Joanne Tompkins

Post-colonial drama : theory, practice, politics

Introduction: Re-acting (to) Empire 1. Re-citing the Classics: Canonical Counter-Discourse 2. Traditional Enactments: Ritual and Carnival 3. Post-colonialist History 4. The Languages of Resistance 5. Body Politics 6. Neo-Imperialisms

The ‘Place’ and Practice of Site-Specific Theatre and Performance

Performing Site-Specific Theatre engages with theatre and performance that is grounded in an in-depth exploration and expression of spatial practice. This volume emerged from the editors’ fascination with how different types of spatial arrangements affect our understanding of and relationships with performance: specifically, the particularities of ‘place’ and its capacity to recontextualize performance, just as performance can reformulate how we perceive and experience space and place.1 The form continues to provoke questions about what both performance and site convey; in response, this volume investigates how the genre operates now and into the future, when space, place, site, landscape, and location are regularly characterized by ambiguity, contingency, and unsettlement.

Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s–1960s

associated with British political drama’ (p. 28). The plays are identified as the work of Thatcher’s children and while the playwrights ‘are unable at this point to articulate political concepts’ (p. 64), their plays ‘point to the way in which this era’s events and trends shaped their individual and collective political subjectivities’ (p. 30). Kritzer contrasts their work with that of some of their contemporaries, such as Joe Penhall and Rebecca Pritchard, whom she sees as engaging with specific issues in order to raise the visibility of ‘aspects of society dismissed by Thatcher’ (p. 47), such as the mentally ill and disadvantaged young women. In her analysis of ‘In-Yer-Face’ plays, Kritzer locates Caryl Churchill as creating a dialogue across the generations and surveys how other playwrights have responded to these works’ alleged lack of direct social engagement, by focusing on issues such as multiculturalism and feminism. She sees these plays as an effort ‘to take up some of the unfinished business of the 1970s movements for social change’ (p. 122), and as laying the path for the resurgence of issue-based drama in recent years. In the fifth and sixth chapters, Kritzer examines this resurgence starting with The Colour of Justice at the Tricycle in 1998. She explicitly links this renewal to the election of New Labour in 1997, which ‘seems to have restored the level of confidence necessary to present arguments for social and political change’ (p. 154). She traces the rise of documentary forms of theatre, examining examples of tribunal and verbatim theatre, including the work of Richard Norton-Taylor and David Hare. ‘Systems of Power’ is perhaps the most interesting chapter. Here, Kritzer looks at political theatre by examining the hegemonic ways in which power works, so ‘exposing these systems of power by bringing them to conscious attention’ (p. 123). The theoretical ground covered is vast and whilst Kritzer points out some interesting directions, it is impossible to examine all these areas in any critical depth. For example, she explores the portrayal of religion in contemporary British theatre in a mere seven pages. This problem pervades the book as a whole. In trying to categorise the constellation of works produced by British playwrights over the last decade, Kritzer sets herself a difficult task, especially in so short a book. It is no wonder that she can offer little more than a whistle-stop tour. Kritzer takes a playwright-centric viewpoint and fails to consider the possibility that non-textual work has made any contribution, as in her opinion the ‘political theatre of contemporary Britain is a theatre of words’ (p. 224). Moreover, there are some puzzling omissions in Kritzer’s choice of playwrights. While she briefly refers to both Anthony Neilson and Martin Crimp, their plays are notably absent from the theatrical landscape of Britain painted in this book. This could be due to the fact that Kritzer’s definition of a political play rests ultimately on the play’s content, such that ‘theatre is considered political if it presents or constructs a political issue or comments on what is already perceived as a political issue’ (p. 10). The new forms that she catalogues are seen as vehicles to deliver the political content rather than operating on a political level themselves. She briefly considers the construction of a politics of form within contemporary performance theory, including Gilles Deleuze’s theatre of nonrepresentation and Hans-Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic theatre, but denies political agency to either. She goes further, claiming that ‘there is no question that postmodern theory and its theatrical offshoots have played a part in delegitimizing socially activist theatre and inhibiting recent development of issue based drama’ (p. 21). Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain is a good introduction to the range of new writing in British theatre over the past ten years, albeit from a rather conservative viewpoint. While bringing to our attention playwrights whose works have yet to be considered in any critical depth, this book perhaps struggles to demonstrate how a political theatre might operate within the current political climate.

Performing Ghosts in Australia: Ibsen and an example of Australian Cultural Translation

This article examines the potential for an Australian translation of Ghosts to create, in Adam Versényi’s words, “a conduit for conversation and comprehension.” I explore the “cultural translation” in the Queensland Theatre Company’s (QTC’s) production of Ghosts in Brisbane in 1989. Any cultural translation has the potential to produce new interpretations of cultural understanding, whether, here, of Australian social history and theatre, of Ibsen’s own texts and contexts, or a combination of the two. What occurs in this Australian production of Ghosts is a specific cultural reformulation of the nature of “scandal,” across the world, over 100 years after the staging of syphilis (even though unnamed) shocked early audiences of Ghosts. Ellen Mortensen’s assessment of “scandal” in Ghosts and Hedda Gabler argues the significance of continuing to analyse “the re-emergence of that which is most feared and repressed in the familiar setting of everyday life” (2007, 170). She argues that the nature of the scandalous and how we might redress it “are still crucial questions on our post-modern, virtual reality” (2007, 183). In this article, I analyse a version of Ibsen Studies, 2013 Vol. 13, No. 1, 2–27, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2013.792663

