Idea Of Theatre Research Articles

Biografia sztuki literackiej. Próba rekonstrukcji projektu literackiego Tadeusza Kantora

In universal consciousness, Tadeusz Kantor is an artist of theatre, painter, creator in other fine arts, but also author of a great number of writings on aesthetics, manifestos, sketches, essays, notes from rehearsals, dramatic scores and of some poems. What is characteristic is that various forms of writing, which by assumption are a theoretical expression of Kantor's ideas on theatre or fine arts, at the same time obtain a character of a literary work while his verses direct one towards theory. Painting, theatre and ideas connected with them are supplemented in the act of writing, which becomes a necessity for Kantor. The author of Dead Class changes the theatrical project into a literary project and in his writing he intermingles drama, commentary, theatre, his own theoretical and biographical reflections, observations of a masterpiece and states of his own consciousness. He plays theatrical ideas not only on the stage but also in theoretical texts and in verses. It is just in writing that the artist from Wielopole establishes anew the relations between theatre, literature and his own biography.

Theater of the Assessed: Drama-Based Pedagogies in the History Classroom

This essay argues that the current crisis in history education at the K-12 levels requires creative interventions and interdisciplinary collaborations. It also offers a series of strategies for teaching critical historical thinking skills to young people. Drawing on the author's recent collaboration with a theater educator, the essay examines the radical potential of one pedagogical method in particular—a theater-based strategy called “process drama.” A philosophical and experiential approach to teaching and learning, this method draws on theatrical ideas to trouble the traditional dynamics of the classroom and provoke students into critical investigation. The author roots her reflections on the power and potential of process drama for history education in a lesson she developed for a group of public school teachers from the Bronx. Interested in introducing these teachers to a diversity of visual primary source documents and in complicating the story of the Civil Rights movement, she asked participants to use a series of theater exercises to examine a set of photographs taken at civil rights protests. This work, the author argues, suggests the power of critical and creative pedagogies in the history classroom; demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary instruction, even at the K-12 levels; and offers a model for social justice history education that does not ignore the practical demands that weigh heavy on classroom teachers in this current standards-saturated public school educational climate.

Reconsideració d'un dramaturg català: el teatre ideològic d'Henrik Ibsen a Llibertat! de Santiago Rusiñol

In this article I suggest that Santiago Rusiñol's Llibertat! explores a theatre of ideas and current affairs which resonates with Henrik Ibsen's. Through it, the conflicts and the message of Rusiñol's play denounce the mediocrity and bourgeois intolerance of his society. It is not correct to frame Rusiñol's theatrical aesthetics solely within symbolist theatre, as many critics do; instead, it must be seen as an appropriation of Ibsen's ideology in order to rethink how Rusiñol's play has been categorized by the critics in the last few decades. The stress on ironical distancing, the individualization of the characters and the specificity of the kind of society portrayed are the characteristics that reveal the influence of the aesthetics of Ibsen's theatre of ideas. Rusiñol uses irony and parody in order to show the status of Ibsen's man: from man to the universe and society, like a divided soul. Rusiñol's is a social drama that fulfils the expectations people had of him that he would renew Catalan theatre.

Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory (review)

