King Alfred Drama

Tadeusz Kantor history

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examples of Tadeusz kantor

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Tadeusz Kantor

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Tadeusz Kantor (6 April 1915 – 8 December 1990) was a Polish painter, assemblage artist, set designer and theatre director. Kantor is renowned for his revolutionary theatrical performances in Poland and abroad.

[edit] Life and career

Born in Wielopole Skrzyńskie, Galicia (then in Austria-Hungary), Kantor graduated from the Cracow Academy in 1939. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he founded the Independent Theatre, and served as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków as well as a director of experimental theatre in Kraków from 1942 to 1944. After the war, he became known for his avant-garde work in stage design including designs for Saint Joan (1956) and Measure for Measure (1956). Specific examples of such changes to standard theatre were stages that extended out into the audience, and the use of mannequins as real-life actors.

Disenchanted with the growing institutionalization of avant-garde, in 1955 he with a group of visual artists formed a new theatre ensemble called Cricot 2. In the 1960s, Cricot 2 gave performances in many theatres in Poland and abroad, gaining recognition for their stage happenings. His interest was mainly with the absurdists and Polish writer and playwright Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (also known as "Witkacy"). Stage productions of Witkacy's plays The Cuttlefish (1956) and The Water Hen (1969) were regarded as his best achievements during this time. A 1972 performance of The Water Hen was described as "the least-publicised, most talked-about event at the Edinburgh festival".

Tadeusz Kantor, commemorative bust

Tadeusz Kantor, Kantor's chair, concrete sculpture, hight 14 m. Hucisko, Poland
Dead Class (1975) was the most famous of his theatre pieces of the 1970s. In the play, Kantor himself played the role of a teacher who presided over a class of apparently dead characters who are confronted by mannequins which represented their younger selves. He had begun experimenting with the juxtaposition of mannequins and live actors in the 1950s.

His later works of the 1980s were very personal reflections. As in Dead Class, he would sometimes represent himself on stage. In the 1990s, his works became well known in the United States due to presentations at Ellen Stewart's La MaMa Experimental Theater Club.

Throughout his life, Kantor had an interesting and unique relationship with Jewish culture, despite being a nominal Catholic and having a father with anti-Semitic tendencies, Kantor incorporated many elements of what was known as "Jewish theatre" into his works.

Kantor died in Kraków

Le coq Link

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http://www.ecole-jacqueslecoq.com/en/biographies_en-000004_t9.html

Theatre of the Absurd

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'The Theatre of the Absurd' has become a catch-phrase, much used and much abused. What does it stand for? And how can such a label be justified? Perhaps it will be best to attempt to answer the second question first. There is no organised movement, no school of artists, who claim the label for themselves. A good many playwrights who have been classed under this label, when asked if they belong to the Theatre of the Absurd, will indigniantly reply that they belong to no such movement - and quite rightly so. For each of the playwrights concerned seeks to express no more and no less his own personal vision of the world.

Yet critical concepts of this kind are useful when new modes of expression, new conventions of art arise. When the plays of Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, and Adamov first appeared on the stage they puzzled and outraged most critics as well audiences. And no wonder. These plays flout all the standards by which drama has been judged for many centuries; they must therefore appear as a provocation to people who have come into the theatre expecting to find what they would recognize as a well-made play. A well-made play is expected to present characters that are well-observed and convincingly motivated: these plays often contain hardly any recognizable human beings and present completely unmotivated actions. A well-made play is expected to entertain by the ding-dong of witty and logically built-up dialogue: in some of these plays dialogue seems to have degenerated into meaningless babble. A well-made play is expected to have a beginning, a middle, and a neatly tied-up ending: these plays often start at an arbitrary point and seem to end just as arbitrarily. By all the traditional standards of of critical appreciation of the drama, these plays are not only abominably bad, they do not even deserve the name drama.

And yet, strangely enough, these plays have worked, they have had an effect, they have exercised a fascination of their own in the theatre. At first it was said that this fascination was merely a succès de scandale, that people flocked to see Beckett's Waiting for Godot or Ionesco's Bald Primadonna merely because it had become fashionable to express outrage and astonishment about them at parties. But this explanation clearly could not apply to more than one or two plays of this kind. And the success of a whole row of similarly unconventional works became more and more manifest. If the critical touchstones of conventional drama did not apply to these plays, this must surely have been due to a difference in objective, the use of different artistic means, to the fact, in short, that these plays were both creating and applying a different convention of drama. It is just as senseless to condemn an abstract painting because it lacks perspective or a recognizable subject-matter as it is to reject Waiting for Godot because it has no plot to speak of. In painting a composition of squares and lines an artist like Mondrian does not want to depict any object in nature, he does not want to create perspective. Similarly, in writing Waiting for Godot Beckett did not intend to tell a story, he did not want the audience to go home satisfied that they knew the solution to the problem posed in the play. Hence there is no point in reproaching him with not doing what he never sought to do; the only reasonable course is to try and find out what it was that he did intend.

Yet, if tackled directly most of the playwrights in question would refuse to discuss any theories or objectives behind their work. They would, with perfect justification, point out that they are concerned with one thing only: to express their vision of the world as best they can, simply because, as artists, they feel an irrepressible urge to do so. This is where the critic can step in. By describing the works that do not fit into the established convention, by bringing out the similarities of approach in a number of more or less obviously related new works, by analysing the nature of their method and their artistic effect, he can try to define the framework of the new convention, and by doing so, can provide the standards by which it will become possible to have works in that convention meaningfully compared and evaluated. The onus of proof that there is such a convetion involved clearly lies on the critic, but if he can establish that there are basic similarities in approach, he can argue that these similarities must arise from common factors in the experience of the writers concerned. And these common factors must in turn spring from the spiritual climate of our age (which no sensitive artist can escape) and also perhaps from a common background of artistic influences, a similarity of roots, a shared tradition.

A term like the Theatre of the Absurd must therefore be understood as a kind of intellectual shorthand for a complex pattern of similarities in approach, method, and convention, of shared philosophical and artistic premises, whether conscious or subconscious, and of influences from a common store of tradition. A label of this kind therefore is an aid to understanding, valid only in so far as it helps to gain insight into a work of art. It is not a binding classification; it is certainly not all-embracing or exclusive. A play may contain some elements that can best be understood in the light of such a label, while other elements in the same play derive from and can best be understood in the light of a different convention. Arthur Adamov, for example, has written a number of plays that are prime examples of the Theatre of the Absurd. He now quite openly and consciously rejects this style and writes in a different, realistic convention. Nevertheless even his latest plays, which are both realistic and socially committed, contain some aspects which can still be elucidated in terms of the Theatre of the Absurd (such as the use of symbolic interludes, guignols, in his play Spring '71). Moreover, once a term like Theatre of the Absurd is defined and understood, it acquires a certain value in throwing light on works of previous epochs. The Polish critic Jan Kott, for example, has written a brilliant study of King Lear in the light of Beckett's Endgame. And that this was no vain academic exercise but a genuine aid to understanding is shown by the fact that Peter Brook's great production of King Lear took many of its ideas from Kott's essay.

What then is the convention of drama that has now acquired the label of the Theatre of the Absurd?

Let us take one of the plays in this volume as a starting point: Ionesco's Amédée. A middle-aged husband and wife are shown in a situation which is clearly not taken from real life. They have not left their flat for years. The wife earns her living by operating some sort of telephone switchboard; the husband is writing a play, but has never got beyond the first few lines. In the bedroom is a corpse. It has been there for many years. It may be the corpse of the wife's lover whom the husband killed when he found them together, but this is by no means certain; it may also have been a burglar, or a stray visitor. But the oddest thing about it is that it keeps growing larger and larger; it is suffering from 'geometric progression, the incurable disease of the dead'. And in the course of the play it grows so large that eventually an enormous foot bursts from the bedroom into the living-room, threatening to drive Amédée and his wife out of their home. All this is wildly fantastic, yet it is not altogether unfamiliar, for it is not unlike situations most of us have experienced at one time or another in dreams and nightmares.

Ionesco has in fact put a dream situation onto the stage, and in a dream quite clearly the rules of realistic theatre no longer apply. Dreams do not develop logically; they develop by association. Dreams do not communicate ideas; they communicate images. And inded the growing corpse in Amédée can best be understood as a poetic image. It is in the nature both of dreams and poetic imagery that they are ambiguous and carry a multitude of meanings at one and the same time, so that it is futile to ask what the image of the growing corpse stands for. On the other hand one can say that the corpse might evoke the growing power of past mistakes or past guilt, perhaps the waning of love or the death of affection - some evil in any case that festers and grows worse with time. The image can stand for any and all of these ideas, and its ability to embrace them all gives it the poetic power it undoubtedly posseses.

Not all the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd can be described simply as dreams (although Adamov's Professor Taranne in this volume actually came to Adamov as a dream, Albee's Zoo Story is clearly far more firmly anchored in reality) but in all of them the poetic image is the focus of interest. In other words: while most plays in the traditional convention are primarily concerned to tell a story or elucidate an intellectual problem, and can thus be seen as a narrative or discursive form of communication, the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd are primarily intended to convey a poetic image or a complex pattern of poetic images; they are above all a poetical form. Narrative or discursive thought proceeds in a dialectical manner and must lead to a result or final message; it is therefore dynamic and moves along a definite line of development. Poetry is above all concerned to convey its central idea, or atmosphere, or mode of being; it is essentially static.

This does not mean, however, that these plays lack movement: the movement in Amédée, for instance, is relentless, lying as it does in the pressure of the ever-growing corpse. But the situation of the play remains static; the movement we see is the unfolding of the poetic image. The more ambiguous and complex that image, the more intricate and intriguing will be the process of revealing it. That is why a play like Waiting for Godot can generate considerable suspense and dramatic tension in spite of being a play in which literally nothing happens, a play designed to show that nothing can ever happen in human life. It is only when the last lines have been spoken and the curtain has fallen that we are in a position to grasp the total pattern of the complex poetic image we have been confronted with. If, in the traditional play, the action goes from point A to point B, and we constantly ask, 'what's going to happen next?', here we have an action that consists in the gradual unfolding of a complex pattern, and instead we ask, 'what is it that we are seeking? What will the completed image be when we have grasped the nature of the pattern?' Thus in Arrabal's The Two Executioners in this volume we realise at the end of the play that the theme is the exploration of a complex image of the mother-son relationship; in Albee's Zoo Story it is only in the last lines of the play that the idea of the entire dialogue between Jerry and Peter falls into place, as an image of the difficulty of communication between human beings in our world.

Why should the emphasis in drama have shifted away from traditional forms towards images which, complex and suggestive as they may be, must necessarily lack the final clarity of definition, the neat resolutions we have been used to expect? Clearly because the playwrights concerned no longer believe in the possibility of such neatness of resolution. They are indeed chiefly concerned with expressing a sense of wonder, of incomprehension, and at times of despair, at the lack of cohesion and meaning that they find in the world. If they could believe in clearly defined motivations, acceptable solutions, settlements of conflict in tidily tied up endings, these dramatists would certainly not eschew them. But, quite obviously, they have no faith in the existence of so rational and well ordered a universe. The 'well-made play' can thus be seen as conditioned by clear and comforting beliefs, a stable scale of values, an ethical system in full working condition. The system of values, the world-view behind the well-made play may be a religious one or a political one; it may be an implicit belief in the goodness and perfectibility of men (as in Shaw or Ibsen) or it may be a mere unthinking acceptance of the moral and political status quo (as in most drawing-room comedy). But whatever it is, the basis of the well-made play is the implicit assumption that the world does make sense, that reality is solid and secure, all outlines clear, all ends apparent. The plays that we have classed under the label of the Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, express a sense of shock at the absense, the loss of any such clear and well-defined systems of beliefs or values.

There can little doubt that such a sense of disillusionment, such a collapse of all previously held firm beliefs is a characteristic feature of our own times. The social and spiritual reasons for such a sense of loss of meaning are manifold and complex: the waning of religious faith that had started with the Enlightenment and led Nietzsche to speak of the 'death of God' by the eighteen-eighties; the breakdown of the liberal faith in inevitable social progress in the wake of the First World War; the disillusionment with the hopes of radical social revolution as predicted by Marx after Stalin had turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian tyranny; the relapse into barbarism, mass murder, and genocide in the course of Hitler's brief rule over Europe during the Second World War; and, in the aftermath of that war, the spread of spiritual emptiness in the outwardly prosperous and affluent societies of Western Europe and the United States. There can be no doubt: for many intelligent and sensitive human beings the world of the mid twentieth century has lost its meaning and has simply ceased to make sense. Previously held certainties have dissolved, the firmest foundations for hope and optimism have collapsed. Suddenly man sees himself faced with a universe that is both frightening and illogical - in a word, absurd. All assurances of hope, all explanations of ultimate meaning have suddenly been unmasked as nonsensical illusions, empty chatter, whistling in the dark. If we try to imagine such a situation in ordinary life, this might amount to our suddenly ceasing to understand the conversation in a room full of people; what made sense at one moment has, at the next, become an obscure babble of voices in a foreign language. At once the comforting, familiar scene would turn into one of nightmare and horror. With the loss of the means of communication we should be compelled to view that world with the eyes of total outsiders as a succession of frightening images.

Such a sense of loss of meaning must inevitably lead to a questioning of the recognised instrument for the communication of meaning: language. Consequently the Theatre of the Absurd is to a very considerable extent concerned with a critique of language, an attack above all on fossilized forms of language which have become devoid of meaning. The converstaion at the party which at one moment seemed to be an exchange if information about the weather, or new books, or the respective health of the participants, is suddenly revealed as an exchange of mere meaningless banalities. The people talking about the weather had no intention whatever of of really exchanging meaningful information on the subject; they were merely using language to fill the emptiness between them, to conceal the fact that they had no desire to tell each other anything at all. In other words, from being a noble instrument of genuine communication language has become a kind of ballast filling empty spaces. And equally, in a universe that seems to be drained of meaning, the pompous and laborious attempts at explanation that we call philosophy or politics must appear as empty chatter. In Waiting for Godot for example Beckett parodies and mocks the language of philosophy and science in Lucky's famous speech. Harold Pinter, whose uncanny accuracy in the reproduction of real conversation among English people has earned him the reputation of having a tape-recorder built into his memory, reveals that the bulk of everyday conversation is largely devoid of logic and sense, is in fact nonsensical. It is at this point that the Theatre of the Absurd can actually coincide with the highest degree of realism. For if the real conversation of human beings is in fact absurd and nonsensical, then it is the well-made play with its polished logical dialogue that is unrealistic, while the absurdist play may well be a tape-recorded reproduction of reality. Or, in a world that has become absurd, the Theatre of the Absurd is the most realistic comment on, the most accurate reproduction of, reality.

In its critique of language the Theatre of the Absurd closely reflects the preoccupation of contemporary philosophy with language, its effort to disentangle language, as a genuine instrument for logic and the discovery of reality, from the welter of emotive, illogical usages, the grammatical conventions that have, in the past, often been confused with genuine logical relationships. And equally, in its emphasis on the basic absurdity of the human condition, on the bankruptcy of all closed systems of thought with claims to provide a total explanation of reality, the Theatre of the Absurd has much in common with the existential philosophy of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. (It was in fact Camus who coined the concept of the Absurd in the sense in which it is used here.) This is not to say that the dramatists of the Absurd are trying to translate contemporary philosophy into drama. It is merely that philosophers and dramatists respond to the same cultural and spiritual situation and reflect the same preoccupations.

Yet, however contemporary the Theatre of the Absurd may appear it is by no means the revolutionary novelty as which some of its champions, as well as some of its bitterest critics, tend to represent it. In fact the Theatre of the Absurd can best be understood as a new combination of a number of ancient, even archaic, traditions of literature and drama. It is surprising and shocking merely because of the unusual nature of the combination and the increased emphasis on aspects of drama that, while present in all plays, rarely emerge into the foreground.

The ancient traditions combined in a new form in the Theatre of the Absurd are: the tradition of miming and clowning that goes back to the mimus of Greece and Rome, the commedia dell' arte of Renaissance Italy, and such popular forms of theatre as the pantomime or the music-hall in Britain; the equally ancient tradition of nonsense poetry; the tradition of dream and nightmare literature that also goes back to Greek and Roman times; allegorical and symbolic drama, such as we find it in medieval morality plays, or in the Spanish auto sacramental; the ancient tradition of fools and mad scenes in drama, of which Shakespeare provides a multitude of examples; and the even more ancient tradition of ritual drama that goes back to the very origins of the theatre where religion and drama were still one. It is no coincidence that one of the masters of the Theatre of the Absurd, Jean Genet, regards his plays as attempts at recaturing the riual element in the Mass itself, which, after all, can be seen as a poetic image of an archetypal event brought to life through a sequence of symbolical actions.

It is against this background that we must see the history of the movement which culminates in Beckett, Ionesco, or Genet. Its immediate forebears are dramatists like Strindberg, who progressed from photographic naturalism to more and more openly expressionist representations of dreams, nightmares, or obsessions in plays like the Ghost Sonata, Dream Play, or To Damascus, and novelists like James Joyce and Kafka. A form of drama concerned with dream-like imagery and the failure of language was bound to find inspiration also in the silent cinema, with its dream-like quality and cruel, sometimes nightmare humour. Charlie Chaplin's little man and Buster Keaton's stonefaced stoic are among the openly acknowledged influences of writers like Beckett and Ionesco. These comedians, after all, derive from the most ancient traditions of clowning, as do, in the talking cinema, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, or Laurel and Hardy, all clearly part of the tradition which leads to the Theatre of the Absurd.

Another direct and acknowledged influence is that of the Dadaists, the surrealists, and the Parisian avant-garde that derives from writers like Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). Jarry's Ubu Roi, first performed in 1896, might in fact be called the first modern example of the Theatre of the Absurd. It is a savage farce in which monstrous puppets castigate the greed and emptiness of bourgeois society through a series of grotesque stage images. Apollinaire's play Les Mamelles de Tiresias ('The Breasts of Tiresias') was the first play to be labelled by its author as 'a surrealist drama'. Here too the action proceeds through a series of savagely grotesque images; the hero, or rather the heroine, Thérèse-Tiresias changes sex by letting her breasts float twards the heavens in the shape of two toy balloons. Jarry and Apollinaire were the direct precursors of the Dadaists in Switzerland, France and Germany. Brecht's earliest plays bear the marks of the Dadaist influence and can be regarded as early examples of the Theatre of the Absurd: In the Jungle of the Cities for instance presents the audience with a totally unmotivate struggle, a series of poetic images of man fighting a senseless battle with himself. In France the two leading exponents of surrealism in drama were Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and Roger Vitrac (1899-1952). Vitrac's play Victor ou Les Enfants au Pouvoir (1924) anticipates Ionesco and Arrabal by showing the world from the point of view of a nine-year-old child of giant size and monstrous intelligence. Artaud, who wrote very little in dramatic form himself, is of immense importance as a theoretician of the new anti-literary theatre: he coined the slogan of the 'Theatre of Cruelty' for his conception of a theatre designed to shock its audience into a full awareness of the horror of the human condition. Jean-Louis Barrault and Roger Blin, two of the leading directors of the contemporary avant-garde theatre, were pupils of Artaud; Arthur Adamov was among his closest friends.

In its present form the Theatre of the Absurd is a post-war phenomenon. Genet's The Maids had its first performance at the Athénée in Paris in 1947; Ionesco's Bald Primadonna and Adamov's earliest plays were first produced in 1950; Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1952. It will be noticed that all these first performances took place in Paris. And Paris certainly is the fountainhead of the Theatre of the Absurd. Yet it is equally strange and significant that the playwrights themselves are largely exiles from other countries domiciled in Paris: Beckett (born 1906) an Anglo-Irishman who writes in French; Ionesco (born 1912) half-French and half-Rumanian; Adamov (born 1908) a Russo-Armenian. Only Genet is a Frenchman born and bred, but then he is an exile in a different sense: an exile from society itself, a child abandoned by his mother, brought up by foster-parents and drifting from detention centres for juvenile delinquents into an underworld of thieves and male prostitutes, prison and penitentiary. It is in the experience of the outcast or exile that our image of the world seen from the outside assumes a new and added significance: for the exile, from his country or from society, moves in a world drained of meaning, sees people in pursuit of objectives he cannot comprehend, hears them speak a language that he cannot follow. The exile's basic experience is the archetype and the anticipation of twentieth-century man's shock at his realization that the world is ceasing to make sense.

Of the dramatists of the Absurd Samuel Beckett is undoubtedly the profoundest, the greatest poet. Waiting for Godot and Endgame are certainly masterpieces; Happy Days and Play, Krapp's Last Tape, and the two Acts without Words (where language has drained away altogether) are brilliant and profound poetic images; and the radio plays All that Fall, Embers, Words and Music, and Cascando have an equal enigmatic power.

Jean Genet (born 1910) lacks Beckett's discipline, intellect and erudition, but he too is a poet, endowed with the wellnigh magic power of creating beauty from evil, corruption and excrement. If the evanescence of man in time and the mystery of human personality and identity are Beckett's main themes, Genet's chief concern is with the falseness of human pretensions in society, the contrast between appearance and reality, which itself must remain for ever elusive. In The Maids we see the servants bound in a mixture of hatred and erotic dependence to their mistress, re-enacting this love-hate in an endless series of ritual games; in The Balcony society itself is symbolized in the image of a brothel providing its customers with the illusions of power; and in The Blacks we are back with the underdog acting out his hatred for his oppressor (which is also a form of love) in an endless ritual of mock-murder.

Jean Tardieu (born 1903) and Boris Vian (1920-59) are among the best of the French dramatists of the Absurd. Tardieu is an experimenter who has systematically explored the possibilities of a theatre that can divorce itself from discursive speech to the point where language becomes mere musical sound. Vian, a devoted follower of Jarry, wrote a play, The Empire Builders, which shows man fleeing from death and loneliness in the image of a family moving into ever smaller flats on higher and higher floors of a mysterious building.

In Italy Dino Buzzati and Ezio d'Errico, in Germany Günter Grass (known as a novelist for his monumental Tin Drum) and Wolfgang Hildesheimer are the main exponents of the Theatre of the Absurd. In Britain, N. F. Simpson, James Saunders, David Campton, and Harold Pinter might be classed under this heading. N. F. Simpson has clear links with English nonsense literature, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. James Saunders, particularly in Next Time I'll Sing to You, expresses in dramatic form the thought of the existential philosophers. Pinter, who acknowledges Kafka and Beckett among his literary heroes, combines realism with an intuition of the absurdity of human existence. In his later work he has shed some of the allegorical symbolism of his beginnings, but even in seemingly realistic plays like The Collection there is an absense of motivation and solution, a multple ambiguity and a sense of non-communication which transforms the seemingly realistic account of humdrum adultery into a poetic image of the human condition.

Behind the Iron Curtain, where socialist realism is the official creed in the theatre, there would appear to be no room for an avant-garde trend of this type. Yet there is one country where the influence of the Theatre of the Absurd has produced some astonishingly successful plays: Poland, an area of relative artistic freedom since the defeat of the Stalinists by Gomulka in the autumn of 1956. A strong surrealist influence was present in Poland even before the war (Gombrowicz and Witkiewicz are two dramatists who might be regarded as among the most important immediate precursors of the Theatre of the Absurd) so that the soil was fertile for a development which was further fostered by the ability of drama of this kind to express political comment in a suitably oblique form. A number of young dramatists, notably Slawomir Mrozek and Tadeusz Rozewicz, have produced outstandingly original work in the convention of the Absurd.

