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In this essay, I compare the delineations of time in Samuel Beckett's novels Malone Dies and The Unnamable with his mimes Act Without Words I and II to postulate that [...]

'I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I [...]

The adjective 'Pinteresque,' first used in 1960, describes a wide variety of recurring themes in Pinter's plays having to do with 'implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial [...]

In June, 2014, a few weeks after his eightieth birthday, Alan Bennett, the celebrated playwright and memoirist, published what he called a 'sermon' in The London Review of Books. First [...]

'Under the circumstances, I would just as soon be Jewish.' (Philip Roth, 'Buried Again') The Jewish-American author Philip Roth celebrated his 80th birthday, his first since his retirement, in a [...]

Though Alasdair Gray is best known as an artist and a novelist--a large part of his literary corpus was published in the eighties and nineties following the success of his [...]

'Welsh says that writing a play is a lot easier than writing a novel. After enduring this one, I felt like borrowing one of his characters' trademark aphorisms. **** off, [...]

While many of our more experimental contemporary novelists have written occasional plays, these plays have typically received relatively little critical attention from academics who study their novels. Conversely, many contemporary [...]

Le theatre et la realite entretiennent des liens etroits quoique parfois conflictuels. La chose est particulierement vraie depuis l'avenement du drame dans la dramaturgie continentale a partir du dix-huitieme siecle. [...]

For in everything ... which has befallen me and of which I believe myself unable to refrain from composing a written record, I succumb to the compulsion to invent it […]

A renowned novelist, playwright, essayist, and social activist, Dacia Maraini is one of the most important voices in Italian culture today, just as she has been for the past many [...]

Eric PRINCE: Women versus Men? Any comments? AYCKBOURN: Yes, this play [Communicating Doors ] is quite pro woman, but in a sense, it's a take on the old dark house [...]

ABSTRACT Much of the dramatic impact of Michel Tremblay'stheatre depends upon the fusion of realistic situations and fantastical elements achieved through the deployment of a wide variety of stage techniques. [...]

Recently I read a short polemical book by a political philosopher in which he claimed that the works of Shakespeare, while entertaining and emotionally engaging, lacked intellectual content by comparison […]

ABSTRACT This article shows how Marlowe departs from his primary historical sources (Mexia and Perondinus) in his retelling of the life of Tamburlaine. Marlowe employed the heavily ironic tone of [...]

The article asserts that Meredith Wilson's 'The Music Man' places the author in the midst of the 'brows' controversy active during the reflective, pre-World War I era. It demonstrates that the musical is thus a tribute to the supremacy of the middlebrow aesthetic and the all-American values it advocates.

La destruccion de Numancia, the tragedy wherein Cervantes depicted the Iberians' collective suicide rather than surrender to the invading Romans, was twice adapted by Rafael Alberti, first in 1937 in [...]

This essay focuses on Jelinek's problematic relationship to her native Austria, as it is reflected in some of her most recent plays: Ein Sportstuck (A Piece About Sports), In den [...]

ABSTRACT The problematic of artistry is a central preoccupation in several of Gerhart Hauptmann's Naturalist plays. This article focuses on two Malerdramen which provide snapshots of artists at critical junctures [...]

In this article, Beliz Gucbilmez argues that 'offstage' is not a place but an idea, a world minus a stage. It is 'anywhere but here', and its time is time-minus-now, making it impossible to determine its scale. It is a foreign tongue--a language with an unknown grammar carrying us to the borders of the uncanny. Gucbilmez rereads the offstage as the unconscious of the stage, looking at its more conventional use in the realistic and naturalistic plays of the nineteenth century and after, but also looking forward to the work of Samuel Beckett. Borrowing from Blanchot's interpretation of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, she characterizes the Beckettian struggle to represent the unrepresentable as the act of bringing Eurydice into daylight--the invisible content of the offstage onto the stage, which is by definition the space of the gaze. Beliz Gucbilmez is an author, playwright, and translator, currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Department of Ankara University in Turkey. She is the author of Irony and Drama from Sophocles to Stoppard (Ankara: Deniz, 2005) and Time, Space and Appearance: the Form of Miniature in the Turkish Realist Theatre (Ankara: Deniz, 2006). A shorter version of this article was presented at the Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (FIRT/IFTR) at its 2005 meeting in Krakow.

