Search results
3 Speculative theatricality: dystopian performatives and vertigo aesthetics in popular theatre The scientific version of our existence on this planet may very well be physically true, but we don’t like it much. It isn’t cuddly. There aren’t many tunes you can hum in the shower. (Atwood 2012, 54) What is this feeling So sudden and new? I felt the moment I laid eyes on you My pulse is rushing My head is reeling My face is flushing What is this feeling? Fervid as a flame Does it have a name? (Holzman and Schwartz 2006, 146) The novelist Margaret Atwood snappily
While the importance of space in Gothic literature and the role of spectacle in the staging of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British Gothic drama have received much attention, little has been written about how Gothic dramatic writing gestures with space. By looking at how dramatic writers rhetorically used Gothics politically and psychologically charged spaces in their dramatic works for stage and page, this essay explores how space functions in pre-realist drama. The essay shows how a rhetoric of space functions in three examples of Gothic theatrical writing - Matthew Lewis‘s The Castle Spectre, Catherine Gore‘s The Bond, and Jane Scott‘sThe Old Oak Chest - and suggests that British Gothic dramas spatial rhetoric anticipates cinematic uses of space.
6 Women’s suffrage and theatricality Sos Eltis P erformance was at the heart of the women’s suffrage campaign. It was, as Lisa Tickner declares in the title of her study of the imagery of the campaign, a ‘spectacle of women’.1 By 1907 the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, had acknowledged that the suffragists had won the ‘political argument’, but had yet to win ‘the political day’, for that they must learn the lesson from men who ‘know the necessity for demonstrating the greatness of their movements, and for establishing that force majeure which actuates and
chapter, I will argue that the possibilities and the connotations of the theatrical storm are repeatedly investigated during the play and that this process is part of The Tempest ’s wider concern with the dramatic representation of nature. Although the ecocritical will become more explicit in the latter part of this chapter, however, it is always at stake in this reading, not least in the following
and tensions. To explore this it is necessary, for a while, to go outside the 1950s, and away from film history, for film criticism and theory has been churlish about the theatrical in cinema; indeed, the inferiority felt by the film industry towards the theatre noted earlier is markedly absent. In theatre criticism, to note that a play is ‘cinematic’ is often to find something interesting in it, to
9 Theatrical torture versus dramatic cruelty: subjection through representation or praxis1 Frans-Willem Korsten In the context of the abundant distribution of representations of violence in the seventeenth century, there is one curious ‘dark spot’: representations of maritime forms of punishment in the Dutch Republic are extremely hard to find. This is, indeed, curious in the light of the scale and importance of the maritime world, the frequency with which punishment was used in it, and the vast corpus in different media on violence and punishment. Instead of
The discourses and practices of science and medicine significantly influenced British Romantic-period drama so that these new fields of inquiry were recontextualized in popular forms of the Gothic. Notions of the body and the spirit were negotiated on the stage, and the result constituted what I call ‘Techno-Gothic’ drama. Not surprisingly, Techno-Gothic drama took on two manifestations - grotesques and ghosts - and I examine how the vampire - at once grotesque and ghos - demonstrates the workings of Techno-Gothic drama in James Robinson Planchés melodrama The Vampire; or the Bride of the Isles, A Romantic Melodrama in Two Acts, Preceded by an Introductory Vision (1820) and in Thomas Dibdin‘s spectacular Don Giovanni; or A Spectre on Horseback (1818). I argue that Planchés and Dibdins popular plays demonstrate how Techno-Gothic drama appropriated, interrogated, negotiated, and resisted scientific concepts and technological methods in post-Enlightenment thought and culture. In parodying scientific methods and demonstrations, The Vampire and Don Giovanni, question the veracity and omnipotence of the new sciences.
T WO PRODUCTIONS OF STAGE adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein emerged in the UK in the spring of 2011, both of which made explicit reference to their liveness in performance. The National Theatre in London production was based upon Nick Dear’s stage adaptation of the novel and was directed by celebrated filmmaker, Danny Boyle. It featured acclaimed popular television and film actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. As part of its theatrical run, the production was commissioned, on a couple of occasions, to be
Gandhi’s non-violence are in essence theatrical performances ( 2001a , 179). A third is his reliance on an incident in Bisipara to explain how Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential ambitions in the United States were demolished. Tuta, an Untouchable who increased his wealth and attempted to elevate his caste position, was falsely accused by his hostile caste superiors of
4 Theatrical hierarchy, cultural capital and the legitimate/illegitimate divide Caroline Radcliffe T hroughout the 1866 hearings of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Theatrical Licensing, the performance of dramatic sketches in music halls had been fiercely debated and contested.1 When the proceedings of the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature re-opened the debate in 1892, tensions had escalated between the figureheads of the respective industries over the cultural, hierarchical and economic interests of the legitimate theatre and the music halls. This