Three of the playwrights represented in this volume are Parisian exiles. Eugène Ionesco is undoubtedly the most fertile and original of the dramatists of the Absurd, and also, in spite of a streak of clowning and fun for its own sake in his work, one of the most profound. He is moreover the most vocal of the dramatists of the Absurd, the only one who is prepared to discuss the theoretical foundations of his work and to reply to the attacks on it from committed left-wing realists. The critique of language and the haunting presense of death are Ionesco's chief themes in plays like The Bald Primadonna, The Lesson, The Chairs, The Killer, Rhinoceros, and Exit The King. Amédée or How to Get Rid of It (1953) is Ionesco's first full-length play and contains one of his most telling images. It is also characteristic in its alternation between states of depression and euphoria, leaden oppression and floating on air, an image which reappears through his work and which culminates, in this particular play, in Amédée's floating away at the end.

Arthur Adamov today belongs to the camp against which Ionesco directs his harshest polemics, the socialist realists whose organ is the periodical Théâtre populaire, but he started out as a follower of Artaud, a self-confessed neurotic, an alien in a senseless world. Adamov's development from one extreme to the other is a fascinating artistic and psychological case history, in which Professor Taranne occupies a key position. Adamov's progress can be seen as a process of psychological therapy through writing. Unable to face the reality of the outside world, he started out by projecting his oppressions and anxieties on to the stage. Nothing would have induced him, he has since confessed, to mention any element of the real world, such as a place-name in one of his plays; he would have regarded that as a piece of unspeakable vulgarity. And yet, when he committed to paper the dream which is now the play Professor Taranne, he realized that a real place-name, that of Belgium, had occurred in the dream. Truthfulness in transcribing the dream thus forced him to compromise on one of his fundamental artistic principles. And from then onwards reality kept breaking through into his writing in ever more insistent form, until today he is a thorough-going realist of the Brechtian school. That is to say, by writing his obsessions out of his system, Adamov acquired the ability to face and to control the objective world from which he had withdrawn into neurosis. It might be argued that the projection of neurotic obsessions is both more interesting and more illuminating in providing insights into the dark side of the human mind than the accurate transcription of historical events, and that therefore Adamov's absurdist plays are more fascinating, more successful than his later efforts. But this is a matter of taste as well as of ideological bias. The fact remains that Professor Taranne and the somewhat more realistic Ping Pong are undoubtedly among Adamov's best plays.

Fernando Arrabal (born 1932) is a Spaniard who has been living in France since 1954 and now writes in French. He is an admirer of Beckett, but sees his roots in the surrealist tradition of Spain, a country that has always been rich in fantasy and the grotesque (El Greco, Goya) and that in more recent times has produced such outstanding representatives of the modern movement as the painter Picasso (who has himself written two plays in an absurdist vein) and the writers Lorca and Valle Inclàn. Arrabal's own contribution to the absurdist spectrum is a highly original one: his main preoccupation is with the absurdity of ethical and moral rules. He looks at the world with the incomprehemsion of a child that simply cannot understand the logic of conventional morality. Thus, in The Automobile Graveyard there is a prostitute who follows her profession simply because religion demands that one be kind to one's neighbours; how then could she refuse them the ultimate kindness of giving herself to them? And similarly in The Two Executioners the rebel son who objects to the tortures that his mother inflicts on his father is faced with the dilemma of several contradictory moral laws: obediance to one's father, the human goodness that prompts one to save the suffering victim from his torturers, and the need to honour and obey one's mother. These moral laws are here in obvious conflict, as it is the mother who has the father tortured. Clearly the situation in which several moral laws are in contradiction exposes the absurdity of the system of values that accommodates them all. Arrabal refuses to judge; he merely notes the position and shows that he finds it beyond his comprehension.

Edward Albee (born 1928) is one of the few American exponents of the Theatre of the Absurd. An adopted child, he shares with Genet the orphan's sense of loneliness in an alien world; and the image of the dream child which exists only in the adoptive parents' imagination recurs in a number of his plays, notably The American Dream and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The latter, which has earned him an enormous success on Broadway, is undoubtedly one of the finest American plays since the heyday of Eugene O'Neill. It is a savage dance of death reminiscent of Strindberg, outwardly realistic in form, but in fact, as in the case of Pinter's best work, existing on at least two levels apart from the realistic one: as an allegory of American society, a poetic image of its emptiness and sterility, and as a complex ritual on the pattern of Genet. The Zoo Story (1958), one of Albee's earliest dramatic ventures, has a similar complexity: it is a clinically accurate study of Schizophrenia, an image of man's loneliness and inability to make contact, and also, on the ritual and symbolic level, an act of ritual self-immolation that has curious parallels with Christ's atonement. (Note the names Jerry - Jesus? - and Peter).

The plays in this volume, like the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd in general, present a disillusioned, harsh, and stark picture of the world. Though often couched in the form of extravagant fantasies, they are nevertheless essentially realistic, in the sense that they never shirk the realities of the human mind with its despair, fear and loneliness in an alien and hostile universe. There is more human reality in the grotesquely extravagant images of Amédée than in many far longer plays plays in a convention that is a mere photographic copy of the surface of life. The realism of these plays is a psychological, and inner realism; they explaore the human sub-conscious in depth rather than trying to describe the outward appearance of human existence. Nor is it quite correct that these plays, deeply pessimistic as they are, are nothing but an expression of utter despair. It is true that basically the Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.

- Martin Esslin, Introduction to "Penguin Plays - Absurd Drama" (Penguin, 1965)

"Martin Esslin was born Julius Pereszlenyi on 6 June 1918 into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the Great War, he became Austrian by default and in 1920 the family moved to Vienna where he was educated at the Bundesgymnasium II. In 1936 he went to the University of Vienna where he studied Philosophy and English. He also studied directing, acting and dramaturgy at the Reinhardt Seminar of Dramatic Art. He was about to begin his theatrical career in Vienna when the Nazis invaded Austria. He fled, spending a year in Brussels before reaching England where he became a scriptwriter and producer for the BBC’s European Services in 1940. He wrote numerous radio features on political, social and literary subjects and in 1955 was appointed assistant head of BBC European Productions, and in 1961, assistant head of Drama (Sound). In 1963 Esslin was appointed head of BBC Radio Drama. By the mid-1960s the Radio Drama department at the BBC was originating between 400 and 500 plays a year. In 1977 Esslin turned to teaching. He became Professor of Drama at Stanford University, California, for two quarters annually, until 1988, and after that Professor Emeritus. He had also been visiting Professor of Theatre at Florida State University (1969-1976). He achieved much recognition as the author of two of the most influential books dealing with the post-war theatre, Brecht: A Choice of Evils (1959) and The Theatre of the Absurd (1962) — a term coined by Esslin. Esslin was awarded the OBE in 1972."

from austrian cutural forum

Martin Esslin links

Grotowski students at work in 1972

2011-12-05T10:49:00.001Z

Preparartion for year 13 A level devised piece

The Riots

2011-11-24T09:22:00.003Z

The Riots - review

Tricycle Theatre, London

Michael Billington
The Guardian, Wednesday 23 November 2011
Article history

Asking why: Kingsley Ben-Adir and Steve Toussaint in The Riots by Gillian Slovo and directed by Nicolas Kent at the Tricycle. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Once again, the theatre steals a march on officialdom. In the absence of any full public inquiry into the August riots, the Tricycle commissioned Gillian Slovo to create a verbatim piece on the events and their possible causes. And, if the result can hardly be expected to provide any definitive answers, it asks the right questions in a way that is clear, gripping and necessary.

The evening is in two distinct halves. In the first we get witness accounts, with film footage and street maps, of events in Tottenham on the night of 6 August. One thing emerges strongly: the failure of the police to inform Mark Duggan's family of either the facts or the circumstances of his shooting. This was the match that lit the bonfire.

But we then hear from the police themselves about the pressures they were under, from members of the Tottenham community caught up in the riots, and from both the victims and perpetrators of the looting. Everyone has a different perspective, but a youth worker puts it succinctly when he says: "You've got the legitimate anger; and then you've got, obviously, people who jump on that anger."

In the second, more reflective half a range of MPs, social workers and top police officers speculate on the underlying causes. Again, you get a wide range of opinions. Diane Abbott, the Hackney MP, sees what happened as a repeat of the race riots of the 1980s: a Manchester chief inspector, in Brixton in the 1980s, says events this time had a totally different feel. Michael Gove describes rioters as "a vicious, lawless and immoral minority"; John McDonnell, Labour MP, relates the riots to damaging cuts in youth services.

You get a plurality of views, but what emerges is a widespread sense of people, and not just the young, seeking revenge on an unjust society. It is fascinating. But is it theatre?

I would offer a resounding "Yes" because one of the medium's many functions, apart from giving ecstasy and entertainment, is to offer information and provoke debate. Slovo's skillfully edited text and Nicolas Kent's well-ordered production do precisely that. In little more than four months, they have amassed a huge range of material and posed the questions that parliament has failed properly to address. Why did the summer riots happen? And what are the lessons we can learn?

From a 14-strong cast, I would single out Steve Toussaint, lending authority to a consultant on racial equality who, asked to sum up the rioters in three words, says "frustrated, angry and British"; Cyril Nri as a black police superintendent; and Kingsley Ben-Adir as a youth worker. Dona Croll as Diane Abbott, and Tim Woodward as a series of authority figures, also impress. And, even if the show has an inevitable London bias, it passes a vital test: it offers us the evidence, and leaves us to form our own opinion as to why there is such anger on Britain's streets.

Theatre trip the dress rehearsal 16/11/11

2011-11-15T14:33:00.002Z

The Riots

by Gillian Slovo from spoken evidence

Photo credit: Lewis Whyld/PA

The Government has so far refused a Public Inquiry into the riots that shook our cities this Summer, so the Tricycle is mounting its own.

From tweets by taxi drivers, to moment-by-moment accounts by riot police, it will build a real-time picture of the riots as they unfolded. And then, from interviews with politicians, police, teachers, lawyers, community leaders, as well as victims and on-lookers,The Riots will analyse what happened, why it happened, and what we should do towards making a better future for ourselves and our city.

Astonishing stories and equally astonishing conclusions told by the many voices that have been stirred up by the riots.

The Tricycle has a long and distinguished record for its verbatim theatre productions. Nicolas Kent and Gillian Slovo were part of the team responsible for Guantanamo – Honor Bound to Defend Freedom which transferred from the Tricycle to the West End and New York.

Talkback sessions will take place on Monday, Wednesday and Friday following the performances. For more details click here.

‘The Tricycle consistently punches above its small size and has become known as something of a powerhouse for political theatre and verbatim inquiry plays’ The Guardian

top girls theatre visit

2011-10-03T08:45:00.004Z

It would be nice to think that Caryl Churchill's 1982 play, written during the rise of Thatcherism, now looks dated. In fact, it seems terrifyingly topical in its portrait of an individualistic society in which the few thrive at the expense of the many. What has changed, as Max Stafford-Clark's alert and zippy production proves, is the focus of dramatic interest in a play that views the role of women from multiple perspectives.

Top Girls
Minerva,
Chichester
Until 16 July
Box office:
01243 781312
Venue details

Originally we were all dazzled by the bravura opening in which Marlene, newly promoted boss of the Top Girls employment agency, hosts a dinner party for iconic women from history. But, for me, it is Churchill's central act which now hits hardest. That is partly because we see Angie, Marlene's frightened, farmed-out daughter, invading her mother's hyper-efficient territory. But it is even more because we see the agency at work in a series of interviews with job-seeking women. One high-flier is told to conceal her intention to get married; a middle-management veteran reveals how she was leapfrogged by male rivals; and a young dreamer fantasises about life as an expense-account sales rep. These dazzling vignettes get to the heart of the matter, in that they show the obstacles women face, underscoring Churchill's key point that you can't have true feminism without a re-ordering of society.

Even if it's the portrait of the employment process at work that now enthrals, there is still pathos in the final encounter between Marlene and her sister, Joyce, confined to a life of domestic drudgery. I found the device of overlapping dialogue followed by a charged silence a bit overdone; but Suranne Jones captures excellently the hidden regrets of the go-getting Marlene, Stella Gonet seethes with justified rage as her sister and Olivia Poulet is both baffled and touching as the daughter who Marlene has pragmatically discarded. What strikes one most about this co-production between Out of Joint and Chichester is its vivid timeliness, in a world where isolated female success still obscures the plight of the majority.

A2 Devised timetable 2011-2012

2011-10-03T08:39:00.001Z

Rehearsal Schedule

Devised Piece

Thurs 29th September
SWED note one draft one. Handed in
Work on characters and message of piece
Monday 3rd October
Faustus work: period one
Work on opening scene/ character workshop

Tues 4th October
Faustus
Wed 5th October Top Girls theatre visit (evening)
Thursday 6th October
More character development
Monday 10th October
Draft in for question two; how effectively are you personally exploring and developing your roles?
Tuesday 11th October
Faustus
Thursday 13th October
Start working on scenes
Work on draft essays of How did your group explore the possibilities of form, structure and performance style./ How did the work of established and recognised theatre practitioners, and /or the work of live theatre, influence the way in which your devised response developed? In for after (half term)
HALF TERM

Monday 31st October
Faustus
Production meeting and then show scenes worked on.
Hand in drafts of SWED notes.
Tuesday 1st November
Faustus
Thursday 3rd November
Workshop more scenes/ props and costume and set discussed

Monday 7th November
Faustus
2nd draft SWED question 1 and 2
Tuesday 8th November
Faustus
Thursday 10th November
More scenes for devised
Monday 14th November
Faustus
2nd draft SWED questions 3and 4
More scenes for devised
Tuesday 15th November
Faustus
WED 16th NOV Dress rehearsal for “The Riots” at the Trycycle
Thursday 17th November
Run through of all scenes so far

Monday 21st November
Faustus
Music/ film work for play

Tuesday 22nd November
Faustus
Thursday 24th November
Run through of play
Monday 28th November
Faustus
3rd draft SWED 1 and 2 notes in
Work on difficult scenes
Tuesday 29th November
Faustus
Thursday 1st December
Run through of play
Monday 5th December
Faustus
3rd Draft SWED 3 and 4 notes in
Tuesday 6th December
Faustus
Thursday 8th December
Run through of play/work on difficult scenes

Monday 11th Dec
Faustus
SWED note question 6 first draft
Tuesday 6th December
Faustus
Thursday 8th December
Voice and movement work
Monday 12th December
Faustus
SWED NOTES work in class
Tuesday 13th December
Faustus
Thursday 15th December
Run through and production meeting/
Do all SWED NOTES drafts again

Christmas holidays

Thursday 12th January
Production meeting/run through
Monday 16th January
Section C preparation/
SECTION C/
Faustus
SWED notes handed in

Tuesday 17th January
Section C preparation/
SECTION C/Faustus

Thursday 19th January
Final needs for the production finalised

Saturday 21st January
Dress rehearsal 10am- 4pm

Monday 23rd January
Dress Rehearsal
Tuesday 24th January
Dress Rehearsal
Thursday 26th January
Performance

Charlie and the chocloate factory photos

2011-06-13T13:56:00.003Z

2011-06-13T13:52:00.006Z

Another practice exam year 13

2011-05-25T11:49:00.000Z

Section C
1: Compare the use of set for your live production with the original settings in its communication of the themes of the show.

Yet another Faustus question for year 13 theatre studies

2011-05-24T09:59:00.002Z

As a director, outline and justify your approach to a production of the play that
demonstrates your understanding of its historical context.

another practice question and support for year 13 theatre studies.

2011-05-24T09:43:00.001Z

As a director outline and justify your approach to a production of the play staged in your chosen performance space. (30 marks)

• These are the elements you need to address in this question:

• How the production will impact on a modern audience so therefore its themes and message and how you intend to convey that to an audience

• Choice of space and venue and why, link to audience actor relationship and practitioner.

• Style of the play and the choices you have made in relation to its original style and the practitioner you have chosen to convey your ideas in acting etc.

• Design elements, eg lighting/set/costumes/ props/staging will come together within an overall interpretation but with specific reference to the chosen space and venue.

This is a question about the performance of the play, it is not specifically about the play and the candidate needs to apply appropriate drama and theatre terminology in order to be able to respond effectively.

• Explain why a particular practitioner has been chosen or why the ideas of a particular recognised practitioner have been adopted. There may be reference to historic features that have influenced the interpretation and how these feature in the staging ideas.

In order to gain all 30 marks you will have to:

1. Demonstrate an outstanding understanding of drama and theatre terminology and offer consideration of the play in relation to a director working on an interpretation of a text and question, which shows imagination, based upon knowledge gained throughout the course.
2. Will be able to give convey an excellent understanding of the play and are able to help their audience understand the play through directorial choices and guidance to enhance their understanding of it further.
3. There will be examples of how a production can be made visually and practically appealing, without losing sight of the original performance values.
4. Examples of how the understanding of drama will have an impact on the audience and the candidate will offer some examples from their interpretation for the production in support.
5. There will be a distinct reference to stylistic or historic elements in the proposed interpretation of the play and there will be an excellent understanding of the likely aesthetic impact on the production and how this compliments the meaning and structure of the play.
6. The chosen space and venue will be identified and how the candidate may explore the performance will be detailed in relation to this.

Give quotes from practitioners, analyse quotes, give example from the text and analyse to back up your point.

Try not to make more than four points in depth.

Practice exam year 13 drama

2011-05-11T10:24:00.001Z

1 a) Using the pope scene explore two rehearsal techniques which would help develop the relationship between the Pope and Faustus

b) Using three rehearsal techniques to explore and develop the comedy of the scene

c) How would you explore in rehearsal the physical aspects of the scene.

2 As a director how would you communicate the slow deterioration of Faustus through out the play.

Section C

Compare how the modern production you saw communicated the social / historical aspects of the play and how they compared with the original conditions.

Warrior Square photos

2011-05-09T14:30:00.007Z

warrior square production video footage for play

2011-04-29T21:49:00.000Z

A2 Drama schedule for revision and exam practice

2011-04-27T10:59:00.002Z

Tuesday May 3rd: Preparation for practice exam
Wed May 4th Practice exam
Monday May 9th Go through exam marking
Tues 10 th May: Individual tutorials on problem areas
Wed 11th May: Ideal husband notes
Monday 16th May: Faustus notes(molly out)
Tuesday 17th May: Preparation for practice exam
Wed 18th May : Practice exam
Mon 23rd May go through practice exam ( Molly out)
Tues 24th May: Individual tutorials
Wed 25th May : any fears and sort out revision schedule

year 13 drama exam section C question

2011-03-29T11:23:00.001Z

SECTION C
Answer ONE question in response to the live production you have seen.
You must write the title of the play, the playwright, the date you saw the play and the
venue of the production at the start of your answer.
EITHER
10 ‘Theatre of the 21st century should be looking forward, not looking back.’
Discuss the above statement in relation to the play you have seen in performance
and with reference to its original performance conditions.
(Total for Question 10 = 30 marks)
OR
11 Compare the staging of the production you have seen with your understanding of its
original performance.
(Total for Question

Year 13 Drama Timetable till Easter

2011-03-22T12:33:00.002Z

Wednesday 23rd: Ideal Husband notes research half of the lesson and discussion with teacher on findings in second half.
Mon 28th :Look at Comedy in Faustus and rehearsal techniques
Tues 29th: Look at themes in Faustus
Wed 30th: Structure for faustus essay and communicate them
Mon 4th: Timed essay faustus
Tues 5th Structure for Ideal husband
Wed 6th: Revision pack and any worries

Marlowe powerpoint for year 13

2011-03-08T12:17:00.000Z

Marlowe edited

View more presentations from debbyturner.

Wednesday 16th March year 13 practice timed essay

2011-03-07T14:28:00.000Z

A2 Half term work

2011-02-17T13:13:00.002Z

1 Finish SWED notes.

2 Research original conditions of an Ideal husband

3 Write notes on modern production of an Ideal husband.

london in the time of An Ideal Husband

2011-02-17T12:50:00.002Z

In Oscar Wilde’s day, London theatre was enjoying expansion and renewed respectability, with the patronage of fashionable people (including royalty) and members of affluent society - exactly the type of characters who inhabit his plays.

When Wilde moved to London in 1878, theatre was beginning to recover from its former reputation as an unsuitable interest for a well-to-do patron. Queen Victoria had visited Charles Kean’s productions at the Princess’s Theatre in Oxford Street in the 1850s, and the German Reeds attracted family audiences with their ‘illustrative gatherings’ at The Gallery of Illustration in Lower Regent Street during the 1860s.

The Bancrofts’ productions of domestic comedies at the Prince of Wales Theatre (from 1865) and the Haymarket Theatre (from 1880), charmed the public with a more genteel type of drama than the previously popular melodrama. From 1878, Henry Irving’s spectacular productions at the Lyceum Theatre were increasingly attracting fashionable audiences who marvelled at the sets and costumes as much as at the plays.

Venues themselves were also increasing in number and style. Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, now the heart of London’s West End, were created between 1877 and 1886, clearing slum areas and providing thoroughfares and grand new theatres for an increasingly keen public. New venues included the Shaftesbury and Lyric Theatres in 1888, and the Royal English Opera House at Cambridge Circus in 1891.

The opening of Richard D’Oyly Carte’s Savoy Theatre in the Strand in 1881, with its innovative electric light, was another advance in the growing respectability of Victorian theatre. With its brilliant production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘Aesthetic’ opera, Patience, the first night audience included aristocracy and royalty, and Oscar Wilde himself.

reviews of An Ideal husband

2011-02-17T12:23:00.002Z

The first thing to be said about Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895) is that it isn’t in the same league as The Importance of Being Earnest, as close as English high comedy has ever come to perfection.

The second is that it is nevertheless hugely entertaining, a curious mixture of melodrama, Wilde’s distinctive epigrammatic wit and sudden moments of deeper feeling.

For beyond the jokes, the plot twists and the blackmailing scarlet woman, there is little doubt that Wilde put a lot of himself and his own experience into this play about a rising politician faced with the prospect of ruin.

When he wrote it, Wilde was already being blackmailed by rent boys, and the Marquess of Queensberry was lurking ominously in the wings. Before the play’s run was over, Wilde had been arrested and Reading Gaol awaited him. As Wilde wrote in his last years, “some of its passages seem prophetic of tragedies to come”.

When the rising politician, Sir Robert Chiltern realises that he is about to be revealed as a man who founded his career and personal fortune by selling confidential Government information, and describes a terror “as if one’s heart were beating itself to death in some empty hollow”, you surely hear the appalled voice of a writer who had been through such hell.

Telegraph

The Stage

Wilde's play used to be seen as a second-rate melodrama festooned with dazzling epigrams. But Peter Hall's landmark 1992 production asked us to take it seriously. And, even if Lindsay Posner's current revival is not quite on that level, it offers a good evening and reminds us that Wilde's wit masked a vision of life.

The play is unmistakably an attack on late-Victorian values. Its hero, Sir Robert Chiltern, is a rising political star whose twin gods are wealth and power. We discover, however, that in pursuit of them as a young man he rashly sold cabinet secrets to a stock-exchange speculator: a mistake that comes back to haunt him when an incriminating letter falls into the hands of the blackmailing Mrs Cheveley. But, if Sir Robert represents the hollow sham of public life, his adoring wife symbolises what Shaw called "the mechanised idealism of the stupidly good". The wisest words in the play are spoken by Viscount Goring, a dandified idler who recognises that life cannot be understood without charity and forgiveness.

Wilde's plot may be full of awkward contrivances but Posner's production does full justice to its genuine substance. Alexander Hanson brings out the posturing element in Chiltern's public virtue and his corresponding rage when his dark secret is revealed: there is real force in the scene where he turns on his over-idealising wife to announce that she has ruined him. And Rachael Stirling is equally powerful as the wife who realises she has worshipped a false idol and has to learn to live with human flaws. Samantha Bond as the blackmailing Mrs Cheveley also looks handsome as hell in her silken gowns and makes this dubious predator an instrument of truth.

