Title Role Research Articles

Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics Spencer Golub Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modernism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics. By Irene R. Makaryk. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004; pp. xx + 257. $58.00 cloth. Western scholars who study Russian theatre have wondered for some time whether or not to include the Ukranian Les (diminutive of Oleksander) Kurbas in the pantheon of great postrevolutionary theatricalist directors, who developed their aesthetic in opposition to Stanislavski. Specifically, should Kurbas—who did not even see a Stanislavski production until after 1923—be considered equal in stature to Meyerhold, who admired and may have been influenced by his work, or to Vakhtangov, who came closer to sharing his approach? Both Kurbas and Vakhtangov called for character objectification and a magical re-creation of a moving situational mimesis. Kurbas, who was always something of the eagerly humanistic pedagogue and whose staging sought to clothe philosophy in the player's motley (a theatrical form he dubbed "psychological harlequinade") (63), periodically appeared before the stage curtain dressed as Harlequin to explain to the audience what his theatre and the evening's specific production were attempting to achieve. The difficulty in answering the question of Kurbas's artistic stature stemmed from both a dea(r)th of sources and the fact that few Western theatre scholars read Ukrainian. As to the first problem, Kurbas was arrested, executed on Stalin's order in 1937, and thrown into an unmarked, multinational mass grave, subsumed even in death by the uniformity and anonymity that Soviet power used to overwrite national and cultural difference. Even Kurbas's death date was falsified, advanced to 1942 to suggest at least the possibility that he was a casualty of war rather than of Stalin. Although the reputations of other Russian and non-Russian artists from the Soviet republics were rehabilitated following Stalin's death and the onset of the Thaw in 1956, Kurbas had to wait until the advent of glasnost in the late 1980s to have his legacy exhumed, and until 1991 to have his basic biographical details published. Now, Irene R. Makaryk, a scholar who reads Ukranian, has brought home those goods that did not perish with their makers. Makaryk studied all but Kurbas's own documents and materials that were confiscated and apparently destroyed in the 1930s. Her book is a very good introduction to Kurbas and his work, and—as the book's title and [End Page 546] subtitle suggest—also an attempt to contextualize her subject's career in both a time and a place that viewed art as being synonymous with politics, and life as an even more-than-usual limit situation. The wider drama Makaryk describes is a quest for national and transnational identity, which logically entails national liberation, even if a number of Kurbas's Ukrainian contemporaries rejected this equation in the name of maintaining a parochial and stunted popular and ethnographic national theatre. The book is most interesting when it burns with the ardor of Kurbas's radically avant-garde thinking, which manifested itself primarily in his Berezil Artistic Association productions of what Charles Marowitz in another context referred to as "quantum leap Shakespeare" (144). This artistic boldness was most prominently displayed in Kurbas's 1924 pre-Brechtian "cubist expressionist" (82) Macbeth (starring Kurbas, an accomplished actor, in the title role), a play which was popular with directors prior to the Revolution for its regicidal theme, and after 1917, for its dark portrait of the tyranny of power under charismatic authority. Makaryk offers a careful description and analysis of Kurbas's rhythmically scored Macbeth, in which dancing witches, the Porter playing a (between-acts) Fool, light projectors, and modernist typography on giant green screens played central roles. The author likens this Macbeth to Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream for the manner in which it indelibly revealed to the public the director's stylistic signature. Kurbas's production demonstrated his central associative staging technique of transformative gesture (peretvorennia), which Makaryk characterizes as a "theatrical objective correlative, a concrete image presented to the audience to signal another reality" (56). Thus, the shaking...

Leopold von Andrian (1875–1951). Korrespondenzen, Notizen, Essays, Berichte. (Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Neuere Geschichte Österreichs 97) by Ursula Prutsch, Klaus Zeyringer