Reviewed by: Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory David Jortner Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory. By Christopher Bigsby. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006; pp. vii + 407. $38.00 cloth. In the first chapter of his book Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust, Christopher Bigsby lays out his thesis: "This book . . . is a meditation on memory, on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. But it is also an exploration of the ways in which fiction and drama have attempted to approach a subject so resistant to the imagination" (4). While this gives the reader a good sense of the structure of the book, Bigsby's statement also underscores the difficulty in reviewing this text for Theatre Journal. As a work of scholarship on Holocaust, memory, and narrative, his work is exemplary; he profiles nine of the most prominent Holocaust writers, all linked through their use or exploration of memory, and examines the biographical and sociocultural connections in their work. From the point of view of theatre scholarship, however, the book is somewhat disappointing. While Bigsby includes several playwrights among his subjects (including Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Weiss, Arthur Miller, and Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, who dramatized Anne Frank), he fails to develop fully the idea of theatre as a repository for memory and the challenges this presents. In order to do this book justice, therefore, I feel compelled to write this review in two parts, first from the standpoint of a scholar interested in memory theory and Holocaust studies, and second as a theatre historian. Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust is an excellent work of scholarship in the field of Holocaust literature. Bigsby begins with a discussion about the simultaneous importance and unreliability of memory as a form of witness; this is a theme he will return to in examining respective authors' works throughout the book. He then includes chapters and analyses of major Holocaust writers who explore ideas of memory/testimony in their work; these include W. G. Sebald, Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Weiss, Arthur Miller, Anne Frank, Jean Améry, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski. He follows these sections with a fascinating chapter titled "Memory Theft," which examines the writings of several well-known Holocaust impersonators—authors who falsely claimed to have survived the Holocaust—and illustrates how their works were originally embraced. One of the strengths of the book is the number and variety of authors Bigsby chooses to study. He analyzes the use of memoir, documentary, and memory in works as diverse as Weiss's The Investigation, and Wiesel's Night, and the mnemonic stylization in the novels of Sebald. In addition, Bigsby's subjects span a range of nationalities and Holocaust voices, including those who had been interned in the camps, both Jews and non-Jews, as well as postwar German and American writers (again, some Jewish, some not) who felt compelled to address the issue. Bigsby's new-historicist approach accentuates the differing voices of each writer; it is fascinating to see how, for example, in the work of Sebald, a German gentile whose father served in the army under the Nazis, the desire for "restitution" surfaces in the actions and memories of fictional (yet autobiographical) characters. Bigsby also does the reader a tremendous service by demonstrating how these authors' texts and memories interact with one another. Undoubtedly, some of the controversies and dialogues will be well-known to Holocaust scholars and historians (such as Cynthia Ozick on the "ownership" of Anne Frank). However, presenting Sebald's comments on Weiss (much of the book uses Sebald's scholarship as a launching point) as well as the dialogue among the works of authors such as Levi, Améry, and Wiesel allows Bigsby to address the difficult nature of memory and history. As a scholar of Holocaust literature, I find Bigsby's book an invaluable resource. However, as a work of theatre scholarship, Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust has a narrow appeal. As mentioned above, Bigsby does spend a significant amount of time on playwrights. The sections on Hochhuth and Weiss deal with the one...

School for citizens: theatre and civil society in Imperial Russia

This book offers a new perspective on the history of theatre in imperial Russia, focusing on the rise and regulation of the theatre industry and on the development of the idea of theatre. Murray Frame analyzes for the first time the impact of Russia's theatre on society and politics from the end of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The book highlights the roles of the state and the intelligentsia, both of which perceived theatre's powerful potential as a means of education. But while the state promoted theatre-going as an essential accoutrement of civilization and respectability, the intelligentsia saw in theater the opportunity to articulate alternative social and political ideas. The author explores the contributions of civil society and theatre culture to one another as Russian theater gained increasingly wide respect, and along the way draws lively portraits of the important actors, patrons, writers, and critics, as well as the theatres that employed and entertained them.

The Impact of Shinpa on Early Chinese Huaju

Focusing on the decade following the 1907 Spring Willow Society (Chunliu She) production of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Tokyo, this paper provides a brief introduction to the impact of Japanese shinpa, as well as that of Western theatre through shinpa, on the formation of early Chinese huaju (spoken drama), also known as xinju (new drama) or wenmingxi (civilized drama). After watching shinpa productions, some Chinese students in Tokyo started staging plays with the help of well-known shinpa actors such as Fujisawa Asajirō. Returning to Shanghai, they brought with them a set of Westernized theatrical conventions. A study of the wenmingxi repertoire reveals shinpa's influence in adaptations of both shinpa versions of European plays such as Tosca and original shinpa productions such as Hototogisu (Cuckoo). In addition, many original wenmingxi plays emulated either the social commentary style of early shinpa or domestic drama of late Meiji shinpa. In terms of acting, shinpa's influence is found in the styles of many wenmingxi stars and the use of female impersonators who followed shinpa onnagata.

