Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2021.1969558
Michelle MacArthur, Signy Lynch, S. Mealey
In Canada, over the last two decades, the concurrent demise of print journalism and the rise of the blogosphere have dramatically altered the theatre criticism landscape, a situation that is mirrored in other international theatre markets. While some consider this a period of existential crisis for criticism and an erosion of quality journalism, others see it as a period of vibrant experimentation and democratization, as writers explore new forms of critical expression online and bypass the gatekeeping of traditional editorial processes. Both sides of these debates are concerned with power: who has it, how it is perceived, and where and how it manifests itself in the theatrical blogosphere. As arts organizations reflect on the role they play in upholding white supremacy, prompted by the global anti-racist activism in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, these questions about power in the theatrical blogosphere take on new urgency on an international scale. In this article, we argue that the internet has not democratized theatre criticism: the proliferation of online venues for reviewing, while increasing access for some writers, has not unsettled the power dynamics cemented during the print era of journalism. The few critics who are remunerated for their work and are published on more visible platforms (often, those associated with traditional, print media outlets) remain a homogenous and elite group. Our empirical study of Canadian theatre reviewers further demonstrates that distinctions between professional and amateur critics are not meaningful in this digital age; we propose new, platform-based categories that more accurately reflect the nuanced power dynamics at play within the blogosphere. 1. Megan Vaughan documents pushback against theatre bloggers in her 2020 book Theatre Blogging: The Emergence of a Critical Culture (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama), 10.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2021.1990899
B. Lease
Bryce Lease: For the past few years, you have been adapting canonical nineteenth century naturalist plays, using Chekhov and Ibsen, for example, to assess social taboos in the particular cultural spaces you occupy as an international director. What made you decide to turn to contemporary American fiction for this production at the Schauspielhaus? Yana Ross: It has been a long dream to stage this text. I had personally discovered Wallace in 2010 and since then, I have been completely obsessed with his language, the density and intellectual rigour of the writing, as well as his incredibly funny, dark sense of humour. I have been carrying this book around and pushing it on every theatre I would go into. We came very close to staging it at Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, but we were unable to secure the rights in the end. However, it feels like it was a project that was waiting to happen at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. This theatre is so open-minded and artistically ripe for this kind of experiment. We staged it at the Schiffbau-Halle, which is a fantastic space that has its own carte blanche to really experiment. I am relieved the piece finally happened and it happened here. BL: You always heavily adapt, rewrite, and rework texts. This is often done in collaboration with the actors and your dramaturg – in this case, Laura Paetau, who has worked on queer-feminist and ‘postmigrant’ themes and aesthetics in German-speaking theatres. David Foster Wallace employs artistic strategies such as footnotes and multiple points of perspective – you have also woven a rich tapestry of texts and perspectives, which are fractured and self-mediated. There is no obvious order to the interviews in the book. Could you tell us about your creative process and how you worked with the actors to shape and determine the dramaturgical structure? YR: From day one, I tried to encourage the whole team, and especially the actors, to let go of Aristotelian, linear dramaturgical thinking. Let go of the idea of a beginning, a middle, some kind of relief, a character on a journey – pack this all up and throw it out of the window. We are looking at Plato, looking in the cave, at parallel worlds, in the shadows. We are playing with bits and pieces, and montage, and abstraction. We need to keep a bird’s eye view in rehearsal all the time, so when you get too close to the character or Contemporary Theatre Review, 2021 Vol. 31, No. 4, 496–507, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1990899
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2021.1969557
Ella Parry-Davies
