Young Actor Research Articles

Gerty MacDowell, Poetess: Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey and the Nausicaa Episode of Ulysses

few hours before Bloom meets Nausicaa on Sandymount beach, Stephen meets Scylla and Charybdis in the Irish National Library. The Dublin intelligentsia have convened to discuss art and artists, in particular Shakespeare, and there seems to be a general agreement that a work of art should be approached by way of its author's biography. When Stephen has expounded theory that Shakespeare is to be equated with Hamlet's father, the talk turns to other recent scholarship in that vein: The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde's, Mr Best said, lifting brilliant notebook. That Portrait of W. H. where he proves that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues. ... It's the very essence of Wilde, don't you know. The light touch. (9.522-30) Wilde's short story, which suggests that the sonnets were written for (not by) a Willie Hughes, was published in 1889, adding to a controversy more than a century old. As early as 1766, Thomas Tyrwhitt had argued that Mr. W. H., according to Shakespeare's dedication the onlie begetter of sonnets, was a young actor named Willie Hughes. There was virtually no historical evidence to support this hypothesis; its proponents mainly relied on the line from sonnet 20, A man in hue all hues in controlling, and on the recurrent puns on the Will, which, of course, might just as well refer to the author himself. For the informed scholar of 1904, however, Wilde's would not have been the most recent contribution to the debate. Only five years before, in 1899, Samuel Butler had published Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered, where he took up Tyrwhitt's hypothesis to argue that if read in the proper sequence, the sonnets yield further information about the background and character of Hughes. The addressee, he claimed, was a young man of modest standing, good-looking and popular but vain and heartless; in consequence, his character developed badly, and ... before the end of the year he had got himself a bad name (137). Given the discussion that precedes Best's remark, it is reasonable to assume that mistaken attribution of authorship to Willie Hughes is not an error on Joyce's part but another allusion to the theme, recurrent in Ulysses, of covert self-portraiture. The same, I believe, applies to the indirect reference to Butler, which acquires unexpected significance at a later point in the novel. The works of Samuel Butler have often been identified as a probable influence on Joyce. Until recently, scholars focused on The Way of All Flesh as a precursor to the Joyce canon, and especially to that other bildungsroman on the verge of modernism, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (1) New inquiries were incited when the list of books in Joyce's Trieste library was published in Richard Ellmann's The Consciousness of Joyce (1977). Besides The Way of All Flesh, the list includes four other works by Butler: Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered, Erewhon, The Humor of Homer, and The Authoress of the Odyssey. As its title suggests, it is the last of these books that can be read most profitably against Joyce's works, especially Ulysses. scholarly study published in 1897, 'The Authoress argues that the Homeric Odyssey was actually written by a Sicilian girl who portrayed herself in the figure of Nausicaa. The book met with critical reservations on its appearance but soon achieved a certain notoriety among students of the Homeric poems. Joyce was among these students, and since The Authoress was on bookshelf at the time, it is reasonable to assume that he had Butler's hypothesis in mind when he wrote the Nausicaa episode of Ulysses in 1919-20. (2) Critics have occasionally speculated about the influence Butler's study might have had on Joyce's conception of Ulysses. Hugh Kenner, who first drew attention to specific intertextual links, sees a parallel between the description of Telemachus's tower in The Authoress and the Martello Tower where Ulysses opens (Homer's Sticks and Stones 293). …

Trapping The Fox and the Trapper : Maruishi Yasushi's Challenging Debut

With its tension of wildness and self-control, secret teachings, and physical rigor, Tsurigitsune (The Fox and the Trapper) is the most challenging of the kyōgen actors' "roles of passage." This analysis of the play's importance in the training of the young actor is followed by an interview with Maruishi Yasushi, a professional from outside the kyōgen tradition, who premiered the play at a late age, discovering its difficulties and rewards.