Small-time Shakespeare: The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2003

It is commonly assumed that Shakespeare scholars and teachers can learn something about Shakespeare's plays-about the textual, interpretive, and theatrical possibilities they contain-from productions of these plays at such venues as London's new Globe, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Stratford, Ontario. This essay, which gives an account of sixteen Shakespeare productions and adaptations at the 2003 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, argues that we can also learn something about Shakespeare's plays from productions by high-school students, college students, and amateur theatrical troupes.1 Academic criticism does not pay a great deal of attention to amateur and student productions for what seem like obvious reasons: such productions have limited resources, and the acting is not always very good. But without making unreasonable claims for the pleasures of amateur theatricals, I would like to suggest that, in terms of theater scholarship and theater history, the standards represented by the new Globe, the two Stratfords, and their analogues are too conservative and too homogeneous. In the pages that follow I will describe what I take to be some remarkable successes by amateur and student performers-moments in which theatrical ideas are conveyed with clarity and energy characteristic of the best acting at any level. I will also describe some predictable failures-moments (or whole productions) in which the opportunity to express a theatrical idea is deliberately squandered, moments that are typical of the most cynical and lazy kind of Shakespearean acting at any level. I am here concerned with something that theater reviews do not focus on enough: the relationship between actors and audience. Amateur productions compel the reviewer to ask why am I here? The reasons we go to the Globe or to Stratford-upon-Avon seem self-evident; consequently, it is easy to record the details of those productions so as to suggest that such details are interesting in and of themselves. We become less like audience members and more like stenographers. In contrast, spending a beautiful

Artaud's Jet de Sang: a Critical Post-Production Analysis

Artaud's Jet de Sang is a text of merely eight pages, published in 1925. This work has acquired a reputation of being ‘unperformable’, partly because of the ‘impossible’ scenic actions asked for in the stage directions (e.g. ‘two stars crash into each other, and we see a number of live pieces of human bodies falling down: hands, feet, scalps… with a maddening, vomit-inducing slowness’), partly because the only professional production, by Peter Brook in the London Season of Cruelty in 1964, was judged to have been a total flop (Hunt & Reeve 77). Over the past ten years, I have scrutinized this text time and time again, related it to the theatrical ideas Artaud was professing in the 1920s, and have never quite understood why the play should be considered unperformable. It is a challenging text, yes, but when not interpreted literally it could act as a springboard for an exploration of Artaud's mind and of our own responses to the topics addressed in the play. A group of students with whom I had worked before on a Dada project convinced me that a production of Jet de Sang, despite its reputation, could be contemplated. Nevertheless, at our first group meeting I expressed the view that the alliance between Surrealism and the theatre profession had been a failure in the past and that it was unlikely to succeed today without compromising either the fundamental intentions behind Surrealist art or the no less axiomatic notions of ‘quality’ in our contemporary theatre world. To explore Artaud's concept of Surrealist theatre would by necessity force us into taking a decision on whether to be faithful to Artaud's ideas or to produce ‘théâtre-bien-fait’.

‘Mise en Scent’: The Théâtre d'Art's Cantique des cantiques and the Use of Smell as a Theatrical Device

In December 1891, an adaptation by Paul-Napoléon Roinard of the Old Testament text of the Cantique des cantiques (Song of Songs) of Solomon was performed at the recently created Théâtre d'Art, expressly to present a new idea of theatre as total art by engaging the visual, aural, and olfactory senses of the audience. One of the few theatre historians who has mentioned this remarkable endeavour notes that in it,‘music, words, colour, even perfume, were to be harmonized; all the senses were to be involved, simultaneously, in the one overwhelming experience’. Roinard's synaesthetic experiment drew on a range of sources including Baudelaire, Wagner and Rimbaud, and, most strikingly, featured scents pumped into the auditorium on cue by young symbolist poets stationed in the far edges of the proscenium and in the balcony and using hand-held vaporizers. According to the outline Roinard provided in the programme, nine scents were used: frankincense, white violets, hyacinth, lilies, acacia, lily of the valley, syringa, orange blossom, and jasmine. Each of these odours had corresponding orchestrations of speech (specific vowel sounds), tones (original music composed by Mme Flamen de Labrély), and colours.

Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance.