What you might call the Ibsenite side of Wilde's play, which involves exposing a marital life-lie, comes across excellently. Strangely enough, it is the verbal comedy that sometimes seems a little plodding. Elliot Cowan captures well the underlying sanity and goodness of Viscount Goring. But, in playing against the idea that he is simply an effete word-juggler, he loses some of the vital laughs.

Heretical as it may be to say so, some of Wilde's comic riffs even come to seem a bit tiresome. There's a long passage in the second act when an elderly aristo, although well played by Caroline Blakiston, fires off her views about politics and society in a way that simply brings the play grinding to a halt. The point about Wilde is that he expresses his philosophy of life through the melodramatic action. When Posner's production focuses on that it is at its best. And, at the climax as everything is resolved, one is reminded of the paradoxical truth of Borges's remark that "the fundamental flavour of Wilde's work is happiness".

An ideal husband modern production notes

2011-02-17T12:22:00.001Z

year 11 cloning essay guidance

2011-01-27T10:02:00.001Z

Drama Cloning Essay guidance

Your response has to be 2000 words maximum

You must include: analysis of 4 explorative strategies: For example:

• Still image
• Narration
• Ritual/movement
• Role-play
• Automatic writing

Choose exercises from any of the lessons to evaluate these.

Your reaction to stimuli:

• The music (Holst Planets) to create the cloning movement and ritual
• Research on stem cells( the doctors and parents or automatic writing scene)

Analyse use of:

• Space/levels
• Use of props
• Language
• Characterisation

From any of the lessons and exercises:

Your evaluation of the whole scheme of work and the content /forms/plot used to analyse and explore the issue of cloning.

Research for warrior square

2011-01-20T15:52:00.000Z

guidance for GCSE Cloning scheme of work

2010-12-14T11:35:00.001Z

more examples of sprechtgesang

2010-11-25T12:30:00.000Z

lotte lenya sprechgesang

2010-11-25T12:29:00.001Z

Brecht on stage

2010-11-25T12:12:00.001Z

Year 12 please watch this documentary to help you with your exploration notes on Brecht

The big Fellah information

2010-10-12T08:48:00.000Z

4 STARS Critics' Choice "Jaw-dropping laughs... a big meaty subject... cracking performances" Sunday Times 12 Sep 2010. More reviews.

Young fireman Michael Doyle decides to live up to his Irish heritage by joining the IRA. He's recruited by Costello, the charismatic "Big Fellah", who wants to use Doyle's brownstone apartment in The Bronx as a safe house for an escaped killer. But it soon becomes clear that someone is leaking information to the FBI...

Set among Irish Americans in New York, Richard Bean's dark, glinting, funny play spans three turbulent decades.

A boisterous and witty story of loyalty, disillusion and betrayal.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"a marvellously funny and humane dramatist" Daily Telegraph

Richard Bean's plays include Under The Whaleback, Harvest (Critics' Circle Awards: Best Play), Honeymoon Suite, The English Game and most recently the controversial, Olivier-nominater England People Very Nice for the National Theatre.

Director: by Max Stafford-Clark
Designer: Tim Shortall
Lighting Designer: Jason Taylor
Sound Designer: Nick Manning

Cast: Rory Keenan, Youssef Kerkour, Finbar Lynch, Claire Rafferty, David Ricardo-Pearce, Fred Ridgeway, Stephanie Street

The Big Fellah theatre trip Thursday 14th October 2010

2010-10-12T08:36:00.000Z

faust theatre visit 30th September 2010

2010-09-17T09:59:00.000Z

Year 12 and 13 theatre students will attend this theatre event.

revision pack year 13 faustus

2010-03-29T13:50:00.000Z

Revision pack for year 13 Theatre studies 2010-

Some notes on Faustus: Use these to enhance your ideas for your production notes and choices. These notes come from Spark notes and the Open University if you quote them.

Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe

Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Sin, Redemption, and Damnation
Insofar as Doctor Faustus is a Christian play, it deals with the themes at the heart of Christianity’s understanding of the world. First, there is the idea of sin, which Christianity defines as acts contrary to the will of God. In making a pact with Lucifer, Faustus commits what is in a sense the ultimate sin: not only does he disobey God, but he consciously and even eagerly renounces obedience to him, choosing instead to swear allegiance to the devil. In a Christian framework, however, even the worst deed can be forgiven through the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, God’s son, who, according to Christian belief, died on the cross for humankind’s sins. Thus, however terrible Faustus’s pact with Lucifer may be, the possibility of redemption is always open to him. All that he needs to do, theoretically, is ask God for forgiveness. The play offers countless moments in which Faustus considers doing just that, urged on by the good angel on his shoulder or by the old man in scene 12—both of whom can be seen either as emissaries of God, personifications of Faustus’s conscience, or both.
Each time, Faustus decides to remain loyal to hell rather than seek heaven. In the Christian framework, this turning away from God condemns him to spend an eternity in hell. Only at the end of his life does Faustus desire to repent, and, in the final scene, he cries out to Christ to redeem him. But it is too late for him to repent. In creating this moment in which Faustus is still alive but incapable of being redeemed, Marlowe steps outside the Christian worldview in order to maximize the dramatic power of the final scene. Having inhabited a Christian world for the entire play, Faustus spends his final moments in a slightly different universe, where redemption is no longer possible and where certain sins cannot be forgiven.
The Conflict Between Medieval and Renaissance Values
Scholar R.M. Dawkins famously remarked that Doctor Faustus tells “the story of a Renaissance man who had to pay the medieval price for being one.” While slightly simplistic, this quotation does get at the heart of one of the play’s central themes: the clash between the medieval world and the world of the emerging Renaissance. The medieval world placed God at the center of existence and shunted aside man and the natural world. The Renaissance was a movement that began in Italy in the fifteenth century and soon spread throughout Europe, carrying with it a new emphasis on the individual, on classical learning, and on scientific inquiry into the nature of the world. In the medieval academy, theology was the queen of the sciences. In the Renaissance, though, secular matters took center stage.
Faustus, despite being a magician rather than a scientist (a blurred distinction in the sixteenth century), explicitly rejects the medieval model. In his opening speech in scene 1, he goes through every field of scholarship, beginning with logic and proceeding through medicine, law, and theology, quoting an ancient authority for each: Aristotle on logic, Galen on medicine, the Byzantine emperor Justinian on law, and the Bible on religion. In the medieval model, tradition and authority, not individual inquiry, were key. But in this soliloquy, Faustus considers and rejects this medieval way of thinking. He resolves, in full Renaissance spirit, to accept no limits, traditions, or authorities in his quest for knowledge, wealth, and power.
The play’s attitude toward the clash between medieval and Renaissance values is ambiguous. Marlowe seems hostile toward the ambitions of Faustus, and, as Dawkins notes, he keeps his tragic hero squarely in the medieval world, where eternal damnation is the price of human pride. Yet Marlowe himself was no pious traditionalist, and it is tempting to see in Faustus—as many readers have—a hero of the new modern world, a world free of God, religion, and the limits that these imposed on humanity. Faustus may pay a medieval price, this reading suggests, but his successors will go further than he and suffer less, as we have in modern times. On the other hand, the disappointment and mediocrity that follow Faustus’s pact with the devil, as he descends from grand ambitions to petty conjuring tricks, might suggest a contrasting interpretation. Marlowe may be suggesting that the new, modern spirit, though ambitious and glittering, will lead only to a Faustian dead end.
Power as a Corrupting Influence
Early in the play, before he agrees to the pact with Lucifer, Faustus is full of ideas for how to use the power that he seeks. He imagines piling up great wealth, but he also aspires to plumb the mysteries of the universe and to remake the map of Europe. Though they may not be entirely admirable, these plans are ambitious and inspire awe, if not sympathy. They lend a grandeur to Faustus’s schemes and make his quest for personal power seem almost heroic, a sense that is reinforced by the eloquence of his early soliloquies.
Once Faustus actually gains the practically limitless power that he so desires, however, his horizons seem to narrow. Everything is possible to him, but his ambition is somehow sapped. Instead of the grand designs that he contemplates early on, he contents himself with performing conjuring tricks for kings and noblemen and takes a strange delight in using his magic to play practical jokes on simple folks. It is not that power has corrupted Faustus by making him evil: indeed, Faustus’s behavior after he sells his soul hardly rises to the level of true wickedness. Rather, gaining absolute power corrupts Faustus by making him mediocre and by transforming his boundless ambition into a meaningless delight in petty celebrity.
In the Christian framework of the play, one can argue that true greatness can be achieved only with God’s blessing. By cutting himself off from the creator of the universe, Faustus is condemned to mediocrity. He has gained the whole world, but he does not know what to do with it.
The Divided Nature of Man
Faustus is constantly undecided about whether he should repent and return to God or continue to follow his pact with Lucifer. His internal struggle goes on throughout the play, as part of him of wants to do good and serve God, but part of him (the dominant part, it seems) lusts after the power that Mephastophilis promises. The good angel and the evil angel, both of whom appear at Faustus’s shoulder in order to urge him in different directions, symbolize this struggle. While these angels may be intended as an actual pair of supernatural beings, they clearly represent Faustus’s divided will, which compels Faustus to commit to Mephastophilis but also to question this commitment continually.
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Magic and the Supernatural
The supernatural pervades Doctor Faustus, appearing everywhere in the story. Angels and devils flit about, magic spells are cast, dragons pull chariots (albeit offstage), and even fools like the two ostlers, Robin and Rafe, can learn enough magic to summon demons. Still, it is worth noting that nothing terribly significant is accomplished through magic. Faustus plays tricks on people, conjures up grapes, and explores the cosmos on a dragon, but he does not fundamentally reshape the world. The magic power that Mephastophilis grants him is more like a toy than an awesome, earth-shaking ability. Furthermore, the real drama of the play, despite all the supernatural frills and pyrotechnics, takes place within Faustus’s vacillating mind and soul, as he first sells his soul to Lucifer and then considers repenting. In this sense, the magic is almost incidental to the real story of Faustus’s struggle with himself, which Marlowe intended not as a fantastical battle but rather as a realistic portrait of a human being with a will divided between good and evil.
Practical Jokes
Once he gains his awesome powers, Faustus does not use them to do great deeds. Instead, he delights in playing tricks on people: he makes horns sprout from the knight’s head and sells the horse-courser an enchanted horse. Such magical practical jokes seem to be Faustus’s chief amusement, and Marlowe uses them to illustrate Faustus’s decline from a great, prideful scholar into a bored, mediocre magician with no higher ambition than to have a laugh at the expense of a collection of simpletons.

Symbols
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Blood
Blood plays multiple symbolic roles in the play. When Faustus signs away his soul, he signs in blood, symbolizing the permanent and supernatural nature of this pact. His blood congeals on the page, however, symbolizing, perhaps, his own body’s revolt against what he intends to do. Meanwhile, Christ’s blood, which Faustus says he sees running across the sky during his terrible last night, symbolizes the sacrifice that Jesus, according to Christian belief, made on the cross; this sacrifice opened the way for humankind to repent its sins and be saved. Faustus, of course, in his proud folly, fails to take this path to salvation.
Faustus’s Rejection of the Ancient Authorities
In scene 1, Faustus goes through a list of the major fields of human knowledge—logic, medicine, law, and theology—and cites for each an ancient authority (Aristotle, Galen, Justinian, and Jerome’s Bible, respectively). He then rejects all of these figures in favor of magic. This rejection symbolizes Faustus’s break with the medieval world, which prized authority above all else, in favor of a more modern spirit of free inquiry, in which experimentation and innovation trump the assertions of Greek philosophers and the Bible.
The Good Angel and the Evil Angel
The angels appear at Faustus’s shoulder early on in the play—the good angel urging him to repent and serve God, the evil angel urging him to follow his lust for power and serve Lucifer. The two symbolize his divided will, part of which wants to do good and part of which is sunk in sin.
Faustus as a Tragic Hero
There are different views of Dr. Faustus.
There may be different or varying ways of looking at certain characters and revealing them as a certain type of character. In Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, the main character, Doctor Faustus, could be described and revealed as a tragic hero, similarly to other tragic characters, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus and Shakespeare’s Hamlet may also be described as such. There are different features and characteristics, which would make these characters be considered as tragic heroes rather than another type of character.

One of the features that characterize a tragic hero is that this type of character “will mistakenly bring his own downfall”, (McManus) which is referred to as “hamartia”. In Marlowe’s play, the main character, Faustus, brings his own downfall by the end of the story. In his opening speech, in Act 1 Scene 1, Faustus tells and explains the audience and the readers that he has skilled himself in law, medicine and divinity, but he wants to know more than what he knows and also know more about other things. This aspect of Faustus, his curiosity to learn and know more, may be thought of as part of the human condition and human nature and isn’t something that is seen as wrong in our society.

However, this aspect also blinds Faustus from a sense of reason and right from wrong. This eventually leads the main character of Doctor Faustus to make an agreement with the devil, which results in Faustus’ downfall. This aspect of Faustus’ character and personality is similar to Oedipus, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Oedipus’ pride blinds him from seeing truth, reason, as well as the difference from right and wrong, which leads to and results in the character’s downfall and to the main character of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus, stabbing his eyes out.
This feature will lead to the characteristic and fact that, by doing these mistakes or “flaws”, the tragic heroes are doomed from the beginning and the audience and readers know the fate of these characters is sealed. And for the tragic hero be just that, a tragic hero or tragic character, this type of character has to be doomed from the beginning of the play, but doesn’t hold any responsibility for possessing his flaw or fault. This may be seen in Faustus. From the beginning of the play, from the time that he tells the audience and readers that he wants to acquire more knowledge and especially when he signs the, the audience and readers may that Faustus is doomed to have a less than perfect and happy ending. Much like Faustus, Oedipus’ fate is sealed when he refuses to see the truth, even when it’s standing right in front of him. Though these two tragic heroes may feel some sense of guilt about their actions, neither Faustus nor Oedipus seem feel some sense of guilt or responsibility of their flaw.
A third feature or characteristic that the tragic hero should have is that “[t]he protagonist should be renowned and prosperous”. (McManus) The audience and readers may witness and see this characteristic in the main character of Doctor Faustus. Early on in the play, the audience and readers knows that Faustus is well renowned and with some reputation. Over the course of the play, there are several people, mainly three scholars, talk about Faustus, his knowledge, and such aspects of this character. The audience and readers may see some signs of prosperity in Faustus. In Act 1 Scene 1, Faustus calls in his servant and student, which reveal not only that Faustus is prosperous, but also renown. The reason for this is that people at this time wanted to send their children study would to well known people.
It could also be said that Oedipus and Hamlet are also prosperous and renown. Oedipus is king of Thebes, which leads the readers and audience to assume that he is fairly prosperous. The readers and audience may also assume that he is renown, because the citizens of Thebes come to Oedipus, when the city is attacked with plague, in the prologue. Hamlet is a prince, which also may lead us to suggest that he is fairly prosperous and successful.
A fourth feature and aspect involving the tragic hero is that this character must support the plot of the story, which is similar to many other protagonists. This may be easily seen with Faustus, in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. It is Faustus’ actions, which seem to lead and direct the plot and the entire story of the play. This is the same situation with Oedipus and Hamlet, in Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. Both Oedipus and Hamlet are tragic heroes, who both lead and guide the story and its plot. This may be also part of and applied to the human life, as most of us make our own decisions and lead and drive our own lives, much like Faustus, Oedipus, and Hamlet guide the plays they are in.
A fifth feature, which is attributed to the tragic hero, is that the main character must be realistic or present some sense of realism. This may help the audience and readers relate to the character. This aspect of the tragic hero is meant for the audience to relate to or feel some form of connection with the characters and the story of the play. Faustus does have a certain sense of realism to him. For one, the main character of the play Doctor Faustus makes mistakes, which is part of the human condition and is something that every human being does. This also adds to a sense of realism to Faustus. This is the same for Oedipus and Hamlet, who also both make mistakes.
There is also the fact that Faustus wants to acquire more knowledge, which adds to the realism of the play. Acquire knowledge is another aspect that is part of the human condition. Learning and understanding more and more subjects and obtaining more knowledge is part of how we can grow and evolve as human beings, as individuals and as a society.
This sense of realism in the tragic hero may introduce pity. This is a crucial aspect to the tragedy genre. If the audience and the readers pity or sympathizes with the main character, this may lead to suggest that the audience and readers feel some form of connection with the hero of the play. In order for this to occur, the character must have some realistic features. This aspect of the tragic hero of Doctor Faustus in relation to the audience and readers may vary. There may be some who do pity Faustus, while other may feel no pity for this character. The same can be said of the characters Oedipus and Hamlet. Several people may feel sympathy for these two characters, while others won’t sympathize with these characters. This aspect and feature is part of the human condition and adds to the realism of the character and of the play. It is impossible to like or sympathize with everyone.
These aspects are a few attributes and features that characterize a tragic hero. Most of these attributes may be applied to Faustus, as well as other tragic heroes, such as Hamlet and Oedipus. But, like every human being and characters that exist, these three tragic heroes aren’t perfect and do make mistakes.

Reading Doctor Faustus ( Open University notes)
2.2 Act 2, Scene 1: Faustus and God ( Calvinism)
By the end of Act 1, Faustus appears to have made up his mind to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years in which he will ‘live in all voluptuousness’ (1.3.94). Act 2, Scene 1 opens with another soliloquy.
Activity
Please look now at this soliloquy (page 15, lines 1–14). How would you describe its mood? Jot down any points you think are important about the way the language helps to create this mood.
Faustus appears to be wrestling with his conscience in this soliloquy. He clearly feels the urge to repent, so why doesn't he? It is interesting that although he delivers this speech before he has signed his contract with Lucifer, he tells himself in the first line that he must ‘needs be damned’; in other words, he sees his own damnation as unavoidable. So what's the point, he asks himself, of thinking of God or heaven? The repetition of the word ‘despair’ in lines 4 and 5 emphasises Faustus's hopeless state of mind. If you count the syllables in lines 2 and 10, you will see that each line has only six. This means that in performance the actor would have to pause for a moment because the lines are shorter than normal, and this would have the effect of drawing attention to the sentiments expressed in the two lines, that is, to Faustus's despairing conviction that he cannot be saved and that God does not love him.
Why should Faustus feel so strongly that he is damned, when at this point in the play there seems to be every reason to believe that repentance will secure God's forgiveness? Some critics, most notably Alan Sinfield (1983) and John Stachniewski (1991), have argued that Marlowe is exploring the mental and emotional impact of the form of Protestantism that prevailed in England during the late sixteenth century, based on the doctrines of the French-born Protestant reformer Jean Calvin. Calvinist theology developed and changed over time, but at this historical juncture it stressed the sinfulness and depravity of human nature. In contrast to the traditional view of salvation as something that an individual could earn by living a virtuous Christian life, Calvinism argued that salvation is entirely God's gift rather than the result of any human effort. Moreover, according to the doctrine of predestination, God gives that gift only to a fortunate few whom he has chosen; everyone else faces an eternity of hellfire.
This theology formed the official doctrine of the Elizabethan Church. However bleak it sounds, its effect on believers was often positive; for those persuaded by their own virtuous impulses that they were chosen by God, it proved an enormous source of comfort and well-being, perhaps especially for poorer members of society, for whom the conviction of divine favour could be empowering. But for some, these doctrines provoked a sense of powerlessness and anxious fear about their spiritual destiny. It is possible to argue that Marlowe's Faustus is a depiction of one of these casualties of Calvinist doctrine, and that this helps to explain not only his opening dismissal of Christianity as obsessed with sin and damnation, but his repeated inability to repent. As in the soliloquy that opens Act 2, he cannot bring himself to believe that God favours him and has granted him salvation. The desire for repentance is overwhelmed by a still stronger belief, consistent with Calvinist doctrine in its early modern form, that the chances are that God does not love him at all.
However, it isn't necessary to believe that Doctor Faustus is specifically about Calvinism to feel that its portrait of the Christian God who vindictively ‘conspires’ Faustus's overthrow is not entirely flattering. Numerous critics have been troubled by a particular episode in the play that seems to cast doubt on the presence of divine mercy and benevolence. This is the moment in Act 2, Scene 3 when Faustus makes his most serious attempt at repentance. He quarrels with Mephistopheles, the Good Angel (unusually) gets the last word in the debate with the Evil Angel, and Faustus calls out to Christ ‘to save distressèd Faustus’ soul’ (2.3.85). And what happens? Lucifer, Beelzebub and Mephistopheles enter. Why does God not intervene to save Faustus? The stony silence that greets his plea for divine assistance seems to call into question the traditional Christian notion of a loving and merciful God.
Other critics have argued that God is silent on this occasion because Faustus's repentance is insincere, and that he consistently fails to repent not because he is suffering from theologically-induced despair, but because he is afraid of the devils and constantly distracted by the frivolous entertainments they stage for him, like the pageant of the seven deadly sins which follows this episode. One could argue as well that the play does represent the Christian God as loving and merciful, and shows human beings to be free to shape their own spiritual destinies. The Good and Evil Angels, after all, seem to give dramatic form to Faustus's freedom to choose: he has a choice between good and evil, and he chooses evil in full knowledge of what the consequences will be. As late as Act 5, Scene 1, the Old Man appears on stage to drive home the availability of God's mercy if only Faustus will sincerely repent his sins. Looked at from this perspective, it is Faustus and not God who is responsible for the terrible fate that greets him at the close of the play.
This critical debate serves to remind us that it is difficult to evaluate how much sympathy the play arouses for its protagonist without taking into consideration its treatment of the Christian God. If you think the God of the play is fundamentally benevolent then you are less likely to feel favourably disposed towards Faustus than if you think he comes across as a harsh and punitive cosmic despot. It is clear, though, that the play offers textual evidence in support of both views. Once again, we find Marlowe refusing to be pinned down to one interpretation.
2 Reading Doctor Faustus
2.3 Acts 3 and 4: What does Faustus achieve?
Act 2 points repeatedly to the failure of Faustus's attempt to secure power and autonomy through his pact with Lucifer: in Act 2, Scene 1 Mephistopheles declines his request for a wife, and in Act 2, Scene 3 he refuses to tell him who made the world. Acts 3 and 4 cover the bulk of the twenty-four-year period that Faustus purchased with his soul. How do they make us feel about what he actually achieves through his embracing of black magic? Are we encouraged to feel it was worth it?
Activity
Please have another look at Act 4, Scenes 1 and 2 (pages 35–43). On the basis of these scenes, would you say that Faustus has realised his dreams of power and pleasure? What evidence would you offer in support of your view?
Now read the discussion
Yet is this all there is to say on this matter? As usual with this play, there is another side to the story, especially if we consider Act 3. Earlier we looked at Faustus's desire to ‘chase the Prince of Parma from our land’, and speculated how, in a climate of military conflict with Spain, it might have endeared him to the play's original audience. At the time of the play's first performances, the Catholic Church would have been viewed by many with comparable hostility. In 1570 the Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth I and released her Catholic subjects from their allegiance to the Protestant heretic queen; in 1580 he proclaimed that her assassination would not be a mortal sin. Read with this context in mind, Act 3, Scene 1, in which Faustus makes a fool of the Pope under cover of his magician's cloak of invisibility, looks like a bid for audience approval, by its portrayal of the Catholic Church as decadent and corrupt, and mired in absurd superstitions like the ceremony of excommunication. By casting Faustus in the role of Protestant hero, this scene seems designed to elicit a favourable response to his conjuring skill.
We need to remember as well the limitations of the theatre, in particular of Marlowe's open-air theatre, where plays were performed in broad daylight with little in the way of props, scenery or artificial lighting see Figure 4). In these conditions, it is not hard to grasp why so many of Faustus's adventures as a magician are reported rather than enacted: the Chorus to Act 3, for example, tells us that in order to learn ‘the secrets of astronomy’ (3.1.2), Faustus scaled Mount Olympus ‘in a chariot burning bright / Drawn by the strength of yoky dragons' necks’ (3.1.5–6). This sounds anything but a hollow experience, and when discussing Acts 3 and 4 we should give due weight to the descriptions Marlowe provides of activities he was unable to enact on stage, especially given that these descriptions probably had a powerful impact on the play's original audience, who were much more accustomed to listening to long and often complex speeches (sermons, for example) than we tend to be nowadays.