Letters to a Young Actor: A Universal Guide to Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Letters to a Young Actor: A Universal Guide to Performance Esiaba Irobi Letters to a Young Actor: A Universal Guide to Performance. By Robert Brustein. New York: Basic Books, 2005; pp. x + 240. $22.50 paper, $32.00 cloth. Robert Brustein's new book is a gem. Unlike his earlier works, such as The Theatre of Revolt, Seasons of Discontent, The Third Theatre, Cultural Calisthenics, and Revolution as Theatre, which are immense and sometimes unwieldy, Letters to a Young Actor is concise, heartfelt, and beautifully written. Richly studded with anecdotes from the theatre world, Brustein's new offering has the potential to galvanize the thousands of unemployed young actors who wait tables and walk the streets into never giving up on their dreams to have successful careers in the theatre. The book will serve as an invaluable tonic for the members of a beleaguered profession. In fact, by the time you get to the end of the book, Brustein reminds the perceptive reader of an aged, armored tank clearing the battlefield so that the young troops can pour in and finish the battle. Brustein draws from his extensive professional experience and offers a battle plan for survival—something sorely needed for an embattled profession whose cultural relevance is daily assailed by television, cinema, sports, football, the Internet, and even pornography. Letters is divided into four sections: "Starting Out," "Getting There," "Being There," and "Working There." It features extremely short chapters (as brief as three pages) on subjects such as "The Pleasures of Imitation," "Looking for Work," and "Ephemeris, Ephemeris." Brustein manages to expertly conflate exciting scandals, gossip, and scenes from the history of Western professional theatre with incisive advice on how young actors can wing their way through this maze of a profession. Indeed, Letters is invaluable to the current generation of young actors who, driven by what Frederic Jameson calls the ontology of the present, desire to become superstars overnight. Brustein cautions that the American theatre needs educated actors; the more the actor can buttress his performing activities with humanistic knowledge, the more fulfilling his life will be. "You'll probably want to major in theatre if your college or university offers such a concentration," Brunstein suggests, "but, that's not essential" (28). Brustein goes on to argue that exposure to great Western dramatic literature helps put the actor in a position to grasp the subtleties of newly-encountered roles. Significantly, the author stresses that "you will need some background in literature, philosophy, economics, history, politics, the natural sciences, and the social sciences, the basic foundation of a liberal arts education" (28). In the rest of the book, particularly in the fourth section, "Working There," Brustein gives the actor first-hand initiatory advice on how the theatre industry works and how the actor can successfully navigate her way through management, audiences, directors, playwrights, coaches, and the indefatigable critics who can maim or mangle your career with a single devastating stroke of the pen. Overall, the strength of Letters stems from Brustein's entrancing theatre anecdotes, his knowledge of Western theatre history, and his devastating critiques of the industry. For example, sizing up Method Acting, he argues that as long as Method actors are playing characters close to themselves—generally working-class Americans with explosive personalities—they can impress us with their power and believability. But the moment they step into the shoes of heroic characters, especially those from other epochs, they are likely to stumble and fall. Commenting on his disagreements with the late August Wilson on the issues of race and representation in American theatre, Brustein states that Wilson had proclaimed that black actors should perform only in plays written by black playwrights. Wilson rejected "color-blind" or "nontraditional casting" as "the same kind of assimilation that black Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years" (28). Brustein argues that this was a melancholy thing to hear at a time when black actors in American resident theatre were getting the chance to play not only Othello and Aaron the Moor, but also Mark Antony and Hamlet. This new separatist movement, Brustein concludes, is unacceptable. But after this political insight, Brustein's arguments on theatre scholarship...

Recycling Judy and Corliss

In the late 1930s, the Stratemeyer Syndicate1 sold the movie rights for its popular Nancy Drew novels (Carolyn Keene 1930–79) to Warner Bros., which quickly released four films based on the teen‐gi...