262 Reviews homopostmodernicus,which necessarily reduces the historic specificity of the time and place depicted in the cycle. Anatol's character traits, such as inconstancy, resdessness and moral ambiguity, become, for Neun, further evidence of the affinities between the twomost recent turns of the century. Neun sees inAnatol, then, an ancestor of what he describes as the contemporary global citizen: 'dass die zu Schnitzlers Zeit exklusive soziale Position Anatols heute zu einer universellen geworden istund deshalb als exemplarisch f?r die postmoderne Situation aufgefasst werden kann' (p. 27). Neun concludes that other important motifs of the Anatol cycle, including ambivalence, decentralization of identity, the rejection of historicity and the cross-fertilization of genres, anticipate to a great degree such similar underpinnings of poststructuralist thought. One of the curiosities of Neun's text is that, given his almost exhaustive analysis of each scene, he mentions only in a passing footnote the recent production of Anatol at the Burgtheater under the direction of Luc Bondy, which premi?red in late Spring 2002 (and thus would have been available to the author). This is curious because Bondy's production ? with itsde-emphasis of the local Viennese colour and casting of the veryGermanic and cool Michael Maertens in the title role? would seem to buttress Neun's thesis about the universality and postmodernity of the character at every turn.Much of the initial critical discussion of Bondy's production praised its successful uncoupling of the text from the 'Schnitzlerismus', to borrow Franz Schuh 's term, that had often undermined the critical potential of earlier productions, so it seems curious for Neun tomiss this opportunity to illustrate his argument in an otherwise comprehensively documented study. I would also take issue with the volume's production values: the typographical and formatting errors are numerous, and the outline form (9, 9.1, 9.11, etc.) unnecessarily interrupts the flow of the narrative, as do the 1471 footnotes. Such distractions are a recipe for readerly frustration with what isotherwise a valuable contribution to the field. Utah State University Felix W. Tweraser Leopold von Andnan (1875-1951). Korrespondenzen, Notizen, Essays, Berichte. Ed. byUrsula Prutsch and Klaus Zeyringer. (Ver?ffentlichungen der Kom mission f?rNeuere Geschichte ?sterreichs 97). Vienna: B?hlau. 2003. 910 pp. 99,00. isbn 3-205-77110-9. Based on extensive and meticulous archival research, primarily in theDeutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach a. ., where Leopold von Andrian's Nachlass, consisting of more than 7000 documents, is housed, this impressive volume offers the most comprehensive documentation to date of Andrian's career as a writer and diplomat, and lays the foundations for further historical research and for the yet to be written biography of one of the key players in the Young Vienna movement, a prominent figure in the foreign service during the last eighteen years of the Habsburg Empire, and a proponent of the legitimist cause after the FirstWorld War. Although some of the documents included in this volume from Andrian's diaries, notebooks and correspondence have been previously AUSTRIAN STUDIES, I3, 2OO5 263 published by Ursula Renner (Leopold Andrians 'Garten der Erkenntnis', 1981), Ferruccio Delle Cave (Correspondenzen. Briefe an Leopold von Andrian, 1989), Walter H. Perl (Hugo von Hofmannsthal Leopold von Andrian, Briefwechsel, 1968) and in some ofmy own articles on Andrian (including Austrian Studies, 7: Gender and Politics inAustrian Fiction [1996], 61-78), Prutsch and Zeyringer are the first to attempt to document Andrian's entire life from his beginnings as a writer in 1888 until his death in 1955. In the process they uncovered a wealth of texts thatwere hitherto unknown, above all the letters, telegrams and reports thatAndrian wrote during his diplomatic career, as well as texts, among them unpublished manuscripts, that illuminate his many-faceted literary and political endeavours after the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy, during his years in exile in South America and after his return to Europe in 1945. What emerges, as the editors rightfully claim, isa 'mosaic' or 'm?lange' of heterogeneous texts that provides a comprehensive picture of Andrian's activities as a writer and political agent, and of historical and political developments in the first half of the twentieth century (p. 14). The volume offers the literary and...

Charles Parsloe's Chinese Fetish: An Example of Yellowface Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Melodrama

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the absence of Asian bodies on US stages resulted in actors developing what Josephine Lee calls "a complex set of codes for the presentation of the Oriental Other" that borrowed from the lexicon of Asian stereotypes.1 I group such codes—conventional associations of signs and meanings that purportedly convey "Asian-ness"—under the term yellowface performance. Actors in yellowface, such as Luise Rainer in the film The Good Earth, David Carradine in the television series Kung Fu, and Jonathan Pryce in the musical Miss Saigon have sparked debates about the production of Asian representations in dominant media.2 But the relative obscurity of nineteenth-century yellowface performers impedes contextualization of these disputes. This article excavates some of this history by sifting through extant records concerning the white actor Charles Parsloe during the 1870s.3 Because of the popularity of his "Chinamen" (a term I self-consciously invoke as a counterpoint to the lived experience of Chinese men), Parsloe provides the most comprehensive case study available with which to examine early yellowface practice. As a popular performer, his embodiment of the Chinaman both depends on and [End Page 627] informs hegemonic constructions of "Chineseness." Therefore, I theorize his performance practice as a kind of ventriloquism in which Parsloe animates the Chinaman as a fetish that substitutes for and conceals the dominant anxieties about Chinese immigrants among the white majority in the late 1800s. Charles Parsloe developed the Chinaman role through four melodramas: Bret Harte's Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876), Harte and Mark Twain's Ah Sin (1877), Joaquin Miller's The Danites in the Sierras (1877; hereafter The Danites) and Bartley Theodore Campbell's My Partner (1879). According to scripts and performance reviews, these theatrical productions depicted their Chinese characters through a performer's costume and mannerisms, with queue jokes and stage "dialect" frequently notated in dramatic texts. In the case of Parsloe, these signifiers apparently conveyed Chineseness to his audiences. James Moy cites several reviews of Mr. Parsloe's Ah Sin, the most flattering of which reads that the actor's portrayal could be "scarcely excelled in truthfulness to nature and freedom from caricature."4 In spite of the fact that Two Men of Sandy Bar and Ah Sin flopped commercially and critically, Mr. Parsloe used these productions to elevate his reputation from that of a competent character actor to the foremost player of Chinaman roles. After performing Hop Sing in Harte's drama and the title role in Ah Sin, Parsloe played Washee Washee in The Danites. According to his obituary, Parsloe next "toured in 'My Partner.' For 1,300 nights he played the role of Wing Wee [sic], the Chinaman, and his share of the profits amounted to over $100,000."5 To trace Parsloe's evolving embodiment of the theatrical Chinaman, I focus on the actor's yellowface performance in Ah Sin,The Danites, and My Partner as part of a "melodramatic formation" that reveals nineteenth-century attitudes about the Chinese in the US as well as the struggles over changing racial, class, and gender dynamics that characterized the slowly reintegrating union in the 1870s.6 In order to realize my investigation of Parsloe's Chinese fetish, I seek to revise history by reading through its margins, providing partial narratives based on limited historical records of what audiences actually saw when Charles Parsloe performed. [End Page 628] Locating Parsloe's Chinamen The relations between the United States and China during the late 1800s form the backdrop for the dramatic worlds that Parsloe entered as Hop Sing, Ah Sin, or Washee Washee. Although none of the plays in which these characters appearedexplicitly addresses international politics, media concerning US-China diplomacy likely informed the reception of Parsloe's Chinese characters, given the limited dispersal of that population on the East coast at this time.7 Although theatregoers probably had...

