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The review covers the main content of the book, which includes three semantic blocks. The first block, a historical-literary one, is devoted to the perception of the personality and creative activity of A. P. Chekhov by Iraqi criticism. The second one analyzes the performances of Chekhov’s works on the stages of Iraq. The third block contains the Russian translations of the texts of the plays written by the Iraqi writer A. Naim, based on the works of Chekhov. The review highlights the range of problems analyzed by the authors of the book and the methodological aspects of comparative analysis and receptive poetics. The author of the article notes the specific features and peculiarities of the intercultural translation of the texts of Chekhov’s works from one artistic lan- guage into another in the situation in which the author and the readers belong to different cultural traditions. The review focuses on the fact that the study of the Arab perception of Chekhov’s personality and creative activity al- lows the researcher to see the Russian culture in a new light and to better understand the Arab culture. Attention is drawn to the fact that the presentation of Chekhov’s plays on the Arab stage takes place in a completely different cultural-historical tradition. This tradition is based on the folk theater and religious mysteries. They determine the apperceptive background and cultural experience not only of Iraqi audience, but also of the authors acting as retranslators of Chekhov’s works. The article emphasizes the significance of the appendix with the texts of five plays by Naim in Russian translation, which are remakes of Chekhov’s works. The advantage of the book is the absolute novelty of the material, a new vision of the problems and a heuristic approach to them, and the semantic expansion of the content of well-known literary works.

Playwrights crafting work from real-life sources have heightened links with both the affective subject material of such work, and the sources themselves, particularly when the life stories derived from such sources are traumatic in nature. Being drawn to and dealing with difficult individual, social, historical and political stories implies a complex writing process of reflexive iterations of responsibility to sources and subject. Such a process requires ethical sensitivity to the concept of 'truth' as an amalgam of subjectivities and attention to 'authenticity' as a complex and accurate encapsulation of that truth. Creativity demands ongoing highly conscious self-knowledge to develop and strengthen both practice and product. This essay explores the point of view and experience of an artist-practitioner working with traumatic subject matter. Drawing on theory from theatre studies and trauma studies and discussing the process and centrality of ethics in relation to creative methodology, the essay reflects on the personal impact of the making of fraught work, and the uncovering, sharing and responsible transformation of fraught stories for a wider audience. It offers an outline of this experience that is relevant for other, similar artist-practitioners and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The story of Medea's murder of her own children to gain revenge against their faithless father has been tackled from many angles by playwrights and directors from Euripides' time to the present. In recent years, due to highly sensationalized, real-life cases of mothers murdering their children, it has become fodder for sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, and feminists. Many recent productions (both original plays and directorial approaches to Euripides' original) have avoided tackling the difficult questions raised by Euripides' ending, which demands an answer to the following question: how could the gods send down a dragon-drawn chariot to rescue a woman who murdered her own children? Many contemporary authors and directors prefer to eliminate Euripides' ending in order to focus on more immediate issues, such as the psychological or social damage resulting from patriarchy, colonialism, and misogyny. After considering several such productions, this article analyzes three plays that directly tackle Euripides' troubling ending: two original scripts, by Heiner Müller and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei respectively; and a production of Euripides' original by Japanese director Miyagi Satoshi. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA. An expert on postwar Japanese and cross-cultural performance, she is also a translator, director, and playwright. The author of Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2005) and co-author of Theatre Histories: An Introduction (third edition, Routledge, 2016), she has published over a hundred articles, chapters, and reviews. She is an Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal and a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been no systematic study of Samuel Beckett's and his estate's use of copyright powers over his stage plays. Yet their copyright interventions are more than just historical or biographical details; they, and theater-makers' responses to them, constitute an integral part of the plays themselves as they exist in the public sphere. If we attend to the copyright scuffles in the right way, we will enrich our understanding of the texts. Keywords: Samuel Beckett / copyright / law / public sphere / theater, 'The pace of scripted language is slow,' one reviewer wrote about a Melbourne production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame in 2015 (Badham). '[The] stage world is distant, and stage actions repetitive [...]

During the workshopping of Foreskin's Lament at the inaugural National New Zealand Playwrights Workshop in 1980, actor Donna Akersten made a decisive dramaturgical intervention that influenced the published form of [...]

This works examines how the dramaturgical creative act varies according to the reality of the artist in exile, whether at home or abroad, in the context of Argentina's last dictatorship (1976-1983). Our corpus examines three playwrights in exile at the time in Spain (Bortnik, Gambaro and Raznovich) and the works of two artists who considered the topic of exile while remaining in Argentina (Gris de ausencia by Cossa and Lejana tierra prometida by Halac). In turn, this allows us to consider an ontological perspective of theatre and uphold the vitality of contact between Argentina, Spain and Italy during this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novelist, playwright, columnist, and short story author Per Olov Enquist, one of the major and most important living Swedish authors, has written about or used German sources since his earliest [...]