Directing Shakespeare: a scholar onstage

An Impossible Question From A Chinese Actor - Why is Shakespeare eternal? - drove Sidney Homan after fifty years in the theater to ponder just what makes Shakespeare...well, Shakespeare. The result, Directing Shakespeare, reflects the two worlds in which Homan operates - as a scholar and teacher on campus, and as a director and actor in professional and university theaters. His concern is the entire process, beginning in the lonely period when the director develops a concept and moving into increasingly larger realms: interaction with stage designer; rehearsal; and public performances in which the audience's response further shapes the play. Homan recounts the experience of staging King Lear accompanied by a musical score for piano, violin, and cello played live onstage. He discusses the challenge of making and trying to justify cuts in Hamlet. A casual remark from an actress leads to a feminist production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. He describes the delicate collaboration between director and performer as he works with actors preparing for The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Hamlet. Other chapters treat a set designer's bold red drapes that influenced the director's concept for Julius Caesar and the cross-influence of back-to-back runs of Stoppard's Rozencrantz and Guildentsern Are Dead and Hamlet. In a highly personal concluding chapter, Homan tells of joyously working with a spontaneous young actor playing Puck and with an audience of unruly teenagers who wept at a performance of Lear, Delightfully written, and filled with practical insights, Directing Shakespeare draws together scholars, critics, and those who work to bring the written word to life.

Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England by George Levine (review)

MLR, 99.4, 2004 1035 to half-empty houses a month later. She stages, on 27 January 1820, her magnificent eightieth-birthday 'Fete', with guests invited 'from all Parts ofthe World' (p. 266), fortunate to have timed it fortwo days before the death of George III and a prolonged period of national mourning. In short, as she writes to her lifelong correspondent, the Reverend Leonard Chappelow, 'Bath does formey(p. 68). But the old lady had one more trick to play, one more tempest to see through, and, like her marriage to Piozzi so many years earlier, it brought public scandal and exile from the society she cherished. It also involved a man, William Augustus Conway, the celebrated young actor, some fifty years her junior. 'Once more Good Night; Your Letter shall be seen by no Eyes but mine, and minister to no one's Happiness but my own' (p. 362), she concludes one letter to him. As their intimacy becomes more public, disfavour grows. 'An Account of disagreeables by Letter is disagreeable in itself?Anonymous Correspondents are best neglected I suppose?though I do not neglect their Advice and rough Admonitions, for I do retirefrom the World, well convinced of its Worthlessness and Deceit' (pp. 395-97), she tells Sir James Fellows. For her exile she chooses 'dull Penzance' (p. 431) or,as she puts itto Penelope Pennington, 'Old Ocean?Can ought else completely wash away all Recollection of Bath parties}' (p. 385), returning only to stay in Cliftonin March 1821. She died in early May, as exuberant and sociable as ever, and just as engaging in her correspondence. This sixth vo? lume of the Piozzi letters completes both a life and a vivid and biased account of a long stretch of English social history. The achievement is immense, the edition invaluable. University of Northumbria Allan Ingram Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. By George Levine. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2002. xi + 326pp. $45; ?3i-5o. ISBN 0-226-47536-0. An epigraph from Pater quoting Plato introduces George Levine's work on the story of epistemology in science and narrative: 'AU who rightly touch philosophy, study nothing else than to die, and to be dead' (p. 1). From Descartes to Karl Pearson, moving between at least three disciplines over four centuries, a scholar of redoubtable learning attempts to trace the protean embodiment of what he argues is in essence a quest narrative, seeking truth at the cost of self: dying to know. This is a formidable enterprise, in both scope and complexity. Few readers could hope to equal the author in reading over such diverse fields. Yet the subject precisely challenges assumptions about knowledge and authority: privileges scepticism, and requires a hard-won sense of personal conviction as a condition of acceptance. It invites questioning to the li? mits of competence, even if the whole outstretches that capacity. I ask about novels, realism, and narrative technique, and must learn about certain aspects of philosophy, science, and statistics. At every stage the argument encounters and works through paradox. 'Descartes's epistemological work [. . .] is first articulated in a narrative, and a narrative that [. . .] attempts to make narrative unnecessary' (p. 19). His and other scientists' au? tobiographies 'gather their power from their very failures' (p. 103); indeed, 'The self-annihilation in the ideal of scientific epistemology becomes a kind of ceremony of resurrection [. . .] the plain style becomes rhetorical after all.' Most striking and disturbingis the disparity between lively minds and their stark self-abnegation. 'Galton 's seems a memoir by the dead' (p. 115). Einstein's AutobigraphicalNotes (quoted p. 8) demand rhetorically,' "Is this supposed to be an obituary?" the astonished reader will likely ask. I would like to reply,essentially, yes.' While Bacon and Descartes are theoretically at odds, their narratives agree in that 'Each affirmsthe presence of contingency even while each argues the possibility of 1036 Reviews the unconditional' (p. 23), for 'Such stories are commonplaces of Western cultural inheritance' (p. 24), moving between 'purity and materiality', seeking how to know. It is narrative itself, and metaphor within narrative, a procedure and its tools, that Levine repeatedly identifies as the means by...

