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Breaking String
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The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill
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Caryl Churchill's plays are internationally performed, studied and acclaimed by practitioners, theatre scholars, critics and audiences alike. With fierce imagination the plays dramatise the anxieties and terrors of contemporary life. This Companion presents new scholarship on Churchill's extraordinary and ground-breaking work. Chapters explore a cluster of major plays in relation to pressing social topics - ecological crisis, sexual politics, revolution, terror and selfhood - providing close readings of texts in their theatrical, theoretical and historical contexts. These topic-based essays are intercalated with other essays that delve into Churchill's major collaborations, her performance innovations and her influences on a new generation of playwrights. Contributors explore Churchill's career-long experimentation - her risk-taking that has reinvigorated the stage, both formally and politically. Providing a new critical platform for the study of a theatrical career that spans almost fifty years, the Companion pays fresh attention to Churchill's poetic precision, dark wit and inexhaustible creativity.n pays fresh attention to Churchill's poetic precision, dark wit and inexhaustible creativity.n pays fresh attention to Churchill's poetic precision, dark wit and inexhaustible creativity.n pays fresh attention to Churchill's poetic precision, dark wit and inexhaustible creativity.
The Cambridge Companion to Chekhov
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This volume of specially commissioned essays explores the world of Anton Chekhov - one of the most important dramatists in the repertoire - and the creation, performance and interpretation of his works. The Companion, first published in 2000, begins with an examination of Chekhov's life, his Russia, and the original productions of his plays at the Moscow Art Theatre. Later film versions and adaptations of Chekhov's works are analysed, with valuable insights also offered on acting Chekhov, by Ian McKellen, and directing Chekhov, by Trevor Nunn and Leonid Heifetz. The volume also provides essays on 'special topics' such as Chekhov as writer, Chekhov and women, and the Chekhov comedies and stories. Key plays, such as The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull, receive dedicated chapters while lesser-known works and genres are also brought to light. The volume concludes with appendices of primary sources, lists of works, and a select bibliography.
The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw
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The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw is an indispensable guide to one of the most influential and important dramatists of the theatre. The volume offers a broad-ranging study of Shaw with essays by a team of leading scholars. The Companion covers all aspects of Shaw's drama, focusing on both the political and theatrical context, while the extensive illustrations showcase productions from the Shaw Festival in Canada. In addition to situating Shaw's work in its own time, the Companion demonstrates its continuing relevance, and applies some of the newest critical approaches. Topics include Shaw and the publishing trade, Shaw and feminism, and Shaw and the Empire, as well as analyses of the early plays, discussion plays and history plays.
The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen
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In the history of modern theater Ibsen is one of the dominating figures. The sixteen chapters of this Companion explore his life and work. The plays are grouped and discussed chronologically; among the thematic topics are discussions of Ibsen's comedy, realism, lyric poetry and feminism. Substantial chapters account for Ibsen's influence on the international stage, including an interview with ex-RSC director John Barton and an essay by Arthur Miller exploring Ibsen's challenge to contemporary theater and film. Essential reference materials include a full chronology, list of works, and essays on twentieth-century criticism and further reading.
The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde
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The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde offers an essential introduction to one of the theatre's most important and enigmatic writers. Although a general overview, the volume also offers some of the latest thinking on the dramatist and his impact on the twentieth century. Part One places Wilde's work within the cultural and historical context of his time and includes an opening essay by Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland. Further chapters also examine Wilde and the Victorians and his image as a Dandy. Part Two looks at Wilde's essential work as playwright and general writer, including his poetry, critiques, and fiction, and provides detailed analysis of such key works as Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest among others. The third group of essays examines the themes and factors which shaped Wilde's work and includes Wilde and his view of the Victorian woman, Wilde's sexual identities, and interpreting Wilde on stage. This 1997 volume also contains a detailed chronology of Wilde's work, a guide to further reading, and illustrations from important productions.
The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre
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This 2004 Companion is designed for readers interested in the creation, production and interpretation of Victorian and Edwardian theatre, both in its own time and on the contemporary stage. The volume opens with a brief overview and introduction surveying the theatre of the time followed by an essay contextualizing the theatre within the frame of Victorian and Edwardian culture as a whole. Succeeding chapters examine specific aspects of performance, production, and theatre, including the music, the actors, stagecraft and the audiences themselves; plays and playwriting and issues of class and gender are also explored. Chapters also deal with comedy, farce and melodrama, while other essays bring forward new topics and approaches that cross the boundaries of traditional investigation, including analysis of the economics of theatre and of the theatricality of personal identity.
Caryl Churchill's Top Girls
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Caryl Churchill is widely considered to be one of the most innovative playwrights to haveemerged in post-war British theatre. Identified as a socialist feminist writer, she is one of the few British women playwrights to have been incorporated into the dramatic canon. Top Girls is one of Churchill's most well known and often studied works, using an all female cast to critique bourgeois feminism during the Thatcher era.
