Download or read book Feminism Dramaturgy and the Contemporary British History Play written by Rebecca Benzie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-08-22 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we think of the contemporary British history play, why might we automatically think of playwrights such as David Hare, Howard Brenton, Peter Gill and Edward Bond? Because for decades the writing of the history play has been the preserve of the white male. This book provides a vital feminist intervention into the dramaturgy of history plays, investigating work produced at major British theatres from 2000 to the present, written by a generation of innovative women playwrights. This much-needed study explores the use of history – specifically Elizabethan, Restoration, Victorian and early 20th century – in contemporary playwriting in order to interrogate the gender politics of this work. Within the framework of contemporary feminism – including the pivotal #MeToo movement – the book looks at post-2000s feminist drama that somehow represents the past. Through delving into the recurring tropes and their politics in the light of current feminist debate, the author helps us grasp how these plays essentially re-imagine gender politics. Plays that are considered include Emilia (Morgan Lloyd Malcolm), Swive [Elizabeth] (Ella Hickson), An August Bank Holiday Lark (Deborah McAndrew), The Empress (Tanika Gupta), Red Velvet (Lolita Chakrabarti), Scuttlers (Rona Munro), I, Joan (Charlie Josephine), Blue Stockings and Nell Gwynn (Jessica Swale), and the musical Six (Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss).
Download or read book The Contemporary British History Play written by Richard H. Palmer and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1998-06-18 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British drama since 1956 has been particularly innovative. This volume investigates how recent British history plays reflect the methods and values of New History, in contrast to traditional biographical dramas that depict the lives of great men of the past. More than 50 British playwrights are discussed, including John Osborne, John Arden, Edward Bond, Robert Bolt, Pam Gems, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, Howard Barker, and Peter Shaffer. Historical drama consistently displays the sense of history prevalent when it was written: a 17th century quest for precedent and analogy; the affirmation of cosmic order in the 18th century; the Romantic search for manifestations of spiritual purpose; in Victorian times, a demonstration that humans control events; and the early 20th century promise, emulating science, to present the facts objectively. Contemporary British history plays, however, demonstrate different agendas for history itself. Marxist plays illustrate a historical dialect leading to the emergence of Communism. Oppositional history takes the point of view of the disenfranchised, the defeated, or the oppressed. Social histories refocus attention away from movers and shakers onto groups of small players. Feminist historians expose the biases of a male dominated hegemony and confront the role of gender in history. Deconstructionists debunk our confidence in historical metanarratives. Postmodernism uses anachronism and stylistic eclecticism to emphasize parallels in different historical periods or to relate historically defined metaphors and rituals to modern experience. Both playwrights and critics confront the implications of the idea that history is constructed and not simply found, and new approaches to history demand innovations in the staging and structuring of plays.
Download or read book The Contemporary History Play written by Benjamin Poore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something exciting is happening with the contemporary history play. New writing by playwrights such as Jackie Sibblies Drury, Samuel Adamson, Hannah Khalil, Cordelia Lynn, and Lucy Kirkwood, makes powerful theatrical use of the past, but does not fit into critics' familiar categories of historical drama. In this book, Benjamin Poore provides readers with tools to name and critically analyse these changes. The Contemporary History Play contends that many history plays are becoming more complex and layered in their aesthetic approaches, as playwrights work through the experience of being surrounded by numerous and varied forms of historical representation in the twenty-first century. For theatre scholars, this book offers a means of interpreting how new writing relies on the past and notions of historicity to generate meaning and resonance in the present. For playwrights and students of playwriting, the book is a guide to the history play's recent past, and to the state of the art: what techniques and formulas have been popular, the tropes that are widely used, and how artists have found ways of renewing or overturning established conventions.
Download or read book Modern British Playwriting The 1970s written by Chris Megson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-03-20 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essential for students of Theatre Studies, this series of six decadal volumes provides a critical survey and reassessment of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1950s to the present. Each volume equips readers with an understanding of the context from which work emerged, a detailed overview of the range of theatrical activity and a close study of the work of four of the major playwrights by a team of leading scholars. Chris Megson's comprehensive survey of the theatre of the 1970s examines the work of four playwrights who came to promience in the decade and whose work remains undiminished today: Caryl Churchill (by Paola Botham), David Hare (Chris Megson), Howard Brenton (Richard Boon) and David Edgar (Janelle Reinelt). It analyses their work then, its legacy today and provides a fresh assessment of their contribution to British theatre. Interviews with the playwrights, with directors and with actors provides an invaluable collection of documents offering new perspectives on the work. Revisiting the decade from the perspective of the twenty-first century, Chris Megson provides an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of British playwriting in the 1970s.
Download or read book The Anachronistic Turn written by Stephanie Russo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anachronistic Turn: Historical Fiction, Drama, Film and Television is the first study to investigate the ways in which the creative use of anachronism in historical fictions can allow us to rethink the relationship between past and present. Through an examination of literary, cinematic, and popular texts and practices, this book investigates how twenty-first century historical fictions use creative anachronisms as a way of understanding modern issues and anxieties. Drawing together a wide range of texts across all forms of historical fiction - novels, dramas, musicals, films and television - this book re-frames anachronism not as an error, but as a deliberate strategy that emphasises the fictionalising tendencies of all forms of historical writing. The book achieves this by exploring three core themes: the developing trends in the twenty-first century for creators of historical fiction to include deliberate anachronisms, such as contemporary references, music, and language; the ways in which the deliberate use of anachronism in historical fiction can allow us to rethink the relationship between past and present, and; the way that contemporary historical fiction uses anachronism to better understand modern issues and anxieties. This book will appeal to students and scholars of historical fiction, contemporary historical film and television studies, and historical theatre studies.