The politics of location in Othello, Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet, and Ong Keng Sen's Desdemona

This article begins with Ania Loombas well-known position that analysing intercultural Shakespeare requires an understanding that ‘Shakespeare’ becomes ‘local’ in some new contexts and rendered ‘foreign’ in others. From Loombas argument, we can suggest that just as ‘Shakespeare’ continues to be altered, so should the concept of ‘location’ (whether ‘foreign’ or ‘local’) be seen to transform and even to multiply. In attempting to pinpoint the significance of ‘location’ in this context, the author addresses the relationship between local and foreign in two plays that are loosely based on Shakespeares Othello: Ong Keng Sens Desdemona (2000) and Djanet Searss Harlem Duet (1997). These two plays explore the meaning of ‘local’ and even of location itself; while Harlem Duet constructs a poetics of displacement in the context of a politics of location, Desdemonas focus on the poetics of displacement to the virtual exclusion of a politics of location reduces its potential to achieve its cultural and political goals.

Editorial Comment: Theatre, Performance, and Visual Images

1 See David Román, ed., “Theatre and Visual Culture,” Theatre Journal 53, no. 1 (2001); and Ric Knowles, ed., “Spectatorship,” Theatre Journal 66, no. 3 (2014). 2 Maaike Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Joel Anderson, Theatre & Photography (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 3 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), quote on 108. 4 Joe Kelleher, The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015). Editorial Comment: Theatre, Performance, and Visual Images

Teaching Spatial Theory and Theatre ‘Site-Specifically’

In this chapter, the author documents her teaching experiences in the MAIPR programme in terms of how a course unfolded in its two iterations in Finland: in Tampere and Helsinki respectively. She outlines how this form of teaching instilled in the students an active learning about spatiality in the theatre. It brought an element of site-specificity to this type of teaching, something that is rarely possible in the institutional context presented by most universities. Instead of using the lecture theatre or the classroom, the students in the first cohort encountered spatiality through the different (theatre) locations in which the classes were held. They attended live theatre productions and discussed each performance’s use of space. Many students reported after the course was completed that they finally understood the significance of and possibilities in space. The author thinks what really raised their understanding about spatiality was the opportunity to understand its potential in numerous ‘locations’. This chapter maps how a form of ‘site-specificity’, a well-known and popular genre of theatre, is an ideal means for introducing students to the intricacies of spatiality in performance.

Staging supernatural creatures in a computer-based visualisation of London’s sixteenth-century Rose Theatre

ABSTRACT This paper argues for recreating performance techniques from early modern theatre by deploying a computer-based visualisation of the Rose Theatre, a London venue from the 1590s. It focuses on one spectacular performance feature in early modern theatre, the dragon, which communicated a combination of excitement, fear, and dread. This era marked a transition between the end of both pagan beliefs and an unquestioned acceptance of Christianity, and a more human-centred (and inquisitive) moment in early modern thinking. Yet the effect of such creatures does not disappear instantly: they continued to yield a fearful awe. Theatrically, this time was extremely dynamic in form and topic, but little is known about the detail of actual performative techniques used at the time. Dragons were known to have been staged at the Rose, as documented by the theatre’s owner, but no detail on its size or the manner of its ‘performance’ remains. To illustrate the potential of digital visualisations for theatre generally and to explore how this dragon may have worked in a detailed virtual model of the Rose Theatre, we track practicalities of size and manoeuvrability; venue questions regarding scale; and theatrical matters of visual impact and effect.

‘Peddling’ Et dukkehjem: The Role of the State

This chapter investigates three ways in which Norway has contributed to shaping the play’s production history. The first pattern maps the touring trajectories of the early Nordic Noras, who created a major interpretative tradition. The second shows the regional and global flows of Nordic artists and productions from 1914 to 1990. Unbroken artistic networks of artists link these tours back to the premiere of the play in 1879: this degree of artistic interconnection is unprecedented in the study of a single play. The third group of patterns comes from maps showing the post-1990 global distribution of the play. These touring circuits are extensive and have been developed through a series of initiatives put in place by the Norwegian government.

Adaptation at a Distance

This chapter addresses the diversity of adaptations of Ibsen’s play. Using eleven productions for geographical, temporal, and interpretative range–Britain 1889, the USA 1938 and 1987, India 1958, Germany 1981, Nigeria 2006, Japan 2006, Pakistan 2006, Malawi 2006, China 2010, and Chile 2012–the chapter provides visualisations of dramaturgical structures that make us rethink theatrical adaptation. Four key areas emerge: the importance of temporal structures; the relationship between genres and spatial relocations; the importance of empathy in the manipulation of character; and the cultural constraints on narrative relocation. The network analysis shows the flexibility with which the play can be adapted to reflect radically different social structures, the most surprising of which is the loss of female agency.