The Tyrone Anthology: Authority in the Last Act of Long Day's Journey into Night

The stage directions for the opening of act 4 of O'Neill's Long Days Journey into Night are The same. It is around midnight. During the act the argument between father and sons reaches full pitch; but the anger of the family is tempered by repeated deference to literary authority, as Tyrone and his sons quote fourteen times from eight writers and make references to seven others. As I shall demonstrate, the act is largely anger and consolation, for the great problem of the play--who bears most responsibility for the family's downfall--has been answered in the third act where we see the wife and mother of the house resort to her own authority, and her own distorted memory of the past, which feeds her embittered personality. Our understanding of the family's defeat at the end of the third act makes the fourth all the more moving, and a consideration of the writers each character quotes, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Kipling, or Baudelaire, and even the writers referred to by O'Neill in earlier stage directions, is an essential element in understanding who speaks with most authority in the play, in discovering who is right and who wrong in its extended argument. Brenda Murphy argues convincingly that the play has two endings, a valuable analysis in explaining the use of quotation, as I shall note. Michael Hinden and Marc Maufort are the only other critics to address this question at length. Maufort concentrates on quotation from Baudelaire alone, and not as an authority quoted but rather as an important influence on O'Neill's thinking. Hinden sees the quotations as representing differences in taste across generations, and as an important part of the family's literary and theatrical background, but again, not as an almost forensic leavening in the play. (1) I shall discuss act 4 first, giving the essential arguments made by the characters in defense of themselves and against others, and then look back at the end of act 3, where the play has its first conclusion. II At midnight Tyrone, half-drunk and unhappy, is dealing cards to himself. Edmund comes home before his older brother Jamie, and Tyrone is glad to see him, although they argue over lights being left on. They will be onstage for the first half of the act, with Jamie and Mary coming in later, both badly impaired by alcohol or drugs. They settle whatever is left of the argument over Tyrone's cheapness, both dreading Mary's descent from the second floor. They argue almost to forget about her. After the argument over the lights being on, Edmund accuses his father of sentimental religious romanticism, for Tyrone has claimed in the past that the Duke of Wellington and Shakespeare were Irish Catholics. Wellington was Irish, although a Protestant; and we know from earlier scenes that Tyrone came of age, professionally, in the late-nineteenth-century American theater, when eccentric theories about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays were at their peak. Ignatius Donnelly, in The Great Cryptogram (1887), and others advanced wild theories that would have baffled the intelligent and sensible young actor. (2) So O'Neill has Tyrone make a transfer of nationality and religion concerning Shakespeare. If others deny that he wrote at all, in the face of overwhelming evidence, why should not young Tyrone, while touring the Midwest in the 1870s and 1880s, have made his own suitable adjustment to Shakespeare's life? O'Neill does not tell us this directly, but I think I have reasoned back from the dialogue without going astray from his intent) Tyrone; Stubbornly. So he was. The proof is in his plays. Edmund: Well he wasn't, and there's no proof of it in his plays, except to you! Jeeringly. The Duke of Wellington, there was another good Irish Catholic! Tyrone: I never said he was a good one. He was a but a Catholic just the same. (127) The use of renegade is important, for Tyrone's great weakness that emerges in the play is not stinginess, a substantial but commonplace failing that he barely acknowledges as a flaw and that his decency more than offsets. …

Male Bonding and Female Pleasure: Refining Masculinity in Japanese Popular Cultural Texts