This text explores the preoccupation of many Renaissance writers' with the inwardness and invisibility of truth. The perceived discrepancy between a person's outward appearance and inward disposition, it argues, influenced the ways in which English Renaissance dramatists and poets conceived the theatre, imagined dramatic characters and reflected upon their own creativity. Reading works by Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and Milton in conjuction with sectarian polemics, gynaecological treatises and accounts of criminal prosecutions, the author delineates unexplored connections among religious, legal, sexual and theatrical ideas of inward truth. She reveals what was at stake ethically, politically, epistemologically and theologically when a writer in early modern England appealed to the difference between external show and interior authenticity.

A Cornerstone for Rethinking Community Theatre

A Cornerstone for Rethinking Community Theatre Sonja Kuftinec (bio) Theatre scholars and professional practitioners tend to refer to “community theatre” in pejorative terms, conjuring images of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland rummaging through Granny’s trunk in the barn, puttin’ on a show. This idea of community theatre may now be as clichéd as the genre itself is perceived to be. Recent collaborations between experienced theatre artists and a wide variety of communities have generated renewed appreciation for the social and aesthetic possibilities of community theatre. This field of performance, termed “community-based theatre,” or “grassroots theatre,” has begun to enter our consciousness in descriptive, practical terms but has yet to be clearly situated in a theoretical context. Some practitioners may fear that, perhaps, critique amounts to criticism, endangering the fragile foundations of nascent projects. In order to legitimize the field and investigate its potential for making meaning, however, it is essential to scrutinize community-based theatre and the ways in which the collaborative process helps to build, perform, and destabilize community. Analysis of Cornerstone Theatre’s production process is an appropriate site for this critical exploration of community-based work. Founded in 1986, Cornerstone has worked in collaboration with rural and urban communities across the country. In the fall of 1994, I served as dramaturg for two productions with Cornerstone, as part of the company’s yearlong residency in Watts, Los Angeles. This experience complemented dissertation research conducted through newsletters, a company oral history, formal and informal interviews, and observations on process. My research and production experience have led me to propose that Cornerstone’s community-based work generates complex, aesthetically intriguing and engaging productions and contributes to a growing discourse on the nature of community and identity. “Community” has been a problematic term for sociologists since at least the 1950s when, to the consternation of the field, George A. Hillery, Jr. described ninety-four use-definitions of community with very little in common among them (qtd. in Bell and Newby 27). The term serves as a convenient symbol encapsulating a number of contradictory ideas. As Raymond Williams notes in Keywords, references to “community” suggest positive connotations without clear meaning (66). This ambivalence of meaning is, in fact, an important element [End Page 91] of how “community” functions. In The Symbolic Constructions of Community, sociologist Anthony Cohen suggests that “community” operates as a “God word,” used symbolically to avoid the confrontation of its connotative differences (Introduction). “Community,” like “God,” symbolically unites those who believe in and employ the concept, even though these individuals may have vastly varying ideas as to its connotations. We generally understand community as a function of commonality, whether that commonality is one of location, class, interest, age, or ethnic background. This idea of commonality lends community the positive connotation that Williams cites. However, as sociologists and cultural theorists such as Cohen, Paul Gilroy, and Iris Marion Young point out, commonality also implies boundaries, difference, and exclusion. 1 In order for a community to distinguish itself, its members must differentiate themselves in some way from other communities through boundaries of land, behavior, or background. These are fluid rather than stable boundaries, dependent on individual perceptions and definitions. Cornerstone’s local collaborations ground this discourse of “community,” defined by both commonality and exclusion, in concrete examples. Original company members founded Cornerstone as a way to expand and diversify one particular community: the theatregoing audience. Co-founders Alison Carey and Bill Rauch were frustrated by what they felt to be a limited idea of national identity as defined by the audience of the American Repertory Theatre. Carey and Rauch felt that, despite its titular claims, this theatre’s mainly white, upper-middle-class audience did not represent the full diversity of America. Rauch, Carey, and other founding Cornerstone members decided that if they wanted to engage a truly diverse American theatre audience they needed to travel beyond the geographical and economic confines of East Coast regional theatres. Further discussion led to the insight that engaging an audience required working with them rather than merely performing for them. Carey comments, “if we were sincere in our desire to learn from people what makes good theatre, and whether theatre...