Introduction: Whither Shakespop? Taking Stock of Shakespeare in Popular Culture

I saw my first Hamlet when I was about eight. It was a musical adaptation, set to Bizet's Carmen. To emphasize the indecisive nature of Hamlet, Gilligan was cast in the title role. Mr. and Mrs. Howell played Claudius and Gertrude, Ginger was totally miscast as Ophelia, and the Skipper's Polonius gave fatherly advice to Mary Ann's Laertes. Even now, whenever I hear Bizet's Toreador Song, I sing: Neither a borrower, nor a lender be. Do not forget-stay out of debt.The successful comic integration of this lowbrow American sitcom with Hamlet is indicative of the familiar relationship American culture has with the shreds and patches of this complex tragedy, its strong identification with a collection of cultural signfiers, often independent of any real understanding of the play as a unified text. As Michael Bristol writes: Shakespeare's name, together with his image, has extraordinary currency at a time when the practice of reading and careful study of his works appears to be in decline (1996, 4).Annalisa Castaldo (co-guest editor of this issue) and I began our work interrogating position in American popular culture nine years ago, when we put together a panel for the West Virginia Shakepeare Conference. Annalisa and I came to our studies from complementary positions: Annalisa is a Renaissance scholar, specializing in film; I study American culture, drawing on my previous experience as a theater administrator. Both of us had problems squaring with our own experiences Lawrence Levine's characterization of position in twentieth-century America as solely highbrow, a position that he documented first in his 1984 essay William and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation and then more fully in his 1990 book Highbrow /Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierachy in America. Despite his thorough research, the picture seemed somehow incomplete. Annalisa was well aware that Capt. James T. Kirk (and the writers of Star Trek) shared her affinity for Shakespeare, and that the Bard's presence was accepted by the series' fans. Rebecca Steinberger (a valuable reader for this collection) also joined us on this panel, discussing further examples of Shakespearean sci-fi; in the discussion that followed, the scholars and teachers debated the value of appropriations: did it move beyond the famous quotes? did the appropriating authors know beyond their forced high school experience? had replaced the Bible as the common moral source? were these new texts re-energized or the equivalent of bad quartos or the Restoration's bowdlerized versions? and of particular importance, can popularized aid in the teaching of or does it merely create new challenges? Over the past eight years, the Shakespeare in Popular area has attracted 3-4 panels each year at both the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association Conference and the Popular Culture/American Culture Conference where scholars have continued to examine Shakespeare-infused texts, and asking these and further questions about the significance of the growing presence of in popular culture, particularly in North America. Frequent and key presenters at these conferences have included Michael Marier, the other tireless reader for this collection, and the duo Kim Fedderson and J. Michael Richardson, who consistently and interestingly represented the Canadian perspective. The essays that comprise this special issue of College Literature both represent and extend these conversations with which I have been privileged to participate.This introductory essay will trace the roots of integration into current popular culture and the American imagination, and the challenge to define the Bard's position as we move into the twenty-first century.The Return of the GroundlingsLawrence Levine documents how during the first part of the twentieth century American popular culture excluded the Bard, relegating him to distinct theatrical productions in select, major cities, attended by well-behaved, passive, highbrow audiences. …

The Legacy of a One-woman Show: A Performance History of Julie Candeille's Catherine, ou la belle fermiere

