Christopher Fitz-Simon – författare
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2 produkter
2 produkter
Del 206 - Carysfort Press Ltd.
Buffoonery and Easy Sentiment
Popular Irish plays in the decade prior to the opening of the Abbey Theatre
Häftad, Engelska, 2019
368 kr
Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar
In this fascinating reappraisal of the non-literary drama of the late 19th - early 20th century, Christopher Fitz-Simon discloses a unique world of plays, players and producers in metropolitan theatres in Ireland and other countries where Ireland was viewed as a source of extraordinary topics at once contemporary and comfortably remote: revolution, eviction, famine, agrarian agitation, political assassination.The form was the fashionable one of melodrama, yet Irish melodrama was of a particular kind replete with hidden messages, and the language was far more allusive, colourful and entertaining than that of its English equivalent. There was much diversity, as shown in plays as different as Murray & Shine’s An Irish Gentleman, Hubert O’Grady’s The Priest Hunter, J.W.Whitbread’s The Victoria Cross and Edward Selden’s McKenna’s Flirtation.
375 kr
Skickas inom 11-20 vardagar
Rise above!: Letters from Tyrone Guthrie details the life of the celebrated theatrical director whose influence on international theatre lives on. Here, in a stunning volume of letters, we are offered a glimpse into the vision of this extraordinary figure as well as a view of the intimacies of his relationships with his mother, sister, wife and friends. During the 1940s and 1950s Guthrie was renowned for liberating the plays of Shakespeare from declamatory delivery and excessive staging. His most enduring legacy was in inspiring the creation of modern theatre buildings where the plays of antiquity could be brought closer to the audience, such as at Stratford, Canada, and the theatre that bears his name in Minneapolis, USA. Of Scots-Irish parentage, he identified most closely with his mother’s home at Annaghmakerrig, Co. Monaghan, which he made his professional headquarters after her death, hosting producers, designers, playwrights and composers there while planning worldwide productions. Guthrie’s letters to his mother, Norah, his wife, Judith, and his sister, Peggy, give a balanced account of his professional and domestic life, and it was on the advice of his sister and her husband, Hubert Butler, that he left his mother’s house to the Irish nation as a workplace for writers and artists. Faced with often seemingly insurmountable financial and personal disaster, his celebrated mantra ‘Rise above!’ was testament to a life lived in the wings of an operatic opening night or a Shakespearean tragedy. Guthrie’s vivid descriptions of places visited are matched by the observational skills of his remarks on the people he worked with, among them well-known figures such as Benjamin Britten, Alec Guinness, Charles Laughton, Siobhán McKenna, Micheál MacLíammóir, the Oliviers and others. Family members come in for as many amused comments as do the famous and distinguished: Cousin Molly is no more spared than Sir Winston Churchill. Fitz-Simon has gathered an important, and entrancing, collection of Tyrone Guthrie’s letters, raising a curtain on the life of Ireland’s leading theatre director of the twentieth-century