Chekhov: a study of the four major plays
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Chekhov in Performance
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For a full understanding of any text, careful consideration must be given to its life in performance. In this rewarding study of four of Chekhov's major plays - Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters - J. L. Styan demonstrates the development of Chekhov's skills as a dramatist and discusses stage action, portrayal of character, differing twentieth-century productions and the audience reactions they evoked.
A Doll's House
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The classic play about a woman's fight for independence and her desire to break free of her role as housewife. One of the best-known, most frequently performed modern plays, A Doll's House richly displays the genius with which Henrik Ibsen pioneered realistic prose drama. The central character, Nora, epitomizes the human struggle against the humiliating constraints of social conformity. Her ultimate rejection of a smothering marriage and life in a "doll's house" shocked theatergoers of the late nineteenth century and opened new horizons for playwrights and their audiences. However, daring social themes are only one aspect of Ibsen's power as a dramatist. A Doll's House demonstrates his ability to create realistic dialogue and a suspenseful flow of events, and bring to life the psychologically penetrating characterizations that make the struggles of his dramatic personages utterly convincing. Here is a deeply absorbing dramatic work as readable as it is eminently playable. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
Edwardian Drama
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The Edwardian Theatre
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The essays in this collection take as their provenance broad patterns of theatrical production and consumption, focusing upon the economics of theatre management, the creation of new audiences, the politics of playgoing, and the meteoric rise of popular forms of mass entertainment, including musical comedy, variety theatre, and the cinema. Individual chapters also offer fresh insights into key aspects of the Edwardian stage such as a definition of the theatre of the time, gender play and role reversal in the Edwardian music hall, as well as issues related to politics and the suffrage movement.
The Edwardian turn of mind
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Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life
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A woman of extraordinary energy, talent and versatility. Elizabeth Robins was an actress who popularised Ibsen on the British stage, a prolific and popular writer of novels and non-fiction, and an Edwardian suffragette. Her extensive circle of friends included Florence Bell, Henry James, John Masefield and William Archer. She worked with the Pankhursts and knew the Woolfs. Through examining the life and work of this vivid and transatlantic figure born during the American Civil War yet surviving into the England of the 1950s, Angela John raises questions about the shaping of historical identities. Situating Elizabeth Robins's achievement in the context of the British and American cultural history of the period, this is a book which will attract historians, teachers and students of theatre studies and all those fascinated by biography.
English Theatre in Transition 1881-1914
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Originally published in 1984. The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a time of considerable change in the English theatre. Victorian attitudes were shocked or shattered by the new drama of Ibsen; the major figure of George Bernard Shaw dominated the period; theatre censorship was the subject of a long and furious contest; and staging conventions changed from the spectacular stylings of Irving and Beerbohm Tree to the masking and statuesque styles of Isadora Duncan and the inner realism of Stanislavsky. This book traces the activities of the leading figures in the English theatre, notably William Archer who introduced Ibsen to this country and who became one of the main promoters of the idea of a National Theatre. Other personalities discussed include Harley Granville Barker, particularly his association with Shaw at the Court Theatre and his part in campaigns against censorship and for changes in the staging of Shakespeare, and Edward Gordon Craig, whose rebellion against the Victorian theatre took and anti-realist direction. This is a stimulating account of the background to the modern English theatre which can only increase appreciation of its standard and variety.
The Feminist Possibilities of Dramatic Realism
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File on Wilde
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'Writer Files is an important series documenting the work of major dramatists of the last hundred years Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1856. In the years following his graduation from Oxford in 1878 he published poems and stories which included The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lady Windermere's Fan was produced in 1892, A Woman of No Importance in 1893 and An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. Later work included De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He died in 1900.Each volume contains a comprehensive checklist of all the writer's plays, with a detailed performance history, excerpted reviews and a selection of the writers' own comments on their work.'
The Flower and the Castle
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Githa Sowerby: Three Plays
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Githa Sowerby's Rutherford and Sontook the London theatre by storm in 1912. Following its triumphant run, the play toured to New York, was produced throughout England, and was translated and staged in multiple European locations. Yet Sowerby's initial theatrical success would not be repeated. With historical hindsight, we can see Sowerby's experience as comparable to that of many other women writers who struggled to achieve lasting recognition, especially when their work was perceived as critiquing the forces restricting women's lives. These vivid domestic dramas explore timely questions of capitalism, feminism, and personal freedom. With the acclaimed revival of Rutherfordat the National Theatre in 1994, and with the efforts by feminist scholars and theatre artists to rediscover the work of such forgotten women writers, Sowerby and her dramas have secured renewed interest. This edition gathers Rutherford and Son, its companion piece A Man and Some Women, and the postwar play The Stepmother. The edition will provide teachers, students, and artists with important historical contexts for Sowerby's dramas and will demonstrate the ongoing cogency of these dynamic, insightful, and engaging plays.
