Download or read book British Socialist and Workers Theatre written by Robert Leach and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-07-07 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of the inception, development and achievements of British socialist and workers theatre – a feat which has not been attempted before. It explores the connections between politics and culture (specifically theatre) and between political theory and cultural (theatrical) expression. The book is organized chronologically and uncovers much in labour and theatre history which is in danger of being lost. It can also be seen as a way into different moments in its subject’s story (e.g. post-Ibsen naturalism; agitprop theatre; ‘fringe’ theatre of the 1970s) and the relationship of such forms to specific political events and ideas at specific points in history.
Download or read book Theatres of the Left 1880 1935 written by Raphael Samuel and published by London ; Boston : Routledge & Kegan Paul. This book was released on 1985 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how workers theatre movements intended their performances to be activist -- perceiving art as a weapon of struggle and enlightenment -- and an emancipatory act.
Download or read book Routledge Revivals Theatres of the Left 1880 1935 1985 written by Raphael Samuel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1985, this book examines how workers theatre movements intended their performances to be activist — perceiving art as a weapon of struggle and enlightenment — and an emancipatory act. An introductory study relates left-wing theatre groupings to the cultural narratives of contemporary British socialism. The progress of the Workers’ Theatre Movement (1928-1935) is traced from simple realism to the most brilliant phase of its Russian and German development alongside which the parallel movements in the United States are also examined. A number of crucial texts are reprints as well as stage notes and glimpses of the dramaturgical controversies which accompanied them.
Download or read book Theatre as a Weapon written by Richard Stourac and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2024-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on theatrical research of unusual depth and enterprise, Theatre as a Weapon (1986) shows how the workers' theatre of the 1920s and 1930s transformed the social function of theatre. Drawing largely on unpublished sources, it provides lively case studies of workers' theatre in the USSR, Germany and the United Kingdom. They range from the Russian mass spectacles in front of the Winter Palace, through the thousands of factory and courtyard performances in Germany, to the May Day activities of the Workers' Theatre Movement all over Britain. The authors worked for many years in political theatre in Britain, Austria and Germany, and they draw on their wide experience to focus on both major theoretical controversies and their practical ramifications. They show how workers' theatre became an instrument, a weapon, for political change, helping to raise the consciousness of thousands of workers and encouraging them to take action. They describe how worker-actors, musicians, writers and directors formed small, flexible troupes which contributed locally to the day-to-day struggles of their class, while at the same time participating in national and international political campaigns. Developments in dramatic structure are analysed, from the simple review form to the more complex scene-and-song montage. Placing the work of Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Piscator, Brecht and Eisler in this context, the authors demonstrate how the montage principle became the significant factor in the political theatre of this period. The book is illustrated with rare photographs which reflect the atmosphere of those mass movements. Unique in its coverage, Theatre as a Weapon is above all an analysis of how the mirror of realistic theatre was transformed into a dynamic weapon for social change. It fills an important gap in the history of working-class culture.
Download or read book British Theatre and the Red Peril written by Steve Nicholson and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how communism was portrayed in plays in the British theatre between 1917 and 1945, and how the theatre played a significant part in communicating and manipulating political propaganda in order to influence orders.
Download or read book The British Labour Movement and Film 1918 1939 written by Stephen G. Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1987. Using a wealth of primary sources, Stephen Jones investigates the role played in cinema affairs by the Labour Movement, stressing the important contributions made by the Labour Party, Communist Party and trade unions in the production and presentation of film. He gives us a rare and important insight into the British film industry, examining the cinema in its wider economic, political and cultural context. He explores the ideological influence of film, the nature of film work, state intervention and Sunday entertainment, as reflected in the policies and attitudes of organized labour. Also discussed are the growth and impact of independent working class film organization.
Download or read book Stages in the Revolution written by Catherine Itzin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-09-05 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1980, is a comprehensive study of the radical theatre movement in Britain from 1968 to 1978. The essays are based on first-hand interviews, with each section being introduced with a summary of key events before detailing the artists under examination.
