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This article examines the ways in which the execution of Dutch statesman John van Oldenbarnevelt in 1619 was understood and represented by contemporaries in England. In contrast to the popular, apocalyptical understanding of the execution as a victory for the Reformed faith, the portrayal of events in Philip Massinger and John Fletcher's play The Tragedy of John van Olden Barnavelt was much more ambiguous. In tracing the way the playwrights used classical analogy to represent the Dutch troubles, this essay highlights the function of the play in the polarizing political context of late Jacobean England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lessing's Nathan the Wise (1779), exemplary for its enlightenment and humanist ideals, assembles Jews, Christians, and Muslims in dialogue during the medieval crusades in Jerusalem. Their encounters allow them to transcend conflict, to recognize their common humanity, and to resolve their differences through dialectical discourse and group arguments. In this article Eva Urban looks closely at the representation of enlightenment in this play and examines the potential role of plays and theatre practice in developing autonomous citizenship and intercultural understanding. Particular reference is made to the 2013 Berliner Ensemble production of Nathan the Wise in relation to aesthetic debates about modern political drama. Eva Urban is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and an Associate of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2010) and has published a number of articles on political drama and Irish studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many film critics tend to believe that film nob, alongside the western, is the quintessential American genre - one that was born in the America of the late 1940s out of specific circumstances reflecting contemporary American realities. In fact, film noir -- which I consider to be a film style, rather than a film-genre -- is the result of various European influences, from the German expressionism of the 1910s and 1920s to the French poetic realism of the 1930s and even to the Italian neorealism of the mid-1940s. Moreover, it was a number of brilliant European émigré directors' arrival in Hollywood in the inter-war Period that defined and transformed American film noir, giving it its distinctive aesthetics. The following paper will try to demonstrate how these cinematic European influences travelled to America, breathing new life into the conservative Hollywood film tradition of the studio period, and resulting in the creation of true masterpieces of film noir, from The Maltese Falcon to Double Indemnity or from The Killers to The Big Heat, defining a cinematic aesthetic that will, in time, profoundly change the face of American cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Tchicaya U Tam'si's The Glorious Destiny of Marshall Nnikon Nniku (Le Destin glorieux du Mardchal Nnikon Nniku, prince qu "on sort) as a Satirical response to the dictatorship of Joseph-Desire Mobutu and his policy of authenticity. I examine Mobutu's authenticity campaign as a transnational phenomenon that involves accepting and performing international perceptions of Africa as "traditional" and suggest that Tchicaya's play uses this transnationality to both critique and resist policies such as Mobutu's. Furthermore, I claim that "authentic" power such as Mobutu's is primarily a transnational performance and that Tchicaya's resistance--embodied in the play by Lheki--is equally transnational and performative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares and contrasts the reception of DR's political drama series Borgen (2010-13) in Denmark and Germany. Whilst German audiences are au fait with a number of Danish primetime drama series, public opinion of the shows can diverge considerably. One such example is the reception of Borgen. Even if the critics' reaction was for the most part positive in both countries, reviews differ in tone and content. Among other issues, this is particularly apparent when critics relate the drama to a much broader discussion of public service broadcasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Carl Sternheim's drama 1913 portrays the last year before World War I in Germany as an era destined for decline. This study looks at Sternheim's rhetoric of epochal threshold and analyses the way Sternheim transfers the argumentative structures of cultural criticism into a dramatic form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores selections from Harold Pinter's later, more decidedly political dramas ("Precisely" [1983], "One for the Road" [1984], "Mountain Language" [1988], and "The New World Order" [1991]) from the point of view spectatorship and, more specifically, by means of a theoretical discourse of affect based chiefly on Deleuze. It argues that, in apprehending the affective dimension of Pinter's political dramas from the 1980s onwards, we can better understand how their political character consists precisely in the way in which they enable spectators to undergo a transformative affective experience. Relatedly, bringing a discourse of affect to Pinter's political dramas permits us to discern the relationship between the works' political expression and their aesthetic composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the early Tudor playwright, John Heywood's interlude, The Play of Love. It explores its associations with the Henrician legal system, its satirical allusions to Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, and its connections with the circle of lawyers and courtiers around Sir Thomas More. It argues that the play reveals a close attention to contemporary events and issues, and suggests it may have been a more ambivalent and Lucianic text, willing to make some uncomfortable points at its viewers' expense, than previous accounts have allowed [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sydney New Theater has staged risky, politically radical plays since its inception in 1932 and has often faced threats to its existence. Now financial difficulties may either close the theater or force it to abandon risky political plays for more popular drama. The circumstances leading to the financial problems are discussed.