A History of Scandinavian Theatre
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This study of the history and development of theater in Scandinavia examines dominant styles and trends in various periods, from the earliest performances in the Middle Ages to the provocative productions and experiments of the present day. This is the only work of its kind in English and provides a balanced and authoritative account of the theatrical history of all three Scandinavian countries. It is generously illustrated and comprehensively documented, with an extensive bibliography.
Looking for Githa
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The Making of Victorian Drama
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In this book Anthony Jenkins examines seven Victorian playwrights who, despite their own ideals and prejudices and the theatre's conservatism, tried to come to terms with such momentous subjects as womanliness, honour and money. The opening chapter briefly describes the social transformation of theatre during the century and the increasing respectability of actors and playhouses. Subsequent chapters deal with the drama of Edward Bulwer, Tom Robertson, W. S. Gilbert, H. A. Jones, Arthur Pinero, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw. Each of these dramatists sought to create a theatre of ideas according to his own vision of art and society. The plays are examined within the social and political context of the Reform Bill, the Revolution of 1848, the Great Exhibition, royal patronage, censorship and copyright, and, above all, the 'Woman Question'. Jenkins combines politics and theatrical history with literary criticism to shed provocative light on the struggle to relate the London theatre to the realities of Victorian England.
The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays
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The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays is an anthology of eight exciting pieces written by supporters of the Suffrage Movement and by members of the Actresses Franchise League. Immediately playable, the plays offer strong, varied roles for female casts, while also providing invaluable source material to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines. The Actresses' Franchise League was founded in 1908, 'as a bond of union between all women in the Theatrical profession who are in sympathy with the Woman's Franchise Movement'. The plays featured in this collection articulate the arguments of the Suffrage Movement through a variety of styles and offer a fascinating glimpse into the range of opinions and hopes held by its proponents.
Modern Drama by Women, 1800-1920
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Modern Drama by Women 1880s-1930soffers the first direct evidence that women playwrights helped create the movement known as Modern Drama. It contains twelve plays by women from the Americas, Europe and Asia, spanning a national and stylistic range from Swedish realism to Russian symbolism.
The Modern Stage and Other Worlds
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The new drama, 1900-1914 : Harley Granville Barker, John Galsworthy, St. John Hankin, John Masefield
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The New Woman and Her Sisters
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Examines the New Woman concept as it emerged in legitimate and popular theater, opera, film, and spectacle.
New Woman Plays
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Between 1890 and 1914, the burgeoning feminist movement that culminated in the militancy of the suffragettes encouraged an increasing number of women to use theatre to explore women's experience. This book features some of these plays, including Elizabeth Robin's "Alan's Wife".
Nineteenth Century Plays
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This collection includes "Black-ey'd Susuan," "Money," "Masks and Faces," "The Colleen Bawn," "Lady Audley's Secret," "The Ticket-of-Leave-Man," "Caste," "Two Roses," "The Bells," and "A Pair of Spectacles." Each play is printed in the form in which it was originally performed, and includes an introductory headnote by Rowell. A glossary of stage terms and a reading list complete the text.
The Octoroon
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Regarded by Bernard Shaw as a master of the theatre, Dion Boucicault was arguably the most important figure in drama in North America and in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was largely forgotten during the twentieth century--though he continued to influence popular culture (the iconic image of a woman tied to railway tracks as a train rushes towards her, for example, originates in a Boucicault melodrama). In the twenty-first century the gripping nature of his plays is being discovered afresh; when The Octoroonwas produced as a BBC Radio play in 2012, director and playwright Mark Ravenhill described Boucicault's dramas as "the precursors to Hollywood cinema." In The Octoroon--the most controversial play of his career--Boucicault addresses the sensitive topic of race and slavery. George Peyton inherits a plantation, and falls in love with an octoroon--a person one-eighth African American, and thus, in 1859 Louisiana, legally a slave. The Octoroonopened in 1859 in New York City, just two years prior to the American Civil War, and created a sensation--as it did in its subsequent British production. This new edition includes a wide range of background contextual materials, an informative introduction, and extensive annotation.
Oscar Wilde
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Pinero
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Engages readers in a thoughtful discussion of the dramatist's prolific output of plays, short stories, poems, essays, speeches, and articles in relation to their theatrical and social contexts.