Over the past few decades, alternative constructions of masculinity have entered the Japanese popular cultural scene. These definitions are slowly chipping away at traditional constructions of gender and creating new subjectivities through which men and women may choose to define their gendered identities. This article explores some of these changing constructions through a case study of 1 particularly popular male celebrity, young male actor and singer Kimura Takuya. Examining his appearances on various Japanese media sites-from television dramas, to popular magazines, to concert videos-this article attempts to identify the different codes of masculinity emerging from Kimura's diverse characters, and considers their possible significance within the larger Japanese popular cultural environment in which they are distributed and consumed.

Tacit Knowledge: Heritage and Waste

Eugenio Barba is founder and director of Odin Teatret, and of the International School of Theatre Anthropology. A longstanding Advisory Editor of NTQ, he is also a prolific writer on the nature of acting and the actor, with a special concern for what is shared by and what divides the traditions and styles of East and West. In the following article he explores the fundamental differences in approaches to the training of the aspirant actor, distinguishing between ‘acculturation’ as the usual point of departure in eastern traditions, and ‘inculturation’ as the dominant western mode. He explores the differing natures of the young actor's apprenticeship which have historically derived from these traditions, and the consequences of new emphases and social movements in the twentieth century which threaten the future of the ‘accultured’ approach, while requiring a new range of responses from the ‘incultured’. This article was first presented at the international symposium ‘Tacit Knowledge – Heritage and Waste’ which was held in Holstebro from 22 to 26 September 1999, on the occasion of Odin Teatret's thirty-fifth anniversary. Eugenio Barba's most recent publications are Land of Ashes and Diamonds: My Apprenticeship in Poland, including a long correspondence from Jerzy Grotowski, and Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt, both from Black Mountain Press.

Teacher

TEACHER/Romw/ws Linney IN SUMMER, 1952, 1 was having the normal nervous breakdown of a confused young actor who didn't see commercial stardom in his future and didn't know what the purpose of his life could possibly be besides summer stock. I went to Appalachia to spend the summer like Hans Castorp, on a magic mountain. The town was Boone, North Carolina, a popular place now, in the fashion of Woodstock, but then still the small town that had been even more remote a generation before. I had lived there between the ages of one and four, in a large, white house on a hill in the center of the town, with my father's relations all gathered together to escape the ravages of the Depression. Now, twenty years later, I had come back. As I said, I was having a nervous breakdown, but it didn't last long. Shortly after I arrived, I was told by my favorite cousin, Margaret Coffey, who ran the house, to stop sitting on the porch brooding and do something. There was a college in Boone; why not take a course? I did, and my blundering about in folklore began, launching me directly into the life I have since led. I saw in the catalogue a course marked Old EngUsh and Scottish Ballads. I registered and showed up. A small, quiet, impish man in middle age was the professor. His name was Gratis WUUams, and he had come from the even more remote mountains of Kentucky when he was very young, gotten through high school, then worked his way through a college, then through graduate school at NYU by teaching courses like this one. In time he became one of the most respected scholars of Appalachia, conceivably in part because the administration building in which he had been storing notes for his magnum opus burned down, thus preserving his reputation from the tarnishing many such academic life works inevitably receive. He is known today as the father of Appalachian studies. We began this course in a scholarly manner, with the Child Collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (a descendant of Percy's Relics) and a description of how the serious study of folklore proceeds, such as Stith Thompson's folk motifs in many volumes. But soon Cratis Williams was doing something else. He was illustrating what folklore was, not with academic analysis or showy erudition but with the Aeolian harp he could magicaUy become. Because he knew, had heard sung in childhood, the ballads of England, Scotland, 168 · The Missouri Review Scandinavia and elsewhere, in Kentucky and North Carolina, and he knew where they were still being sung, in what versions. He could tell us not only how old a Child ballad was in the United States, but where and in what version he had heard it, and how he himself dealt with it. And tell us quietly but with authority. He was an artist, disguised as a professor, but a happy one, who loved teaching and students. Ballads, this little man told us, were stories before songs, starkly delivered, unvarnished by minstrelsy. This was news to me: I was at that time (and still am) a lover of Burl Ives and Richard Dyer Bennet. But Cratis Williams said that while their interpretations were all very well, the art of the minstrel clouded the deeper drama of a great ballad. Real ballad singers not only didn't sing beautifully, but purposely never trained their voices. They sternly avoided anything that sounded like music, beauty, or, God save us, culture. A ballad was the stripped-down essence of life, sung over and over for thousands of years, in country after country, changing, but not much, as the different balladeers performed it. This was my first taste ofthe vast world of illiterate magnificence. He sang to us what he considered to be the best of the ballads, "Edward," to a tune that was simple but elusive: How come that blood on your coat my son, O my son tell me, It is the blood ofmy good gray hound, That led the chasefor me, me, me, That led the chasefor me. The blood...