Figure 4: William Dudley, The 1587 Rose Theatre: A Cutaway View, 1999 for the onsite exhibition which was also designed by Dudley. Used with the permission of William Dudley. The Rose was the site of the first recorded performance of Doctor Faustus on 30 September 1594
The mention of the play in performance leads us to an important characteristic of drama, which makes it different from other literary forms such as the novel and poetry: plays are written to be performed whereas novels and poems are written to be read. This means that a play is not so much a fixed and finished literary text as a blueprint for actors and directors who will have to make decisions about how it is going to be translated from the page to the stage. They will have to ask themselves questions, such as what is actually happening on stage at any given moment? How should a particular speech be spoken by the actor playing the part, and which actor is best suited to play the part? A director will also need to make decisions about set design, costumes, lighting, music and other sound effects. All of these aspects of performance will contribute to the meaning of the play, and they will differ from one production to another.
Activity
So how might consideration of Doctor Faustus as a text intended for performance affect our response to Faustus's career as a magician? A moment ago we discussed the way in which Act 4 in particular seems to emphasise the gap between Faustus's aspirations and his actual achievement. Does thinking about these scenes in terms of performance open up different possibilities?
Now read the discussion
The same might be said of the two appearances of Helen of Troy in Act 5, Scene 1. This scene is structured in such a way as to establish a clear contrast between Faustus's two encounters: with the Old Man, who urges piety and repentance, and with the legendary beauty Helen of Troy (Figure 5). Faustus chooses Helen, and many critics have echoed the Old Man's stern disapproval. Yet the critic Thomas Healy points out that in the theatre Helen is usually represented as so ‘strikingly beautiful’ that even if one agrees on a rational level that Faustus would be better off with the Old Man, on a visual level the Old Man loses out to Helen, who engages what Healy calls the audience's ‘emotional and aesthetic sympathy’ (Healy, 2004, p. 183). By the same token, a director might choose to portray Helen instead as a malign influence on the hero.
Reading Doctor Faustus
2.5 Morality play or tragedy?
Pity and fear are the emotions that, according to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, are aroused by the experience of watching a tragedy. At the start of this chapter we asked whether Doctor Faustus is a late sixteenth-century morality play, designed to teach its audience about the spiritual dangers of excessive learning and ambition. When the play was published, first in 1604 and then in 1616, it was called a ‘tragical history’; if we take ‘history’ here to refer not to a particular dramatic genre but more generally to a narrative or story, then the publisher described the play as a tragic tale. So what is a tragedy? In fact, ‘tragedy’ is a notoriously difficult literary term to define, for it seems to take various forms in different historical periods. But for the sake of discussion, we can fall back on the broad strokes of Aristotle's description (in the Poetics) of the tragedies he had seen in Athens in the fourth century BCE: tragedies are plays that represent a central action or plot that is serious and significant. They involve a socially prominent main character who is neither evil nor morally perfect, who moves from a state of happiness to a state of misery because of some frailty or error of judgement: this is the tragic hero, the remarkable individual whose fall stimulates in the spectator intense feelings of pity and fear.

Figure 6: This is the title page of the 1620 edition of the ‘B’ text of Doctor Faustus, first published in 1616: The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. British Library, London. c. 1891–6 C.39.c.26. By permission of the British Library
To what extent does Doctor Faustus conform to this description of a tragic play? Well, it follows the classic tragic trajectory in so far as it starts out with the protagonist at the pinnacle of his achievement and ends with his fall into misery, death and (in this case) damnation. From the beginning the play identifies its protagonist not as ‘everyman’, the morality play hero who ‘stands for’ all of us, but as the exceptional protagonist of tragic drama. Moreover, it is certainly possible to argue that Faustus brings about his own demise through his catastrophically ill-advised decision to embrace black magic. Perhaps most importantly, we have seen in the course of this unit that Faustus is consistently presented to us as an intermediate character, neither wholly good nor wholly bad: both brilliant and arrogant, learned and foolish, consumed with intellectual curiosity and possessed of insatiable appetites for worldly pleasure, a conscience-stricken rebel against divine power. We have seen as well how skilfully Marlowe uses the soliloquy to create a powerful illusion of a complex inner life: from Faustus's first proud rejection of the university curriculum and his exuberant daydreams of unlimited power, to his anguished self-questioning and final terrified confrontation with the divine authority he defied, the play gives us access to the thoughts and feelings of a dramatic character whose fall, whether or not we feel it is deserved, seems to call for a fuller emotional response than the Epilogue's moralising can provide.

3 Hero and author
What, if anything, does Doctor Faustus tell us about its notorious author? Having read the play, do you feel that it supports or invalidates the dominant view of Marlowe as the bad boy of Elizabethan drama? There is certainly no doubt that the play has a defiant streak, that it calls into question the justice of a universe that places restrictions on human achievement and demands the eternal suffering of those who disobey its laws. On this level, it does seem to be the work of an author disinclined to take orthodox beliefs on trust, who bears some resemblance to the restless, irreverent personality described and decried by the likes of Baines and Beard. However, we have seen throughout this unit that this allegedly rebellious figure produced a play that, if it questions divine justice, also insists on the egoism and sheer wrong-headedness of its erring protagonist, and powerfully conveys his feelings of guilt and remorse. Perhaps the play's ambiguity is a measure of how risky it would have been for Marlowe to write a more overtly subversive drama; yet one could also argue that the play's orthodox sentiments are too deeply felt to be dismissed as camouflage for the author's heretical opinions. In the end, all we can say is that Marlowe's treatment of the Faust legend is neither simply orthodox nor simply radical. With its stubborn resistance to single, fixed meanings, Doctor Faustus leaves the character and beliefs of its author in shadow. Yet if we cannot finally assess the accuracy of Marlowe's reputation as a rebel and outsider, I hope that your reading of the play has made clear why he also has a reputation as a pioneer of English drama.

Figure 5: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Helen of Troy, 1863, oil on panel, 33 × 28 cm. Photo: Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg/The Bridgeman Art Library. A representation of Helen of Troy, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, by the pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti

2 Reading Doctor Faustus
2.4 Act 5, Scene 2: Faustus's last soliloquy
The play draws to a close with Faustus's final soliloquy, which is supposed to mark the last hour of his life.
Activity
Please reread this speech now, thinking as you read about how Marlowe uses sound effects to heighten the emotional impact of the soliloquy.
Now read the discussion
Critics have often commented on how skilfully Marlowe uses rhythm to underline the passage of time. Look, for example, at the second line: ‘Now hast thou but one bare hour to live’ (l. 67). Because this is a sequence of monosyllabic words, it is not entirely clear which of them are stressed. It would certainly be possible for an actor to give a more or less equally strong stress to each word, which is why O'Connor points out that the line seems to echo the striking clock we have just heard (p. 108). This echo effect is strengthened by the internal rhyme between ‘Now’ and ‘thou’. The monosyllabic words continue into the next line until the last word: ‘And then thou must be damned perpetually’ (l. 68). The sudden appearance of a long five-syllable word focuses our attention on it and alerts us to what it is that Faustus most fears: an infinity of suffering. This sparks his desperate and futile plea for time to stand still, and Marlowe underlines the futility through the use of enjambement, or run-on lines:
Fair nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day … (ll. 71–3)
Faustus wants time to stop or slow down, but the way one line of verse tumbles into the next, accelerating rather than slowing down the rhythm, seems to signal the inevitable frustration of that wish. Faustus himself grasps this: ‘The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike; / The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned’ (ll. 76–7).
Time really is the essence of this soliloquy, not only because the clock is ticking for Faustus, but because, as we have seen, what most horrifies him is the prospect not of suffering but of endless suffering. After the clock strikes the half hour, Faustus pleads with God to place a limit on his time in hell – ‘Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, / A hundred thousand, and at last be saved’ (ll. 103–04) – only to come back to the awful truth: ‘O, no end is limited to damnèd souls’ (l. 105).
One of the most striking aspects of the speech is the way it reverses the dreams of power and glory that Faustus expressed in his first soliloquy. In that speech he declared his desire to be more than human, to be a ‘mighty god’, but now, as he faces an eternity in hell, he wishes that he were less than human: he longs to be transformed into ‘some brutish beast’ whose soul would simply dissolve into the elements when it dies (ll. 109–12), or that his soul might ‘be changed into little waterdrops, / And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found’ (ll. 119–20). In his final soliloquy, Faustus's self-assertive spirit collapses into a desire for extinction; his aspiration to divinity into a longing for annihilation as he seeks desperately to escape from ‘the heavy wrath of God’ (l. 86).
Does this final humbling of Faustus encourage a feeling of satisfaction that he has got what he deserved? That seems to be how the Epilogue sees things. As in the Prologue, the Chorus begins by acknowledging Faustus's greatness, but in essence it is issuing a warning to the audience that his terrible fate is what awaits all those ‘forward wits’ who ‘practise more than heavenly power permits’ (ll. 7–8). Yet it is arguable that the final soliloquy's powerful evocation of Faustus's agony, coupled with its stress on the horrors of the never-ending suffering to which he has been sentenced, are designed to make us wonder whether the savage punishment really fits the crime. Feelings of pity and fear might seem a more appropriate response to Faustus's end than the Epilogue's moral, as tidy as its concluding rhyming couplet.

Mock exam Thursday 25th March

2010-03-22T09:56:00.001Z

Mock paper for set text
1)
A) Outline for your performers two ways they might indicate the relationship between Faustus and Mephistopheles ( 4)

B) Consider the appropriate rehearsal techniques you might use in order to highlight the different personalities of Faustus and Mephistopheles. (6)

C) Explain to your performers how you intend to work on developing the relationship between Faustus and the pope and me Mephistopheles in this extract, giving reasons for your approach, supported by clear examples. (10)

2) As a director, outline and justify how you will explore and communicate your themes in a production of Faustus in your chosen performance space

AS level exam practical date

2010-03-04T09:07:00.002Z

A date for your diary

6th May 2010 6pm in the Phoenix Theatre is the practical exam where AS drama students will perform "The Maids " by Jean Genet and monologues and duologues to an outside examiner

drama year 13 question for thursday timed essay guidance

2010-03-01T11:48:00.002Z

Year 12 Drama half term work

2010-02-12T12:33:00.003Z

Over half term I would like you to work on the Brecht notes for your final notes on Friday.

Also James and Theo need to be working through the list I sent you for sound and set for The maids and working on character development and units and objectives for your duologues.

Sophie and Molly need to work on the character development of your characters in the maids and write a plot summary and all the main plot points of the play. Also create a character arc for your character, what does she say about herself, what does she say about the other, what is her super objective for the play? Also work on your monologues and develop your character biography.

Also you should all have learnt your lines of your monologues and duologues

year 13 drama work half term

2010-02-12T12:01:00.004Z

Carrying on work on Faustus

1 Create a 50 minute rehearsal for any scene in the play and be ready to direct the scene with the other members of the group on the first lesson back.

2 Carry on developing your idea with notes on costume/setting with diagrams/ character development/practitioner etc.

year 13 faustus timeline and links

2010-02-03T11:56:00.002Z

1.
1564
Feb 6, 1564 - Christoper Marlow Christopher Marlow Christopher Marlowe was born on February 6, 1564 (Discovering Christopher Marlowe 2), in Canterbury, England, and baptized at St. George's Chur... Tragedy In Drama Tragedy and Drama In a range of dramatic works from ...

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From Is Dr. Faustus A Medieval Morality Play Or Is It A Renaissance Drama? - … - Related web pages
www.bignerds.com/essays/Dr-Faustus-Medieval ...
3.
1587
1587 - The Rose , built in 1587, was an original venue for the plays of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Its remains are present in SE1 today and, once it is fully analysed, the Rose's remains will be the only available evidence of an original ...

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From Rose Theatre appeal launched - Related web pages
www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/428
5.
1590
1590 - 344. Marlowe's " Tamberlaine." — Christopher Marlowe's (1564-1593) " Tambourlaine the Great," was published in 1590. It may bo read in Mr Havelock Ellis's edition of the best plays of Marlowe. Ancient Pistol.—The Second Part of King Henry IV. ii.
From Monarchs Retired from Business - Related web pages
books.google.com/books?id=7fsVAAAAYAAJ&pg ...
7.
1592
1592 - The novel's title also alludes to Christopher Marlowe's classic play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus written in 1592. [edit] Other composite elements Mann's characters are composites, not specific counterparts to individuals. Where names do seem to allude ...

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From Doctor Faustus (Thomas Mann novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Faustus_ ...
9.
1593
1593 - The Marlowe Inquest - Christopher Marlowe died in Deptford, Kent, in 1593, in a tavern brawl. Despite the verdict of an inquest held that year, mystery still surrounds his death. Feel the anguish of the English king whose reckless relationship with another man ...

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From Edward II - DVD
www.bbcamericashop.com/dvd/edward-ii-15085.html
11.
May 1593 - Part of the report from Richard Baines to the Privy Council in May 1593, stating what Christopher Marlowe was supposed to have said. The report listed one and a half pages of similar accusations. That Christ was illegitimate and Mary his mother dishonest... that ...

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From The Making of the United Kingdom and Black Peoples of the Americas
books.google.com/books?id=xpZy8nEtE4cC&pg=PA41 ...
13.
May 30, 1593 - Christopher Marlowe died on May 30th, 1593. Answer verified with This answer was verified with Encyclopedia.com Get more facts and information about Christopher Marlowe from Encyclopedia of World Biography at Encyclopedia.com.
From When did Christopher Marlowe die? | Smart QandA: Answers and facts … - Related web pages
qanda.encyclopedia.com/question/did ...
15.
1604
1604 - A couple of centuries earlier, a prior version of the story entitled The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus had made its way from Germany to England. There it was picked up and rewritten by Christopher Marlowe in 1604. Dr ...

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From Green-Eyed Monsters and Good Samaritans - Related web pages
books.google.com/books?id=yZlT3JzDxuoC&pg ...

Year 12 theatre studies rehearsal schedule

2010-01-26T13:37:00.000Z

Rehearsal schedule

Week one: Tuesday 26th Jan

The maids cuts and revisions and vision
Start off all set design and sound
Scene 1
Character work.

Thurs 28th Jan

Monologues duologues final choices and start research.
Fri: written work: Theatre review final handed in.

Week Two: Tues 2nd Feb

Opening sequence
Page 35-38
Research for James and Theo

Thurs 4th Feb

Monologues and duologues write a plot synopsis/character biography / objectives and units

Friday: Stanislavski notes final draft. Handed in

Week Three: Tues 9th Feb

Pages 39- 50

Ist ideas for sound and set for maids prod seen.

Thurs 11th Feb
Individual tutorials

Friday 12th Feb
Brecht notes final draft handed in.

HALF TERM

Week Four: Tues 23rd Feb

51-61 pages

Theo drawings and sourcing set and interview set designer

James sourcing sound and interview of sound engineer.

Thurs 25th feb :indiv monologues and duologues tutorials

Fri: 26th : james and theo indiv tut / girls work on scenes or research/ costume etc.

Week five March 2nd

Pages 66-79

Thurs 4th March: present monologues duologues to each other peer assessment.

Fri 5th Written coursework for monologues/duologues.

Week 6 tues 9th march pages 79-90

Thurs 11th march indiv tut for monologues duologues.

Fri 12th march Theo and James presentation of work so far/ girls work on lines and scenes already looked at.

Week 7 : tues 16th march

Pages 91-100
Powerpoint worked on by james/ theo

Thurs 18th march indiv monologues/ duologues.

Friday 19th march written work

Week 8

Tues 23rd march run through

Thurs 25th march present monologues duologues

Fri 26th march revision work for easter.

Week 9 tues 30th march

Run through play and establish work over Easter.

Easter holiday.

Week 9 Thurs 22nd April: Run through of play in theatre.

Friday : written work.

Week 10 tues 27th April: run through of play / pres of theo and james

Thursday 29th April: present monologues etc.

Fri 30th written work

Weekend reh: 1st may /2nd may 10am – 4pm compulsory

Week 11 Tues 4th may:
Dress rehearsal in lesson and 4pm -6pm

Wed 5th may: open dress rehearsal 6pm

Thrus 5th May EXAM PERFORMANCE Time TBA

Tim Bevan Master class

2010-01-26T11:39:00.003Z

Tim Bevan of Working Title productions will be giving a master class on 27th January 2010.

Year 13 Monday 18 January cover work.

2010-01-18T10:41:00.002Z

Year 13 this week needs to be a combination of getting ready for Saturday and Sunday dress rehearsal and Monday and Tuesday Performances. You must have ready

1) a script of cues for the lights so the technician will be able to follow what we are doing. Also think of what lighting you need.

2) a script or any dialogue for Richard including an idea of movement work he needs to do written and emailed to me at debby_turner@hotmail.com as soon as possible.

3) All media projections need to be saved onto the lap top

4) all sound placed on the ipod and cds ( ipod in my filing cabinet)

5) all costume and set needs to be in place for saturday.

6) make a poster and programme. Write a directors vision about what the show is about.

You must also have all notes for your swed completed and ready for marking.

If all is ready you can finish off christmas work on Faustus.

If you have any questions contact me via Lydia and I will ring you at lesson times.

Faustus
Social/Cultural/Historical
1 Find out about Christopher Marlowe, His life, his other plays
2 Find out about life in the 1600s politics etc
3 What were their views on religion/Education/ morals in the 1600s
Visual/Design elements
· Find out about staging of plays in the 1600’s- original staging. How did it affect design elements? Lighting/set/costume/ Acting Techniques.
Language
· Comparisons with Shakespeare/ any similarities?
Form and Structure
· Write out the plot in 10 sections
· Characters: Who are the main characters? Do a character biography for each and what are their super objectives for the play?
Vision
What is your overall vision for your production of Faustus?
Think of time set in, original or modern?
Context: making relevant to a modern audience.
Staging: Where will your play be staged what kind of theatre space?
How will this effect communication with the audience?
Overall message.

more support research material year 13

2010-01-11T09:50:00.002Z

year 13 devised support research material

2010-01-11T09:49:00.001Z

year 12 questions opening research for The Maids

2010-01-04T20:30:00.002Z

1 Using the research on this blog and elsewhere explain what does the term Theatre of the Absurd mean?

2 What were the characteristics of Jean Genets work?

3 How did he like his plays to be viewed by the audience?

4 How much of an influence was genet's life on his playwriting , give specific examples.

Theatre of the absurd by Martin Esslin

2010-01-04T20:24:00.003Z

James Saunders | writings | weed's home page

Absurd Drama - Martin Esslin

Introduction to "Absurd Drama" (Penguin Books, 1965)

'The Theatre of the Absurd' has become a catch-phrase, much used and much abused. What does it stand for? And how can such a label be justified? Perhaps it will be best to attempt to answer the second question first. There is no organised movement, no school of artists, who claim the label for themselves. A good many playwrights who have been classed under this label, when asked if they belong to the Theatre of the Absurd, will indigniantly reply that they belong to no such movement - and quite rightly so. For each of the playwrights concerned seeks to express no more and no less his own personal vision of the world.

Yet critical concepts of this kind are useful when new modes of expression, new conventions of art arise. When the plays of Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, and Adamov first appeared on the stage they puzzled and outraged most critics as well audiences. And no wonder. These plays flout all the standards by which drama has been judged for many centuries; they must therefore appear as a provocation to people who have come into the theatre expecting to find what they would recognize as a well-made play. A well-made play is expected to present characters that are well-observed and convincingly motivated: these plays often contain hardly any recognizable human beings and present completely unmotivated actions. A well-made play is expected to entertain by the ding-dong of witty and logically built-up dialogue: in some of these plays dialogue seems to have degenerated into meaningless babble. A well-made play is expected to have a beginning, a middle, and a neatly tied-up ending: these plays often start at an arbitrary point and seem to end just as arbitrarily. By all the traditional standards of of critical appreciation of the drama, these plays are not only abominably bad, they do not even deserve the name drama.

And yet, strangely enough, these plays have worked, they have had an effect, they have exercised a fascination of their own in the theatre. At first it was said that this fascination was merely a succès de scandale, that people flocked to see Beckett's Waiting for Godot or Ionesco's Bald Primadonna merely because it had become fashionable to express outrage and astonishment about them at parties. But this explanation clearly could not apply to more than one or two plays of this kind. And the success of a whole row of similarly unconventional works became more and more manifest. If the critical touchstones of conventional drama did not apply to these plays, this must surely have been due to a difference in objective, the use of different artistic means, to the fact, in short, that these plays were both creating and applying a different convention of drama. It is just as senseless to condemn an abstract painting because it lacks perspective or a recognizable subject-matter as it is to reject Waiting for Godot because it has no plot to speak of. In painting a composition of squares and lines an artist like Mondrian does not want to depict any object in nature, he does not want to create perspective. Similarly, in writing Waiting for Godot Beckett did not intend to tell a story, he did not want the audience to go home satisfied that they knew the solution to the problem posed in the play. Hence there is no point in reproaching him with not doing what he never sought to do; the only reasonable course is to try and find out what it was that he did intend.

Yet, if tackled directly most of the playwrights in question would refuse to discuss any theories or objectives behind their work. They would, with perfect justification, point out that they are concerned with one thing only: to express their vision of the world as best they can, simply because, as artists, they feel an irrepressible urge to do so. This is where the critic can step in. By describing the works that do not fit into the established convention, by bringing out the similarities of approach in a number of more or less obviously related new works, by analysing the nature of their method and their artistic effect, he can try to define the framework of the new convention, and by doing so, can provide the standards by which it will become possible to have works in that convention meaningfully compared and evaluated. The onus of proof that there is such a convetion involved clearly lies on the critic, but if he can establish that there are basic similarities in approach, he can argue that these similarities must arise from common factors in the experience of the writers concerned. And these common factors must in turn spring from the spiritual climate of our age (which no sensitive artist can escape) and also perhaps from a common background of artistic influences, a similarity of roots, a shared tradition.

A term like the Theatre of the Absurd must therefore be understood as a kind of intellectual shorthand for a complex pattern of similarities in approach, method, and convention, of shared philosophical and artistic premises, whether conscious or subconscious, and of influences from a common store of tradition. A label of this kind therefore is an aid to understanding, valid only in so far as it helps to gain insight into a work of art. It is not a binding classification; it is certainly not all-embracing or exclusive. A play may contain some elements that can best be understood in the light of such a label, while other elements in the same play derive from and can best be understood in the light of a different convention. Arthur Adamov, for example, has written a number of plays that are prime examples of the Theatre of the Absurd. He now quite openly and consciously rejects this style and writes in a different, realistic convention. Nevertheless even his latest plays, which are both realistic and socially committed, contain some aspects which can still be elucidated in terms of the Theatre of the Absurd (such as the use of symbolic interludes, guignols, in his play Spring '71). Moreover, once a term like Theatre of the Absurd is defined and understood, it acquires a certain value in throwing light on works of previous epochs. The Polish critic Jan Kott, for example, has written a brilliant study of King Lear in the light of Beckett's Endgame. And that this was no vain academic exercise but a genuine aid to understanding is shown by the fact that Peter Brook's great production of King Lear took many of its ideas from Kott's essay.

What then is the convention of drama that has now acquired the label of the Theatre of the Absurd?