Foreword

As we all know, the idea of theatre is undergoing significant revision: ideas of cultural performance, gender construction, ethnic, personal and national expression, postcolonial performance, and performativity (both cultural and linguistic) are joining more traditional definitions of the play text as sites of analysis. Just as historiography urges a contextual reading of the important documents of Canada's stage, poststructural criticisms urge study of theatrical performance in a plurality of contexts and from various (often previously ignored) perspectives. Studies of a particular play can approach the source material from many vantages, each imbricating the other to create a lattice of analysis which more fully reveals the play's meanings. And, by showing a variety of ways of seeing, such studies also deny the transcendence of any one means of investigation; indeed, they demonstrate that all readings are provisional and contingent upon the subject-position of the spectator.

Theatre History, Methodology and Distinctive Features

We are living at a time when we are particularly conscious of historical change and of the impermeability of institutions, political, social, intellectual, and educational. The old disciplinary structures that organized our Western educational system for so long seem to have accelerated from the slow and comfortable evolution which gave rise to, for example, the various social sciences and, indeed, our own discipline of theatre studies into a dizzying whirl of new inter and cross relationships that the stunning proliferation of centres, institutes, and special programmes reflects but by no means adequately represents. The world of intellectual discourse, within which theatre studies, historical studies, and for that matter the cognate fields toward which and from which analytical ideas of theatre and performance circulate, has become in the last quarter of a century extremely complex, and seems to offer an almost infinite variety of methodologies vying for critical attention. There are a number of concerns and assumptions that run consistently through a great deal of this varied discourse, however, and one of the most important of these has obviously also contributed significantly our sense of a conceptual world in flux. This is the wide circulation in modernist thought of historical and cultural relativism, the rejection of traditional essentialist beliefs in favour of an attitude that regards most human institutions as culturally generated and thus always changing or changeable through the continuing negotiations of cultural activity.

Wole Soyinka's ‘Death and the King's Horseman’, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

In large part due to the relative lack of productions in Europe, the plays of Wole Soyinka have mostly been approached from a literary point of view rather than analyzed as theatrical events. Because the plays rely heavily on non-verbal conventions, this neglect of visual and acoustic patterns promotes an incomplete understanding of Soyinka's idea of theatre. Here, for the first time, a play by Soyinka is analyzed from the point of view of performance – specifically, the production of Death and the King's Horseman staged at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 1990. Martin Rohmer examines the transformation of playscript into mise-en-scène, focusing in particular on the use of music and dance, but looking also at the production as an intercultural event – asking not only how far a European company has to rely on African performing skills, but how far a European cast and audience is capable of a proper understanding of the play. This article is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English, held in Bayreuth in June 1992. Martin Rohmer studied Drama, German Literature, Anthropology, and Philosophy in Munich, and Theatre, Film and TV Studies at the University of Glasgow, before completing his MA in Munich in 1992. Presently he is a Research Assistant at the University of Bayreuth, where he is working on a PhD on the performing arts in Zimbabwe.

Jean Cocteau's Theatre: Idea and Enactment

Written in 1922, one year after the play first performed at the Thedtre des Champs Elysees, Jean Cocteau's Preface to Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel (The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower) offers in an informal, non-dramatic mode his manifesto of the theatre. It was to be one of his most important pronouncements on the according to Margaret Crosland.1 But it has not been adequately appreciated as such. In the Preface, Cocteau sets forth ideas have come to epitomize the avant-garde theatre, ideas which animate and pervade his own oeuvre. The piece written ostensibly to introduce the unfamiliar style of The Wedding: his publishers, he says, thought that this complicated machinery should have two or three pages of explanatory text.2 Cocteau wrote eight. Some of it is merely petulant complaint about insensitive critics and audiences, the latter designated as that little headless and heartless group whom the newspapers call 'the elite' (97). But much of it is richly revealing of what happening in the Parisian avant-garde theatre. A multi-purpose document, the Preface does less to introduce or explain the play to a resistant or unsophisticated audience than it does to convey, primarily in terms of The Wedding, Cocteau's idea of theatre. These principles also work surprisingly well in the best of Cocteau's later playsChevaliers de la table ronde (Knights of the Round Table).