Download or read book Churchill s Socialism written by Siân Adiseshiah and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although now celebrated as a world-leading playwright, Caryl Churchill has received little attention for her socialism, which has been frequently overlooked in favour of emphasising gendered identities and postmodernist themes. Churchill’s Socialism examines eight of Churchill’s plays with reference to socialist theories and political movements. This well-researched and dynamic new book reframes Churchill’s work, positioning her plays within socialist discourses, and producing persuasive political readings of her drama that reflect much more of the political challenge that the plays pose. It additionally explores her uneasy relationship with postmodernism, which presents itself particularly in Churchill’s later plays. The book contains a very helpful chapter on socialist contexts, which outlines some of the key events, debates, and movements during the late 1960s up until the early 2000s. This chapter also offers an incisive critique of the easy acceptance by some socialists of a postmodernist rejection of grand narratives and political agency. An in depth examination of the rarely explored interconnections of utopianism and theatre, forms another chapter, where all eight of Churchill’s plays, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Vinegar Tom, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Mad Forest, The Skriker, and Far Away, are introduced. The plays are then discussed in pairs in a further four chapters with reference to communist historiography, the class/gender intersection, the end-of-history thesis, ecocritical challenges and postmodernism.
Download or read book Theatre As a Weapon written by Richard Stourac and published by Methuen. This book was released on 1986-06-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book British Theatre Between the Wars 1918 1939 written by Clive Barker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume initiates a long-overdue reassessment of mid-twentieth-century British theatre cultures.
Download or read book Workers Tales written by Michael J. Rosen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of political tales—first published in British workers’ magazines—selected and introduced by acclaimed critic and author Michael Rosen In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, unique tales inspired by traditional literary forms appeared frequently in socialist-leaning British periodicals, such as the Clarion, Labour Leader, and Social Democrat. Based on familiar genres—the fairy tale, fable, allegory, parable, and moral tale—and penned by a range of lesser-known and celebrated authors, including Schalom Asch, Charles Allen Clarke, Frederick James Gould, and William Morris, these stories were meant to entertain readers of all ages—and some challenged the conventional values promoted in children’s literature for the middle class. In Workers’ Tales, acclaimed critic and author Michael Rosen brings together more than forty of the best and most enduring examples of these stories in one beautiful volume. Throughout, the tales in this collection exemplify themes and ideas related to work and the class system, sometimes in wish-fulfilling ways. In “Tom Hickathrift,” a little, poor person gets the better of a gigantic, wealthy one. In “The Man Without a Heart,” a man learns about the value of basic labor after testing out more privileged lives. And in “The Political Economist and the Flowers,” two contrasting gardeners highlight the cold heart of Darwinian competition. Rosen’s informative introduction describes how such tales advocated for contemporary progressive causes and countered the dominant celebration of Britain’s imperial values. The book includes archival illustrations, biographical notes about the writers, and details about the periodicals where the tales first appeared. Provocative and enlightening, Workers’ Tales presents voices of resistance that are more relevant than ever before.
Download or read book George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre written by Tracy C. Davis and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1994-07-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biographically based study of George Bernard Shaw and his milieu, this book offers a non-laudatory reading of Shaw's economic practices and theories, augments feminist and postcolonial critiques that preoccupy the study of literary history in the 1990s, and provides a long overdue revisionist reading of Shaw for an undergraduate readership. It traces the theatrical and political influences on Shaw from his earliest days in London; tracks his interest in socialism as an activist and author of tracts, novels, and plays emphasizing certain polemical traits; and follows his career as a major literary figure into the mid-20th century. The overarching themes of theatre and politics are narrated in relation to attempts by Shaw and his contemporaries to identify an audience and aesthetic for socialist theatre. The bibliographic essay that concludes the book is particularly helpful for student readers, who can benefit from a manageably-sized orientation to the mountain of Shavian scholarship.