Let us take one of the plays in this volume as a starting point: Ionesco's Amédée. A middle-aged husband and wife are shown in a situation which is clearly not taken from real life. They have not left their flat for years. The wife earns her living by operating some sort of telephone switchboard; the husband is writing a play, but has never got beyond the first few lines. In the bedroom is a corpse. It has been there for many years. It may be the corpse of the wife's lover whom the husband killed when he found them together, but this is by no means certain; it may also have been a burglar, or a stray visitor. But the oddest thing about it is that it keeps growing larger and larger; it is suffering from 'geometric progression, the incurable disease of the dead'. And in the course of the play it grows so large that eventually an enormous foot bursts from the bedroom into the living-room, threatening to drive Amédée and his wife out of their home. All this is wildly fantastic, yet it is not altogether unfamiliar, for it is not unlike situations most of us have experienced at one time or another in dreams and nightmares.

Ionesco has in fact put a dream situation onto the stage, and in a dream quite clearly the rules of realistic theatre no longer apply. Dreams do not develop logically; they develop by association. Dreams do not communicate ideas; they communicate images. And inded the growing corpse in Amédée can best be understood as a poetic image. It is in the nature both of dreams and poetic imagery that they are ambiguous and carry a multitude of meanings at one and the same time, so that it is futile to ask what the image of the growing corpse stands for. On the other hand one can say that the corpse might evoke the growing power of past mistakes or past guilt, perhaps the waning of love or the death of affection - some evil in any case that festers and grows worse with time. The image can stand for any and all of these ideas, and its ability to embrace them all gives it the poetic power it undoubtedly posseses.

Not all the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd can be described simply as dreams (although Adamov's Professor Taranne in this volume actually came to Adamov as a dream, Albee's Zoo Story is clearly far more firmly anchored in reality) but in all of them the poetic image is the focus of interest. In other words: while most plays in the traditional convention are primarily concerned to tell a story or elucidate an intellectual problem, and can thus be seen as a narrative or discursive form of communication, the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd are primarily intended to convey a poetic image or a complex pattern of poetic images; they are above all a poetical form. Narrative or discursive thought proceeds in a dialectical manner and must lead to a result or final message; it is therefore dynamic and moves along a definite line of development. Poetry is above all concerned to convey its central idea, or atmosphere, or mode of being; it is essentially static.

This does not mean, however, that these plays lack movement: the movement in Amédée, for instance, is relentless, lying as it does in the pressure of the ever-growing corpse. But the situation of the play remains static; the movement we see is the unfolding of the poetic image. The more ambiguous and complex that image, the more intricate and intriguing will be the process of revealing it. That is why a play like Waiting for Godot can generate considerable suspense and dramatic tension in spite of being a play in which literally nothing happens, a play designed to show that nothing can ever happen in human life. It is only when the last lines have been spoken and the curtain has fallen that we are in a position to grasp the total pattern of the complex poetic image we have been confronted with. If, in the traditional play, the action goes from point A to point B, and we constantly ask, 'what's going to happen next?', here we have an action that consists in the gradual unfolding of a complex pattern, and instead we ask, 'what is it that we are seeking? What will the completed image be when we have grasped the nature of the pattern?' Thus in Arrabal's The Two Executioners in this volume we realise at the end of the play that the theme is the exploration of a complex image of the mother-son relationship; in Albee's Zoo Story it is only in the last lines of the play that the idea of the entire dialogue between Jerry and Peter falls into place, as an image of the difficulty of communication between human beings in our world.

Why should the emphasis in drama have shifted away from traditional forms towards images which, complex and suggestive as they may be, must necessarily lack the final clarity of definition, the neat resolutions we have been used to expect? Clearly because the playwrights concerned no longer believe in the possibility of such neatness of resolution. They are indeed chiefly concerned with expressing a sense of wonder, of incomprehension, and at times of despair, at the lack of cohesion and meaning that they find in the world. If they could believe in clearly defined motivations, acceptable solutions, settlements of conflict in tidily tied up endings, these dramatists would certainly not eschew them. But, quite obviously, they have no faith in the existence of so rational and well ordered a universe. The 'well-made play' can thus be seen as conditioned by clear and comforting beliefs, a stable scale of values, an ethical system in full working condition. The system of values, the world-view behind the well-made play may be a religious one or a political one; it may be an implicit belief in the goodness and perfectibility of men (as in Shaw or Ibsen) or it may be a mere unthinking acceptance of the moral and political status quo (as in most drawing-room comedy). But whatever it is, the basis of the well-made play is the implicit assumption that the world does make sense, that reality is solid and secure, all outlines clear, all ends apparent. The plays that we have classed under the label of the Theatre of the Absurd, on the other hand, express a sense of shock at the absense, the loss of any such clear and well-defined systems of beliefs or values.

There can little doubt that such a sense of disillusionment, such a collapse of all previously held firm beliefs is a characteristic feature of our own times. The social and spiritual reasons for such a sense of loss of meaning are manifold and complex: the waning of religious faith that had started with the Enlightenment and led Nietzsche to speak of the 'death of God' by the eighteen-eighties; the breakdown of the liberal faith in inevitable social progress in the wake of the First World War; the disillusionment with the hopes of radical social revolution as predicted by Marx after Stalin had turned the Soviet Union into a totalitarian tyranny; the relapse into barbarism, mass murder, and genocide in the course of Hitler's brief rule over Europe during the Second World War; and, in the aftermath of that war, the spread of spiritual emptiness in the outwardly prosperous and affluent societies of Western Europe and the United States. There can be no doubt: for many intelligent and sensitive human beings the world of the mid twentieth century has lost its meaning and has simply ceased to make sense. Previously held certainties have dissolved, the firmest foundations for hope and optimism have collapsed. Suddenly man sees himself faced with a universe that is both frightening and illogical - in a word, absurd. All assurances of hope, all explanations of ultimate meaning have suddenly been unmasked as nonsensical illusions, empty chatter, whistling in the dark. If we try to imagine such a situation in ordinary life, this might amount to our suddenly ceasing to understand the conversation in a room full of people; what made sense at one moment has, at the next, become an obscure babble of voices in a foreign language. At once the comforting, familiar scene would turn into one of nightmare and horror. With the loss of the means of communication we should be compelled to view that world with the eyes of total outsiders as a succession of frightening images.

Such a sense of loss of meaning must inevitably lead to a questioning of the recognised instrument for the communication of meaning: language. Consequently the Theatre of the Absurd is to a very considerable extent concerned with a critique of language, an attack above all on fossilized forms of language which have become devoid of meaning. The converstaion at the party which at one moment seemed to be an exchange if information about the weather, or new books, or the respective health of the participants, is suddenly revealed as an exchange of mere meaningless banalities. The people talking about the weather had no intention whatever of of really exchanging meaningful information on the subject; they were merely using language to fill the emptiness between them, to conceal the fact that they had no desire to tell each other anything at all. In other words, from being a noble instrument of genuine communication language has become a kind of ballast filling empty spaces. And equally, in a universe that seems to be drained of meaning, the pompous and laborious attempts at explanation that we call philosophy or politics must appear as empty chatter. In Waiting for Godot for example Beckett parodies and mocks the language of philosophy and science in Lucky's famous speech. Harold Pinter, whose uncanny accuracy in the reproduction of real conversation among English people has earned him the reputation of having a tape-recorder built into his memory, reveals that the bulk of everyday conversation is largely devoid of logic and sense, is in fact nonsensical. It is at this point that the Theatre of the Absurd can actually coincide with the highest degree of realism. For if the real conversation of human beings is in fact absurd and nonsensical, then it is the well-made play with its polished logical dialogue that is unrealistic, while the absurdist play may well be a tape-recorded reproduction of reality. Or, in a world that has become absurd, the Theatre of the Absurd is the most realistic comment on, the most accurate reproduction of, reality.

In its critique of language the Theatre of the Absurd closely reflects the preoccupation of contemporary philosophy with language, its effort to disentangle language, as a genuine instrument for logic and the discovery of reality, from the welter of emotive, illogical usages, the grammatical conventions that have, in the past, often been confused with genuine logical relationships. And equally, in its emphasis on the basic absurdity of the human condition, on the bankruptcy of all closed systems of thought with claims to provide a total explanation of reality, the Theatre of the Absurd has much in common with the existential philosophy of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. (It was in fact Camus who coined the concept of the Absurd in the sense in which it is used here.) This is not to say that the dramatists of the Absurd are trying to translate contemporary philosophy into drama. It is merely that philosophers and dramatists respond to the same cultural and spiritual situation and reflect the same preoccupations.

Yet, however contemporary the Theatre of the Absurd may appear it is by no means the revolutionary novelty as which some of its champions, as well as some of its bitterest critics, tend to represent it. In fact the Theatre of the Absurd can best be understood as a new combination of a number of ancient, even archaic, traditions of literature and drama. It is surprising and shocking merely because of the unusual nature of the combination and the increased emphasis on aspects of drama that, while present in all plays, rarely emerge into the foreground.

The ancient traditions combined in a new form in the Theatre of the Absurd are: the tradition of miming and clowning that goes back to the mimus of Greece and Rome, the commedia dell' arte of Renaissance Italy, and such popular forms of theatre as the pantomime or the music-hall in Britain; the equally ancient tradition of nonsense poetry; the tradition of dream and nightmare literature that also goes back to Greek and Roman times; allegorical and symbolic drama, such as we find it in medieval morality plays, or in the Spanish auto sacramental; the ancient tradition of fools and mad scenes in drama, of which Shakespeare provides a multitude of examples; and the even more ancient tradition of ritual drama that goes back to the very origins of the theatre where religion and drama were still one. It is no coincidence that one of the masters of the Theatre of the Absurd, Jean Genet, regards his plays as attempts at recaturing the riual element in the Mass itself, which, after all, can be seen as a poetic image of an archetypal event brought to life through a sequence of symbolical actions.

It is against this background that we must see the history of the movement which culminates in Beckett, Ionesco, or Genet. Its immediate forebears are dramatists like Strindberg, who progressed from photographic naturalism to more and more openly expressionist representations of dreams, nightmares, or obsessions in plays like the Ghost Sonata, Dream Play, or To Damascus, and novelists like James Joyce and Kafka. A form of drama concerned with dream-like imagery and the failure of language was bound to find inspiration also in the silent cinema, with its dream-like quality and cruel, sometimes nightmare humour. Charlie Chaplin's little man and Buster Keaton's stonefaced stoic are among the openly acknowledged influences of writers like Beckett and Ionesco. These comedians, after all, derive from the most ancient traditions of clowning, as do, in the talking cinema, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, or Laurel and Hardy, all clearly part of the tradition which leads to the Theatre of the Absurd.

Another direct and acknowledged influence is that of the Dadaists, the surrealists, and the Parisian avant-garde that derives from writers like Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). Jarry's Ubu Roi, first performed in 1896, might in fact be called the first modern example of the Theatre of the Absurd. It is a savage farce in which monstrous puppets castigate the greed and emptiness of bourgeois society through a series of grotesque stage images. Apollinaire's play Les Mamelles de Tiresias ('The Breasts of Tiresias') was the first play to be labelled by its author as 'a surrealist drama'. Here too the action proceeds through a series of savagely grotesque images; the hero, or rather the heroine, Thérèse-Tiresias changes sex by letting her breasts float twards the heavens in the shape of two toy balloons. Jarry and Apollinaire were the direct precursors of the Dadaists in Switzerland, France and Germany. Brecht's earliest plays bear the marks of the Dadaist influence and can be regarded as early examples of the Theatre of the Absurd: In the Jungle of the Cities for instance presents the audience with a totally unmotivate struggle, a series of poetic images of man fighting a senseless battle with himself. In France the two leading exponents of surrealism in drama were Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and Roger Vitrac (1899-1952). Vitrac's play Victor ou Les Enfants au Pouvoir (1924) anticipates Ionesco and Arrabal by showing the world from the point of view of a nine-year-old child of giant size and monstrous intelligence. Artaud, who wrote very little in dramatic form himself, is of immense importance as a theoretician of the new anti-literary theatre: he coined the slogan of the 'Theatre of Cruelty' for his conception of a theatre designed to shock its audience into a full awareness of the horror of the human condition. Jean-Louis Barrault and Roger Blin, two of the leading directors of the contemporary avant-garde theatre, were pupils of Artaud; Arthur Adamov was among his closest friends.

In its present form the Theatre of the Absurd is a post-war phenomenon. Genet's The Maids had its first performance at the Athénée in Paris in 1947; Ionesco's Bald Primadonna and Adamov's earliest plays were first produced in 1950; Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1952. It will be noticed that all these first performances took place in Paris. And Paris certainly is the fountainhead of the Theatre of the Absurd. Yet it is equally strange and significant that the playwrights themselves are largely exiles from other countries domiciled in Paris: Beckett (born 1906) an Anglo-Irishman who writes in French; Ionesco (born 1912) half-French and half-Rumanian; Adamov (born 1908) a Russo-Armenian. Only Genet is a Frenchman born and bred, but then he is an exile in a different sense: an exile from society itself, a child abandoned by his mother, brought up by foster-parents and drifting from detention centres for juvenile delinquents into an underworld of thieves and male prostitutes, prison and penitentiary. It is in the experience of the outcast or exile that our image of the world seen from the outside assumes a new and added significance: for the exile, from his country or from society, moves in a world drained of meaning, sees people in pursuit of objectives he cannot comprehend, hears them speak a language that he cannot follow. The exile's basic experience is the archetype and the anticipation of twentieth-century man's shock at his realization that the world is ceasing to make sense.

Of the dramatists of the Absurd Samuel Beckett is undoubtedly the profoundest, the greatest poet. Waiting for Godot and Endgame are certainly masterpieces; Happy Days and Play, Krapp's Last Tape, and the two Acts without Words (where language has drained away altogether) are brilliant and profound poetic images; and the radio plays All that Fall, Embers, Words and Music, and Cascando have an equal enigmatic power.

Jean Genet (born 1910) lacks Beckett's discipline, intellect and erudition, but he too is a poet, endowed with the wellnigh magic power of creating beauty from evil, corruption and excrement. If the evanescence of man in time and the mystery of human personality and identity are Beckett's main themes, Genet's chief concern is with the falseness of human pretensions in society, the contrast between appearance and reality, which itself must remain for ever elusive. In The Maids we see the servants bound in a mixture of hatred and erotic dependence to their mistress, re-enacting this love-hate in an endless series of ritual games; in The Balcony society itself is symbolized in the image of a brothel providing its customers with the illusions of power; and in The Blacks we are back with the underdog acting out his hatred for his oppressor (which is also a form of love) in an endless ritual of mock-murder.

Jean Tardieu (born 1903) and Boris Vian (1920-59) are among the best of the French dramatists of the Absurd. Tardieu is an experimenter who has systematically explored the possibilities of a theatre that can divorce itself from discursive speech to the point where language becomes mere musical sound. Vian, a devoted follower of Jarry, wrote a play, The Empire Builders, which shows man fleeing from death and loneliness in the image of a family moving into ever smaller flats on higher and higher floors of a mysterious building.

In Italy Dino Buzzati and Ezio d'Errico, in Germany Günter Grass (known as a novelist for his monumental Tin Drum) and Wolfgang Hildesheimer are the main exponents of the Theatre of the Absurd. In Britain, N. F. Simpson, James Saunders, David Campton, and Harold Pinter might be classed under this heading. N. F. Simpson has clear links with English nonsense literature, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. James Saunders, particularly in Next Time I'll Sing to You, expresses in dramatic form the thought of the existential philosophers. Pinter, who acknowledges Kafka and Beckett among his literary heroes, combines realism with an intuition of the absurdity of human existence. In his later work he has shed some of the allegorical symbolism of his beginnings, but even in seemingly realistic plays like The Collection there is an absense of motivation and solution, a multple ambiguity and a sense of non-communication which transforms the seemingly realistic account of humdrum adultery into a poetic image of the human condition.

Behind the Iron Curtain, where socialist realism is the official creed in the theatre, there would appear to be no room for an avant-garde trend of this type. Yet there is one country where the influence of the Theatre of the Absurd has produced some astonishingly successful plays: Poland, an area of relative artistic freedom since the defeat of the Stalinists by Gomulka in the autumn of 1956. A strong surrealist influence was present in Poland even before the war (Gombrowicz and Witkiewicz are two dramatists who might be regarded as among the most important immediate precursors of the Theatre of the Absurd) so that the soil was fertile for a development which was further fostered by the ability of drama of this kind to express political comment in a suitably oblique form. A number of young dramatists, notably Slawomir Mrozek and Tadeusz Rozewicz, have produced outstandingly original work in the convention of the Absurd.

Three of the playwrights represented in this volume are Parisian exiles. Eugène Ionesco is undoubtedly the most fertile and original of the dramatists of the Absurd, and also, in spite of a streak of clowning and fun for its own sake in his work, one of the most profound. He is moreover the most vocal of the dramatists of the Absurd, the only one who is prepared to discuss the theoretical foundations of his work and to reply to the attacks on it from committed left-wing realists. The critique of language and the haunting presense of death are Ionesco's chief themes in plays like The Bald Primadonna, The Lesson, The Chairs, The Killer, Rhinoceros, and Exit The King. Amédée or How to Get Rid of It (1953) is Ionesco's first full-length play and contains one of his most telling images. It is also characteristic in its alternation between states of depression and euphoria, leaden oppression and floating on air, an image which reappears through his work and which culminates, in this particular play, in Amédée's floating away at the end.

Arthur Adamov today belongs to the camp against which Ionesco directs his harshest polemics, the socialist realists whose organ is the periodical Théâtre populaire, but he started out as a follower of Artaud, a self-confessed neurotic, an alien in a senseless world. Adamov's development from one extreme to the other is a fascinating artistic and psychological case history, in which Professor Taranne occupies a key position. Adamov's progress can be seen as a process of psychological therapy through writing. Unable to face the reality of the outside world, he started out by projecting his oppressions and anxieties on to the stage. Nothing would have induced him, he has since confessed, to mention any element of the real world, such as a place-name in one of his plays; he would have regarded that as a piece of unspeakable vulgarity. And yet, when he committed to paper the dream which is now the play Professor Taranne, he realized that a real place-name, that of Belgium, had occurred in the dream. Truthfulness in transcribing the dream thus forced him to compromise on one of his fundamental artistic principles. And from then onwards reality kept breaking through into his writing in ever more insistent form, until today he is a thorough-going realist of the Brechtian school. That is to say, by writing his obsessions out of his system, Adamov acquired the ability to face and to control the objective world from which he had withdrawn into neurosis. It might be argued that the projection of neurotic obsessions is both more interesting and more illuminating in providing insights into the dark side of the human mind than the accurate transcription of historical events, and that therefore Adamov's absurdist plays are more fascinating, more successful than his later efforts. But this is a matter of taste as well as of ideological bias. The fact remains that Professor Taranne and the somewhat more realistic Ping Pong are undoubtedly among Adamov's best plays.

Fernando Arrabal (born 1932) is a Spaniard who has been living in France since 1954 and now writes in French. He is an admirer of Beckett, but sees his roots in the surrealist tradition of Spain, a country that has always been rich in fantasy and the grotesque (El Greco, Goya) and that in more recent times has produced such outstanding representatives of the modern movement as the painter Picasso (who has himself written two plays in an absurdist vein) and the writers Lorca and Valle Inclàn. Arrabal's own contribution to the absurdist spectrum is a highly original one: his main preoccupation is with the absurdity of ethical and moral rules. He looks at the world with the incomprehemsion of a child that simply cannot understand the logic of conventional morality. Thus, in The Automobile Graveyard there is a prostitute who follows her profession simply because religion demands that one be kind to one's neighbours; how then could she refuse them the ultimate kindness of giving herself to them? And similarly in The Two Executioners the rebel son who objects to the tortures that his mother inflicts on his father is faced with the dilemma of several contradictory moral laws: obediance to one's father, the human goodness that prompts one to save the suffering victim from his torturers, and the need to honour and obey one's mother. These moral laws are here in obvious conflict, as it is the mother who has the father tortured. Clearly the situation in which several moral laws are in contradiction exposes the absurdity of the system of values that accommodates them all. Arrabal refuses to judge; he merely notes the position and shows that he finds it beyond his comprehension.

Edward Albee (born 1928) is one of the few American exponents of the Theatre of the Absurd. An adopted child, he shares with Genet the orphan's sense of loneliness in an alien world; and the image of the dream child which exists only in the adoptive parents' imagination recurs in a number of his plays, notably The American Dream and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The latter, which has earned him an enormous success on Broadway, is undoubtedly one of the finest American plays since the heyday of Eugene O'Neill. It is a savage dance of death reminiscent of Strindberg, outwardly realistic in form, but in fact, as in the case of Pinter's best work, existing on at least two levels apart from the realistic one: as an allegory of American society, a poetic image of its emptiness and sterility, and as a complex ritual on the pattern of Genet. The Zoo Story (1958), one of Albee's earliest dramatic ventures, has a similar complexity: it is a clinically accurate study of Schizophrenia, an image of man's loneliness and inability to make contact, and also, on the ritual and symbolic level, an act of ritual self-immolation that has curious parallels with Christ's atonement. (Note the names Jerry - Jesus? - and Peter).

The plays in this volume, like the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd in general, present a disillusioned, harsh, and stark picture of the world. Though often couched in the form of extravagant fantasies, they are nevertheless essentially realistic, in the sense that they never shirk the realities of the human mind with its despair, fear and loneliness in an alien and hostile universe. There is more human reality in the grotesquely extravagant images of Amédée than in many far longer plays plays in a convention that is a mere photographic copy of the surface of life. The realism of these plays is a psychological, and inner realism; they explaore the human sub-conscious in depth rather than trying to describe the outward appearance of human existence. Nor is it quite correct that these plays, deeply pessimistic as they are, are nothing but an expression of utter despair. It is true that basically the Theatre of the Absurd attacks the comfortable certainties of religious or political orthodoxy. It aims to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it. But the challenge behind this message is anything but one of despair. It is a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because ultimately man is alone in a meaningless world. The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful, but it leaves behind it a sense of freedom and relief. And that is why, in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.

- Martin Esslin, Introduction to "Penguin Plays - Absurd Drama" (Penguin, 1965)

"Martin Esslin was born Julius Pereszlenyi on 6 June 1918 into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the Great War, he became Austrian by default and in 1920 the family moved to Vienna where he was educated at the Bundesgymnasium II. In 1936 he went to the University of Vienna where he studied Philosophy and English. He also studied directing, acting and dramaturgy at the Reinhardt Seminar of Dramatic Art. He was about to begin his theatrical career in Vienna when the Nazis invaded Austria. He fled, spending a year in Brussels before reaching England where he became a scriptwriter and producer for the BBC’s European Services in 1940. He wrote numerous radio features on political, social and literary subjects and in 1955 was appointed assistant head of BBC European Productions, and in 1961, assistant head of Drama (Sound). In 1963 Esslin was appointed head of BBC Radio Drama. By the mid-1960s the Radio Drama department at the BBC was originating between 400 and 500 plays a year. In 1977 Esslin turned to teaching. He became Professor of Drama at Stanford University, California, for two quarters annually, until 1988, and after that Professor Emeritus. He had also been visiting Professor of Theatre at Florida State University (1969-1976). He achieved much recognition as the author of two of the most influential books dealing with the post-war theatre, Brecht: A Choice of Evils (1959) and The Theatre of the Absurd (1962) — a term coined by Esslin. Esslin was awarded the OBE in 1972."

from austrian cutural forum

Martin Esslin links

Stanford Report - drama professor and theater critic (obit)
Guardian Unlimited - illuminating writer and radio drama producer (obit)
Stanford Magazine - he found meaning in absurdity (obit)
Voy Forums - Martin Esslin, drama critic, teacher, author (obit)
Joanne Karpinski (Regis Univ) - The Theatre of the Absurd (Martin Esslin extract)
Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia - theater of the absurd (Martin Esslin article)

James Saunders | writings | weed's home page

comments to: weed@venus.co.uk
revised 7 May 2003
Original URL: http://www.venus.co.uk/~weed/writings/jamessaunders/jsesslin.htm

to Samuel Beckett Resources

Theatre of the Absurd

2010-01-04T20:21:00.000Z

The Theatre of the Absurd (French: Théâtre de l'Absurde) is a designation for particular plays written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work. Critic Martin Esslin coined the term "Theatre of the Absurd", relating these plays based on a broad theme of absurdity, roughly similar to the way Albert Camus uses the term. The Absurd in these plays takes the form of man’s reaction to a world apparently without meaning or man as a puppet controlled or menaced by an invisible outside force. Though the term is applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of the plays: broad comedy, often similar to Vaudeville, mixed with horrific or tragic images; characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions; dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive; either a parody or dismissal of realism and the concept of the "well-made play". Playwrights commonly associated with the Theatre of the Absurd include Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Fernando Arrabal, and Edward Albee.