Recent research has demonstrated that a central feature of many women's operatic creations from late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century France was a marked autobiographical element. Although this autobiographical style resulted in numerous box-office successes, it also limited the lifespan of these successes because it linked the works too closely with their authors. This article will discuss a work that appears to be an exception to this rule: Julie Candeille's Catherine, ou la belle fermi�re, a musical comedy that became the longest-running operatic work by a woman in history, playing virtually uninterruptedly between 1792 and 1839. In fact, the work and the title role remained intimately connected to the person of Candeille, who could never rid herself of the curiosity engendered by the public image she had earlier created for herself. (JL and RA)

The Irony of Passionate Chaos: Modernity and Performing Medea

Clara Armand, author of the preceding article on ‘Dialogism and the Theatre Event’ in relation to Deborah Warner's production of Euripides' Medea, talks with Fiona Shaw about her close working relationship with the director in earlier productions, and the process of creating and developing the title role in the play. The interview took place in the Queen's Theatre on 21 February 2001, during the West End run of the production.

Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends by Jody Enders (review)

MLRy 99.1, 2004 187 religious struggles of the day (Sabine Lardon). The final section consists mostly of essays on pamphlets written in the turbulent years of the late sixteenth or early se? venteenth centuries, and covers debates not only on religious issues, but also on the question of the powers and status of the monarchy. Overall this volume contains a wealth of scholarship, which the dedicatee can feel proud to have inspired. University of Birmingham Leslie C. Brook Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends. By Jody Enders. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2002. xxx + 432 pp. ? 24.50; $35. ISBN 0-226-20787-0 In 1549 in the town of Tournai a remarkable event occurred. During the performance ofa play dramatizing the story of Judith and Holofernes, just before the climax, when Judith decapitates the drunken Holofernes, the two principal actors were replaced by two criminals, who had been instructed to carry out the execution of Holofernes for real. The one was promised execution rather than an even more painful death; the other was promised freedom. But could this really have happened? Is it not merely a tall story? This is just one of several such incidents recorded (mostly) in the annals of late medieval French theatre history,which are the subject of Jody Enders's latest book. For Enders, whether such events really took place or not is of secondary importance. They are medieval versions of what are now often called urban legends, i.e. they may well be fictional, but they probably contain an element of truth and a moral lesson of value. After an introduction which discusses the nature of the urban legend, with emphasis on modern examples, Enders devotes a chapter to each of fourteen cases, or groups of similar cases, where drama and reality become confused. The fourteen chapters take up 200 pages, followed by 100 pages of documents, notes, bibliography, and index. The Judith and Holofernes example is probably the most bloody, but the others are all intriguing and sometimes amusing: a wealthy merchant marries the actress playing the role of Saint Catherine; a widow wishes to take under her wing the beautiful young man who played the title role in the mystery play of Saint Barbara?but the actor prefers the protection of a priest; two priests almost die on the cross playing the roles of Jesus and Judas; a stagehand is killed by a canon; an actor screams with genuine fear at the sight of the tortures his character is due to undergo; ete. Most of these anecdotes are well known to historians ofmedieval drama. But Enders considers that they are worthy of much closer attention than they have been accorded in the past. In each case, she analyses the documents which record the stories, playing inventively with the inconsistencies between the sources, and studies the historical, social, and dramatic background to each event. She does examine the potential truthfulness of the stories, but this is not of the essence. What interests Enders is how it came about that such stories were remembered and recorded, and what light they cast on the people and the society that produced them. This book does not tell us anything new about medieval drama, but that is not its intention. What it does is provide material of interest to a whole range of other disciplines?social anthropology, psychology, religiosity,folklore, medieval and modern mentalities, ete.?from which diverse fields Enders frequently quotes modern theoreticians. These provide an academic framework for her own fascinating discus? sions of this somewhat unusual material, inspired, it would appear, by a disturbing personal experience. Many sections of this essay are deliberately fanciful and some? what self-indulgent. But there is no doubt that Enders has written an attractive and 188 Reviews unusual book which tells us a lot about the importance of storytelling, whether true or false, forthe understanding ofthe human psyche, whatever the period. Edinburgh Graham Runnalls Pre-histoires II: langues etrangereset troubleseconomiques au xvf siecle. By Terence Cave. (Cahiers d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 61: Les seuils de la modernite, 5) Geneva: Droz. 2001. 212 pp. ?36.76; SwF 54.30. ISBN 2-600-00627...

Research paper titles in literature, linguistics and science: dimensions of attraction

Although it is a very small part of the research paper, the title plays an important role as the first point of contact between writer and potential reader and may decide whether or not the paper is read. Research paper titles in the widely differing fields of science, literature and linguistics are studied in detail with a view to showing what researchers from each discipline implicitly feel are important features in the succinct knowledge transmission required in title design. Three basic types of titles in the three disciplines are analyzed: full sentence, compound and a remaining group made up largely of noun phrases with or without postmodification. Very clear-cut differences in frequency and form were found across the three disciplines reflecting fundamental differences in pragmatic intention inherent in the disciplines concerned. Analysis focusses on the role of titles in informing the reader as to what the paper is about and also in attracting him/her to read the paper. Discussion of how these functions are met rests on techniques involved in both information packaging and advertising.

