Richard J. Hand

The Grand-Guignol: Aspects of Theory and Practice

The Theâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris (1897–1962) achieved a legendary reputation as the ‘Theatre of Horror’, a venue displaying such explicit violence and blood-curdling terror that a resident doctor was employed to treat the numerous spectators who fainted each night. Indeed, the phrase ‘grand-guignolesque’ has entered the language to describe any display of heightened, remorseless horror. Such is the myth of the Grand-Guignol: the reality is subtler and far more complex.

Uncanny Audio: The Place and Use of Sound in Gothic Performance

Although we typically think of Gothic performance as a realm of visual spectacle, it is a place where the auditory may be even more important. Throughout theatre history, pioneering developments in audio technology have found an affinity with the uncanny. The audiences of Greek plays, Renaissance drama, nineteenth-century stage illusions and melodrama or the Theâtre du Grand-Guignol had their moods manipulated by efficacious sound effects and music. Contemporary live performance continues to develop ingenious sound design: from ‘in-the-dark’ stage plays such as Hattie Naylor’s Going Dark (2010) and Glen Neath and David Rosenberg’s binaural productions to experiences created by Disney or the London Dungeons, the auditory can be exploited on physiological and psychological levels to place the audience in an extraordinarily uncanny or alienated position.

Wireless zombies! A re-creation of Golden Age radio drama for a contemporary audience

The literally unseen yet fully imagined abject condition of the zombie has ensured that this incarnation of horror has played a resonant role in the history of popular radio drama through to the digital audio cultures of the present day. This article describes and contextualizes the production of Lover’s Lane (2013), an all-new zombie radio play in the 1940s style, by audio and radio researchers at the University of South Wales. This practical re-creation of the performance practices of ‘Golden Age’ radio was designed for both theatre and online audiences simultaneously. The discussion includes a variety of perspectives: writing/directing (Hand); production and broadcast (Traynor); music composition and performance (Challis and Smith); sound effects (Dean); and voice acting (D’Arcy).

Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives on the British Library's Archival Sound Recordings Project

p r e f a c e The authors are members of the User Panel of the British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings (ASR) project.1 We represent a number of performing and visual arts disciplines and a variety of approaches to research and teaching; our aim here is to give an overview of the ASR project and reflect on some of the ways it may inform and enhance our work. Over the past year the User Panel has built a productive relationship with the project’s design and implementation team at the British Library National Sound Archive. Our thinking has advanced in sometimes surprising ways from diverse multidisciplinary viewpoints on how we can use digitised audio materials. Launched on 28 September 2006, the ASR project represents something of a milestone in digital provision in the UK as a large set of highquality, well-described audio materials from our most important national collection. It is making four thousand hours of digitized audio freely available to the Higher and Further education communities of the UK. The initial choice of content reflects the broad span of the Sound Archive’s holdings. It ranges from unique and previously unpublished African field recordings, to a comprehensive collection of Beethoven String Quartet recordings over the past hundred years, to four hundred tracks illustrating developments in popular music. It includes oral histories of jazz in Britain, told by musicians, promoters and the label owners; sound actuality in Soundscapes; seventeen hundred hours of visual art oral history interviews; the Bow Dialogues, recordings made in the 1970s of weekly dialogues held at Bow Church, East London, between the Rector of the Church, Joseph McCulloch, and an invited guest, usually a wellknown personality in his or her field (contributors included Bernard Levin, Germaine Greer, James Callaghan, and Iris Murdoch); broadcast material ranging from African Writers’ Club, a collection of BBC World Service material that focuses on the rich vein of African literature, to the Sony Radio Awards, a selection based on the winners and nominees to the award from 1986 to 1997, representing the best of UK radio broadcasts. In addition there are supporting transcripts, summaries and visual materials. In the following pages we reflect on the likely impact of this digital collection on research and teaching in the performing and visual arts; the effects of enhanced accessibility to this collection; the way in which it may change our practices of research and teaching; the consequences of digital resources on education at all levels, and how to prepare future generations for the choices and directions they can take. We start with an overview from Celia Duffy on the current state of play and the sorts of tools users need to get the best from digitised audio collections, then move to discipline-specific perspectives: Deborah Price takes a performed and performative stance towards the materials, Rachel Cowgill and Richard Hand consider

Staging an ‘unbearable spectacle’: Joseph Conrad's Laughing Anne

Abstract Although completed in 1920 and published soon afterwards, Joseph Conrads play Laughing Anne remained unperformed until June 2000, when the première was presented at the University of Glamorgan and toured Britain and the USA. Conrads play was long neglected not least because of John Galsworthys condemnation of the script as technically naïve and even, in places, threatening to present ‘an almost unbearable spectacle’. In producing this forgotten play, we faced the challenge of navigating through Conrads alleged naïveté and implied obscenity for our performance. What we in fact discovered through rehearsal and in production is a play that is as avant-garde and eclectic as it is innocent or antiquated. Moreover, it proved impossible to stage Conrads decidedly problematic tale of adventure without being influenced by—and alluding to—other deconstructions of heroism since 1920. Neither could we realise Conrads script without acknowledging Conrad as a cultural icon.