Emotion Memory and the Medieval Performance of Violence

When Constantin Stanislavski'sAn Actor Preparesfirst appeared in English translation in 1936, the Moscow Art Theater had already made a great impact on American theatre. Particularly influential in the Soviet director's theories of acting was his concept of emotion memory. InAn Actor Prepares, the young actor, Kostya, tries to understand how to access the “memory of life” rather than the “theatrical archives of his mind” and has an epiphany at the moment when he recalls and relives the violence of an isolated vehicular accident that had dismembered its victim:

Christopher Newton: Unsure But Incredibly True

Thirty years ago, in June 1964, a young actor stepped on to a make-shift stage upstairs in the Court House in Niagara-on-the-Lake to play a character auspiciously named “A” in Shaw’s Village Wooing. After a circuitous route through many of the regional theatres in Canada, he returned in 1980 as the Artistic Director destined to set the Shaw Festival on a productive new course. That young man was Christopher Newton, and his career to date spans three of the most interesting decades in Canadian theatre, touching many of the groups that have shaped what Canadian theatre is today — Canadian Players, Manitoba Theatre Centre, Stratford Festival, Theatre Calgary, Vancouver Playhouse. Looking at these thirty years in the life of one actor-director puts a personal face on the recent history of theatre in Canada; listening to his story, frequently told in his own words, we catch some of the great changes that Canadian Theatre Review has documented since 1974.

Liberating the Young Actor: Feminist Pedagogy and Performance

Liberating the Young Actor: Feminist Pedagogy and Performance

Moods Indigo: A Long View Part 2

Like The Color Purple (the film with which Part I of this article concluded), another black novel-into-film that failed to live up to expectations was Native Son (1986) directed by a white director, Joel Freedman, though scripted by a black scenarist, Richard Wesley. An earlier effort to film this novel took place in Argentina, with author Richard Wright in the major role, and directed by the Frenchman, Pierre Chenal. Oddly enough, the curious earlier version is more compelling than the remake, even though neither version captures the tragic power of the novel. Censorship restrictions hampered the former, and lack of imagination destroyed the latter. The challenge of Native Son lies in finding the perfect image of its beleaguered and ignorant hero, Bigger Thomas, a nineteen-year-old ghetto black in Chicago of the late 1930s. The insight and sympathy of an American DeSica was necessary, with a strong neorealistic approach to the milieu of the Depression. The young actor chosen for the part, Victor Love, could not erase intelligence from his eyes, and his acting technique obliterated any conviction that Bigger Thomas's responses to society and his fumbling crime were based upon ignorance and brute responses to life. Instead of tragedy, one finds only horror, and the sociopolitical undercurrents of the novel, with Bigger as a symbol of the oppressed black man seen through Communist eyes, are blunted or ignored. One remembers only the crime itself, the incineration of a young woman's body in a furnace, with all of its gruesomeness on screen. The supporting