To You, The Birdie! (Phedre) (review)

Jean Racine's Phèdre et Hippolyte was first performed in 1677, with Racine's mistress, La Champmelée, in the title role. It was a terrible flop. Pradon, a mediocre writer loyal to Racine's neo-classical nemesis, Corneille, had simultaneously produced his own version of the play and momentarily triumphed. Racine left Paris and the stage for twelve years. During this time, he became the king's historiographer, married, and devoted himself to religious practice. But when the Comedie Française was first founded in 1680, Phèdre was the first play to be produced.

Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 (review)

216Comparative Drama will continue that pattern. Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova are guardedly optimistic—an optimism that rests largely on the capacious shoulders of Shakespeare. Felicia Hardison Londre University ofMissouri-Kansas City Roger A. Hall. Performing theAmerican Frontier, 1870-1906. Cambridge Studies in American Theater and Drama 13. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 297. $55.00. In the spring and summer of 1876, an avid playgoer in Chicago may very well have found him- or herselfat Hooley's Theatre for the premiere ofBret Harte's California mining camp melodrama Two Men ofSandy Bar, which would open in New York a few months later. Audiences in Rochester, New York, no doubt looked forward to the return of Frank Mayo, who came to the Corinthian to perform, for the thousandth but hardly the last time, the title role in Davy Crockett, with which he had succeeded fantastically on Broadway. During this same theatrical season, NewYorkers might have enjoyed Frank Frayne in a play called Si Slocum, which featured the trick-shooting prowess ofthe actor turned cowboyturned actor, and theymight also have attended a performance ofDashing Charlie starring Texas Jack Omohundro, a frontier scout who along with Buffalo Bill Cody had begun a few years earlier to perform for Broadway audiences a series of highly stylized, action-oriented renditions of life in the postCivil War West, ostensibly as he and Cody had experienced it. Or, a NewYorker might have gone during the winter to see Codyhimselfin Life on theBorder, one ofhis typical earlyblood-and-thunder melodramas. (In the 1870s, prior to embarking full-time as a traveling showman, Cody performed on the New York stage during the winters and scouted on the Plains for the military during the summers.) By 4 July, reports telling ofthe destruction ofCuster's Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn had begun to appear, and six weeks later, on 14 August, a loose dramatization of these events called Sitting Bull; or, Custer's Last Charge opened at New York's Wood's Theater. A few weeks after this, Custer and His Avengers opened at the Bowery. Finally, in what is frequently recognized as one of the most significant instances of a person's crafting a persona and an autobiographical record via the staging of history, Cody's The Red Right Hand; or, Buffalo Bill's FirstScalpfor Custer appeared on Broadway in 1877 to recount the already famous tale ofCody's hand-to-hand battle with a Cheyenne named Yellow Hand a few weeks after Custer's defeat. Reviews217 With respect to the representation oftheWildWest onstage, however, these examples from the United States's centennial year represent but a fraction of what was a tremendous cultural phenomenon. Even a cursory glance at Roger A. Hall's Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906will convey the vital role of the frontier West in post-Civil War attempts at cultural and national selfdefinition . This strikingly thorough book documents and describes roughly 150 theatrical productions from the last three decades of the nineteenth century (up until the arrival of cinema) that in some manner relied on the frontier as setting or backdrop. This does not mean, however, that anything resembling a genuinely accurate rendition ofwhat was happening on the frontier could be found in New York City's popular theater. At the outset of his book Hall acknowledges that"[t]he drama of the frontier as it was presented to eastern audiences in the late nineteenth centurywas certainly fictional, even when it sprang from actual events. It both perpetuated myths and provided realistic images. Theatrical presentations reinforced popularbut misleading images ofwhite settlers as victims ofnative populations, responding with violence only when provoked by savage atrocities" (3). The full measure of Hall's extensive research thus emerges in his wonderful explication ofthe many and often contradictory ways in which a popular dramatic art form imagined and translated, usually into melodrama, the facts ofcross-cultural encounters, imperial expansion, and racial conflict. To be sure, not every play mentioned in Performing theAmerican Frontier was necessarily engaged in furthering an ideology of conquest. However , the extraordinary popularity of many of the productions that Hall mentions does raise the question oftheater's ability to affect...

