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This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
GBB-chapter6 11/4/06 12:41 Page 157 6 Re-forming the stage The season of 1697/8 marks a crucial period in theatre history and an extraordinary chapter in the history of theatre women. In no other season on the Late Stuart stage were so many new plays by female playwrights performed by the same company in the same playhouse. Competition between the two houses was still fierce and an act of overt plagiarism by the Patent Company fuelled the ongoing animosity. The Players’ Company maintained its commercially successful edge over its rivals and this season can be
116 5 Ii Charlotte Brontë on stage: 1930s biodrama and the archive/museum performed Amber K. Regis The Brontës were big business upon the 1930s stage. Adaptations of the sisters’ novels, particularly Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847), had always been popular at the box office; but from the late 1920s there was an unprecedented biodrama boom (see Appendix). ‘There have been at least a dozen plays written about the Brontës recently’, remarked C. Mabel Edgerley in 1934, reporting to the Brontë Society as corresponding secretary (Edgerley, 1934: 152). A year previously
1 The paper stage This chapter seeks to modify existing models of the relation between print and an emergent public sphere by considering the special case of drama printed between 1647 and 1660. Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the emergence of a unified bourgeois public sphere, where people come together to critically share ideas and knowledge in spaces that are not governed by pressures from social or political authority, has inspired many scholars.1 Habermas locates the development of the public sphere in the coffee houses of late seventeenth-century London and
state’ [ 48 ], and authorized the actors ‘freely to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing’. Yet in liberating the London stage James had form, having overruled the Kirk of Scotland when it tried to block an Edinburgh season by ‘certain English Comedians’ in 1599, with a decree that ‘all His Majesty’s subjects, inhabitants within this said burgh may freely at their own pleasure repair to the
examination, any more than a pun can be bounced backwards and forwards in dialogue without acknowledgement of its shifting connotations. In a pun, the word remains the same, but in different contexts its meaning shifts: so too do sound effects shift their meaning as they shift their context. Early modern plays had intertextual soundscapes, relying on sonic allusions to create a shared acoustic world. To trace soundgrams on the early modern stage, this chapter will consider four sound effects: bells, guns, trumpets, and thunder. They are by no means the
Adapting a novel for the stage is no easy task, especially if the novel in question is as famous and omnipresent as Bram Stoker‘s Dracula. Seven years prior to Francis Ford Coppola‘s box office hit, the Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead wrote a version of the vampire saga which not only successfully translates the technical complexities of Stoker‘s text into the difficult medium of the theatre, but also offers a careful reading and contemporary evaluation of the subversive potential of the novel. In her adaptation, the fundamental dilemma of subjectivity and otherness becomes visible and demonstrates why Stoker‘s creation keeps fascinating readers, film audiences and critics alike.
The number of television productions of plays originally written for the stage, and the range of contexts in which they have been created, means that an attempt such as this to outline a history of stage plays on television from 1930 to the present must inevitably be partial. Any such chronicle will of course be inadequate and incomplete, but it will also favour certain elements
10 A revolution in two stages: the curiosity of the Bulgarian case Elena Simeonova The East European revolutions A revolution in two stages: Bulgaria The Bulgarian revolution, as a fundamental change of the political, social and economic order, occurred in two stages. The first (November 1989 to July 1991) was marked by an overhaul of the political system. The second (December 1996 to February 1997) cleared the way for the restructuring of the economy and state social provision. The period between the two stages was characterised by economic breakdown and
4 The ‘Blood-Stained Stage’ revisited J em m y Cat nach and the Staffordshire potters were not the only businessmen to make a substantial profit from the murder of William Weare by John Thurtell near Watford in October 1823. Even before the outcome of Thurtell’s trial, the Surrey Theatre on London’s south bank advertised the production of a new melodrama based on the tragedy, ‘The Gamblers’, to be performed nightly from 17 November. Playbills drew in enthusiastic audiences with the promise of ‘Fac-similes of those Scenes, now so much the object of general