British pantomime between 1985 and 2005 has undergone an evolutionary reconstruction based on practices of branding. Within this broad field, Martina Lipton distinguishes two competing pantomime models, investigating the contrasting ideological and cultural positioning of dominant representations of modern pantomime by a major production group, Qdos Entertainment, and the Nottingham Playhouse and York Theatre Royal repertory companies. She reads these models as identifying collective experiences and taste communities after the categories identified by Pierre Bourdieu as conferring 'distinction'. While these companies both offer a somewhat similar mediatized product, they successfully co-exist within a dynamic and competitive marketplace by branding their pantomimes as respectively embracing and resisting the influence of mass-media popular culture. Both branding practices have succeeded in restoring the genre to high visibility and economic success. Martina Lipton is working on a PhD at the University of Queensland.

Postwar British theater history was shaped and bounded by a very stable periodization that located its origin in the premiere of John Osborne's 'Look Back in Anger' at the Royal Court Theater on 8 May 1956. Contained within this history are many elements not directly related to the 1956/1968/1979 period markers, however this revolution model and its tripartite division of the era affected the conceptualization and positioning of all events within postwar theater history.

A research is conducted on the Alfred Jerry theatre that operated between 1926 to 1928 and comprises the bulk of Antonin Artaud's theatrical practice including direction, producing and designing for Jarry theatre. In each Jerry Theater rehearsal, Artaul was reportedly extremely free with the performers and designers and yet he managed to make the event representative of his own personal vision.

The Vietnamese contemporary spoken drama makes use of its multi -cultural heritage, while keeping abreast of current social realties. The Vietnamese playwrights, set designers, directors, and actors have combined aspects of the realistic theatre with the conventions of their suppositional traditional theatre to come up with a hybrid that is uniquely Vietnamese.

The differences between American and Canadian theatre are discussed. American theatre is market based existing in the shadow of capitalism and recognizes only success.

The Spanish Golden Age comedia as a genre has proven notoriously difficult to explain fully. Since Lope de Vega first published in the early seventeenth century his Arte nuevo de [...]

A critical analysis is made of the play, Mother Courage and Her Children. Emphasize is laid on Courage's mute daughter Kattrin who she perceives as a feminine and maternal figure, born of violence but rises above all that.

The thoughts and views of various professional freak personnel on theatre history are discussed. It is satted that the prejudices against the freak show make professional freak performance more difficult with each passing year.

Sarah Daniels, known for her high incidence of female characters in her plays, and her representation of madness in her plays, Ripen our Darkness and Head-Red Holiday, are described.

Pedestrian performances in various places of Los Angeles on their current issues are described. The focus is to develop an understanding of theatre focused on place, an understanding theorized in terms of pedestrian performances.

In 1927, Fabre's staging of a major event, which he hoped to bring the new aesthetic to bear on the repertoire in an acceptable context for the state theatre: the Centennial of Romanticism, and it being termed as a brilliant compromise, are discussed.

The commendable work done by the Casualties Union, from the time of 1941, is described. It is stated that the Casualties Union was an experimental prototype, and over the course of three decades its practices became the international standard for fully enacted medical emergency drills.

The common points between the plays 'The Death of Cuchulain' and 'Death and the King's Horseman' written by Nobel prize-winners Wole Soyinka and W. B. Yeats are discussed. It was observed that the goals, plots, characters and imagery of the two playwrights coincided.

The questions of what happens when African literary and dramatic texts travel with the help of Wole Soyinka's 'The Road' are explored. It is stated that like the dramatic and literary texts of every cultural region of the world, African literary and dramatic texts necessarily and inevitably change when they travel.

Idi Amin, the dictator of Uganda from 1971-1979 was well known for his atrocities. The Idi Amin era is recalled by the famous African writers in their plays, which is described.

Wole Soyinka has been accused of not being 'ideologically committed' by Marxist critics. Soyinka's play The Beautification of Area Boy, which engages with power and shifting meanings in Nigerian society is discussed.

The African drama lacked an adequate vocabulary of descriptive, analytical, and conceptual tools. The criticism faced by the African drama and the points to improve upon them are examined.

The moral constant of Wole Soyinka's dramatic universe is employing the most arcane and ritualistic performance form. The illusions of modernity in Africa demonstrated by Soyinka needs careful attention.

The conference on 'Wole Soyinka and Contemporary Theatre' and the various aspects of Wole Soyinka in the postcolonial era are reviewed.

One of the most vexed terms in literary criticism is tragedy. As critics we often denounce the popular use of the term when the death of the family pet is [...]