Research Jean Genet

2010-01-04T20:14:00.003Z

e a n g e n e t : f a c t s

Name: Jean Genet
Born: December 19, 1910
Place of birth: Tanier Childbirth Clinic, Paris, France
Died: April 15, 1986
Place of death: Paris, France
Buried: Larache, Morocco
j e a n g e n e t : b i o g .

Jean Genet was born on December 19, 1910, the illegitimate son of a Parisian prostitute, and orphaned seven months later. At the age of ten, he was accused of stealing. Although innocent but having been described as a thief, the young boy resolved to be a thief. "Thus," wrote Genet, "I decisively repudiated a world that had repudiated me." At the age of thirteen, after being a ward of the state, he began a life of crime and adventure. From 15 to 18 Genet was in the Mettray penitentiary, a place of hard labour, where a code of love, honour, gesture and justice was enforced by the inmates, and where his sexual awakening occurred. He then joined the French Foreign Legion in Syria. He deserted and spent more periods in prison living by petty theft, begging, and homosexual prostitution. By the age of 23, Genet was living in Spain, sleeping with a one-armed pimp, lice-ridden and begging - a period which became the basis for The Thief's Journal, his record of a journey, in which no aspect of suffering, sordidness, and degradation was spared him.

Between 1930 and 1940, he wandered throughout Europe and he eventually, he found himself in Hitler's Germany where he felt strangely out of place. "I had a feeling of being in a camp of organized bandits. This is a nation of thieves, I felt. If I steal here, I accomplish no special act that could help me to realize myself. I merely obey the habitual order of things. I do not destroy it."

At age 32, while in prison, he started writing his first manuscript, Our Lady of the Flowers. It was discovered and destroyed. Genet rewrote it from memory. This handwritten manuscript was smuggled out of his cell and eventually came to the attention of Cocteau and Sartre, who lobbied vigorously for a pardon from a life-sentence. More than forty intellectuals and artists petitioned the French government on Genet's behalf. Ignoring traditional plot and psychology, Genet's work relies heavily on ritual, transformation, illusion and interchangeable identities. The homosexuals, prostitutes, thieves and outcasts are trapped in self-destructive circles. They express the despair and loneliness of a man caught in a maze of mirrors, trapped by an endless progression of images that are, in reality, merely his own distorted reflection. Genet's stature as an original and important writer was cemented with Sartre's study of him in the book Saint Genet.

After five novels, and then silence for several years, Genet re-emerged as a playwright. He wrote a number of theatrical pieces which further established his success, beginning with the production of The Maids, and followed by the other classic plays: The Blacks, The Balcony, and The Screens. Genet, believed the theatre should be an incendiary event, and was precise about how his works should be produced.

Genet wrote of the gay world, without apology or explanation, revealing beauty in the harsh world in which his characters lived loved and died. He deeply felt a sense of solidarity with thieves, and society's dispossessed. In later life, Genet championed the causes of the Black Panthers in the United States and Palestinian soldiers in Jordan and Lebanon. His final work, Prisoner of Love, is a record of his years spent with these two groups. He died on April 15th 1986.

year 12 reminder

2009-12-04T14:44:00.003Z

Don't forget theatre visit on tuesday 2pm national theatre get your tickets from me on monday.

Endgame theatre review timed essay on thursday in lesson.

reviews for End game

2009-11-27T12:58:00.002Z

Two months ago, Mark Rylance was playing a freewheeling social outcast in Jez Butterworth's hit play Jerusalem at the Royal Court, when he received an unexpected phone call. Simon McBurney, director of Complicite theatre company, was two weeks into rehearsals for his West End production of Beckett's Endgame, and both his lead actors – Richard Briers and Adrian Scarborough – had pulled out. Would Rylance step in and play opposite McBurney?

1. Endgame
2. Duchess theatre,
3. London
4. WC2B 5LA

1. Until 5 December
2. Box office:
0844 412 4659

By rights, alarm bells should have rung. Rylance recalls that another actor once described the typical Complicite rehearsal process to him as follows: "It led to a day when, to a person, every actor was convinced that this was the first Complicite show that was going to be absolute shit. And it wasn't until Simon had fished out the last bit of hope that any of them might have had, and squashed it into a rich compost of all their ambitions, rotting there at the end of the garden, that something original could grow." Sitting beside him, McBurney laughs drily. Rylance continues: "Hearing this, I felt I had come to understand something about Simon. He has more capacity to deal with chaos, a wider love of randomness and impulse, than the rest of us."

Rylance wasn't put off, which is why the two men are now in a bar at the Duchess theatre in London, where they are preparing to play Beckett's tragicomic double act – Hamm and Clov, with Rylance as the imperious, despondent Hamm, and McBurney as his impatient servant. They make an intriguing double act themselves: McBurney, widely revered as a theatre visionary, fidgets with a piece of paper, while Rylance, a former director of the Globe theatre with a reputation for eccentricity, meticulously arranges his packed lunch of tinned salmon, lentils and mustard dressing on the table in front of him. Both speak softly – Rylance in sumptuous metaphors, McBurney with a probing intellect. There is a thrumming quality to McBurney, as though he were plugged into an electric current; his hair flies statically upwards from his head.

What outsiders don't appreciate about the theatre, McBurney says, is that it works in chaos. Even the greatest success can be a happy accident – like Boeing-Boeing, which won Rylance a Tony award for best actor when it transferred to Broadway last year. The production only came about because its director, Matthew Warchus, had a few weeks to spare and said to Rylance that he wanted to do "something silly". "Increasingly, I quite like things coming surprisingly," says Rylance. "Having spent 10 years at the Globe, being responsible for the fates of 100 or more people, it's very nice not to have to live a year in the future."

Admiration and envy

Rylance admits to being apprehensive about tackling Beckett for the first time. He emailed Beckett veteran Fiona Shaw for advice when he took the job (she said an actor needs to find a way of making the play as shocking as it first was), and is reading a biography for background. But the chief attraction of this production was the opportunity to work with McBurney. It's a first, but only by accident rather than design. The pair are close contemporaries – McBurney is 52, Rylance is 49 – and have followed each other's careers with interest.

McBurney says he first noticed Rylance when he was performing at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, in the early 1980s. "He was fascinating to me, because he seemed to be swimming somewhere in the mainstream of things. He was invited to work at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he played Hamlet – all the things that I never imagined would come my way." Rylance regarded McBurney with the same mixture of admiration and envy. The first time they were in a room together, he thinks, was in 1987. McBurney had come to see The Wandering Jew at the National, in which Rylance was performing, and "hadn't thought very much of it", Rylance recalls. "My impression was that Simon was very strident, quite frightening. I would go along to Complicite shows and think they were wonderful, and wanted to be part of that crowd, instead of being institutionalised."

He did try. In the early 1980s, Rylance and six friends set up their own experimental group, the London Theatre of Imagination. "We didn't have anywhere near the same success as Complicite," he says now. "I was very unhappy about that. I still hanker to make pieces – but I don't long any more to have a company. The Globe has kicked a lot of that out of my system."

Knowing McBurney now, Rylance wonders whether he has come to regard Complicite as a burden, in that he is always expected to do something groundbreaking. He sympathises with McBurney's desire not to have his theatre labelled. "I think it was one of the first things that got me into being an actor: I used to do many different, crazy things in my life to try and make people not sure what I was. That was particularly satisfied by acting different parts on stage."

McBurney doesn't contradict him, and adds: "As an actor, it's much easier for me to get work in the movies because nobody knows who I am, except for the work that I've done in another movie. I really enjoy that." (He has recently had roles in The Duchess and a forthcoming Harry Potter.) While he accepts that there are "consistencies and continuities" in his theatre work, he becomes twitchy at any suggestion that there is a Complicite style he might bring to Endgame.

This isn't such an outlandish proposal: Complicite productions are celebrated for their all-encompassing theatricality, and McBurney grows animated as he describes how Endgame is ripe for reinvention. "It's like an extraordinary installation of words – you could put it up in Tate Modern.I sometimes feel I would like to do crazy things with Endgame, where someone says something, but the words, instead of being spoken, are written words projected out of their mouth."

What infuriates him is the expectation that he will always take a radical approach. "In Germany, when you're asked to direct something, one of the first things they say is: 'What is your conzept?' To which I answer: 'I do not have a conzept.'" He emanates scorn. He says he is more interested in understanding Beckett's mindset. "He is extremely careful about his choice of words and actions," McBurney says – particularly when it comes to his precise but sometimes baffling stage directions. "Just as you speak a line of text and say, 'I don't know what that means', you do an action and say, 'I don't know what that's doing.'" The Beckett estate has a low tolerance for directorial interventions but Rylance predicts it will have no complaints: "I haven't been this faithful to a text, ever."

A compulsive curiosity

The struggle for understanding, says McBurney, has been at the root of every theatre piece he has ever worked on, whether it is understanding memory (1999's Mnemonic), mathematics (2007's A Disappearing Number), or the Japanese language (2008's Shun-kin). He puts this down to a compulsive curiosity: "I constantly want to know, what is a table, or what is a cat?"

This is a production he has been working towards ever since the earliest Complicite shows, mime pieces which he describes as "very Beckettian in spirit". His chief worry now is that: "People will see it and think that it's the finished thing. I know Mark and I will go on finding and finding, because we can. I can't think of any two rehearsals in which our interpretation has remained the same. Everything is a search."

Evening Standard
Mark Rylance is a masterclass in Hamm acting in Endgame

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness”, says the legless old woman Nell in Samuel Beckett’s apocalyptic play. It’s a perverse claim, typical of Beckett, yet in Complicite’s claustrophobic production unhappiness does provide comedy. A blind man, Hamm, squirms in a wheelchair. His servant, Clov, cannot sit down and staggers around the stage; we sense he would like to go elsewhere but is inextricably bound to his master. In two bins lurk Hamm’s parents, Nell and her similarly disabled husband Nagg. They and Clov are conventionally thought of as the three nails on which Hamm (a truncated hammer) crashes down. Yet the interdependence of Hamm and Clov is clear: they share their suffering, and so do we. In chess, the endgame begins when there are just a few pieces left on the board. Crucially, it does not have to result in a decisive conclusion, since stalemate is always a possibility. Beckett’s characters seem trapped in that condition. They inhabit a depleted world, tormented by memories of a better past where there were sugar plums and flourishes of greenery.

They return repeatedly to images of this past — Nell lapses into a reverie at the mere mention of “yesterday” — and the future seems unimaginable. In 1957 the Lord Chamberlain’s office refused the play a licence because Beckett would not amend a line about God: “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!” He eventually relented and changed “bastard” to “swine”. Here the offending word is restored.

This is as it should be, for Beckett is the most linguistically sensitive of writers, and amid the play’s remorseless asperity there’s poetry — given brilliant expression by director Simon McBurney, who imbues every blighted element of the drama with a flicker of humour.

Mark Rylance brings mercurial fury and a haunted bittersweetness to the role of Hamm. Seated throughout, he nonetheless gives a performance of kinetic intensity. His modulations are adroit, though occasionally a bit immodestly telegraphed. One moment he resembles a dyspeptic club bore, the next a forsaken manchild; he is a king, a seer and a Christ figure, but also a hysteric and a stingy little bully. Simon McBurney’s stiff-legged Clov recalls a primitive wind-up toy, at once downtrodden and energetically resentful, while Miriam Margolyes is a touching Nell.

The design, by Tim Hatley, is a masterpiece of bleakness. Two high windows are eyes letting light into the set’s skull-like chamber; its mean mouth is a swing door brilliantly contrived to squeak in two different ways.

Yet even as Beckett reduces the world to a dungeon where mankind totters towards its end, he seems to intimate that art is the richest verification of our being imaginatively alive.

Beckett described Endgame as “rather difficult and elliptical”. He wasn’t joking. Some, inevitably, will complain that next to nothing happens, or that it’s
too desolate.

Nevertheless, it is not easy to imagine a much better production of the play than this one.

Henry Hitching - Evening Standard

A bleak world that ought to depress but is a pure delight Endgame is the masterpiece that sorts out the men from the boys when it comes to admirers of the bleak dramatic world of Samuel Beckett.

Waiting for Godot, as the recent West End revival starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart proved, may depict two men stranded in a hostile Godless universe, but at least they have the consolation of companionship and a determination to keep on keeping on. Krapp’s Last Tape may present us with a dying man whose hopes have turned to ashes but it is also illuminated by a beautiful memory of love. And in Happy Days, Winnie somehow keeps smiling even when buried up to her neck.

In Endgame (1957), however, Beckett mercilessly excludes every possibility of the positive. The world outside is described as a zero, and while Beckett was doubtless considering the possibility of nuclear annihilation, his evocation of an arid planet now also reminds us of the possibility of a world laid waste by global warming. Inside the grim penumbral room where the play takes place, cruelty prevails.

The monstrous Hamm, blind, unable to walk, and slumped in a wing chair on wheels, mercilessly bullies the slave, Clov, who may also be his son. Meanwhile, Hamm’s old mother and father are kept in dustbins and fed dog biscuits. Both die in the course of the play. When a flea is discovered in Clov’s crotch it’s a matter for grave concern for it might eventually mutate into a human and perpetuate the misery of life on earth.

The effect ought to be terminally depressing, but somehow one emerges from Simon McBurney’s superb production feeling strangely braced, even cleansed. This is partly because we know that except in our darkest moments, most of our lives aren’t quite as terrible as those Beckett depicts. But it is also because of the clarity, courage, spare beauty and pitch black comedy of the writing in Endgame. Even in this vision of hell, Beckett makes us laugh, and gasp at his sheer courage in making art out of terminal despair.

I haven’t seen a better production of the play than this. Fresh from his triumph in Jerusalem, Mark Rylance has mutated from a wild rural hero into a bitter, emaciated sadist, who loves the sound of his own cruel voice but who somehow also makes us laugh at his extravagant actor-laddy diction and feel sorry for his distress.

McBurney combines the cowed with the comically laconic as Clov, alternately raging at and cowering from his master, while scuttling up and down tepladders with legs that seem to have lost the ability to bend at the knee. And Miriam Margolyes and Tom Hickey, clinging to the rims of their dustbins like chimps clutching the bars of their cage at the zoo, bring warmth and memories of marital happiness to the stage, as well as a grim reminder of the senility that awaits us.

That such a dark, unsparing play can leave its audience feeling so richly rewarded is one of the mysteries of great art.

Charles Spencer - THe Daily Telegraph
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COMPLICITE - Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer Present

Endgame synopsis

2009-11-25T15:25:00.003Z

Endgame is Samuel Beckett’s second published play. The plot is continuous, unbroken by separate scenes or acts. Roger Blin first produced this play in France at the Royal Court, in 1957, and later Blin and Georges Devine produced it again in an English production. Both were badly received by almost all London critics. Only after the now famous Paris production of 1964, starring Patrick Magee and Jack Macgowran in the roles of Hamm and Clov, was Endgame recognized as a masterpiece.

As the play opens, Hamm is dying in a world that seems to be coming to an end. Hamm takes satisfaction in knowing that all of existence may fade to nothing. Hamm is confined to a chair, and throughout the play he discards, reluctantly, the continuing prospects of life: food; painkillers; his servant Clov, on whom he is totally dependent; the pole that enables him to move his wheelchair; and holding the dog, on which he lavishes his affection.

Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, having lost their legs many years ago in a bicycle accident, live in ashbins from which they occasionally emerge only to be cursed by their son. His mother dies and Hamm, knowing that Clov is leaving him, prepares for his last battle, first to outlive his father and then to face inevitable death without the help of the few objects that have given him comfort in his final days. Hamm soliloquizes in terms of the last moves in chess, a king evading checkmate as long as possible with stern asides on religion, ‘‘Get out of here and love one another! Lick your neighbor as yourself!’’ He echoes Pozzo’s gravedigger aphorism in Waiting for Godot when he says, ‘‘The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.’’ Clov prepares to leave, hating Hamm for past wrongs, yet now without pity for Hamm.

More about Beckett

2009-11-23T09:53:00.001Z

interview with Alan Rickman about Samuel Beckett

2009-11-23T09:51:00.000Z

extract from endgame by Samuel beckett

2009-11-23T09:47:00.001Z

year 13 inspiration for devised piece Krapp's last tape by Samuel beckett

2009-11-23T09:41:00.002Z

Look at the movements and the moments of silence and the humour mixed with the sadness of his isolation

1600s linked research

2009-11-20T10:42:00.001Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MhZsGvk7GE

Christopher marlowe links for year 13 research

2009-11-20T10:28:00.002Z

http://www.marlowe-society.org/

http://www2.prestel.co.uk/rey/index.htm

http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/marlowebio.htm

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=christopher+Marlowe&hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&hs=eb6&sa=G&tbs=tl:1&tbo=u&ei=LXAGS_DiLsj44AbFrqXTCw&oi=timeline_result&ct=title&resnum=22&ved=0CEwQ5wIwFQ

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/doctorfaustus/

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=3123

Faustus Christmas holiday work

2009-11-20T10:22:00.002Z

Faustus Christmas work

Social/Cultural/Historical

1 Find out about Christopher Marlowe, His life, his other plays

2 Find out about life in the 1600s politics etc

3 What were their views on religion/Education/ morals in the 1600s

Visual/Design elements

· Find out about staging of plays in the 1600’s- original staging. How did it affect design elements? Lighting/set/costume/ Acting Techniques.

Language

· Comparisons with Shakespeare/ any similarities?

Form and Structure

· Write out the plot in 10 sections

· Characters: Who are the main characters? Do a character biography for each and what are their super objectives for the play?

Vision

What is your overall vision for your production of Faustus?

Think of time set in, original or modern?

Context: making relevant to a modern audience.

Staging: Where will your play be staged what kind of theatre space?

How will this effect communication with the audience?

Overall message.

Endgame theatre visit for year 12 and 13 Theatre studies on 26th November 2009

2009-11-02T10:19:00.003Z

Complicite presents:

Endgame

by Samuel Beckett

Directed by Simon McBurney, who also plays Clov, Endgame features Olivier and Tony Award-winning actor Mark Rylance as Hamm, Miriam Margolyes as Nell and Tom Hickey as Nagg.

Endgame will play until 5 December at the Duchess Theatre Catherine Street, London WC2B 5LA

"Simon McBurney...is the greatest theatre-maker of his generation; Mark Rylance is the greatest actor...Now they are together on stage at last."
The Independent

Directed by Simon McBurney
Design - Tim Hatley
Lighting - Paul Anderson
Sound - Gareth Fry
Costume - Christina Cunningham
Co-produced by Complicite, Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer

Year 13 5 different parts of ourselves stimulus for Character work

2009-10-22T11:01:00.002Z

Five parts of us:

1 What image we try to present to others
2 What we think of ourselves, privately
3 What we don't know about ourselves
4 What others think of us?
5 What are our dreams?

SWED Year 13 first draft deadline Monday 2nd Nov

2009-10-20T12:15:00.001Z

SWED notes tips

Supporting Written evidence

How is the initial material being researched and developed at significant stages during the process of creating drama?

You need to analyse how you have used your stimulus. (The Freud article) and the message of the piece. “Why is the fear of isolation so powerful in man?”

How have you used it in the piece, give examples from one scene and the whole vision of the piece and how it has affected your plot and structure of the play.

Then discuss your research into Jung and Michael Wesch and Mad V and how that has developed the structure and choices of the piece. Give examples from scenes and how you have developed the ideas.

Discuss practitioners e.g. Artaud and how you are using his techniques to develop the piece. Again give examples and analyse.

How effectively are you personally exploring and developing your roles?

You need to analyse your character development using practitioners, eg Stanislavski or Brecht or through ritual and Grotowski e.g. Arbitrary cycle.
Give examples from the scenes and analyse how they are developing through your rehearsal process.

How did you and your group explore the possibilities of form, structure and performance style?

Discuss and analyse using specific examples from scenes, workshops done with me and then how you utilised them in your scenes. Give detailed analysis don’t just describe scenes or techniques and make sure you use quotes from practitioners to back up your examples. This really refers to use of space, communication with the audience and design and visuals as well as practitioners.

How did the work of established and recognised theatre practitioners, and /or the work of live theatre, influence the way in which your devised response developed?

Analyse Shunt’s money and how that influenced your ideas on use of space and form and style and communication to audience and your response to the message. Then analyse how you have developed the work using Artaud and Grotowski and Brecht. Give detailed examples from scenes and relate them to the play and practitioners, using quotes to back up your points.

How Successfully did the final performance communicate your aims and intentions for the piece to your audience?

Give specific detailed examples of scenes and show what your intentions and aims were for the scenes and overall vision and then analyse how well they were communicated and why. Give quotes from audience responses and analyse to back up your points.

How effectively did the social, cultural, historical/ political context of the piece communicate to your audience?

Give detailed analysis of what your intended aims were in relation to cultural etc context and then give specific examples of how that was realised in performance.

2009-10-20T11:57:00.001Z

The experimental performance collective Shunt aren’t short of a bob or two. Having started life just over 10 years ago, holed up in some dingy railway arches in Bethnal Green, their relocation to a vast labyrinth of vaults beneath London Bridge station in 2004 coincided with support from various funding bodies. Next year, Arts Council England will be stumping up a handsome £150,000 to keep them in business.

I’m not pointing this out in order to demand they account for every penny - though some may emerge so baffled and bemused from their latest show, Money, a radical response to Zola’s 1890 novel L’Argent, that they rail against the idea of their receiving a single sou in subsidy. However there’s such a huge gulf between the resources lavished on the technical aspects of this production and the detail invested in the text you’re forced to think about the cost of it all. And that, oddly enough, intentionally or otherwise, takes you to the heart of Zola’s work, which was inspired by the notorious collapse - in 1882 - of the Union Generale. By leaving you feeling awed by its big-bucks spectacle and short-changed by its hard-to-follow script, the piece makes you consider the nature of scams.

Without wishing to give too much away, half-way down Bermondsey Street, round the corner from their London Bridge vaults, Shunt have set up a second home in an old tobacco warehouse once owned by Fidel Castro. Inside stands a towering metallic edifice, wreathed with stairways and steaming piping. Absurdly guarded by modern riot-police clutching colourful helium-balloons, so that it resembles an outlandish fun-fair attraction, it fills the air with much ominous grinding, clanking and rumbling.

Summoned inside this three-storey ‘abandoned relic of Victorian technology’ - and instantly bamboozled by an infernal round of pitch-darkness and deafening noise, you’re introduced to a handful of locations that combine 19th-century and modern ambiences. Figures prowl above and below you, glimpsed through ingenious sections of transparent flooring, engendering a vague mood of suspense and debauched excitement.

In a plush ante-chamber you watch comically incompetent beret-wearing guards handle a bearded entrepreneur who is seeking to win the backing of an inscrutable Jewish banker in order to get impossibly rich quick. In a champagne-bar upstairs, you’re invited to hurl plastic lotto-style baubles about the place, while eavesdropping on mysterious conversations taking place in a parlour and sauna below.

What does it all mean? Even Zola would have been stumped. There’s so much cryptic nonsensicality coursing through this 90-minute affair that it’s probably best to relax and let it wash over you. That way you can emerge none the wiser yet curiously refreshed.