Download or read book Sport and the British written by Richard Holt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and deeply researched history - the first of its kind - goes beyond the great names and moments to explain how British sport has changed since 1800, and what it has meant to ordinary people. It shows how the way we play reflects not just our lives as citizens of a predominantlyurban and industrial world, but what is especially distinctive about British sport. Innovators in abandoning traditional, often brutal sports, and in establishing a code of `fair play', the British were also pioneers in popular sports and in the promotion of organized spectator events.Modern media coverage of sport, gambling, violence and attitudes towards it, nationalism, and the role of sport in sustaining male identity are also explored, and the book is rich in illuminating and entertaining anecdotes, which it combines with a serious historical understanding of a fascinatingsubject.
Download or read book Contemporary British Theatre written by V. Angelaki and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection brings together a team of internationally prominent academics and delivers cutting-edge discourse on the strongly emerging tradition of experimentation in contemporary British theatre - redefining what the dramatic stands for today. Each chapter of the collection focuses on influential contemporary plays and playwrights.
Download or read book Medieval and Early Modern England on the Contemporary Stage written by Marianne Drugeon and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the multiple connections between contemporary British theatre and the medieval and early modern periods. Involving both French and British scholars, as well as playwrights, adapters and stage directors, its scope is political, as it assesses the power of adaptations and history plays to offer a new perspective not only on the past and present, but also on the future. Along the way, burning contemporary social and political issues are explored, such as the place and role of women and ethnic minorities in today’s post-Brexit Britain. The volume builds into a dialogue between the ghosts of the past and their contemporary spectators. Starting with a focus on contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, then concentrating on contemporary history plays set in the distant past, and ending with the contributions of famous playwrights sharing their experience, the book will be of interest to practitioners, as well as students and researchers in drama and performance studies.
Download or read book The Contemporary History Play written by Benjamin Poore and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something exciting is happening with the contemporary history play. New writing by playwrights such as Jackie Sibblies Drury, Samuel Adamson, Hannah Khalil, Cordelia Lynn, and Lucy Kirkwood, makes powerful theatrical use of the past, but does not fit into critics' familiar categories of historical drama. In this book, Benjamin Poore provides readers with tools to name and critically analyse these changes. The Contemporary History Play contends that many history plays are becoming more complex and layered in their aesthetic approaches, as playwrights work through the experience of being surrounded by numerous and varied forms of historical representation in the twenty-first century. For theatre scholars, this book offers a means of interpreting how new writing relies on the past and notions of historicity to generate meaning and resonance in the present. For playwrights and students of playwriting, the book is a guide to the history play's recent past, and to the state of the art: what techniques and formulas have been popular, the tropes that are widely used, and how artists have found ways of renewing or overturning established conventions.
Download or read book International Dramaturgy written by Maya E. Roth and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection provides the first full-length investigation of the oeuvre of one of Britain's leading dramatists: Timberlake Wertenbaker. By considering the polyglot playwright's theatre from translations and adaptations to new plays as a dynamic continuum of «translations and transformations», Maya Roth and Sara Freeman create an intriguing, focused frame for understanding Wertenbaker's work as distinctly cross-cultural, theatrically rich, and intertextual, providing a prescient case study of the translational turn emerging in international theatre today. The contributors investigate translation theory and practice through Wertenbaker's diverse linguistic and genre translations - from French, ancient Greek, and Italian to English, and from myth, history, classics, fairytale, and literature to the stage. Interrelated chapters by scholars and artists from varied countries, language traditions, and disciplines use performance studies, comparative literature, feminist theory, and cultural anthropology to position Wertenbaker's theatre as a critical nexus for analyzing - and imagining - cross-historical dialogues with contemporary audiences and our plural legacies. Thanks to its substantive engagement with the ethics, theories, and collaborative practices of theatrical translation and adaptation more broadly, and its equally rigorous examination of Wertenbaker's hybridic politics and poetics, this collection can serve as a useful resource for scholars and artists, both.
Download or read book Death Culture Leisure written by Matt Coward-Gibbs and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death, Culture and Leisure: Playing Dead is an inter- and multi-disciplinary volume that engages with the diverse nexuses that exist between death, culture and leisure. At its heart, it is a playful exploration of the way in which we play with both death and the dead.
Download or read book Contemporary British History written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Contemporary Record written by and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A History of Modern Britain written by Andrew Marr and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 996 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Modern Britain confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. It tells the story of how the great political visions of New Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan Age, rival idealisms, came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity and self-gratification. In each decade, political leaders think they know what they are doing, but find themselves confounded. Every time, the British people turn out to be stroppier and harder to herd than predicted. Throughout, Britain is a country on the edge – first of invasion, then of bankruptcy, then on the vulnerable front line of the Cold War and later in the forefront of the great opening up of capital and migration now reshaping the world. This history follows all the political and economic stories, but deals too with comedy, cars, the war against homosexuals, Sixties anarchists, oil-men and punks, Margaret Thatcher's wonderful good luck, political lies and the true heroes of British theatre.
Download or read book Democracy and Political Culture written by Ross McKibbin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Democracy and Political Culture' attempts to give a total picture of the political-social culture of Great Britain in the 20th century. It is a study of British democracy and asks the question: what does it mean to describe Britain as a democratic society?
Download or read book Publishers Weekly written by and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 1786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Modern British History written by Jeremy Black and published by Palgrave Macmillan Limited. This book was released on 2000 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling text provides a thematic account of British history centering on the 20th century. To the traditional, chronological account of historic events, Black adds long-range thematic chapters reflecting the full range of topics. These include political structures, ideologies, wars and international relations, economic history, and social history as well as consumerism, media, and mass communication. The coverage is further enlivened with exhibits providing supplementary background information on key personalities and pivotal events, and numerous illustrations.