Martha Graham's American Document: A Minstrel Show in Modern Dance Dress

American Document, which received its premiere in Bennington, Vermont, on August 6, 1938, marked a significant shift in Graham's development as an artist. Commentators, from its inception, were generally agreed on its importance. Edwin Denby bluntly asserted, Martha Graham's American Document is a major work, as everybody knows. Lincoln Kirstein termed the production a dance-drama of the first importance, and many critics noted that the piece represented a radical line of departure for Graham.' The reputation of the piece is such that it has never been in danger of being forgotten, yet it vanished from the repertoire after 1944. The original choreography has been lost; the musical score composed by Ray Green has never been recorded, although it is still in his possession; two early films of selections from the dance are difficult to decipher, and the libretto itself, a later revised version of which was published in Theatre Arts Magazine in 1942, has been neglected in the literature about Graham. In 1989, the Graham company announced its intention to present a work with new music by a different composer, based on the original script and starring the great Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov.2 One of the most obvious reasons why American Document was considered a turning point in Graham's development was that, for the first time, a man was invited to join the company. Erick Hawkins, a ballet dancer from Ballet Caravan, was featured as Graham's partner, and Housely Stevens, Jr., a young actor who moved like a dancer,

This Very Old Fair Lady: the Last Years of Mrs. Patrick Campbell

Mrs. Patrick Campbell had captivated New York, in her distinctively grand manner, well before Bernard Shaw wrote the part of Eliza for her in Pygmalion, and immortalized her reputation on stage – as, perhaps, his own protracted and largely epistolatory affair with the temperamental actress immortalized her off-stage. But by the early 1930s, when Mrs. Pat was approaching her own seventh decade, her stage appearances were infrequent, and less fortunate times found her living well beyond her means in New York. There, Alan Brock, at the time an aspiring young actor, made her acquaintance, and in due course became her agent. In the following article he tells the story of Mrs. Pat's declining years – which were marked by a final triumph, half the proceeds of which evaporated, instantly and characteristically, on celebrating the success. Alan Brock went on to become an actor for George Abbott, Howard Lindsay, and the Shuberts. Also a New York actors’ agent, he represented numerous leading players, and later worked with Ben Hecht and Billy Rose on two Broadway shows, while authoring his own radio series and contributing a regular column to the trade weekly Backstage.

Theatre in Ottawa in the 1930s: A Memoir

Michael Meiklejohn (1906-89) joined the Ottawa Drama League on his arrival in Canada in 1930, and became one of the ODL's most prominent members over the ensuing thirty-five years. In this memoir, written about 1981 and found among his private papers after his death, Mr Meiklejohn offers his observations and describes his activities as a young actor, director, and stagehand with one of Canada's leading 'little theatres' in the 1930s.

Trois documents méconnus sur l'histoire sociale et religieuse de l'Afrique romaine tardive retrouvés parmi les spuria de Sulpice Sévère

Three manuscrits of Orosius' Aduersus Paganos add a letter written by Sulpicius Severus, and three others from a different author. The first, called Epistula ad Saluium, had been written by an African landowner, living near the city of Matar, now Mateur, in northern Tunisia. Salvius, the letter addressee, claimed coloni living on an estate called the Fundus Volusianus, owned by the author ; he asserted their origo was sited on his own lands. In spite of Salvius' threatening words and of his intention of bringing the case before the courts, the author rejected the claim, Salvius' rights being, in his opinion, imaginary. The clash was the result of an old conflict having brought together the former owners of the lands. The document may be dated from the beginning of the Vth century. It shows how harsh were the clashes concerning the land property and exploitation. The author and his addressee where both advocates, so the letter uses accurate juridical sentences. We can see that the procedure, for such a claim of coloni, was quite similar to that concerning a claim of slaves. Some recent studies have strongly pointed out that the late Roman laws considered the coloni as free men. This document does not positively refute this statement, but it shows clearly the heaviness of the coloni's, overheads and subordination. Two other letters from this set seem to have been written by the same African anonymous author. The first congratulates an addressee (surely a bishop) on having converted without recourse to coercion a lot of crude contrymen who practised a false and unlawful religion. This is an episode of the elimination of Donatism by the imperial laws, passed after the Conference of Carthage in 41 1 and compelling the landowners to convert their countrymen. In another letter, the author asks the decurions of a city to exempt a newly baptised young actor from going on the stage, according to the prescriptions of the canon law, ratified by the imperial law. The document clearly shows that, in the Later Empire, an actor's job was seen as a compulsory public duty (munus).