February 2019. I’m at a protest, talking to a man outside a grey, nondescript building near London Bridge. ‘My daughter’s had to emigrate, she can’t find work’, he tells me. ‘My factory has closed down’. He looks at the grey building. ‘This is the problem’, he says; ‘they are the problem’. Becket House is empty today; normally a queue forms in the cold early mornings, when people who are seeking asylum in the UK, and others with temporary immigration status, come for their weekly or fortnightly ‘compliance’ checks. Vans parked round the back, out of sight, wait to take some into detention centres indefinitely; the force used by officers has been described as ‘disproportionate’. 1 The man’s pink face is flushed against a grey sky cleft by the Shard, a 300 metre glass and steel tower rising behind him. I lift my hand towards the distant windows of luxury offices. ‘The problem is there’, I say. But he turns again towards the dull concrete of Becket House; sees only the ghosts of Black and brown bodies queuing around the corner. June 2019. ‘Amara’ has taken me to Piccadilly Circus, where she slept rough one night after escaping from abusive employers as a live-in domestic worker, and finding herself undocumented and homeless in London. Now, through a screening procedure named the National Referral Mechanism, she is awaiting a Home Office decision about whether she has been deemed a victim of ‘modern slavery’. While she waits, she has no right to work, and receives approximately £5 per day subsistence. It’s been almost three years. 1. HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, ‘Report on an Unannounced Inspection of the Short-Term Holding Facility at Becket House’, June 18, 2019, https://www. justiceinspectorates. gov.uk/hmiprisons/ wp-content/uploads/ sites/4/2019/09/ Becket-House-web2019.pdf (accessed December 9, 2020). Contemporary Theatre Review, 2021 Vol. 31, No. 4, 409–421, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1969557
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2021.1969555
Dorota Semenowicz
On 19 July 1985, about a hundred people, mainly from theatre circles, were allowed inside a working slaughterhouse (upon invitation, after hours) in the Italian town of Riccione. There, as part of the Santarcangelo Festival, the company Magazzini Criminali were to perform a shortened version of their 1984 play Genet a Tangeri. The actors were reciting fragments of their lines while walking in the yard, stables, and other spaces of the building that held slaughterhouse machinery, drainage gutters, carts, stone tubs, and metal hooks – all clean but emanating the smells of animals and blood. In the stables, slaughterhouse workers held and stroked a horse. Then in the next room, with a veterinarian present, they killed the animal with a shot to the head, then skinned, disembowelled, and cut it into pieces. The workers were performing their daily tasks and the horse they were processing into meat was already scheduled for slaughter – the audience had been informed of this fact before entering the building. Actors and slaughterhouse staff made no contact; they were functioning separately and independently in the space. When butchering had been completed and once the equipment was methodically cleaned, the actors wrote Jean Genet’s name across the room’s white walls, and then, while sitting on the floor under one of the building’s walls, they read excerpts aloud from his article ‘Four Hours in Shatila’, written in 1982 following the massacre of Palestinian refugees in camps in Sabra and Shatila, in West Beirut. Genet was among the first foreigners into the massacre sites shortly after the attack had been carried out by Lebanese Phalangists who, with the consent of Israeli commanders, had murdered hundreds of camp inhabitants. The Magazzini Criminali performance at the festival soon sparked off a heated debate in the Italian press and resulted in the company being Contemporary Theatre Review, 2021 Vol. 31, No. 4, 422–437, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1969555
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2021.1968588
Victoria Lowe
also highlight the persistent fragility of such exercises as ‘social connotations that are still commonly attached to [Standard Pronunciation; StP] and [Non-Standard English] accents, on and off the Shakespearean stage’ remain dominant. Massai also deftly charts the history and role of Original Pronunciation (OP) practices in diversifying Shakespearean performance style and acoustics, and finding new audiences for Shakespeare, before taking a further step back in time to explore David Garrick’s ‘Sonic Revolution’ of the eighteenth century. By combining a carefully constructed performance history with a socio-cultural study of the contemporaneous perception of accents, she thus exposes the cultural divides that existed between those who advocated for a StP Shakespeare (although just what counted as StP was highly controversial) versus those who desired a more ‘natural’ delivery, such as Garrick and the two John Palmers. As Massai explains, ‘elitist attitudes towards the ownership of Shakespeare and spoken drama in the nineteenth century’ would result in Received Pronunciation ‘reign[ing] supreme on the English stage’ for centuries to come (140). As ever, central to these discussions is a perennial concern with legitimacy, place and ‘acoustic correctness’ (140) that therefore ‘prevent[s] the urgent, acoustic emancipation or re-activation of both performer and spectator, voicer and listener’ (194). Whilst Massai acknowledges the methodological difficulties that are inherent to studying and reimagining accents from the early modern era, she convincingly argues that accents were used, if sparingly, for characterisation and sophisticated dramatic effect on the early modern stage by drawing on two central examples: the role of Evans and the Anglo-Welsh accent in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Edgar’s