Stimulus for devised piece year 13

2009-10-20T08:14:00.003Z

Does this make us an internet community and have a stronger voice as an individual or are we still isolated?

Stanislavski Exploration Notes Ist Draft Deadline 3rd November 2009

2009-10-16T08:40:00.001Z

Evaluation Notes tips

The social, cultural, historical and political context

· Write about Norway at the time of Ibsen

· Women’s place in society

· Laws relating to fraud

· Social rules of society at that time

· Clothing / housing/ life of the middle classes

Language

· Give examples of the use of language in the play which helps the reader :

Understand the style of the play eg: Naturalism

Explores the class of the character

Reveals information about the characters personality and or relationship with other characters

Non Verbal Communication

· This should look at the use of subtext in the writing and give examples of that

· Also explore the super objectives of the characters and their units and objectives in the scene that you worked on for your presentation

Vocal Awareness

Explore your response to playing middle class women and how approached the language in terms of clarity / vocal expression and centreing of the voice. Use practical workshop and performance and rehearsals for scene

Characterisation

Write and analyse character choices you made using the Stanislavski techniques and how you developed your character for the scene give examples and quotes from the text and Stanislavski to back up your points.

Include:

Given circumstances

Character biographies

Magic If

Truth and belief

Character five step

Units and objectives

Emotion memory/imaging

Adaption/ communion

The visual, aural and spatial elements of production

Write and analyse all features which make it a naturalistic play and how they add to the themes and message of the play

Set

Costumes

Lighting

Props

Type of staging

Relationship with audience

The response to a practitioner

Explore the difference between Realism and Naturalism and what makes the Dolls house a naturalistic play.

Give examples from your rehearsals and performance on how you worked using the Stanislavski techniques and how it enabled you to create a believable 3 dimensional character and evaluate your understanding of the practitioner and what you learnt about him.

Interpretation

Explore and evaluate the choices you made about the scene and how you chose to show the characters and themes and message of the play through the scene you worked on

Give examples from your rehearsals and performance and analyse all aspects in detail.

*This all should be written in the first person and should be a personal exploration of the work that you have done and evaluation of the play and practitioner you have worked on.

EX Student working with Oily carte Theatre Company

2009-10-13T10:20:00.002Z

http://www.oilycart.org.uk/complex_disabilities/current/

Take a look at their hydrotheraphy play designed for children on the Autistic spectrum

stimulus for devised piece year 13 Michael Wesch Anthropology

2009-10-12T11:06:00.000Z

Drama and theatre studies course power point

2009-10-12T11:01:00.000Z

Drama and Theatre Studies specification

View more presentations from kingalfredmedia.

More Artaud theatre of cruelty footage

2009-09-22T14:44:00.001Z

Analyse what you think is effective or not

year 13 devised piece rehearsal schedule

2009-09-22T14:36:00.003Z

Rehearsal for Year 13 devised play

Week 2: 14th -18th September
Brainstorming and establishing extra rehearsals
Character /location/themes
Basic plot.
message

Week 3: 21st Sept-25th

Character development
Work on scenes
Carry on research for stimuli
Utilise practitioners work.
Development of ideas

Week 4: 28th September
Basic plot and scenes
Start on supporting written evidence questions
1st 4 questions especially.

Week 5: 5th Oct-9th
Rehearsals and workshops towards performance

Week 6:12th Oct- 16th
Production meeting
Play should be ready to show as a limp through by end of the week

Week 7: 19th Oct-23rd

Work on difficult scenes and work on who will get costume/set/music/lights etc.

Supporting written drafts given in and handed back before half term.
Week 8: half term

Week 9: 2nd nov-6th nov
Run throughs

Week 10: 9th- 10th Nov
Run throughs

Week 11 16-18th Nov

Dress rehearsal : 17th

5pm
Perf: 18th 5pm to parents/staff/friends

Supporting written evidence completed for 1st day of new term January 2010.

year 12 Theatre studies

2009-09-22T08:30:00.003Z

Welcome back year 12
HENRIK IBSEN (1828-1906)

This article was originally published in A Short History of the Drama. Martha Fletcher Bellinger. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1927. pp. 317-22.

IN the entire history of literature, there are few figures like Ibsen. Practically his whole life and energies were devoted to the theater; and his offerings, medicinal and bitter, have changed the history of the stage. The story of his life -- his birth March 20, 1828, in the little Norwegian village of Skien, the change in family circumstances from prosperity to poverty when the boy was eight years old, his studious and non-athletic boyhood, his apprenticeship to an apothecary in Grimstad, and his early attempts at dramatic composition -- all these items are well known. His spare hours were spent in preparation for entrance to Christiania University, where, at about the age of twenty, he formed a friendship with Björnson. About 1851 the violinist Ole Bull gave Ibsen the position of "theater poet" at the newly built National Theater in Bergen -- a post which he held for six years. In 1857 he became director of the Norwegian Theater in Christiania; and in 1862, with Love's Comedy, became known in his own country as a playwright of promise. Seven years later, discouraged with the reception given to his work and out of sympathy with the social and intellectual ideals of his country, he left Norway, not to return for a period of nearly thirty years. He established himself first at Rome, later in Munich. Late in life he returned to Christiania, where he died May 23, 1906.

IBSEN'S PLAYS

The productive life of Ibsen is conveniently divided into three periods: the first ending in 1877 with the successful appearance of The Pillars of Society; the second covering the years in which he wrote most of the dramas of protest against social conditions, such as Ghosts; and the third marked by the symbolic plays, The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken. The first of the prose plays, Love's Comedy (1862) made an impression in Norway, and drew the eyes of thoughtful people to the new dramatist, though its satirical, mocking tone brought upon its author the charge of being a cynic and an athiest. The three historical plays, or dramatic poems, Brand, Emperor and Galilean, and Peer Gynt, written between 1866 and 1873, form a monumental epic. These compositions cannot be considered wholly or primarily for the stage; they are the poetic record of a long intellectual and spiritual struggle. In Brand there is the picture of the man who has not found the means of adjustment between the mechanical routine of daily living and the deeper claims of the soul; in Emperor and Galilean is a portrayal of the noblest type of pagan philosophy and manhood, illustrated in the Emperor Julian, set off against the ideals of the Jewish Christ; and in Peer Gynt is a picture of the war within the soul of a man in whom are no roots of loyalty, faith, or steadfastness.

When The Young Men's League was produced, the occasion, like the first appearance of Hernani, became locally historic. The play deals with political theories, ideas of liberty and social justice; and in its presentation likenesses to living people were discovered, and fierce resentments were aroused. The tumult of hissing and applauding during the performance was so great that the authorities interfered. The Pillars of Society, Ibsen's fifteenth play, was the first to have a hearing throughout Europe. It was written in Munich, where it was performed in the summer of 1877. In the autumn it was enacted in all the theaters of Scandinavia, whence within a few months it spread over the continent, appearing in London before the end of the year. The late James Huneker, one of the most acute critics of the Norwegian seer, said: "The Northern Aristophanes, who never smiles as he lays on the lash, exposes in The Pillars of Society a varied row of white sepulchres. . . . There is no mercy in Ibsen, and his breast has never harbored the milk of human kindness. This remote, objective art does not throw out tentacles of sympathy. It is too disdainful to make the slightest concession, hence the difficulty in convincing an audience that the poet is genuinely humain."

The Pillars of Society proved, once and for all, Ibsen's emancipation, first, from the thrall of romanticism, which he had pushed aside as of no more worth than a toy; and, secondly, from the domination of French technique, which he had mastered and surpassed. In the plays of the second period there are evident Ibsen's most mature gifts as a craftsman as well as that peculiar philosophy which made him the Jeremiah of the modern social world. In An Enemy of the People the struggle is between hypocrisy and greed on one side, and the ideal of personal honor on the other; in Ghosts there is an exposition of a fate-tragedy darker and more searching even than in Oedipus; and in each of the social dramas there is exposed, as under the pitiless lens of the microscope, some moral cancer. Ibsen forced his characters to scrutinize their past, the conditions of the society to which they belonged, and the methods by which they had gained their own petty ambitions, in order that they might pronounce judgment upon themselves. The action is still for the most part concerned with men's deeds and outward lives, in connection with society and the world; and his themes have largely to do with the moral and ethical relations of man with man.

In the third period the arena of conflict has changed to the realm of the spirit; and the action illustrates some effort at self-realization, self-conquest, or self-annihilation. The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken must explain themselves, if they are to be explained at all; for they are meaningless if they do not light, in the mind of the reader or spectator, a spark of some clairvoyant insight with which they were written. In them are characters which, like certain living men and women, challenge and mystify even their closest friends and admirers. Throughout all the plays there are symbols -- the wild duck, the mill race, the tower, or the open sea -- which are but the external tokens of something less familiar and more important; and the dialogue often has a secondary meaning, not with the witty double entendre of the French school, but with suggestions of a world in which the spirit, ill at ease in material surroundings, will find its home.

It is significant that Ibsen should arrive, by his own route, at the very principles adopted by Sophocles and commended by Aristotle -- namely, the unities of time, place and action, with only the culminating events of the tragedy placed before the spectator. After the first period he wrote in prose, abolishing all such ancient and serviceable contrivances as servants discussing their masters' affairs, comic relief, asides and soliloquies. The characters in his later dramas are few, and there are no "veils of poetic imagery."

IBSEN'S MORAL IDEALS

The principles of Ibsen's teaching, his moral ethic, was that honesty in facing facts is the first requisite of a decent life. Human nature has dark recesses which must be explored and illuminated; life has pitfalls which must be recognized to be avoided; and society has humbugs, hypocrisies, and obscure diseases which must be revealed before they can be cured. To recognize these facts is not pessimism; it is the moral obligation laid upon intelligent people. To face the problems thus exposed, however, requires courage, honesty, and faith in the ultimate worth of the human soul. Man must be educated until he is not only intelligent enough, but courageous enough to work out his salvation through patient endurance and nobler ideals. Democracy, as a cure-all, is just as much a failure as any other form of government; since the majority in politics, society, or religion is always torpid and content with easy measures. It is the intelligent and morally heroic minority which has always led, and always will lead, the human family on its upward march. Nevertheless, we alone can help ourselves; no help can come from without. Furthermore -- and this is a vital point in understanding Ibsen -- experience and life are a happiness in themselves, not merely a means to happiness; and in the end good must prevail. Such are some of the ideas that can be distilled from the substance of Ibsen's plays.

On the plane of practical methods Ibsen preached the emancipation of the individual, especially of woman. He laid great stress upon the principle of heredity. He made many studies of disordered minds, and analyzed relentlessly the common relationships -- sister and brother, husband and wife, father and son. There is much in these relationships, he seems to say, that is based on sentimentalism, on a desire to dominate, on hypocrisy and lies. He pictured the unscrupulous financier, the artist who gives up love for the fancied demands of his art, the unmarried woman who has been the drudge and the unthanked burden-bearer -- all with a cool detachment which cloaks, but does not conceal, the passionate moralist.

From the seventh decade of the last century to his last play in 1899, the storm of criticism, resentment, and denunciation scarcely ceased. On the other hand, the prophet and artist which were united in Ibsen's nature found many champions and friends. In Germany he was hailed as the leader of the new era; in England his champion, William Archer, fought many a battle for him; but in the end no one could escape his example. Young playwrights learned from him, reformers adopted his ideas, and moralists quoted from him as from a sacred book. His plays scorched, but they fascinated the rising generation, and they stuck to the boards. Psychologists discovered a depth of meaning and of human understanding in his delineation of character. He did not found a school, for every school became his debtor. He did not have followers, for every succeeding playwright was forced in a measure to learn from him.

HENRIK IBSEN RESOURCES

* Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) - A biography of the Norwegian dramatist, plus links to purchase all of his works currently in print.
* Henrik Ibsen: Monologues - An index of monologues by the Norwegian dramatist.
* Henrik Ibsen: Poems - An index of poems by the Norwegian dramatist.
* Henrik Ibsen Quotes - A collection of quotes from the plays and other writings of the Norwegian dramatist.
* Henrik Ibsen Quotes - More quotations from his most famous plays.
* Brand - An analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* A Doll's House - A synopsis and analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* A Doll's House - An analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* An Enemy of the People - A synopsis and analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* Ghosts - A synopsis and analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* Hedda Gabler - An analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* The Lady from the Sea - An analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* The Master Builder - An analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* Peanuts and the Ibsen Drama - A first-hand account of a performance of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler by Mrs. Fiske.
* Peer Gynt - An analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* The Pillars of Society - A synopsis and analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* The Pretenders - An analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* Rosmersholm - An analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* The Social Significance of Henrik Ibsen - An essay by Emma Goldman on the Social significance of Ibsen's dramas.
* The Task of the Poet - Full text of a speech given by Ibsen to a group of Norwegian Students on September 10, 1874.
* When We Dead Awaken - An analysis of Ibsen's last drama.
* The Wild Duck - An analysis of the play by Ibsen.
* Purchase Plays by Henrik Ibsen
* Search eBay for Henrik Ibsen items

can't pay won't pay production photos

2009-05-11T11:09:00.008Z

Joyce Henderson working on Can't Pay won't pay with year 12 AS students

2009-03-18T16:06:00.007Z

Joyce used a mixture of Le Coq exercises and Commedia Del Arte to explore the concept of energy and taking the characters choices to the extreme. Joyce will be doing another workshop with the year 12 next week as part of a new college bursary given each year to KAS for work shops with professionals to help develop students performance skills.

Master class Jon Ronson

2009-02-12T10:17:00.002Z

Yesterday the year 12 and 13 media students and year 12 theatre studies students met Jon Ronson the writer and Journalist (see interview below). It was fascinating to see how productions are developed and the process of optioning a book to be made into a film. We also discussed the ethics of journalism ie. what is printed from interviews especially if the writer thinks the interviewee has made a mistake in expressing that view. Should he go ahead and print. It provoked a healthy debate. His stories were highly entertaining and thought provoking and the students found the whole experience exciting and fascinating. A big thanks to Jon Ronson for giving his time.

Jon Ronson master class

2009-02-10T13:45:00.003Z

About Jon Ronson
AN INTERVIEW WITH JON RONSON FROM THE WEBSITE 'THE WOLFMAN KNEW MY FATHER'

As a youth growing up in Cardiff, culturally what were your interests?

Jon Ronson: Chapter Arts Center. I remember seeing a double bill of Woody Allen's Zelig and Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy at Chapter. I remember that better than pretty much anything that actually happened to me. Yes, the things I remember most clearly from my childhood are things I watched and listened to rather than things I experienced. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Spillers Records, where I first heard Captain Beefheart. Listening to Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones at Bill Davies' house in Roath Park during the Cardiff High School lunch-breaks. Reading Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse 5. Sirens of Titan was heartbreaking to me, especially the plight of the jellyfish type animals that lived in the caves beneath Mercury. Seeing The Specials at Sophia Gardens before it fell down in the snow.
I used to go to the Sherman Theatre too. In fact when I was sixteen I somehow landed a part in Death of a Salesman at The Sherman. I played Henry, the next-door neighbour's son. The only line I remember is, "What happened in Boston, Willy?" I don't remember what happened in Boston, but I think it had something to do with shoes.
Other than that, I just hung around amusement arcades (on Caroline Street and Queen Street) with a boy called Dick Johns. I was a hoodie, although I had no hood. Dick and I were obsessed with David Bowie. We used to walk down Cyncoed Road singing Five Years and Rock & Roll Suicide. Non Sadler (who died when she was about 22) introduced me to Lou Reed's Transformer, also on Cyncoed Road. Dick and I and Bethan Morgan used to go busking. I learnt how to play the keyboards.

Did they force you to play rugby in school?

Jon Ronson: Oh God, yes. I was a prop. There was frost on the ground. Prop. Frost.
As I answer these questions I am feeling waves of melancholic nostalgia, which I think is a sign of getting old.

How on earth did you end up in the Frank Sidebottom band?

Jon Ronson: Well, when I left Cardiff I went to study journalism at the Polytechnic of Central London. When I was 20 I became the the entertainments manager for the Student's Union, and somehow I became friendly - over the phone - with Frank Sidebottom's manager, Mike Doherty. One day Mike phoned me up in a panic and said, "We're playing a gig in London tonight and Mark Radcliffe (who was the keyboard player at the time) has had to drop out. Do you know any keyboard players?"
I said, "I can play the keyboards."
He said, "Well, you're in!"
I said, "I don't know any of the songs."
He said, "Can you play C, F and G?"
I said, "Yes."
He said, "Well, you're in!"
So I turned up at the Cricketer's in The Oval, and I told Frank Sidebottom that I was slightly worried because I didn't know any of the songs. Frank said, "Do you know C,F and G?"
I said, "Yes."
Frank said, "Well, you'll be okay then."
They put me behind the speaker-stack and turned my keyboard right down, and when Frank introduced the band at the end, nobody cheered me because nobody knew I was there.
Anyway, for some reason they asked me to continue with the band, and I did, for about three years. In fact I dropped out of college to move to Manchester and become a member of the Frank Sidebottom Oh Blimey! Big Band. Life on the road was a more glamorous prospect than journalism studies. We supported Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers at the Town and Country Club. It is not easy to describe Frank Sidebottom to readers who are not familiar with his oeuvre. Could you provide a picture?

Chris Evans was our driver, briefly. We used to drive around in a transit van. One time we were playing in London and we pulled up on Edgware Road and the driver - I can't remember if it was Chris Evans - wound down the window and said, "Excuse, mate?"
"Yeah?" said a passer-by.
"Is this London?" said the driver.
"Yeah," said the passer-by.
"Well, where do you want this wood?" said the driver.
My favourite Sidebottom story was when he supported Gary Glitter at some Student Freshers' Ball. Gary Glitter's people were really rude. "You haven't got a dressing room. You can't drink any of our beer. You aren't allowed to use our lights. Whatever happens don't go anywhere near the hydraulic floor."
And so, as soon as Frank went on stage, he jumped onto the hydraulic floor and started singing: "Come On! Come On! Do you want to be in my gang...?" And the floor rose, setting off various fireworks and smoke bombs, and floated out towards the audience. After the show, Frank jumped off stage and ran down the corridor, chased by Gary Glitter's bouncers. Frank took off his head and costume - he had his own clothes underneath - just as the bouncers caught up.
"Did you see Frank Sidebottom?" they asked him.
"He went that way," said Frank.

How much of a grounding for your later books and documentaries was your Time Out column? (I seem to recall lots of new age madness and eccentric behaviour in those pieces).

Jon Ronson: There was indeed much madness in those columns, but I wouldn't say that they had any relation to the later books. When I was a Time Out columnist I was only 23 or 24, and really I hadn't found my voice. I was just copying Victor Lewis-Smith and PJ O'Rourke. I only really worked out how to write when I wrote Them: Adventures with Extremists.
I got the column, by the way, because when I was in Frank's band I started presenting a late night radio show on KFM in Stockport. I co-presented with Craig Cash, who went on to create and act in Early Doors and The Royle Family. Those were happy times. But then we got sacked, and there was a 'Reinstate Craig Cash and Jon Ronson' campaign in the Manchester media. This somehow got the attention of Time Out in London, and they offered me a column. I never got reinstated though.
Craig Cash still calls me from time to time. When The Royle Family was nominated for a BAFTA, Craig left a message on my answer-phone: "Ronno! It's Craig. Am I going to see you at the BAFTAs tonight? Oh no I'm not, am I, because you haven't been nominated again. Poor old Ronno with his face pressed up against the glass."
And when I became a father, Craig left another message on my answer-phone: "Ronno! I've heard you're a father. Congratulations. But you haven't got two BAFTAs on your shelf, have you?"

How did you get your first break in television?

Jon Ronson: It is a strange story. When I was writing my Time Out column, I got a call from my old journalism teacher from the Polytechnic of Central London.
He said, "You should do a TV series. Do you mind if I approach Janet Street Porter?"
I said, "Do you know her?"
He said, "No."
So he wrote to her - I had no idea what he said, I still don't - but the next thing I knew I was in her office at the BBC in White City.
She said, "I think it's a BRILLIANT idea for a series."
I just sat there, because I had no idea what the idea was. I just smiled and nodded.
And the next thing I knew I had been allocated £420,000 to make a six half-hour series for BBC 2.
It was nuts. It is always a mistake to commission a series when one has no idea what the series is.
So I made a series called The Ronson Mission. We basically made it up as we went along. Some of it was terrible. Actually, most of it was terrible. I was just in my mid-20s. I had had no ambition whatsoever to be on TV. It was all quite surreal. There were a few good ideas in there, but I must admit that the Guardian called The Ronson Mission one of the five worst series of Michael Jackson's tenure as controller of BBC2. I didn't enjoy making it, primarily because these were the days before DV cameras, and so there was a huge crew, a van full of us turning up at people's houses trying to replicate reality.
After The Ronson Mission I didn't make any more TV shows for at least three years. I was glad to have it behind me. But then I got a call from one of the series' only fans - a man called Peter Grimsdale who was a commissioning editor at Channel 4. He said he wanted to put me together with a director called Saul Dibb. By now hi-8 cameras had been invented so film-making was much more like writing. the camera was like a notebook. We made a film called New York to California, which was an epic journey from a little village called New York, just outside Norwich, to a caravan site down the road called California. And then we made Tottenham Ayatollah, which was our breakthrough. Tottenham Ayatollah documented our year with Omar Bakri Mohammed, an Islamic militant. That was the beginning of the story that ended with Them.

Which do you prefer - filming or writing?
Jon Ronson: Writing. I am a natural writer, and not a natural director. I have friends - like Adam Curtis, who made The Power of Nightmares, and Saul Dibb, who has gone on to direct Bullet Boy - who are natural directors. They love pictures and sound and pacing. They are aesthetes. I like words.

With regards your presentational style how faux is your naif ? And generally how happy are you with your TV persona?

Jon Ronson: I have only got my TV persona (if it IS a 'persona', that is, I'm not sure that it is a persona) right on a few occasions: Secret Rulers of the World and Tottenham Ayatollah. The rest of the time it hasn't quite worked. Faux Naifery is a delicate art that can get annoying if mishandled. I've been doing a lot of mishandling of late.
I don't know how faux it is. Much of Them is about me trying to track down the Bilderberg Group, who the likes of Omar Bakri and David Icke believe is the shadowy cabal that secretly controls the world.
Now, I could have done a whole lot of research about Bilderberg before I set off to try and track them down. but I didn't want to solve the mystery before I had the adventure, whatever the adventure might be. As it was, I followed them to Portugal with a conspiracy journalist called Big Jim Tucker. I had no idea if Bilderberg existed or if they were just a figment of people's imaginations. There's a passage in Them where we scout around the hotel where this mysterious Bilderberg Group are supposed to be meeting. And afterwards, we start getting followed by men in dark glasses. One of my favourite passages from Them is about this chase. It is the moment when I become the people I'm writing about. Here's the passage:

‘British Embassy.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m a journalist from London. I’m calling you on the road from Sintra to Estoril...’
‘Hold on.’
‘Press office.’
‘I’m a journalist from London,’ I said. ‘I’m calling you on the road from Sintra to Estoril. I’m being tailed, right now, by a dark green Lancia, registration number D4 O28, belonging to the Bilderberg Group.’
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I just heard you take a sharp breath.’
‘Bilderberg?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They watched us scouting around the Caesar Park Hotel and they’ve been following us ever since. We have now been followed for three hours. I wasn’t sure at first, so I stopped my car on the side of a deserted lane and he stopped his car right in front of us. Can you imagine just how chilling that moment was? This is especially disconcerting because I’m from England and I’m not used to being spied on.’
‘Do you have Bilderberg’s permission to be in Portugal?’ she said. ‘Do they know you’re here?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Bilderberg are very secretive,’ she said. ‘They don’t want people looking into their business. What are you doing here?’
‘I am essentially a humorous journalist,’ I explained. ‘I am a humorous journalist out of my depth. Do you think it might help if we tell them that?’
From the corner of my eye, I saw Jim wind down his window. He leant his head out and blew an antagonising lady-like kiss at the Lancia.
‘Hold on a second,’ I said.
‘Jim!’ I said, sternly. ‘Please stop that.’
I lowered my voice.
‘I’m here with an American,’ I said, ‘called Big Jim Tucker. He’s an agent provocateur. That might be the problem. Perhaps you can phone Bilderberg and explain that I may be in the car with Jim Tucker, but I’m not actually with him.’
‘Listen,’ she said, urgently. ‘Bilderberg is much bigger than we are. We’re very small. We’re just a little embassy. Do you understand? They’re way out of our league. All I can say is go back to your hotel and sit tight.’