Plays
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This volume contains four plays by the leading late Victorian and Edwardian playwright Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934). It provides a representative sample of the work of a writer who far outshone his rivals (including both Wilde and Shaw) in his own day, and inspired such successors as Somerset Maugham and Terence Rattigan in the genre of the 'wellmade play', and Ben Travers in the writing of farce. The plays are The Schoolmistress (1866), one of the famous Court farces; The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), the best known of all the plays about 'a woman with a past'; Trelawny of the 'Wells' (1898), a much-loved backstage romance; and The Thunderbolt (1908), a pioneering social drama. Two of the plays (The Schoolmistress and The Thunderbolt), are not available in print elsewhere. This scholarly edition includes an introduction, a biographical account, a full list of Pinero's plays in performance and publication, and several important appendixes, including an alternative ending to The Schoolmistress and significant variants in the text of The Second Mrs Tanqueray.
The Quintessence of Ibsenism
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Great critic and dramatist's commentary on Ibsen's aims and methods, including evaluations of plays: Brand, Peer Gynt, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, others.
The Repertory Movement
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Revising Wilde
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A radical re-examination of Oscar Wilde's plays, Revising Wilde challenges long-established views of the writer as a dilettante and dandy, revealing him instead as a serious philosopher and social critic who used his plays to subvert the traditional values of Victorian literature and society. By tracing Wilde's painstaking revisions and redrafting of his plays, Sos Eltis uncovers themes subsequently concealed in successive versions which demonstrate that Wilde was in fact an anarchist, a socialist and a feminist. Wilde borrowed plots and incidents from numerous contemporary French and English plays, but he then subtly rewrote his plagiarized material in order to mock the conventions he imitated. By analysing previously unconsidered manuscript drafts, and comparing the finished plays with their sources, Eltis displays a surprising depth and complexity to Wilde's work. The little-known early play, Vera; or, The Nihilists is revealed as a politically radical drama, the society plays are shown to challenge Victorian sexual and social mores, and The Importance of Being Earnest is interpreted as an anarchic farce, which reflects the Utopian vision of Wilde's political essay, `The Soul of Man Under Socialism'. Taking into account the more recent scholarship and criticism, this accessible study will be of interest to Wilde specialists and enthusiasts alike.
Stage to Screen
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A study of early cinematic practice which investigates how the 19th-century stage, with its spectacles, melodramas, and panoramas, led to the pioneering work of E.S.Porter and D.W.Griffith. The emergence of cinema as the dominant visual art of this century was an event of enormous historical importance. To understand and evaluate this development is the aim of this study.
Theatre and Fashion
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This is the first book to explore the complex relationship between theatre, fashion and society in the late Victorian and early modern era. Examining such diverse topics as the emergence of the society playhouse, fashion journalism, the role of the couturier-costumier, department store marketing, and the establishment of 'dress codes' by militant suffragettes, Kaplan and Stowell provide a new context for assessing plays by established writers like Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Arthur Pinero and Harley Granville Barker, as well as lesser known figures, such as Edith Lyttelton, Emily Symonds and Cicely Hamilton.
Theatre in the Victorian Age
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This book examines all major aspects of theatre practice and dramatic literature of the Victorian period. Michael Booth's comprehensive survey explores the social and cultural context of the theatre including theatre management, the audience, architecture and production methods, acting and the job of actor, as well as the drama itself. Within this framework, Booth discusses such topics as the effect on theatre of population growth and the spread of the railway system, the typical organization of a Victorian theatre company, the contribution to theatre of several important actor-managers, the use of stage machinery and lighting instruments, and the stock company and rehearsal system.
Victorian People and Ideas
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In this important study, Richard D. Altick moves us toward an understanding of the social, intellectual, and theological crises that Carlyle and Dickens, Tennyson and Arnold were daily struggling to solve. And the issues were many: the revolution in class structure and class attitudes; the rise of utilitarianism and the evangelical spirit; the crisis in religion, including the Oxford movement and Darwinism; the democratization of culture; the place of art and the artist in an industrial, bourgeois society; the effects of industrialism, especially on the way people live. Altick brings to the discussion of these complicated questions the lively and sensitive intelligence that his many readers have come to expect. He includes contemporary illustrations and a full reference index.
The Victorian Theatre
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Victorian Theatre
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...a valid and informed analysis of the Victorian stage and a sourcebook that is remarkably rich...-Theatre Notebook
Votes for Women
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Votes for Women provides an innovative re-examination of the suffrage movement, presenting new perspectives which challenge the existing literature on this subject. This fascinating book charts the history of the movement in Britain from the nineteenth century to the postwar period, assessing important figures such as; * Emmeline Pankhurst and the militant wing * Millicent Garrett Fawcett, leader of the constitutional wing *Jennie Baines and her link with the international suffrage movements.
The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, Revised Edition
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The boldest and most distinguished introduction to drama available today, W.B. Worthen's pace-setting text continues to provide exciting plays usefully situated within their historical and cultural contexts. Based on the best-selling WADSWORTH ANTHOLOGY OF DRAMA, the Brief Edition provides many of the important elements of that anthology but in a more streamlined form.