deliberate use of a Southern accent whilst confronting Oswald in King Lear. As Massai powerfully concludes, ‘we tend to not only underestimate the versatility of English accents and dialects as they were deployed by Shakespeare and his contemporaries on the early modern stage but [also] the extent to which inflected voices carried social and cultural meanings’ (188). These meanings continue to be shaped and reformed as ‘politically charged acts of self-(re)fashioning’ (190). This accessibly written book is grounded in a thoroughly researched performance and sociolinguistic history of vital conversations that continue to shape current practices and approaches towards the intricate relationships and power dynamics between accents, theatre-making, and Shakespeare. It is an important read for students and scholars of Shakespearean performance, past and present, and the cultural and political history of sociolinguistics.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2021.1969556
Melissa Poll
Towards an Eighth Fire Approach: Developing Modes of Indigenous-Settler Performance-Making on Turtle Island
走向第八个火的途径：海龟岛上原住民表演制作的发展模式
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2021.1968589
Mischa Twitchin
tualisation of viewer responses to scripted reality shows such as The Hills (2006–10). Hunter argues here that the uncertainty produced between the ‘staged and the spontaneous’ (77) in these programmes is one of the pleasures of engagement for viewers, because appreciation of their co-presence suggests that ‘illusion and reality might not be the distinct and opposed categories received knowledge suggests them to be’ (78). Hunter makes a comparison between this and the Wooster Group’s intermedial performance of Hamlet (2007), which staged and disrupted the footage of Richard Burton’s Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud, initially broadcast live and once only from Broadway to cinemas across the US in 1964. Hunter argues that the central conceit of the Wooster Group’s production is in the similar pleasurable apprehension of different levels of authenticity in performance, although this is achieved through its blurring of the supposed ontological distinctions between the live and the recorded. The Burton-Gielgud Electronovision experiment also provides a useful comparison for an examination of the claims to liveness central to the productions broadcast to cinemas by NT Live and the RSC’s Live from Stratford-upon-Avon. The growth in live theatre broadcasting to cinemas is almost matched by the growth in academic scholarship, with several books on the subject published in the last four years, and Hunter does not say much that is new about this now established practice. Rather, she reframes the question to look at how producers’ insistence on the distinctness and ‘realness’ of the experience of watching these plays in the cinema (in which liveness is often invoked) operates more to reify certain qualities as necessary to preserve theatre as theatre, or in other words, ‘a mediatization that does not endanger the ontological “core” of theatrical experience’ (12). Again, she makes fascinating parallels between these institutional framings of the event and Burton’s pronouncements 50 years earlier on how the Electronovision live cast was more than a recording because it preserved the precarity of the actor’s live performance. The chapters on gaming further explore how the actual is produced, whilst not entirely effacing the methods of construction and how (following on from Jane McGonigal’s formulation) participants segue between ‘believing and playing at belief’ (98). Hunter’s analysis of the alternate reality game (ARG), World Without Oil, clearly demonstrates the useful consequences of access to this theatrical space for gamers in being able to play out the effects of a drastic real-world global shortage of oil in a computer-generated scenario. In all of these examples, Hunter teases out the implications of the troubling of boundaries between actual and imagined with admirable intellectual rigour. Whilst I applaud the use of the term ‘mischief’ throughout the book as productive in this respect, I did sometimes wonder when reading from a post-Trump perspectiv
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Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2021.1968591
Caridad Svich
{"title":"A Story that Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood & Other Traumas","authors":"Caridad Svich","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2021.1968591","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1968591","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45350817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2021.1945810
David Calder, Broderick Chow, Maria M. Delgado, Maggie B. Gale, Bryce Lease, Caridad Svich, Sarah Thomasson
{"title":"Editorial 31.3","authors":"David Calder, Broderick Chow, Maria M. Delgado, Maggie B. Gale, Bryce Lease, Caridad Svich, Sarah Thomasson","doi":"10.1080/10486801.2021.1945810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1945810","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43835,"journal":{"name":"CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42342576","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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