Stage and Screen Studies – serie

This book is an analysis and study of postmodernism, political theatre, and the politics of representation. Traversing a wide span of twentieth-century political theatre and performance practices in the West, the author analyses and questions the performance practices of the historical and neo-avant-gardes, modernist political theatre, and postmodern performance in order to explore the relationships between politics, performance and postmodernism. Chinna contends that it is the provisional and contingent strategies of performance which set the model for the postmodern. Drawing on the poststructuralist theories of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, among others, the postmodern is defined as a performance model – like deconstruction, endlessly deferring unequivocal meaning and final closure. It is argued that historical avant-garde performance practices such as Dada, as well as the neo-avant-gardes from the 1950s onward, were always trapped within a dialectic of representation and the ‘real’ in their quest for a merging of art and life.

Roger Blin’s career in the Arts was woven inextricably into the fabric of the Twentieth-Century French Avant-Garde. First appearing in the films of Abel Gance, Marcel Carné and Jean Cocteau, his acting career led him to a close friendship and association with Antonin Artaud, for whom he performed the function of assistant director. He championed Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot, otherwise rejected unanimously by the French theatrical establishment, was Jean Genet’s director of choice and was long associated with artists and practitioners as diverse as Arthur Adamov, Jean-Louis Barrault and Jacques Prévert. Marxist in outlook, Blin also sought to apply rigorous humanist principles to his art and delighted in the opportunities he enjoyed to disrupt and upturn the attitudes and complacencies of certain of his audiences. This book surveys all aspects of Blin’s artistic output to consider and clarify his motivations, his ambitions and his aesthetic preferences. In doing so, the author hopes to offer perspectives on the methodologies that Blin employed and define the influence his work and his legacy has exerted on the French and World stage.

The Many Lives of Galileo is a Marxist study of the development of Bertolt Brecht’s great play Galileo on the English stage. Tracing various translations of Brecht’s original, and the historical and political moments surrounding these translations, Dougal McNeill examines how, across the distances of culture, history and language, The Life of Galileo has come to figure so prominently in the life of English-language theatre.The translations and productions of Galileo by Charles Laughton, Howard Brenton and David Hare are examined, in a method combining close reading with an attention to broader social contexts, with an eye to uncovering their implications for drama in performance.Brecht valued re-creation, re-invention and re-telling as much as creation itself. In this book the author applies Brecht’s aesthetic to translations of his own work, following Laughton, Brenton and Hare as they set themselves the task of rewriting Brecht and, in the process, use him to comment on their own eras.

The private detective novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane have provided the source for some of Hollywood’s most successful, controversial and baffling films. Spanning almost the whole of the studio era, the private eye mini-genre boasted stars like William Powell, Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell, as well as top-calibre directors John Huston, Edward Dmytryk and Robert Aldrich. Yet the movies themselves still manage to remain something of an enigma: MGM’s influential adaptation of Hammett’s The Thin Man has been all but ignored by critics and historians, while classic entries such as The Maltese Falcon and Murder, My Sweet are usually considered only within the wider context of film noir. This book provides a new perspective on the private eye mini-genre of the studio area. Drawing extensively on archival material, Hollywood Through Private Eyes links the private eye screen adaptation to its novelistic source, charting the journey from page to screen and exploring the key influences along the way.

This book examines the ritualistic and mythological features derived from various religious traditions depicted in ten Ibsen plays. The worshipping of the Great Mother, the Mysteries of Eleusis, the Hebrew Passover Meal and Yom Kippur, alongside with the most sacred feasts of Christianity, are identified in Ibsen’s texts in a way not discovered before. The outcome is a fascinating voyage through a landscape of ritualistic visions. Throughout the book the author illustrates how the plays contribute to the revival of the sacred in modernist theatre. Each chapter of the book contains a synopsis of the play interpreted, followed by a detailed analysis, which focuses on religious concepts and mythological elements incorporated in Ibsen’s texts.

Samuel Beckett’s Play, written 1962-63, was an aesthetic watershed inaugurating his late, ‘abstract’ dramatic style. This book gets close to Beckett’s creative process by examining the possible influence of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music and Vassily Kandinsky’s abstract painting upon this formal shift; by tracing Beckett’s developing attitude to abstraction and its relation to his long-standing preoccupation with the ‘breakdown’ of the subject-object relation and the ultimate failure of all expression; and by following his formal choices through manuscript drafts. The author goes on to analyse Beckett’s attempt to adapt his new methods to the media of film and television, and to demonstrate how Beckett’s late works for stage and screen develop alongside one another right up to his 1985 adaptation of the play What Where for television. Throughout the book, unpublished manuscript materials such as Beckett’s letters, drafts, notes on philosophy, psychology and art, and his ‘German diaries’ augment a detailed account of the submerged sources that Beckett appropriated to the evolving needs of his abstract dramatic art.

This book examines changes in performance practice in mainstream British theatre since 1945 which focus on the attempt by directors and companies to replace the realism of inter-war theatre with more physically and vocally expressive acting and ensemble approach to production processes. The aim was to replace the capitalist line-management approach of the commercial theatre with a more democratic collaborative structure that would encourage contribution to the creation of the performance text by the director, writer, actors, designers and technicians. Theatre is viewed as a mode of socio-cultural practice and its evolution in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century is explored in the context of changes in cultural perception, state subsidy, the social status of theatre, technology, and aesthetic influences from abroad. The study focuses not on dramatic texts but on mainstream productions that represent stages in an aesthetic evolution. They include Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1946); Theatre Workshop’s A Taste of Honey (1958) and Oh What a Lovely War (1963); The Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1962), The Wars of the Roses (1963), The Theatre of Cruelty Laboratory (1964), The Marat-Sade (1964) and US (1966); Steven Berkoff’s Metamorphosis (1969) and Complicite’s The Three Lives of Lucy Cabrol (1994).

In the age of Alfonso II D’Este (1533-1597), the tournois à thème developed into a more complex performance, the cavalleria, which involved stage-setting, acting, music, dancing, machinery and firework displays. One of its most accomplished examples was the cavalleria L’Isola Beata (1569), which is fully described and analysed in this work. The cavalleria also influenced the development of dramatic tournaments in the Italian courts, and anticipated a new form of performance in the Baroque period, the opera-torneo.