Кормя двуглавого орла… Русская литература и государственная идеология в последней трети XVIII – пер-вой трети XIX века по Андрей Зорин (review)

Кормя двуглавого орла… Русская литература и государственная идеология в последней трети XVIII – пер-вой трети XIX века по Андрей Зорин (review)

Enshrining Mozart:Don Giovanniand the Viardot Circle

Pauline Viardot-Garcia—known as Meyerbeer's first Fidès in Le Prophète, and in the title role of Gluck's Orphée in the version assembled by Berlioz—was known for her performances of roles in Don Giovanni from the mid 1840s until she retired from the stage in 1863. At least as significant as her dramatic involvement in the opera was her purchase of the autograph of Don Giovanni in London in 1855. From the mid-1850s, the autograph of Don Giovanni held a particular place within the Viardot circle. It was associated with a number of ritualistic discourses comparable with very few such documents before or since. Pauline Viardot preserved the document in an artefact that was as close in construction to a reliquary that its nature would allow, and treated it as a shrine. Its position was described with great pride by Viardot in her correspondence, and visitors to her homes in Paris and Baden-Baden behaved exactly as if they were in the presence of a relic: Rossini genuflected and Tchaikovsky claimed to have been in the presence of divinity. The autograph, coupled to its surrounding ritualistic discourses, was elevated to the status of a national monument when it was displayed at the Exposition Universelle of 1878, and at the anniversary exhibition of Don Giovanni's premiere in 1887. When it was donated to the library of the Conservatoire in 1892 (announced as early as 1889) its sacred and national characteristics were elided. By this time, the autograph of Don Giovanni had contributed substantially to the ongoing nineteenth-century project of enshrining Mozart.

Ion (review)

For the past thirty years, the Classical Greek Theatre Festival has been working its way through the entire cannon of extant Greek plays, performing at a number of venues throughout the Salt Lake City area and on tour to colleges throughout the Western states. For their thirtieth anniversary production, they returned to Euripides' Ion, in a new adaptation by David Lan. This production, directed by David Dynak, was a self-consciously postmodern attempt to make Greek theatre both accessible and engaging through a pastiche of contemporary music and dance, a set and costumes evoking pop culture, and an ironic and emotionally distanced acting style. While the provocative set and solid performance of B. Joe Rogan in the title role worked well to achieve the goal, the complexity of this thought-provoking play was undermined by a dancing, singing chorus, inappropriately mismatched costumes, and heightened acting that spilled over into farce.

Neil Gaiman's “A Midsummer Night's Dream”: Shakespeare Integrated into Popular Culture

How this particular man produced the works that dominate the cultures of much of the world almost four hundred years after his death is one of life's mysteries-and one that will continue to tease our imaginations as we continue to delight his plays and poems. (Mowat and Werstine 1993: xxxv) Bill Moyers: But, has no audience, today, to speak of. He really doesn't. Peter Sellars: Well, our has been taught that is not theirs. Our has been taught that belongs to the British and to the Royal Company[...]. What is maddening is most people have been separated from their culture. They've been told there's a special privileged class of artists-they have a special insight. A normal person doesn't have this insight and is not on the inside track of this work. That is a monstrous lie and it is hideous, because it is taught to us early on as we grow up this system. (Moyers 1990) The twentieth century saw about three hundred and eighty-five film and television adaptations of Shakespeare's plays-two hundred and thirty-four for film and one hundred and fifty-one for television (IMDB). Thirty-six of these films were made the 1990s, the largest amount any decade, except for the 1910s, when fifty-two of Shakespeare's plays were adapted to film. The most popular Shakespearean films of the 1990s most notably correspond with Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989), which led a Branagh-Shakespearian renaissance through such films as Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Othello (1995), and Hamlet (1996), all of which (except Othello) he directed. This popular British resurgence of on film also included Ian McKellen's adaptation and lead role Richard 111 (1995) and Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night (1996). Also, other popularizations of Shakespeare's plays adapted to film the 1990s revolved around the popularity of movie stars, beginning most strikingly with action movie star Mel Gibson's appearance the title role of Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990), as well as Leonardo DiCaprio and Clair Danes Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (1996), Al Pacino's documentary-postmodern rendition of Richard III Looking for Richard (1996), and Calista Flockhart's, Kevin Kline's, and Michelle Pfeiffer's appearances A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999). The 1990s Shakespearean film renaissance seemed to peak with Love (1998), which earned an Academy Award for best picture 1999, indicating not only the high brow sensibility of the Academy, but also the film's popularity the larger public, a popularity not seen since the first half of the nineteenth century. Interviewer Bill Moyers, talking to theater director Peter Sellars, mused about how he was fascinated to learn that in the nineteenth century, great American actors would roam the countryside the small towns. In Marshall, Texas, they would get off the railroad and they would perform for mill workers, for saloons, mining camps, and they were speaking to an untutored, but appreciative audience (1990). In fact, researching popular novels, playbills, and newspapers of the nineteenth century, historian Lawrence Levine discovered that Shakespeare's works were so integrated into American culture during the time period Moyers speaks of that he drew the following conclusion: Shakespeare was popular entertainment nineteenth century America (Levine 21) -a view lost to most of the twentieth century, as Sellars bemoaned the interview opening this essay. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the plays of Shakespeare, Levine observes, were presented as of the same milieu inhabited by magicians, dancers, singers, acrobats, minstrels, and comics. [His works] appeared on the same playbills and was advertised the same spirit (23). Spectators didn't see as someone to revere, but as part of the culture they enjoyed, a rendered familiar and intimate by virtue of his context (23). …