(And this is what happened when we got back to the hotel).

Sandra from the British Embassy called me on my mobile phone to inform me that she had spoken to the Bilderberg office at the Caesar Park and they said that nobody was following us and how could they call off someone who didn’t exist?
‘He is,’ I said, in a staccato whisper, ‘behind the tree.’
‘The good news,’ said Sandra, ‘is if you know you’re being followed, they’re probably just trying to intimidate you. The dangerous ones would be those you don’t know are following you.’
But this was scant comfort. What if these men were the dangerous ones, and I happened to be naturally good at spotting them? What if I was adept at this?'

None of this would have happened had I done all my research beforehand. I wouldn't have slid into this world of paranoia. Is that faux naive, genuinely naive, or not naive at all?

For Them: Adventures With Extremists you did actually put yourself in some genuinely scary situations - do you regard yourself as a courageous person?

Jon Ronson: Absolutely not. I am not fearless at all. I just felt I had to go where the story took me, and that included being chased by Bilderberg, and infiltrating Bohemian Grove, that strange secret club where the Bushes and the Cheneys go and have their ceremonies. These things were not fun for me at the time, although I'm now glad that I did it.

Why do you think people like David Icke and Ian Paisley allowed you to get reasonably close to them, given that you have a reputation as a journalist who allows his subjects to make themselves look foolish?

Jon Ronson: It isn't always me who makes the initial approaches. Ian Paisley was approached by a Northern Ireland television producer called David Malone, who secured the access before I was brought into it. I did approach David Icke myself. We'd had a bit of a sore past together, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt. Remember that - by and large, I would say - the people in my stories often come out of it very well. David Icke, Alex Jones, Lt Col. Jim Channon and General Stubblebine (from The Men Who Stare At Goats), even Omar Bakri, I would argue, come out of the stories as human beings, with character traits the reader can identify with. Some of the people I write about come out of it extremely well: The Weaver family, for instance, from Ruby Ridge. They have been demonized for years by the media. Them was really the first time that their story was told.

How did you first learn about the new age influence on the American military that eventually produced The Men Who Stare at Goats?

Jon Ronson: In 1995 the CIA declassified the fact that the Army had a team of psychic spies, and they'd been trying to be psychic for 23 years. They'd been based in a condemned clapboard building down a wooded track in Fort Meade, Maryland. They were Black-Op, nobody knew they existed. Anyway, when the CIA declassified them and closed them down it was such a colourful story nobody wondered whether it was the tip of an even weirder iceberg. In 2001 I met a psychologist called Ray Hyman. Ray had been employed by the CIA to evaluate the psychic program. They knew Ray was a sceptic and would say the program was nonsense. They wanted this conclusion so they could close the unit down. Ray indeed concluded it was nonsense. When I met Ray (in Las Vegas), I asked him if he'd heard of anything else going on, and he said he had some vague notion - he'd heard some rumours that they were trying to teach soldiers how to be invisible and walk through walls. He gave me a few half-remembered names: Channon. Stubblebine. So I clung onto that scant information and followed it, to Channon and Stubblebine, and then onto the War on Terror, where these ideas live on in mutated form.

How has The Men Who Stare at Goats been received outside of Britain, particularly in the States?

Jon Ronson: It has been received very well indeed in the States. Rave reviews in all the major papers.

You've used your family a lot as raw material for your Guardian column. Do they find it disconcerting that casual remarks might end up as part of a humorous anecdote in a national newspaper?

Jon Ronson: No. My wife feels the same way I do about the column - if it works, if it is funny, it is fine. If it isn't funny, it isn't fine. I wrote a short memoir called A Fantastic Life, about taking my son to Lapland to meet Santa, which I think is the best bit of writing I've ever done. It is not exploitative of my son. He is the straight-man in it. I am the idiot. I see the columns as additions to that story. One day they will all come together to form something else. Maybe a film script? Maybe a book?

Have any particular writers or humorists influenced your prose style or approach to writing in general?

Jon Ronson: Oh yes. Kurt Vonnegut. Raymond Carver. I learnt short sentences from them. And nowadays, Jonathan Coe's What A Carve Up! This influenced the kinds of subject matter I write about. I love Lynn Barber's journalism. And I am a great fan of an American radio show called This American Life. I contribute to it sometimes. It is full of people who do the kind of things I do - Sarah Vowell, David Sedaris, Ira Glass. William Leith has a brilliant new book coming out called The Hungry Years - a memoir of a compulsive eater.

Finally Jon, you have an excellent website www.jonronson.com with a lively forum but let's be honest, it's like having your own cult. Is there a danger that you might turn into a crazed egomaniac - the kind of person who ends up in one of your own documentaries?

Jon Ronson: Things don't go to people's heads when they get to 37. By the time we get to 37 we are too bowed by the travails of life to become crazed egomaniacs.

Shunkin Review

2009-02-06T15:34:00.002Z

Reviews for “Shunkin” by Complicité at the Barbican

A few years ago, Simon McBurney and his Complicité company, arguably the only experimental British set-up (troupe is the wrong word) with a genuine international profile, co-operated with the Setagaya Public Theatre in Tokyo on a revelatory theatrical animation of the stories of Haruki Murakama, The Elephant Vanishes.
Sushi, sushi, listen who dares: Simon McBurney is saying his prayers. And he's convened the same arrangement to unravel the writing of another popular 20th-century Japanese writer, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965), who in 1933 wrote A Portrait of Shunkin, a sadistic love story concerning a 19th-century merchant's daughter and her older apprentice, and a related essay on Japanese aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows.
The resulting show, lasting two long hours with no interval, while possessing a quiet and stealthy charm, is not all that big a deal. It's not a patch on The Elephant Vanishes, which bristled with vivacity and invention. Shun-kin proceeds at a single slow pace, with a confused perspective of the narrator living in Osaka in the 1930s who is telling the story, and the ageing lover, Sasuke, who survived Shunkin, blind from birth and disfigured in an attack.
Shunkin's talent is as a master of the shamisen, the Japanese three-stringed lute, played in the shadows by a seated musician, while the narrator reads the story by a desk light on the other side of the stage. This narrator is making a translation of "our" theatre experience into another medium, but this layer is never properly explored, except gratuitously at the end in a blazing exit by the protagonists upstage into the "real" world. I kicked myself with annoyance at this cheap trick.
Although continuously humiliated by Shunkin, Sasuke – I can't tell you who plays what or whom because the programme doesn't – refuses to give up on her and blinds himself, piercing his eyes with pins. As Shunkin is already blind, they could have jointly become sarcastically known as "old four eyes," I suppose, but instead he just tends to her every need, wraps her face in bandages, rests his mouth against her cooling feet, only for her to, well, kick him violently in the teeth.
The show is calmly laid out on a collection of dun-coloured mats, and much the most striking element is the representation of young Shunkin as a half life-size doll – the creation, funnily enough, of Blind Summit Theatre – operated and spoken for by two graceful lady attendants. The whole technique is one of illustrating a story rather than inhabiting it and while this might have a certain aesthetic appeal for some, for others (and me) it just seems dull. Even Brecht's theory of alienation didn't mean you didn't get involved; that was all about critical appreciation.
When the doll becomes a pasty-faced woman, sensuously stripped to the waist and bathed by her ladies, you become interested in her potential as a siren or Scheherazade, but she remains a blank, a collection of words summoned by the narrator and fleshed out as an afterthought.
Oh, and when facial violence is administered, guess what? A stream of red ribbons. Not so much cutting edge as rusty razors, methinks. One can only be grateful we didn't have to watch a river crossing and the subsequent billowing of a lot of blue silk.
________________________________________________________________________
The story comes from the popular Japanese writer Jun’chiro Tanizaki who appeals to our modern fetishes of sexuality and the body, the pleasures and perversions of our real and imagined lives, according to the scholar Stephen Dodd. What appeals, obviously, to McBurney, is the chance to place a chillingly observed relationship in a context of modern fascination.
But unlike in his previous collaboration with this company,
, based on the stories of
,
finds McBurney resisting cultural cross-pollination, concentrating instead on the slow, boring purity of a deliberate presentation owing something to both Noh and Kabuki traditions. The framing device is just that, until the very last moments when the stage is transformed in light.
Director Simon McBurney's love affair with Japan produced a terrific show for Complicite in The Elephant Vanishes, a collaboration with Tokyo's Setagaya Public
. Love, however, proves blind in this latest Complicite piece that combines two works by Jun'ichiro¯ Tanizaki: an essay on aesthetics and shadows, and his 1933 story about the sadomasochistic relationship between a blind woman, Shun-kin, and her servant lover, Sasuke. The latter endures intense mental and physical cruelty before mutilating himself for love. There are clearly cultural differences operating here, because what the Japanese admire as devotion and passion, we would probably call domestic violence and send for the social services.
As you would expect from McBurney, there is plenty in this two hours without interval that is meltingly beautiful; its stillness, the way it plays with light and shadow, and, best of all, the work of the acclaimed puppet company Blind Summit, who magically dissolve the barriers between the wooden-jointed and the human so you cannot tell one from the other. The evening is as delicate as one of Shun-kin's own feet.

By Michael Coveney
By Nobuku Tanaka
"I have absolutely no idea beforehand what exactly I am going to do. Everything comes together really at the last minute," says 50-year-old English dramatist Simon McBurney when asked how he's approaching his latest collaboration. Working with Japanese actors, McBurney is producing "Shunkin," a play based on works by Taisho Era novelist Junichiro Tanizaki (1896-1965), for a world premiere on Feb. 21 at Tokyo's Setagaya Public Theatre (SEPT).
The cofounder of the London-based Complicite theater company, McBurney first worked with SEPT in 2003 on "Elephant Vanishes," a work based on stories by the novelist Haruki Murakami. Whereas "Elephant Vanishes" examined the lonely lives of modern urban dwellers, "Shunkin" looks to the past to tell of a mysterious relationship between Shunkin, a blind koto master, and her servant and lover Sasuke.
McBurney has drawn on Tanizaki's 1933 works "Shunkin Sho (A Portrait of Shunkin)," a short novel, and "In'ei Raisan (In Praise of Shadows)," an essay on aesthetics. Fascinated by the works since he first visited Japan, the English director tells The Japan Times what he's learned from them about memory, language and identity.
Why are you so interested in novelist Junichiro Tanizaki's works?
When I first came to Japan in 1995, I did workshops about memory — a topic I was interested in at that time, wondering how it works and about its biochemistry, for example. In 1999, I actually made a play about memory titled "Mnemonic." I started to wonder how different people in different cultures see the past. When I was talking to a friend in Japan about this, he gave me a copy of "In'ei Raisan" by Tanizaki. I discovered it was not just an essay about aesthetics, but also about the ways Japanese writers might meditate on the past.
Meanwhile, I discovered that in our brains, the biochemical reactions involved in memory are exactly the same as those of the imagination. I realized that Tanizaki totally "imagined" the past — he didn't try to say this is how the past was, but he was playing with the idea of the past. This playing with the past is something I am very interested in. In "Shunkin Sho," he pretended he was documenting a real story from the 1850s, and he quoted lines from a bogus book called "Shunkin-den." So, he set up this atmosphere first and then asked himself whether these things really happened or didn't happen — meaning that his novel is Tanizaki's meditation on how he tells a story.
How are you staging "Shunkin"?
For me, it's very important that many young people will come to see this play — not just Tanizaki fans — and that they want to see a new kind of theater. Whatever we do, we and the actors must connect with the people of today. We must not focus on whether the actors' Kansai accents are perfect or not — that would be like English people saying you are not speaking Shakespeare's English quite right. That's not a question for a piece of theater — the question we always ask about a piece of theater is just this: "Is it alive?"
Every day now, I am starting to understand more about the story. It's a very strange process for me as I am trying to understand what's going on in the language (Japanese) as well. Every day we are making discoveries. Then we have to react to what's written and invent something from there.
Why did you choose "Shunkin Sho" from among all of Tanizaki's works?
I often think I shouldn't have, and that I should have chosen something else (laughs). However, sometimes you must set yourself a challenge.
He was creating a new language during a transitional period in history, in the 1930s, when something radical was going on, and I am particularly interested in that period. His usage of multiple writing styles is very modern. He was deliberately meditating on the past, and he's playing with his audiences and shocking them. But also, "Shunkin Sho" is a meditation on the nature of love. Maybe, that's why I chose it.
I quite understand that his writing was a kind of decadent art, or art for art's sake. But he deliberately drew contrasts with the modern world of his time while he meditated on that other world. He also tried to point out the sadism and masochism in the relationship between Shunkin and Sasuke.
There is no cast list yet — have you not decided on the actors?
In the novel, the character of Shunkin is represented in a number of quite complicated and contradictory ways, so she is not presented as being the same here as she is there. She is just not an ideal woman and she is quite unpleasant because she has suffered. Also, descriptions of her come from all sorts of different viewpoints. So it is unlikely that Shunkin will be represented by one actress. Equally, Sasuke must be represented by different-aged actors as the story unfolds. These are among our challenges, and in subsequent stagings of "Shunkin," the approaches may change because theater is a living art.
________________________________________________________________
By Fiona Mountford

Fusing two 1933 works from novelist Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, McBurney and his 10 Japanese performers spirit us far away to the stylised world of shadows that is the 19th century Meiji Era.
There’s ritual elegance, hypnotic wonder and a daunting cultural chasm, as the peculiar story of a sado-masochistic relationship unfolds. Shunkin, blind mistress of stringed instrument the shamisen, takes up with her servant-pupil Sasuke, subjecting him to a life of complicit humiliation and the unlearned in Japanese tradition to no little confusion.
A framing narrative helps us to get more of a handle on the indisputably stylish action, which comes complete with live music and puppetry. A contemporary actor records Tanizaki’s work for radio, and contemplates her own troubled romance in the refracted light from Shunkin/Sasuke. It’s all very intriguing yet ultimately distancing, and the constant focus-pulling battle between the action and the far-away surtitles is no help.

He follows the original in having the tale recounted by a narrator living in Osaka in the 1930s, the real time of the story itself. This woman pores religiously over the text, hunched in a small pool of light, reading the story while the actors mime it in slow motion. For most of the evening of nearly two uninterrupted hours, the blind, sexually sadistic Shunkin is played by a puppet manipulated by two female attendants.
She later emerges, half-naked and alluring, in the shape of an actress whose name I cannot divulge (the programme lists the company without attributing roles), and her puppeteers are still on hand. This transition is one of several beautiful effects; another being the loyal Sasuke’s piercing of his own eyes with pins; another, admittedly hackneyed, the sprouting of red ribbons when Shunkin is facially wounded.
The Elephant VanishesHaruki MurakamaShun-kinShunkin is a master of the shamisen, the Japanese lute-like musical instrument with three strings that is played constantly at the side of the stage while Sasuke graduates from shop boy to lover, apprentice to master himself and keeper of the sacred flame. But an air of suffocating piety hangs over the show, and you long for emotional break-out.
- Michael Coveney

Send for the social services ... Shun-kin. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
But what is missing is the excitement you so often get from a Complicite show, the feeling that you are watching a piece that was made with all synapses firing and blood pumping, something multilayered that makes unexpected connections for both head and heart. This is much more like looking at a strange, beautiful and very expensive object behind glass in a museum. You admire it, but you don't know what it is actually for. Not only does it feel useless, some of the devices utilised - rolling bodies, integration of film and live action, actors playing trees - have been used by McBurney before to better effect. An elusive evening that leaves both director and audience still chasing shadows.
Shun-kin is inspired by two works by one of the most important Japanese writers of the twentieth century, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. Written in 1933 when Japan was opening its arms to Western influence, the short story, A Portrait of Shunkin, is a tale of masochistic longing. In the same year, Tanizaki wrote In Praise of Shadows, his essay on Japanese aesthetics.
Both stories were shaped by Tanizaki’s own fantasies and idealisation of a bygone era. Shun-kin moves between the neon glow of Japan and the vanished world of the Meiji era and uncovers moments of light in a world of darkness.
McBurney and Complicite tell a tale of devotion, passion and power, where beauty is unforgiving and love is blinding. Emerging from traditional Japanese culture this powerful production reveals how close beauty and violence can be. Shun-kin is performed by a Japanese cast in Japanese with English surtitles.
Shun-kin has original music by Hidetaro Honjo, design by Merle Hensel and Rumi Matsui, costume design by Christina Cunningham, lighting by Paul Anderson, sound by Gareth Fry, projection design by Finn Ross for Mesmer and puppetry by Blind Summit Theatre.
Under the artistic direction of McBurney, Complicite is one of the world’s leading theatre companies. Its last show, A Disappearing
Number, was seen at the Barbican during bite07 and subsequently won Olivier and Critics’ Circle Drama Awards for Best New Play, as well as the Evening Standard Award for Best Play. Other recent work includes a world tour of Measure for Measure (co-production with the National Theatre) and a revival of A Minute Too Late (National Theatre).
Actor, writer, director and co-founder of Complicite, McBurney has devised, directed and performed in over 30 productions for the company. His other directing credits include Pet Shop Boys meet Eisenstein (Trafalgar Square), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with Al Pacino (New York) and All My Sons with Katie Holmes, John Lithgow and Diane Wiest (Broadway).
As an actor, he has appeared in numerous films, among them The Duchess, The Golden Compass, The Last King of Scotland, Friends with Money, Bright Young Things, Eisenstein and Onegin.

Year 7 drama Silent Movies

2009-02-06T15:31:00.003Z

YEAR 7 DRAMA LESSONS

This term we have been studying silent movies. We started of by watching some Buster Keaton movies so we got the idea of what we were aiming for. We were given a story line to follow. We rehearsed that for a couple weeks and also were allowed to add a bit of our own comical themes. After a few weeks of rehearsal it was time to write the placards, they are crucial in silent movies to explain what’s going on in the scene as there is no sound. On the last week we performed them to the camera, there was some music in the background to give the movie a bit of atmosphere. It was music you would find in a pub in France as most of the scenes were set at a bar/nightclub. Facial expressions are very important in silent movies because there is no communication, so the spectators need to understand what is going on and how the person feels.

Drama is a great opportunity to express your self and be somebody different. When acting you are not your self, you are only the person who you are acting. Acting is something that only looks good if you are enjoying your self whilst doing it.

There are things I would like to do in drama, I would like to do comedy and also comedy plays from a script, and the last thing is scripts in general.

By Calvin Carrier

Events around the world in 1974 (research for Can't Pay Won't pay

2009-01-26T07:48:00.002Z

1974

JANUARY
January 4 - Citing executive privilege, U.S. President Richard Nixon refuses to surrender 500 tapes and documents which have been subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.
January 4 - Joni Lenz is attacked in her bedroom by serial killer Ted Bundy in Washington.
January 6 - In response to the energy crisis, Daylight Saving Time commences nearly 4 months early in the United States.
January 19 - In college (men's) basketball, Notre Dame defeats UCLA 71-70, ending the Bruins' record 88-game winning streak.
January 27 - Brisbane Qld Australia is flooded.
January 30 - G. Gordon Liddy is found guilty of Watergate charges.
January 30 - In his State of the Union Address, U.S. President Richard Nixon declares, "One year of Watergate is enough."

FEBRUARY
February 1 - Fire breaks out in the Joelman Bank Building in São Paulo, Brazil; 177 die, are 293 are injured, 11 die later of their injuries.
February 1 - Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, was declared as a Federal Territory.
February 3 - In the second Bathurst Gaol riot, prisoners destroy much of the facility with petrol bombs.
February 4 - The Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaps Patricia Hearst, the 19-year-old granddaughter of publisher William Randolph Hearst.
February 8 - After a record 84 days in orbit, the crew of Skylab 4 returns to Earth.
February 12 - U.S. District Court Judge George Boldt rules that Native American tribes in Washington State are entitled to half of the legal salmon and steelhead catches, based on treaties signed by the tribes and the U.S. government.
February 13 - Nobel Prize winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the Soviet Union (he returns May 27, 1994).
February 17 - A soccer stampede occurs in Cairo, killing 49.
February 21 - The long-running comic strip "Sazae-san" ispublished in the Asahi Shimbun for the final time, after 28 years of daily installments.
February 22 - The Second Islamic Summit Conference by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is held in Lahore, Islamic Republic of Pakistan, from 29 Moharram to 1st Safar, 1394 H, (22-24 February, 1974).
February 23 - The Symbionese Liberation Army demands $4 million more to release kidnap victim Patty Hearst.
February 28 - The United Kingdom general election results in an almost dead-heat. Harold Wilson becomes Prime Minister again, despite his Labour Party having received fewer votes than the Conservative Party.
February 28 - Ethiopian prime minister Tsehafi Taezaz Aklilu Habte-Wold, who had held the position since 1961, is dismissed by Emperor Haile Selassie and replaced with Endelkachew Makonnen.

MARCH
March 1 - Watergate scandal: Seven former White House officials are indicted for their role in the Watergate break-in and charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice.
March 1 - Pierre Messmer finishes his first term as Prime Minister of France.
March 3 - A Turkish Airlines DC-10 travelling from Paris to London crashes in a wood near Paris, killing all 346 aboard.
March 8 - Charles de Gaulle Airport opens in Paris, France.
March 10 - A Japanese World War II soldier, Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, surrenders in the Philippines.
March 18 - Ten miners die in a methane gas explosion at Golborne Colliery near Wigan, Lancashire.
March 18 - Oil embargo crisis: Most OPEC nations end a 5-month oil embargo against the United States, Europe and Japan.
March 20 - Ian Ball fails in his attempt to kidnap Her Royal Highness Princess Anne and her husband Captain Mark Phillips in The Mall, outside Buckingham Palace.
March 29 - Mariner 10 approaches Mercury.

APRIL
April 1 - The Local Government Act 1972 comes into effect in England and Wales, creating 6 new metropolitan counties and comprehensively redrawing the administrative map.
April 2 - French President Georges Pompidou dies; Senate President Alain Poher becomes Acting President for the second time.
April 3 - The Super Outbreak, the largest series of tornadoes in history, hits 13 U.S. states and one Canadian province. By the time the last of 149 tornadoes hit early the following morning, 315 die and over 5,000 are injured.
April 6 - ABBA wins the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton, England.
April 8 - Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves breaks Babe Ruth's home run record, by hitting his 715th career home run off Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Al Downing at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.
April 10 - In Israel, Golda Meir resigns as Prime Minister.
April 15 - In San Francisco, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army rob a branch of the Hibernia National Bank, joined by Patricia Hearst, their erstwhile captive.
April 24 - Stephen King publishes his first novel, Carrie, under his own name.
April 25 - Carnation Revolution: A coup in Portugal restores democracy.
April 27 - The Lewis' store in Manchesters Piccadilly Gardens is evacuated after an IRA bomb threat; nobody is hurt.
MAY

May 4 - An all female Japanese team summits Manaslu in Nepal, becoming the first women to climb an 8,000 metre peak.
May 4 - The Expo '74 World's Fair opens in Spokane, