Search

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 [...]