The Norwegian master Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is and will remain the most important modern playwright--which is not to say there are no flaws in his work. Of all artists, playwrights [...]

As poets, dramatists, and life writers, Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) have already been much rehabilitated into the late-nineteenth-century canon, with conferences, critical essays, collected editions, and monographs [...]

In 1939, the radio-dramatist Norman Corwin broadcast two poems by Sterling Brown on a special episode of CBS's Words Without Music dedicated to 'Negro poetry.' The circumstances of Corwin's radio adaptation reveal a specific dimension of Brown's achievement as a poet of black, dialect that is difficult to apprehend on the printed page: the poetry's own constitutive relation to the media-ecological conditions of its making. Brown's poems can be said to resist the exclusionary terms of midcentury network broadcasting precisely insofar as they bear the latent traces of prior encounters with mass media. Formulated with regard to Brown and Corwin, the concept of latent remediation offers a means ofgrasping how a technologizedsoundscape can materially transform the formal protocols even of poems never destined for the airwaves. Keywords: Sterling Brown / radio / poetry / dialect / media, At 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, January 15, 1939, radio listeners tuning in to their local CBS affiliates enjoyed the seventh installment of Norman Corwin's Words Without Music, a new sustaining [...]

Irene Morra. Verse Drama in England, 1900-2015: Art, Modernity and the National Stage. Series editors Patrick Lonergan and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. Critical Companions Series. London, Bloomsbury, 2016. 304 pages. [...]

The preservation and promotion, the propagation and rehearsal of the value of one's ancestors is the surest way to a full and productive life August Wilson (1) August Wilson considered [...]

In 1911, Susan Glaspell was 'disentangling herself' from her native Iowa and preparing to move to New York City, where her fellow Davenporter and future husband George Cram Cook would [...]

The great English actor, David Garrick, grandson of French Huguenot refugees, resurrected Shakespeare's works and assured his immortality by organizing the first Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769, describing the playwright as [...]

Edward de Yere, 17th Earl of Oxford, died on June 24, 1604. To our knowledge, there was neither public recognition of his death nor notice made in personal letters or [...]

Few early modern English dramatists have been as critically maligned as William Percy (1570-1648). His six extant plays have received only infrequent attention, and even when scholars have analyzed his [...]

This paper shows that the number of roles in theatre plays has decreased over time. Playwrights seem to internalize the costs of producing plays by downsizing the number of roles. This downsizing is not a recent phenomenon: it already started a long time ago. This is not surprising, since production costs increase over time and the Baumol cost disease is obviously one of the reasons, though one cannot exclude that fashion has changed given the time elapsed between William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hong Kong, a borrowed place where her stories are always narrated by others. Theatre, a mediated platform where theatre makers look for ways to voice out their concerns and at the same time, audiences who expect to hear resonance of their lives and times. Theatre makers should never forget that the mission of live drama is to unfold realities through creative expression, images and ideas. This task is a never-ending mission for playwrights in Hong Kong. This article provides an overview of Hong Kong’s contemporary theatre life through two basic perspectives: the work of young playwrights and the impact of venue policy on the present development of local performing arts.

The article studies contemporary British plays “Faust is Dead” (1997) by Mark Ravenhill and «Killology» (2017) by Gary Owen. The playwrights in their works present a young generation of computer users, involved in digital technology and virtual reality. The aim of this research is to analyze dramatic children-characters interacting with cyberspace who are the object or doer of evil. A new type of a child-hero, which is represented in the plays by Owen and Ravenhill, is now called a «digital» child. The hero of the play “Faust is Dead” is a virtual child who exists only in the network space. Subjecting himself to violence and brutality, Donny tries to confirm his reality, as the experience of pain is supposed to be the only proof of existence of this child. In the article Mark Ravenhill’s “Faust is Dead” is compared with the poem «Faust» by N. Lenau. The plays by Ravenhill and Owen were written at the interval of 20 years, and computer equipment and users changed during those years. G. Owen in the play “Killology” shows real children, who were born in the digital era. The “digital child” in the play by Owen is fully associated with the virtual world and feels comfortable in such an environment. “Digital” child is characterized by the feeling of virtual omnipotence, which often develops into cruelty and propensity to violence. However, if the hero of Ravenhill’s plays was cruel to himself in order to become real, the characters of Owen’s drama, on the contrary, are cruel to their virtual victims. Owen’s heroes do not want to go beyond the borders of virtual reality. The article considers the dynamics of contemporary British Theatre of Cruelty on the instance of children-heroes.

