and how the fight against theatre censorship still goes on

Dos autores judeoconversos frente a la censura: Antonio Enríquez Gómez y Felipe Godínez

Como testimonio de la incidencia de la censura sobre la obra de los dramaturgos de segunda fila del Siglo de Oro (donde frecuentemente se encuentran ejemplos de gran interés para conocer la censura teatral en aquella época), se estudian aquí dos autores de ascendencia judeoconversa, Felipe Godínez y Antonio Enríquez Gómez (ambos tuvieron problemas con la Inquisición y sufrieron persecución y censura, tanto en el siglo XVII como en el XVIII, cuando algunas obras suyas fueron incluidas en el Índice de libros prohibidos). Se parte en este trabajo de algunos casos ya publicados con anterioridad (La conversión de la Magdalena, Las misas de San Vicente Ferrer o el entremés El alcalde de Mairena), pero se indaga también en otros que estaban pendientes de estudio (Santa Táez y El médico pintor, San Lucas, ambas de Enríquez Gómez).

A Hero of the Two Koreas: Yi Sun-shin Dramatized in North and South

Yi Sun-shin (1545–98), an admiral of the Joseon dynasty, is a Korean national hero who is admired by both North and South Korea regardless of political ideology. Yet between 1960 and 1970 North and South Korea presented Yi from different perspectives in accordance with their own political interests. In South Korea, Yi was portrayed as a solitary hero who sacrificed himself to save the country despite the blame and entrapment he suffered as a result. Alongside, North Korea presented Yi as an ideal leader with the warmth of a father figure who embraced the people's aspirations to fight against their Japanese enemies. In this article, Seong-kwan Cho and Jae-beom Hong discuss these representations of Yi and survey North Korean theatre of the 1960s, which is rarely examined in theatre scholarship outside the Korean peninsula. Seong-kwan Cho (first author) lectures in the Korean Department of Konkuk University, and published in NTQ136 on South Korean theatre censorship. Jae-beom Hong (corresponding author) is a Professor in the same Department. The pair have recently been researching North Korean realist theatre, and this article is their third on the subject. This paper was supported by Konkuk University in 2016.

The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth 1's Court Theatre by W. R. Streitberger

Reviewed by: The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth 1's Court Theatre by W. R. Streitberger Janet Clare The Masters of the Revels and Elizabeth 1'S Court Theatre. By W. R. Streitberger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; pp. 336. W. R. Streitberger's seminal 1978 article on the biography of Edmond Tilney, the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean Master of the Revels, pioneered a revived interest in the organization and development of the Revels Office and, in particular, its relationship to the nascent commercial theatre. Now, forty years later, Streitberger has written a comprehensive account of court revels—a narrative which encompasses biographies of the Masters and under-officers; the management and the evolution of the Revels Office; the production of masques, plays, tilts and jousts at court; and the patronage networks and alliances at court which shaped its entertainment. The study offers far more than an account of Elizabeth's court theatre, as Streitberger frequently backtracks to the reigns of Edward VI and Mary to chart the early careers of Elizabeth's officials and to better understand the constitution of the revels she inherited. The subject of the first chapter is Thomas Cawarden, who had been conferred Master of the Revels by Henry VIII in 1545 and served Elizabeth in that role for less than a year. Under Cawarden, the Queen's revels were "elaborate and exuberant," but hardly novel as Cawarden drew on the devices, effects, and themes of the festivities he had overseen during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. (As a reformer who had produced anti-Catholic revels at court during Somerset's protectorship, he was regarded with suspicion during the reign of Mary and spent some time under house arrest.) In contrast, Thomas Benger, Cawarden's successor—the subject of chapter 2—helped to negotiate Mary's accession and was knighted the day after her coronation. Serving as auditor to Princess Elizabeth's household at Hatfield House, though, Benger became implicated with John Dee and his allegedly black arts and spent some time in the Fleet prison. Benger's tenure of the revels under Elizabeth is presented as a period of mismanagement and escalating costs, although his innovative masques and triumphs—characterized by spectacle, surprise, and verisimilitude—forged a new style of court festivity. He was the first to use specially-designed, three-dimensional houses in his plays and, according to Streitberger, the first to use sophisticated lighting schemes. With no royal company to play at court, Benger responded by producing plays by boy companies—the children of the Chapel Royal and of Windsor Chapel and the children of Paul's and of Westminster School—although evidence of the plays they performed is relatively scant with only the texts of Damon and Pythias and Sapientia Solomonis extant. A crisis arose in 1572 following Benger's death and the pressing need to have revels for the French embassy of the Duke of Montmorency, charged with negotiating a marriage alliance between the Queen and the Duke of Alençon. During what Streitberger titles the interregnum of 1572–78, highly placed courtiers, including the Queen's cousin, the Earl of Sussex, were appointed to oversee entertainments, while the practices and processes of the Office were scrutinized by the Privy Council with the idea of reform. Cost cutting was the objective and to this end a number of reformatory memoranda recommend exercises such as using cloth no longer considered serviceable in the various royal wardrobes for revels, and establishing a yearly budget for revels that the queen "will not pass." Streitburger devotes two chapters to Tilney as Master of the Revels, focusing on the expansion of his powers and—as cost cutting led to the outsourcing of court entertainment to privileged companies—the transformation of the office. Tilney was a new kind of Master as his function changed from a deviser of inhouse entertainment to that of a producer and director of works produced by professional playwrights. Extensive work on the Elizabethan playing companies and on theatre censorship [End Page 521] means that readers will be more generally familiar with these sections of Streitberger's narrative. Still, local details are telling. In the early Jacobean...

Theatre Censorship in South Korea: a Nation in Permanent Crisis

Between 1975 and 1988, the Korean Public Performance Ethics Committee (KPPEC) censored obscene language, body exposure, and extreme violence, as is common in all forms of theatre censorship. However, the KPPEC focused in particular on depictions of the President of South Korea, and proscribed any work that challenged or even questioned the public image of the President as a strong leader for a nation in crisis. Despite the official abolition of censorship in 1988, it was discovered in 2016 that a blacklist had been in operation that excluded ‘left’ and ‘pro-Pyongyang’ theatre directors and actors from accessing public funding. By exploring the process of censorship, Seong-kwan Cho in this article interrogates the relationship between the theatre and the nation. Seong-kwan Cho is a lecturer at the School of Global Communication at Kyung Hee University. With Jae-beom Hong, in his current research he has been exploring North Korean performance, and his article on this subject is forthcoming in Asian Theatre Journal.

Staging dissent: When a Britiish prime minister was not amused by satire, theatre censorship followed. We revisit plays that riled him, 50 years after the abolition of the state censor

Staging dissent: When a Britiish prime minister was not amused by satire, theatre censorship followed. We revisit plays that riled him, 50 years after the abolition of the state censor