Nothing to Repent: The Life of Hesketh Pearson (review)

350 biography Vol. 11, No. 4 destroyed by flooding on the Colorado River. Profits in a copper mine were lost when a clerk absconded with substantial funds, and Sylvester lost his life after spending time in a San Diego jail. James could have turned his luck around by staying in California and accepting a generous land grant, but the requirements to become a Mexican national and a Roman Catholic were too much to ask of a confirmed Protestant from Kentucky. He traveled to Mexico City to file a claim for services rendered in California, but the Mexican government failed to give him satisfaction. James returned by ship to the United States, where he eventually met with Timothy Flint to produce his story. Pattie's trail ends with a Kentucky tax record of 1833, at which time he may have died in a cholera epidemic. Reports that he may have later lived in California are vague at best. In his biography, Richard Batman has done a fine job of maintaining the spirit and excitement of Pattie's original narrative. His clarification of facts, new interpretations, and abundant explanatory materials make this a valuable contribution to western literature . Iris H. W. Engstrand University of San Diego Ian Hunter, Nothing to Repent: The Life ofHesketh Pearson. London: Hamish Hamilton , 1987. 211 pp. £14.95. Reflecting Hesketh Pearson's temperament, this warm-hearted biography is energized by a lively spirit, glimpses of famous persons, and a taste for good talk, close friendships , and amorous liaisons. It even pays tribute to Pearson's biographical methods, using the chronology of his life as a conventional underpinning while characterizing him with a stress on anecdotes. Yet Hunter's closeness to his subject has some drawbacks . As a biographer Pearson was more prolific than great, as a person he was more well-meaning than profound. Relative to most exceptional figures he cut a narrow swath, achieving minor notice less in his own right than in the fame or uniqueness of those he wrote about. Consequently Hunter's chronological detailing and anecdotes often beg for justification: given Pearson's derivative status as a biographer and small distinction as a personality, how significant or interesting or amusing are details or anecdotes about him; are they worth one's time? Such questions may dog the reader throughout this biography, particularly since the author appears to have little awareness of them. Early pages spent on Pearson's ancestors, his hatred of a schoolmaster, and the beginnings of his religious skepticism seem almost gratuitous; later pages on his "senseless and boring" wartime experiences are only slightly more than that; and, near the end, details of his walking expeditions with Hugh Kingsmill seem needlessly discursive. Throughout the book, vignettes of various famous personalities give an impression that Hunter, short of primary materials , is padding. More engaging portions of the narrative include accounts of Pearson's professional and personal faux pas. Failing as a clerk, he pursued an acting career but nearly destroyed his chances on the stage when he ridiculed actors and theater managers in his first book, Modem Men and Mummers (1921). Learning slowly, he later pretended that his third book, an attack on diplomats and world leaders titled TL· Whispering Gallery (1926), was by someone else. The truth brought a lawsuit against him by the publisher, almost terminating his writing career. Equally imprudent as a REVIEWS 351 womanizer, Pearson finally decided to marry his mistress and asked his wife for a divorce, only to discover that meanwhile the mistress had become engaged to another. Contrary to the biography's title, this marital cruelty was one thing he did repent, especially when his wife kindly forgave him. In capitalizing on these missteps and in critically probing other foibles, Hunter can be adroit at humanizing his subject. Yet sometimes when he attempts to build Pearson 's character by quoting him, he fails to notice how the quotations compromise his effort. As a young actor, Pearson first came across Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and Bernard Shaw. These, he declared, provided the "four major revelations of my life, as a result of which I grew up." The reader may suspect that growing up in...

An Unrecorded Glimpse of Halifax's Theatre Royal in 1830

In the James E. Murdoch Papers at the Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library, the author of this article has discovered details of Murdoch's visit to Halifax in 1830. As well as providing a valuable commentary on Halifax theatre at the time, the Murdoch Papers offer us an informative account of the young actor's humorous experience on an early Canadian stage.