The focus of this article is upon Samuel Daniel's neo-Senecan tragedy, Philotas, a play that has been widely interpreted as a drame à clef about the fall of the Earl of Essex. This article aims to propose an additional, and hitherto overlooked, political subtext in the form of topical allusions to the new king, James I, with Alexander the Great's victory over the Persian king, Darius the Great, and the subsequent conquest of his realms, providing a fitting analogue for James's accession to the English throne. I will argue that contemporary concerns and specific events surrounding the accession - such as James's defence of divine rights, his campaign to unite the kingdoms of Britain, and the excessive number of knighthoods he awarded in the early part of his reign - are interrogated in the play's sub-plot which dramatizes Alexander's assumption of godlike status and the increasing influence of Persian subjects in Macedonian society. This reading thus shows how the play engages with more immediate political concerns alongside certain controversies left over from Elizabeth's reign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introducing Elizabeth Robins to students is a challenge because Robins is a minor figure in American and British drama of the early twentieth century and her literary work is overtly political. The contributions of Robins were recovered by feminist scholarship in the eighties and have undergone a transformation with critical opinion focusing on her abilities as a writer. Her famous play, Votes for Women (1907), is an investigation of the feminist maxim: "the personal is the political." The play demonstrates the gradual conversion of an apathetic philanthropist, Miss L., into a militant advocate of more rights for women and depends on spectators to enhance its political themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines fan identity and ontological security through the work of sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991, 1992) to explore how fans articulated their responses to the ending of the American political drama series The West Wing. The article discusses how fans negotiated their reactions to this cessation through a “reiteration discourse” in which they linked the show to their self-narratives and often interpreted and understood the show and its characters through their own real-life experiences. The article also examines how fans responded in the years after the show's cancellation, considering how they responded at the moment that their favored object ceased to be ongoing, and when their fandom moved into an era of what can be termed “post-object fandom.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that digital media, by fragmenting people into ideologically homogeneous interest groups, polarizes society. Further, this polarization risks the transformation of agonistic political engagement into antagonistic ideological combat. As evidence of this danger, the authors examine the case of Howard Dean's 2004 presidential primary blogs. In these blogs, a rhetorical vision emerges of a dramatic fight between Dean's heroic supporters and the villainous Republicans, media elite, and Democratic challengers. Examples from Barack Obama's 2008 campaign blogs are offered as a counterpoint to the antagonism found in Dean's blogs. The authors argue that the type of political drama evident in the Dean blogs invite antagonism that undermines cross-group cooperation and thus weakens democratic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented examining the intersection between folk drama practices in rural China with the state-led propaganda campaigns of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) throughout the 20th century into the beginning of the 21st. An overview is presented describing the history and development of the CCP's expansion into folk storytelling since 1935. Analysis is also provided describing how the practice has led to a semi-religious practice for community advocacy.

The article considers the political drama of Dean Parker, a playwright and trade union activist. The views of playwright Louis Nowra on the state of political theatre in Australia are discussed. Noted is the decision of Parker to detach his works from mainstream publishing and bourgeois theatre production and promotion. An analysis of some of the plays written by Parker, which include "The Hollow Men," and"Baghdad Baby!," is included.

Political philosophy pervades Angels in America, and its author, Tony Kushner, has never hidden the fact that he is, as a writer, unashamedly engagé. One is almost invited, therefore, to look for a political stance that the play might be said to promote. This is complicated, however, by the sheer wealth of often disparate, politically-oriented ideas and positions that Kushner weaves into his drama. In considering Kushner's political debt in Angels in America to three principal sources – thinkers of the Enlightenment, the socialism of Raymond Williams, and the messianic and apocalyptic political vision of Walter Benjamin – this article locates the main political currents of the play, identifying what is being criticized and what affirmed, in a way that reveals at least the outline of the political position the play may be said to endorse. The position that comes to light places emphasis on the fundamental value of community and is characterized by a radical adherence to hope in the face of apparent hopelessness. Such hope is meagre and indigent in comparison with other more recognisable, predominantly Christian, forms of hope. Kushner's audacious suggestion seems to be that the actual condition of possibility of the sort of hope he envisages is an experience of hopelessness born of some sort of catastrophe. In concluding, the article argues for the importance of drama as the medium of Kushner's message and offers a reflection on a possible post-9/11 revision of his politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]