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The Fun Palace, a landmark cultural complex that was initiated in London in 1961 by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price and followed an increasingly mobile agenda until 1975, circulates relentlessly in architectural scholarship today. Yet the cultural agenda of the project that emanates from the archive and Littlewood’s role in it seems to have been neutralized. This article reconstructs the almost sixty year history of the reception of the Fun Palace so as to critically investigate the conditions that informed the distinctive afterimages of the project. The complex topology of the Fun Palace archive is regarded as a main agency that is constitutive of the project’s modes of reception today: scholarship and activism.

This research represents a new kind of critical investigation of the renowned Fun Palace as a complex cultural project, one that exceeds its remarkable architectural significance. The Fun Palace maps an extensive network of practices and agencies involved in the project’s complex constitution and constant regeneration. Initiated in London 1961 as an interdisciplinary collaboration between radical theatre entrepreneur Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price, it engaged main personalities throughout its development up until 1975, such as cyberneticist Gordon Pask, engineer Frank Newby, journalist Tom Driberg and trustee Buckminster Fuller, amongst other. It aimed to construct situations in which self-directed, pleasure-led and open exchange could transform mass-audiences into active citizens. By 1964 the Fun Palace had gained momentum, and a giant cybernetic infrastructure featured within the Civic Trust’s plans for Lea Valley. By the end of the decade, and under the leadership of Littlewood, the idea was reconstituted into local activism to engage Stratford youth amidst violent redevelopment in the area neighbouring Theatre Royal, where Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop was based. Over and above, the struggle for a site in the institutional map of London prompted the realization of the Fun Palace as a media event. Broadsheets, films, journals, grids and press cuttings, all these media actively produced and disseminated the Fun Palace’s distinctive cultural agenda of emancipation through pleasure in Britain in the 1960s and early 70s. Meanwhile, an excited architectural scholarship celebrated the challenge that the Fun Palace issued to the determinism of modern architecture and planning. Paying close attention to the role of Joan Littlewood in the project, this research analyses the conditions of production, circulation, storage and reception of these media as a way to unpack the complexity embedded in the Fun Palace’s cultural agenda. On one hand, the radical plurality, ephemerality and dynamism of the project reflects transformations in British society from the immediate postwar period across the 1960s and 1970s and the pressures that these exerted upon interrelated areas of cultural production – architecture, theatre, education, leisure, (mass) media, and information and communication technologies. On the other hand, the analysis of the distinctive periodization and the modalities of the Fun Palace reception during its fifty-year long history and up until today, questions the agency of the uneven Fun Palace archive. Ultimately, through the interrogation of all this situated activity and agency, I argue for the central role that media plays in the constitution of the Fun Palace’s complex cultural agenda.

espanolEl Fun Palace, el emblematico complejo cultural iniciado en Londres en 1961 por Joan Littlewood y Cedric Price y cuya agenda iria progresivamente ganando en contingencia e inestabilidad hasta 1975, circula sin cesar en la investigacion academica de la arquitectura en la actualidad. Sin embargo, el programa cultural del proyecto que emana del archivo y el papel de Littlewood en el aparecen en cierto modo neutralizados en estos discursos. Este articulo reconstruye los casi sesenta anos de historia de la recepcion del Fun Palace para investigar criticamente las condiciones que influyeron en la construccion de sus distintivas imagenes. La compleja topologia del archivo del Fun Palace se vislumbra como un actor principal en la constitucion de los modos de recepcion del proyecto en la actualidad: la investigacion academica y el activismo. EnglishThe Fun Palace, a landmark cultural complex that was initiated in London in 1961 by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price and followed an increasingly mobile agenda until 1975, circulates relentlessly in architectural scholarship today. Yet the cultural agenda of the project that emanates from the archive and Littlewood’s role in it seems to have been neutralized. This article reconstructs the almost sixtyyear history of the reception of the Fun Palace so as to critically investigate the conditions that informed the distinctive afterimages of the project. The complex topology of the Fun Palace archive is regarded as a main agency that is constitutive of the project’s modes of reception today: scholarship and activism.

Joan Littlewood’s Stratford Fair, a late manifestation of her Fun Palace idea, aimed – through community-led and temporary playgrounds – to reclaim public land compromised by local government slum clearance in East London. Scholarship to date has discussed the Fair as a trigger for the political imagination of local youth, but not the central role that media played in the constitution of its public agenda. This article explores the archive as an active site of representation of the Fair. Recorded and circulated through monthly diaries, the Fair’s events generated affects that fostered attachment and identity, while its distributed media archive maintains a latent regenerative potential and invites plural historiography.

Audio Drama and Modernism traces the development of political and modernist sound drama during the first 40 years of the 20th Century. It demonstrates how pioneers in the phonograph age made significant, innovative contributions to sound fiction before, during, and after the Great War. In stunning detail, Tim Crook examines prominent British modernist radio writers and auteurs, revealing how they negotiated their agitational contemporaneity against the forces of Institutional containment and dramatic censorship. The book tells the story of key figures such as Russell Hunting, who after being jailed for making ‘sound pornography’ in the USA, travelled to Britain to pioneer sound comedy and montage in the pre-Radio age; Reginald Berkeley who wrote the first full-length anti-war play for the BBC in 1925; and D.G. Bridson, Olive Shapley and Joan Littlewood who all struggled to give a Marxist voice to the working classes on British radio.

