Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd is an innovative collection of essays, written by leading scholars in the fields of theatre, performance and eco-criticism, which reconfigures absurdist theatre ...through the optics of ecology and environment. As well as offering strikingly new interpretations of the work of canonical playwrights such as Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, Adamov, Albee, Kafka, Pinter, Shephard and Churchill, the book playfully mimics the structure of Martin Esslin's classic text The Theatre of the Absurd, which is commonly recognised as one of the most important scholarly publications of the 20th century. By reading absurdist drama, for the first time, as an emergent form of ecological theatre, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd interrogates afresh the very meaning of absurdism for 21st-century audiences, while at the same time making a significant contribution to the development of theatre and performance studies as a whole. The collection's interdisciplinary approach, accessibility, and ecological focus will appeal to students and academics in a number of different fields, including theatre, performance, English, French, geography and philosophy. It will also have a major impact on the new cross disciplinary paradigm of eco-criticism.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an object can be defined, amongst other things, as “the person or thing to which something is done, or on which something acts or operates”. Since ...classical antiquity, no form has been used as symbol, icon or image in European culture, more than the female body: from Athena as emblem of military victory; to Medusa as figuration of horror, to Mary as incarnation of purity. However, these female figures have tended to affirm the general good—or bad—rather than to affirm their own identity, specificity or subjectivity. The idealised—or demonised—female form in art and culture is “the person or thing to which something is done, or on which something acts or operates”; in other words, an object. Here, I discuss Judith from Barker’s play of the same name (1990). I summarise the story of Judith from the Bible. I then show how successive generations of theological and moral ideologies have acted upon her body, desire and sexuality, transforming her into an object. By analysing Barker’s playtext and several productions of the play, I suggest that Barker enables Judith fleetingly to affirm her status as subject, before mythology straitjackets her back into an object for its discourses of order and power.
An obituary for professor Christian Biet, who died in 2020, is presented. One might almost be forgiven for not knowing that Christian Biet was a leading seventeenth-centurist, seeing as the ...publications he produced and major events he organized, treated areas as diverse as contemporary Chinese theatre, theatre translation, performance art, and the Situationist International.
A particular kind of remembering and staging of our transient contemporary “reality” has become prevalent in the UK since the end of the twentieth century: verbatim theatre. This is a form of ...documentary theatre that stages theatre’s other – events and experiences as they are lived by actual people and rendered in witness testimonies that are transcribed word-for-word, edited into a play, and performed by actors. This essay examines four permutations on the verbatim mode: Dennis Kelly’s Taking Care of Baby (2007); and three pieces from a co-authored series of short plays on the 11 September 2001 attacks on the USA (9/11), Decade (2011) – Samuel Adamson’s Recollections of Scott Forbes , Simon Schama’s Epic, and Alexandra Wood’s My Name is Tania Head. Together, they plays enable an interrogation of what happens when theatre’s other – lived events and experiences – are staged. Whereas Adamson and Schama seem to employ verbatim in an attempt to narrow the gap between theatre and its other – the reality of the 9/11 attacks –, Wood and Kelly appear to insist upon the impossibility of such an endeavour. Whereas for Adamson and Schama the historical source material of the witness testimony is presented as credible, for Wood and Kelly this credibility, and the “reality” it purports to describe, are thrown into doubt. And yet, I conclude by arguing that too much is perhaps made of the fact that verbatim theatre might aspire towards an impossible coincidence between “real” events, document, and fiction. Regardless of the verbatim author’s and director’s intentionality, any play is a negotiation between “real” events and their representation, a fact of which I feel spectators are aware.
French Theatre 'dans la merde' Finburgh, Clare
Contemporary theatre review,
05/2012, Letnik:
22, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Finburgh discusses the hundred enraged protesters gather outside the French theater. Fifty protesters are arrested and charged under Article 431-1 of the Penal Code, with using intimidation to ...prevent freedom of expression.
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