Download or read book An Illustrated History of British Theatre and Performance written by Robert Leach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-10 with total page 848 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Illustrated History of British Theatre and Performance chronicles the history and development of theatre from the Roman era to the present day. As the most public of arts, theatre constantly interacted with changing social, political and intellectual movements and ideas, and Robert Leach’s masterful work restores to the foreground of this evolution the contributions of women, gay people and ethnic minorities, as well as the theatres of the English regions, and of Wales and Scotland. Highly illustrated chapters trace the development of theatre through major plays from each period; evaluations of playwrights; contemporary dramatic theory; acting and acting companies; dance and music; the theatre buildings themselves; and the audience, while also highlighting enduring features of British theatre, from comic gags to the use of props. Continuing on from the Enlightenment, Volume Two of An Illustrated History of British Theatre and Performance leads its readers from the drama and performances of the Industrial Revolution to the latest digital theatre. Moving from Punch and Judy, castle spectres and penny showmen to Modernism and Postdramatic Theatre, Leach’s second volume triumphantly completes a collated account of all the British Theatre History knowledge anyone could ever need.
Download or read book Condition of the Working Class in England written by Friedrich Engels and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2006 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This masterpiece by Engels reflects his views on the plight of labour classes in England. It is based on his in-depth research and parliamentary reports. In a factual and analytic manner he has voiced his support for fundamental human rights. It is an emphatic protest against the barbarianism of capitalism and industrialization. A prototypical opus!
Download or read book British Drama of the Industrial Revolution written by Frederick Burwick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the advent of the French Revolution and the short-lived success of the Chartist Movement, overworked and underpaid labourers struggled to achieve solidarity and collective bargaining. That history has been told in numerous accounts of the age, but never before has it been told in terms of the theatre of the period. To understand the play lists of a theatre, it is crucial to examine the community which that theatre serves. In the labouring-class communities of London and the provinces, the performances were adapted to suit the local audiences, whether weavers, or miners, or field workers. Examining the conditions and characteristics of representative provincial theatres from the 1790s to 1830s, Frederick Burwick argues that the meaning of a play changes with every change in the performance location. As contributing factors in that change, Burwick attends to local political and cultural circumstances as well as to theatrical activities and developments elsewhere.
Download or read book Scenes from the Revolution written by Kim Wiltshire and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political theater thrives on turbulence. Transmuting Brexit, Trump, and impending ecological disaster into a potent, dramatic art form, its practitioners hold a mirror up to our society, wielding the power to entertain, shock, and discomfit. Scenes from the Revolution is a celebration of fifty years of radical theater in Britain. Beginning with a short history of pre-1968 political theater--covering Brecht, Joan Littlewood, and Ewan McColl--the editors move on to explore agit-prop, working-class, youth, community, POC, women's, and LGBTQ theater. Comprehensive in scope, and featuring many of the leading voices in the field today, as well as "lost" scripts from the radical theater companies of the past, Scenes from the Revolution is a must-read for anyone interested in politics in the arts.
Download or read book Staging Strikes written by Colette A. Hyman and published by Critical Perspectives on the P. This book was released on 1997 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the thirties, those on the political left, Socialists, Communists, artists and writers, educators, and labor movement activists, shared the belief that leisure activities should reflect and promote the interests of working people. Cultural activities should be used to educate workers in bringing about radical social and political changes and to draw people together around shared interests. Workers' theater became a successful vehicle for political education and for involving the audience in the labor movement. Such plays as "Let Freedom Ring" and "Waiting for Lefty" depicted experiences that paralleled the audiences' own, that entertained and absorbed them, and that showed them the personal, social, economic, and political changes that could be achieved through the struggles of the labor movement. In clear and moving prose, Hyman traces the history of workers' theater from its grassroots origins to the Federal Theater Project of the WPA under Roosevelt and into unions' recreational programs. Even today, the tradition of workers' theater endures in local and regional productions that reflect current worker concerns or revive significant workers' plays of the Depression period. Hyman shows that the significance of workers' theater lies not only in the plays produced but also in the audiences' experience, in coming together out of common concerns to achieve a solidarity that emphasizes the effectiveness of collective action. Author note:Colette A. Hymanis Associate Professor of History and Director of Women's Studies, Winona State University, Minnesota. She is the author of several articles on political art and women in the labor movement.