Abstract: The article examines the figure and contribution of the late Professor Paul Colilli as a versatile academic who left an indelible mark on literature of all times, as well [...]

CRAZY, LONG LOST, AND ORIGINAL Metaphors of birth are a regular feature in the origin stories of vernacular American music. Middlebrow journalists and popular historians speak of the birth of [...]

The account book of theater financier Philip Henslowe, commonly called Henslowe's Diary, is the single most valuable document relating to the theater business surviving from early modern England. It includes [...]

This article compares and analyses factors that impact when creating a network on both online and live networking platforms, designed as spaces for artistic and critical engagement both within Africa and beyond. As I draw on the African Womens' Playwright Network as my example, I consider how we can acknowledge the materiality of the processes and relationships involved in these kinds of networks, which as Stephansen argues, also involve the making of new publics. In this analysis I particularly reflect on the impact of using Linda Tuhiwai Smith's approach to decolonising indigenous research methodologies when creating a cross-cultural network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theatre classroom is necessarily a space in dialogue with myths about the marginalisation of theatre as an art and theatre audiences as a public. It is precisely because theatre is a marginalised discipline that curricula should incorporate the processes by which the labour of theatre artists changes value and joins the mainstream; playwrights employed in television offer a relevant study of just that. How do we revise undergraduate curricula in order to substantially address this intermediality in a way that is legible for students? And where do television and theatre meet in existing theatre courses and objectives? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS and Yukio Mishima talked about their work and work routines in 1959. The conversation was lightly moderated by Williams ' life partner Frank Merlo, whom Mishima refers to [...]

The early modern play Sir Thomas More, written by Anthony Munday, Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare, takes an ecumenical viewpoint of the play's Catholic hero in order to conform to the expectations of the Master of the Revels and to appeal to a cross-confessional audience. The playwrights carefully construct the play within the confines of censorship by centering the play's action around More's dynamic personality instead of giving a full exposition of historical plot. More's personality and famous wit function together as a means for diverting attention away from the controversy surrounding More's silent opposition to Henrician policy while subtly validating his martyrdom. The argument of this article examines the adaptation of the play's ideologically diverse source material, the playwrights' use of martyrological conventions, and the subtle traces of Erasmian allusion and recusant rhetoric in its reading of the play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On Arab stages, Shakespeare's tragedies have a particular and exciting history, the roots of which go back to the nineteenth century. The various manifestations of Shakespeare in Arabic have oscillated [...]

Although many U.S. regional theatres claim that gender parity factors prominently into their seasons’ show selections, women playwrights continually struggle to have their work produced. In this study, we explore the dissonance between theatre professionals’ stated intentions and actions with regard to gender parity in play selection. Interviews with theatre professionals reveal that the prioritization of organizational needs over gender inclusion perpetuates a silencing of women’s voices in American regional theatre. The inclusivity of theatres and other types of arts organizations may improve with a reanalysis of organizational structures and communication, as well as a refocusing on the organizations’ immediate communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus on the translators as their situation has proved to be more and more difficult in France. With examples, we want to consider how one’s position has evolved in the publishing world from the 16th century to the present. Looking at the 16th century, we can observe a real fever for translations of ancient texts. In the Netherlands, Italy and France, printers were translators and signed their translations with their proper name. Playwrights did the same with Latin and Greek works. For example, we know Oedipo tyranno by Giustiniani who translated Sophocles. The name of the Greek or Latin writer was eclipsed by the translator’s name such as Plantin and the Biblia Polyglotta, or Belleforest with his translation of The War of the Jews written by Flavius Josephus. The translation of the title gave the work a new specificity and was considered as the genuine work of the translator even though the name of the original author was still given. During the 16th century in France, Literary Property Laws were called “Privilège” and were attached to the author of the printed text. Later on, this law changed. We know that playwrights used translations and never mentioned the authors as they had actually never done before. Indeed, this particular type of literature often evaded the law. The publishers became more and more important and could thus decide what would be announced on the book’s cover. The author is to be mentioned for legal reasons, but translators are rarely mentioned. Today, you have to search for their name inside the book despite the fact that as our world is becoming more and more global we need them more and more. To some extent, on stage, some directors plunder translations done by specialists and attribute them to themselves. Two avenues of enquiry should help us understand the French translator’s paradox, which consist in the fact that the translator’s status evolves from a finder and producer to an intellectual whose name is today nearly ignored – despite his/her legal status.

In Stratford-upon-Avon, the youthful writer Will Shakeshaft walks out on his family, leaving his wife Anne and their three children in the care of his father. Will has his sights [...]

Editor's Note: Edward Albee died on Friday, September 16th, 2016, at the age of 88. He passed away at his summer home in Montauk, New York, after a short illness. [...]