Christine Dymkowski

The Cambridge companion to theatre history

Introduction: why? 1. Why theatre history? David Wiles Part I. When?: Indicative Timeline: 2. Modernist theatre Stefan Hulfeld 3. Baroque to romantic theatre Christopher Baugh 4. Medieval, renaissance and early modern theatre David Wiles 5. Classical theatre Erika Fischer-Lichte Part II. Where?: 6. Liverpool Ros Merkin 7. Finland S. E. Wilmer 8. Egypt Hazem Azmy 9. Traditional theatre: the case of Japanese Noh Diego Pellecchia 10. Reflections on a global theatre history Marvin Carlson Part III. What?: 11. The audience Willmar Sauter 12. The art of acting Josette Feral 13. Music theatre and musical theatre Zachary Dunbar 14. Circus Marius Kwint Part IV. How?: 15. The nature of historical evidence: a case study Thomas Postlewait 16. The visual record: the case of Hamlet Barbara Hodgdon 17. Museums, archives and collecting Fiona Macintosh 18. Re:enactment Gilli Bush-Bailey 19. The internet: history 2.0? Jacky Bratton and Grant Tyler Peterson.

‘The Play’s the Thing’: The Metatheatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker

Timberlake Wertenbaker is one of the most exciting playwrights to have emerged in Britain in the past decade. Her most notable work is self-reflexive, interrogating the nature and function of theatre in individual and communal life; through devices such as doubling and mirroring, her plays engage in a dialectical relationship with their audiences about the experiences they are undergoing as they watch. This essay will explore the myriad ways in which Wertenbaker initiates and sustains this relationship in two of her plays, Our Country’s Good and The Love of the Nightingale, both first staged in 1988.

Traditional theatre: the case of Japanese Noh

This chapter addresses the question of how we position ‘traditional’ theatre within a historical narrative that is likely to be constructed in linear terms and to be framed around the nation-state. Japanese Noh theatre offers a particularly interesting case study because it is self-evidently ‘theatre’ in terms of all normal Western definitions – Noh plays being based upon crafted literary scripts and offering the audience stories about distinctive characters – yet it sits outside the evolutionary narrative explored in Part II of this Cambridge Companion , which runs from twentieth-century modernist theatre back to the ancient Greeks. In 1868, at the dawn of the Meiji restoration that overturned the military regime of the Tokugawa shogunate and restored the central position of the Emperor, Japan opened its borders to the outside world after more than two centuries of almost complete closure. It is during this period that notions of Noh theatre started to circulate in Europe and North America through the accounts of the few who visited Japan, mostly diplomats and literati. Noh performance was initially ridiculed because of its performative means, such as the use of masks and the melange of mime and dance, regarded as primitive by spectators used to the late nineteenth-century naturalistic stage. Noh was an antiquity seen through the lens of the archaeologist (see Fig. 14).

Baroque to romantic theatre

The history of the theatre from the late sixteenth to late in the nineteenth century is usually framed around dominant periods of national dramatic literatures: theatre of the Spanish golden age; Shakespeare and his contemporaries; the classic theatre of France; the comedy of manners of the English Restoration; Weimar and the golden age of German theatre. Given the longevity, authenticity and the archaeological value of the printed play text, this framing is understandable and inevitable. Nevertheless, these histories with their focus upon ‘great works’ have the effect of identifying the written and spoken word as both the prime instigator and the most important archival souvenir of theatre. Inevitably such theatre histories have shaped our contemporary perception: what we consider to be ‘good’ dramatic literature. For example, beyond the small output of R. B. Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith, the British eighteenth-century theatre produced few plays that are today considered to be ‘good’ dramatic literature, and yet in terms of audience popularity, famous actors and scenic developments, the period clearly produced great theatre. Likewise, during the period c. 1830–c. 1880, theatre throughout Europe was a hugely popular form that responded fully and widely to social and political events, and yet, in marked contrast to opera, few plays from the period have entered the canon of dramatic literature. There appear, therefore, to be distinctive periods of European theatre history when the co-existence of ‘great’ dramatic literature with ‘great’ theatre did not occur. It would therefore seem to be important to treat with caution modern judgements about what is great dramatic literature and to inflect the assumption that ‘great plays’ are a necessary ingredient of great theatre. Whilst dramatic literature is of considerable importance, it should serve as only one approach to the making of histories of theatre. This essay aims to use the framing of the baroque and the romantic in order to make a narrative of theatre as a spatial and visual phenomenon from the late sixteenth century to the modernist revolt against romantic and material realism, which began in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

