Hanna Scolnicov - Böcker

This is a volume of essays, which examines the relationship between the play and its historical and cultural contexts. Transferring plays from one period or one culture to another is so much more than translating the words from one language into another. The contributors vary their approaches to this problem from the theoretical to the practical, from the literary to the theatrical, with plays examined both historically and synchronically. The articles interact with each other, presenting a diversity of views of the central theme and establishing a dialogue between scholars of different cultures. With play texts quoted in English, the range of themes stretches from a Japanese interpretation of Chekhov to Shakespeare in Nazi Germany, and Racine borrowing from Sophocles. Most of the essays are based on papers presented at the Jerusalem Theatre Conference in 1986. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of the theatre and of literature and literary theory as well as to theatregoers.

This is a volume of essays, which examines the relationship between the play and its historical and cultural contexts. Transferring plays from one period or one culture to another is so much more than translating the words from one language into another. The contributors vary their approaches to this problem from the theoretical to the practical, from the literary to the theatrical, with plays examined both historically and synchronically. The articles interact with each other, presenting a diversity of views of the central theme and establishing a dialogue between scholars of different cultures. With play texts quoted in English, the range of themes stretches from a Japanese interpretation of Chekhov to Shakespeare in Nazi Germany, and Racine borrowing from Sophocles. Most of the essays are based on papers presented at the Jerusalem Theatre Conference in 1986. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of the theatre and of literature and literary theory as well as to theatregoers.

In this book Hanna Scolnicov examines the configuration of the theatrical space as an icon of the problem of woman. Through her historical and comparative study, Scolnicov reveals the changing conventions of the theatrical space as faithful expressions of the changing attitudes to woman and her sexuality. The theatrical space has shifted accordingly from the front of the palace, to the street, the piazza, and then, progressively, into the drawing-room, the kitchen, the bedroom, narrowing down the scope and infringing on the privacy of intimate relations. Some contemporary playwrights have gone further, deconstructing the familiar naturalistic room to form a non-mimetic interior. From this unusual vantage point, Scolnicov looks at plays by a wide range of authors, including, among others, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Plautus, Shakespeare, Jonson, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov and Pinter, relating them to contemporary pictorial and architectural evidence. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of theatre and theatre history, comparative literature, and women's studies.

The Experimental Plays of Harold Pinter offers a fresh approach to the plays of Nobel Prize laureate Harold Pinter. He is highlighted as an experimental playwright who attempted to free the theatre from the legacy of realism, causality, and motivation. His plays are read in relation to the avant-garde movements in the visual arts and music that flourished in the twentieth century. Scolnicov's new interdisciplinary perspective sets Pinter’s dramatic works against a background of the other arts and yields new insights into the themes and structure of the plays, underlining their evolving innovativeness. Such an approach has not been attempted to date, and Pinter’s plays are usually discussed in the context of their contemporary drama and theatre. This shift of interpretive focus requires a radical change in the acting technique called for by Pinter’s plays. The intermedial reading offered in the book also carries wider implications for the development of theatre studies.Twentieth-century dramatic criticism has lagged behind art criticism and has not been quick enough to develop adequate tools for the analysis of Pinter’s experiments with theatrical form. Scolnicov borrows from the ideas of different contemporary art movements, such as hyperrealism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, minimalism, conceptual art, and abstract art to better understand his work. Pinter also adapted techniques from music, film, and literature, constantly re-defining the limits of dramatic art and theatre in his plays.