The oldest dead white European males and other reflections on the classics

Should ancient Greeks - the oldest dead white European males - and their legacy have any relevance to way we live now? So much of what ancients were and did may now appear positively racist and sexist in this era of multiculturalism. Yet for all their flaws, Greeks gave us Homer Sappho, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles and Thucydides, to name a few. They invented much of what we now take for granted: idea of humanities, philosophy, theatre, competitive athletics, political theory, rhetoric and oratory, biology, zoology and atomic theory. In this book, Bernard Knox raises questions that are of fundamental importance for our age.

‘A very nice Theatre at Edinr.’: Sir Walter Scott and Control of the Theatre Royal

In short, the drama is in ours, and in most civilized countries, an engine possessing the most powerful effect on the manners of society.Thus the idea of theatre is political … it must make possible the enactment of an actual political world in the midst of painful and complex transformations within and between politics.

New Tragedy and Comedy in France, 1945-70 by Peter Norrish

Reviews91 come an important sourcebook for research into early seventeenthcentury political drama. RICHARD FINKELSTEIN SUNY, Geneseo Peter Norrish. New Tragedy and Comedy in France, 1945-70. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988. Pp. ? + 156. $28.50. This is a welcome and useful introduction to an important area of twentieth-century French literature. A specialist in the field might find it too unambitious, but the uninitiated reader who comes to a college library looking for a short, clear, well-written, balanced treatment of the major dramatists writing in French from 1945 to 1970 will fall upon it with gratitude. It must be conceded that the dates 1945-70 in the title are quite arbitrary and approximate, and no attempt is made to be encyclopaedic in scope within them. The author flatly states at the outset that his "aim is rather to consider, in as selective and economical a way as seems reasonable, the attempts to modernise tragedy in the 'Theatre of Ideas,' and then the extraordinary transformations in both tragedy and comedy in the 'New Theatre,' which emerged immediately after it." Only the most important dramatists and only their key plays are discussed. After a general introduction that presents unrigorous, carefully-worded, and deliberately uncontroversial formulations of tragedy and comedy, there are two chapters on the "Theatre of Ideas," primarily involving Sartre and Camus, and then six chapters each presenting a single playwright of the "New Theatre," viz., Montherlant, Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov, Genet, and Arrabal. The text is extensively footnoted, and it seems puzzling at first that a writer who has read so conscientiously integrates so little of his research into his exposition. A great many brilliant, controversial, and seminal critical works are casually relegated to the notes at the end of the chapters with a dismissive sentence. Eventually I came to respect this simplification : the author feels it necessary to indicate that he is not unfamiliar with Existentialist philosophy and genre studies and Marxist analysis and semiotics and so forth, but rather that he is setting all that aside in the interest of clarity. It is refreshing to encounter a literary critic and university professor who strives to avoid the reductionist jargon that infests so many journal articles today. Perhaps it is a mercy that those literary critics who spend their lives feverishly pouring old wine into new bottles have somewhat neglected the theater of this period; so many other authors and works have been over-paradigmed and over-typologized to the point that the old wine is no longer in bottles at all but dispersed in eye-droppers, and leaking fast. To pursue this metaphor to the point of absurdity, Norrish may be said to pour out the old wine of Sartre and Camus and Ionesco and Beckett into an honest glass and offer it to us ingenuously, saying, perhaps, like a great writer of another century: 'Mon verre n'est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre." It takes a certain courage for an academic to risk publishing a book whose keynote is common sense. There is a temptation to try to impress 92Comparative Drama the reader with the latest meretricious cant. The best writers, like the best teachers, present texts with a willed simplicity. I daresay Norrish's unpretentious book will be readable into the future. Although he does mention a director or a production from time to time in passing, the author does not really discuss the plays in the theater. This might prove a disappointment for the student of theater, who is accustomed to assess the "stageworthiness" of plays he reads about, and previous productions of them, and to speculate about whether they could be done today, and in translation. This is by no means a judgment against the author, who cannot have had the intention to present these plays in such a light. Certainly the translations of dialogue that he occasionally inserts are very sensitively done and are decidedly a cut above many published English translations of the plays he discusses. Indeed, one of the greatest difficulties the author of such a book faces is that the reader who must explore these postwar French dramatists in mediocre translations does not see...