Caryl Churchill: Far Away … but Close to Home

Caryl Churchill has long been recognised as one of Britain’s most innovative and exciting dramatists. From the gender-swapping of Cloud Nine (1979), to the overlapping dialogue, fractured time scheme and impossible dinner party of Top Girls (1982), to the elliptical narrative of Icecream (1989), to the collaboration of dance, song, and speech in Lives of the Great Poisoners (1991), Churchill’s sense of play stands theatrical convention on its head and challenges her audiences to engage positively with each work on its own terms. At the same time, she also challenges herself: there is no playing safe, no return to familiar patterns, but constant reinvention. The only predictable aspect of a new Churchill play is that it is certain to surprise expectation. However, her playfulness with genre, structure, and style, often witty and sometimes exuberantly comic, is characteristically allied to a serious political, social and moral commitment, albeit one that is undidactically expressed. Indeed, Churchill’s theatrical inventiveness serves to make meaning elusive but not indeterminate, engaging spectators in a dialectical search for the significance of the theatrical experience. This essay will focus on the ways in which Churchill’s most recent play, Far Away (2000), has done so, relating them briefly to tactics employed in her other recent solo-authored work: The Skriker (1994), This is a Chair (1997) and Blue Heart (1997). Far Away opens in ‘HARPER’s house. Night’ with young Joan complaining ‘I can’t sleep’ to the aunt whose remote home she is visiting.1 In Stephen Daldry’s production, the audience, waiting for the play to start,

Breaking the rules: The plays of Sarah Daniels

Throughout her playwriting career, Sarah Daniels has relentlessly probed the fault‐lines of contemporary society, tackling issues that are sites of contention between conservative attitudes and liberal/radical reappraisals. Danielss handling of such potentially explosive subjects as power relations between the sexes, the position of women, lesbianism, pornography, male violence, and sexual abuse is itself subversive and challenging. By considering some of Danielss thematic concerns, her dramatic treatment of them, and the critical responses they have provoked, this essay demonstrates the ways in which the playwrights subversion of theatrical convention and expectation challenges normative social attitudes. It concludes that the most transgressive aspect of her work is the foregrounding of female experience in a culture that is still overwhelmingly male‐defined.

Medieval, renaissance and early modern theatre

All historians divide the past into periods, distinguishing moments of decisive change from times of relative stability. There is no other way to give the past a shape and thereby perceive it as something other than a random stream of events. Every label we put upon a historical period is already an interpretation and contains a story embedded within it. There is no escaping from this process into objectivity. Telling the story of the past in terms of centuries may appear to be a neutral process, but it is not, for the world flows on when centuries change. Italian theatre historians are relatively comfortable when framing books or essays around the cinquecento , the 1500s, because at the start of that century we find dramatists adapting Roman comedies into Italian in a decisive move into ‘renaissance’ drama, whilst at the end we find dramatists, again in imitation of antiquity, creating new forms of music-theatre that will later be defined as ‘baroque opera’. English historians struggle harder to make ‘sixteenth-century drama’ work as a narrative frame and usually opt for ‘Tudor drama’, since the Tudor dynasty ruled from 1485–1603. Shakespeare’s writing career straddled two centuries, not to mention two dynasties, and he has become the reference point for creating a sense of English theatre history. His mid-career Hamlet was probably written in 1601, while nothing remarkable seems to have happened in around 1500. The ‘Sixteenth Century’ works as an organising frame if the English historian wants to trace a process that culminated in the masterpieces of Shakespeare, but it yields a different kind of story to the Italian cinquecento . The word ‘medieval’ (i.e., of the ‘middle ages’) has proved one of the most resilient of all period labels. The idea of a time in the middle emerged as early as the fifteenth century, when Italian intellectuals tried to emulate a lost classical civilisation, believing that the ten centuries since the fall of the Roman Empire had been a time of cultural darkness. With the ruins of ancient buildings littered about their cities, Italians sensed the importance of a vanished civilisation and wanted to recoup what they saw as their own past; in the Germanic world of central Europe, on the other hand, the institution of the Holy Roman Empire implied that a line of continuity joined the first pagan emperors of Rome to their Christian successors, so the concept of a ‘middle’ ages dividing then from now was slower to emerge..

In memoriam : David Bradby (1942-2011) : liberte, egalite, fraternite

This special edition of Backpages is dedicated to commemorate the passing of Contemporary Theatre Reviews co-editor David Bradby, whose long-standing, exemplary, open-hearted leadership in theatre education, scholarship, translation, theory and practice was profound, and beyond measure. Backpages has gathered personal tributes from practitioners and fellow colleagues in the field in his memory.This special edition of Backpages is dedicated to commemorate the passing of Contemporary Theatre Reviews co-editor David Bradby, whose long-standing, exemplary, open-hearted leadership in theatre education, scholarship, translation, theory and practice was profound, and beyond measure. Backpages has gathered personal tributes from practitioners and fellow colleagues in the field in his memory.