Brooks/Jackson’s level Cleopatra: production and reception

The influence which current views on dramatic theory and technique have exercised upon theatrical productions has long been the object of scholarly inquiry. Peter Brook’s The Empty Space (1968; rpt. 1990), for instance, can be a helpful tool in the study of Brook’s own 1978 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Antony and Cleopatra, with Glenda Jackson and Alan Howard in the title roles. The production followed by eight years the now legendary “circus” Midsummer Night’s Dream which Brook had staged for the RSC in 1970, and reviewers were virtually unanimous in praising the production’s innovative, swiftly-paced set.

Identity, Gender and Performance: the Identity of the Female Performer in Adamov's Professor Taranne

This analysis arose out of a production of Adamov's Professor Taranne performed by undergraduate students at the University of Glamorgan in January 2000. An innovative feature of this work was the incorporation of a female performer in the title role. This resulted in an emergent critique of the Absurdist perspective informing Adamov's original play as well as philosophical notions of Absurdity at a more general level. Whereas the Absurd negates gender distinctions on the basis of universalistic assumptions, the use of cross-gender casting in this production suggested that the asserted dissolution of self and identity cannot be disassociated from issues of gender.

Shakespeare on the German stage: the twentieth century

Hortmann, Wilhelm. Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century (with a section on Shakespeare in the GDR by Maik Hamburger). Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1998. 497 pp. $69.95. This book is designed to take up where Simon William's volume, Shakespeare on the German Stage, 1586-1914 (1989), leaves off. The period up to the outbreak of World War I is, however, basically covered in both William's and Hortmann's volumes. Not surprisingly, given the enormous number of performances of Shakespeare in German-speaking countries in the 20th century (Hortmann estimates there to have been circa 9000 of these), Hortmann chooses to sample key developments rather than attempting to cover every production. The choices made by Hortmann (and Maik Hamburger who covers the GDR) are generally judicious, covering not only the stages of the largest cities and best endowed theaters, but often looking in detail at signal contributions of smaller venues, places as diverse as Bochum and Greifswald. Backing up the verbal analysis of specific productions are 125 well chosen and well reproduced black and white photographs. At times the description pulses with a real sense of German history and we are taken in time to how a particular production struck viewers in a particular time and place. Very compelling is Hortmann's meticulous historical reconstruction of Gustav Grundgens in the title role of Hamlet in Berlin in 1936, (159-61). Grundgens, himself is shown as intensely vulnerable in the Third Reich not only because of his homosexuality, but because of the efforts he was making to protect Jewish members of his theater staff: Similarly skilled is Maik Hamburger's description of the interaction of play and of historical circumstances with the mounting of Hamlet in Greifswald in 1964. Hamburger (388-90) traces how Adolf Dresen remembers doing the play in an atmosphere where SED party restrictions seemed to rule out anything but a stiff presentation of a recognized classic. This Dresen was unwilling to do even if his new position of artistic director in Greifswald was on the line. Dresen used as a kind of mantra for the production both Heinrich Mann's brilliant description of the Third Reich: Die Macht war geistlos and der Geist war machtlos, and Holderlin's description of a world that he saw as tatenarm and gedankenreich. Dresen's meditations on the play itself and on German history up to his own time became compressed for him into the slogan is near Weimar. The thought is stunningly similar to Jorge Semprun's meditations (he was himself a prisoner at Buchenwald from 1943-45) in his 1964 novel Le Grand Voyage. Superbly rendered by Jurgen Holtz in the title role, Shakespeare/Hamlet became a contemporary and by so doing deeply disturbed the omnipresent SED watchdogs. Because of its huge success with audiences, this all too apt production was quickly taken ofF and the director was warned in a review that artists who wished to keep their jobs, needed to be cleverly and prudently guided. Though in the two instances given above, the authors of this volume manage simultaneously to illuminate both Shakespeare and the historical era, sometimes (and this is more frequent in Hortmann, who tackles the larger task, than in Hamburger), descriptions seem rather routine and lack sparkle. …

The Cripple of Inishmaan, and: Tarry Flynn (review)