Popular Theatre

Only recently has the phrase “popular theatre” won acceptance in Canada to describe theatre for social action and community development. Ever since Kam Theatre’s Bread & Circuses Festival in Thunder Bay in 1981, where representatives of a dozen companies founded the Canadian Popular Theatre Alliance, the idea of theatre as a tool of development has made increasing inroads among educators, development agencies, and of course, in the theatre profession itself. Three successive CPTA festivals (Bread & Roses, Edmonton 1983, Bread & Dreams, Winnipeg 1985, and Standin’ the Gaff, Sydney 1987) have done much to legitimize the work of Canadian popular theatres.

The Architecture of Revision: Fowles and the Agora

The Architecture of Revision:Fowles and the Agora James R. Lindroth (bio) In the Foreword to the new edition of The Magus, John Fowles indicates that he considers the revised ending a major change (7).1 Yet from the standpoint of dramatic structure, the two endings appear the same: the lovers, Urfe and Alison, are reunited in London's Regent's Park, the scene reaches its dramatic climax with Urfe's violent slap of Alison's face, and it ends ambiguously with Alison's bowed head and her silence. Moreover, immediately noticeable changes, such as the addition of an allusion to L'Astrée and the interpolation of the word "hazard" in the penultimate sentence, appear minor. Upon closer inspection, however, it can be seen that Fowles reinforces these seemingly superficial changes with others that greatly increase the aesthetic distance between himself as author and his two major characters, Conchis and Urfe. The original ending blurs this distinction by having Urfe assume Conchis' role as director of the godgame; it suggests that there is little or no difference between the theatrical ideas of Conchis and those of Fowles. The revised ending makes it clear that, although he has validated the therapeutic benefits of Conchis' psychodrama, Fowles takes the dramatic experiment a step further. Conchis dispenses with an audience, and to some degree allows his performers to depart from his prepared scripts, but retains the traditional director's godlike control over the total scene. In the [End Page 57] revised ending, Fowles emphasizes his rejection of the godgame as theatrical model by clearly dissociating Conchis from Urfe; then he substitutes a more radical theatrical model of his own. Greatly expanding the physical dimensions of the performance site from that of the conventional stage, or those of any on Bourani, Fowles sets the scene in the agora of Regent's Park, dispenses with a script, eliminates the director, and gives his actors complete freedom to improvise. In the revision Fowles further distinguishes his theater from that of Conchis through a reemphasis of the performance site as the nontheological space postulated by Artaud2; Conchis, on the other hand, as controlling presence at the center of the godgame, consistently evokes what Artaud identifies as the theological space of the traditional theater. Although this agora is an unconventional performance site in accord with Fowles's notions of a radical theater, it is not unprepared for from the standpoint of structure; rather it is part of a core architectural trope. In both versions Fowles employs the theatrical architecture of Bourani as spatial model for the final scene. Bourani, with its open performance site on which the ravishment masque is enacted and its terrace functioning as the dress circle from which Urfe watches, is symbolic theater; and it is around this architectural trope that Fowles structures both versions of The Magus. In the original, Fowles complements this architectural model with painterly ones drawn from Bonnard and Goya. In the revision he strengthens the architectural trope by substituting the theatrical model for Bonnard in the scene presenting the sexual consummation of Urfe's affair with Julie. Finally, the revision greatly amplifies the satyr figure who first appears in the agora of Bourani and whose role Urfe assumes in Conchis' series of psychodramas. The aim of this psychodrama, the self-awareness of psychological maturity, is originally achieved during the trial scene when Urfe suddenly realizes that if he lets the whip fall he will be acting the role of the sadistic Wimmel (446). However, in the original ending, Fowles largely negates the effect of this psychological transformation by allowing Urfe to revert to the satyr's role; the revised ending affirms rather than denies the psychodrama's beneficial effects by completely erasing this figure. In the original, Urfe and Alison confront one another in the agora of Regent's Park after an enforced separation during which Urfe has attempted to make himself worthy of her love. Urfe believes Conchis is once again behind the scenes pulling the strings that manipulate them as actors in his metatheater. Specifically, Urfe locates the Magus behind the windows of the not-too-distant Cumberland Terrace, an architectural [End Page 58] repetition of...