Creating their major productions in the prosperous ‘glorious decades’ that followed the devastation of the Second World War, Littlewood, Strehler and Planchon represent a first expressly ‘European’ generation of theatre directors. Revisiting works from the classical dramatic canon by drawing on popular theatre traditions, and reaching out to spectators beyond the educated middle-class elite, they put theatre in the service of uniting a traumatised continent. For Littlewood, Strehler and Planchon, theatre has the capacity to create communities. This volume shows how these three directors take up key aesthetic prompts from earlier innovators –Stanislavsky, the modernist avant-garde and not least Brecht – and thereby prepare the ground for contemporary, politically engaged ‘directors’ theatre’.

Статья посвящена антимилитари-стскому политическому шоу Джоан Литтлвуд «О, что за чудесная война!», в котором события Первой мировой войны были представлены на сцене в традициях мюзик-холла, агитаци-онно-плакатного театра и эпического театра Б. Брехта.

During a BBC programme devoted to her career, Joan Littlewood described her experiment in committed drama with her company, the Theatre Workshop. Very popular in the 20s and 30s in the United-States, but also in Russia and in Germany, the formula consisted in extracting information from the press, to which the company would bring a fictional treatment that would put a highly political and critical outlook on the issue at stake. Joan Littlewood compared this type of performance to the journalistic version of a “happening”. She would see the staging of information as an invitation to resist the trivialization of topical issues due to journalism and its highly repetitive treatment of news and current events. Though the original themes were primarily social, the scope of investigation of committed drama widened very quickly to cover political issues. More recently, the war in Iraq brought about the rebirth of the epic theatre genre, on both sided of the Atlantic, with performances that challenged governmental policies. Verbatim plays such as Guantanamo (2004) and Called to Account (2007) were staged in both institutional and less conventional venues, from theatres to campuses, as part of a larger project to set up itinerant performances designed to provide dissenting perspectives on international issues. The purpose of this paper will be to try and examine committed drama from aesthetic and political angles and see how far, at critical periods in the British history, it tried to familiarize audiences with divergent viewpoints on topical issues. Au cours d'une émission que la BBC lui a consacrée, Joan Littlewood revient sur sa carrière et décrit son expérience du théâtre engagé avec sa compagnie, Theatre Workshop. Très populaire dans les années 20 et 30 aux États-Unis, mais aussi en Russie et en Allemagne, la formule du théâtre engagé consistait à extraire des informations de la presse, auxquelles la troupe de théâtre apporterait un traitement fictionnel afin de mettre en évidence une perspective à la fois critique et politique. Joan Littlewood compare ce type de représentation à la version journalistique d'un «happening». Selon elle, la mise en scène de l'information représente une invitation à résister à la banalisation des questions d'actualité. Bien qu’à l’origine les thèmes fussent surtout d'ordre social, le champ d'investigation s’est très rapidement élargi pour couvrir les questions politiques. Plus récemment, la guerre en Irak a contribué à la renaissance du théâtre engagé, de part et d’autre de l'Atlantique, avec des spectacles qui avaient pour mission de mettre en cause les politiques gouvernementales. Des pièces inspirées du théâtre verbatim, telles que Guantanamo (2004) et Called to Account (2007) ont été mises en scène dans des lieux institutionnels et d’autres moins conventionnels, comme des campus, dans le cadre de projets plus vastes destinés à redonner vie aux spectacles itinérants conçus pour contrer les médias traditionnels et offrir, à la population, sur son lieu de vie, des perspectives divergentes sur les questions internationales. Le but de cet article est d'essayer d’analyser le théâtre engagé en tant que média en fonction de données esthétiques et politiques afin de voir dans quelle mesure, à des périodes critiques de l'histoire britannique, il a eu pour ambition de fournir un traitement subversif de l’information.

This thesis is an attempt to portray the birth of British modern drama and the most important figures breaking its new ground; more to the point, to shed light on the second generation of British dramatists breaking what G.B. Shaw used to call ‘middle-class morality’. The focal point here is fixed on Stephen Poliakoff, one of the distinctive dramatists in contemporary British theatre, his work and the dramatic tinge he adds to the new drama., Doctorat en Langues et lettres, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

[ES] Se analizan en esta aportación dos textos dramáticos traducidos de Oh What a Lovely War! / ¡Oh, qué bonita es la guerra! de Joan Littlewood (The Theatre Workshop). Por un lado, la versión del texto teatral, publicada en 1969 en la colección Cuadernos para el Diálogo y, por otro, la versión cinematográfica de Richard Attemborough subtitulada. Se plantea un análisis comparativo de las traducciones con los respectivos originales, y se plantean reflexiones respecto a la calidad de los productos traducidos.

International audience; The development of devised theatre in Great-Britain was stimulated in the 1960s and 1970s by experimental theatre collectives, formed by artists who wished to escape the usual hierarchy of companies. The “democratic” process of collective improvisation matched the political focus of groups such as Joint Stock, the feminist collective Monstrous Regiment, or the Red Ladder Theatre Company (originally called the Agitprop Street Players). In recent decades the range and variety of devised theatre has expanded and its focus is no longer exclusively political. The two shows presented in this section thus represent two different eras in devised British theatre: whereas the Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War! (1963) recycles agit-prop techniques from the 1920s and 1930s to indict the business of war, Complicite’s Mnemonic (1999) is an exploration of human memory, which uses a blend of dialogue, projection and physical theatre to examine universal processes of identity and history construction.