Reviewed by: The Cripple of Inishmaan, and: Tarry Flynn Michael C. O’Neill The Cripple Of Inishmaan. By Martin McDonagh. Royal National Theatre, Lyttelton, London. 12 June 1997. Tarry Flynn. By Patrick Kavanagh. Adapted by Conall Morrison. Abbey Theatre, Dublin. 16 June 1997. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Helen (Aisling O’Sullivan) in Royal National Theatre of London’s production of Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Lyttelon Theatre. Photo: Gautier Deblonde. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Billy (Ruaidhri Conroy) in Royal National Theatre of London’s production of Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Lyttelon Theatre. Photo: Gautier Deblonde. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. James Kennedy and Pauline Flanagan in Abbey Theatre of Dublin’s production of Patrick Kavangh’s Tarry Flynn, adapted and directed by Conall Morrison. Photo: Amelia Stein. The legacy of Irish provincial life casts a long and sometimes flickering shadow across two deeply felt comedies staged in the national theatres of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland last summer. At the center of both Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan and Conall Morrison’s adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh’s novel Tarry Flynn are young, misfit heroes who, like countless others in Ireland and its fiction, try to escape the rural existence that has defined them. Cripple Billy Claven, the title character of McDonagh’s widely praised play, seeks his refuge in the movies; Tarry Flynn composes poems to wildflowers and insects as he works the thankless fields of County Cavan. Informing each of their struggles, however, is the cultural legacy from which both McDonagh and Morrison have drawn, which is embodied in startlingly different styles in these two highly literate and insightful productions. The play is set on the remote island of Inishmaan, which John Millington Synge described in 1903 in The Aran Islands as possibly the most primitive place left in Europe. The Cripple of Inishmaan contrasts Synge’s portrayal of a pure, almost prelapsarian Irish life with a petty and comic existence suddenly—and deceptively—given meaning when Hollywood film director Robert Flaherty and his crew of Americans arrive to shoot Man of Aran on location in 1934. McDonagh’s characters see in the filming only an opportunity to escape to Hollywood and the good life in America. To the islanders’ amazement, Cripple Billy, the outcast and orphan of Inishmaan, is hired by Flaherty and travels to Hollywood for a screen test bursting with [End Page 257] Irish clichés and stereotypes about the disabled that sends Billy packing for the reality of home, where in turn he unmasks the lies surrounding his birth and the death of his parents. McDonagh has created a range of richly defined characters, all of whom are recognizable relatives of the Irish types that Synge helped reinvent in The Playboy of the Western World and that Patrick Kavanagh satirized in Tarry Flynn. The two maiden aunts, Kate and Eileen Osbourne, raise Billy Claven as their own son, smothering him with their good intentions and their worries for his health; under stress, Kate begins speaking to stones, and Eileen, to cope with her Irish fatalism, sneaks sweets from behind the counter of her shop. Johnnypateenmike, the local bachelor busybody, trades gossip for eggs, and still tends to his ninety-year-old mother, who has a habit of drinking so much she cannot climb the stairs to bed and taunts her son by calling him “the most boring oul fecker in Ireland” (The Cripple of Inishmaan [London: Metheun, 1996], 35). Bartley, Billy’s dim-witted friend, expresses his need for adventure by begging for a telescope to look at the cows and rocks. The National Theatre has assembled a brilliant cast for The Cripple of Inishmaan, most notably Aisling O’Sullivan as the beautiful and foul-mouthed Helen whom Billy adores, and Owen Sharpe as Bartley, the younger brother Helen torments. Fine character performances are turned in by Ray McBride as Johnnypateenmike and by Anita Reeves and Dearbhla Molloy as Billy’s aunts. In the title role, Ruaidhri Conroy is so convincing as the...

The Last Post:Henry V, War Culture and the Postmodern Shakespeare

“Marketing, that mysterious part of the theatre industry, can produce surprising effects,” observes Peter Holland in his recent book on Shakespearean production in Britain during the 1990s. Discussing the material constraints on the repertory of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Holland cites the promotion of the 1994 production ofCoriolanusas it transferred to the Barbican, which, knowingly addressed a “youth” market versed in the work of Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino. The RSC poster displayed a blood-soaked Toby Stephens in the title role, accompanied by the slogan “A natural born killer too.” For an even more surprising and mysterious example of optimistically modish marketing, consider the tactics of the newspaper advertisement announcing the 1996 season at Stratford-upon-Avon. Avoiding any direct mention of Shakespeare, his plays, or theatre, it pictured an ominously darkened cloudscape, with slogans projected onto it, almost like skywriting. These posed a question, “Virtual reality?” and a riposte: “Try the real thing.”

Re-gendering the Libertine; or, the Taming of the Rake: Lucy Vestris as Don Giovanni on the early nineteenth-century London stage

When Luigi Bassi entered the stage of the Prague National Theatre in 1787 to create the title role of Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni, he could have drawn inspiration from a rich tradition of theatrical, pantomimic and marionette representations of the legendary Don Juan, to which this new opera was the latest contribution. Previous incarnations had been shaped by the likes of Tirso de Molina, Molière, Shadwell, Purcell and Gluck; yet it is Mozart and Da Ponte's version that has for us become the definitive: the Don as paradox; an uncomfortable blend of the despicable and the admirable, hero and anti-hero. Lecher, rapist, liar, cheat, murderer, he is the brutal epitome of macho striving for power and domination, yet clothed with a seductive panache, conviction and bravado — the reckless-heroic libertine phallocrat who would rather face the fires of eternal damnation than curb his appetites.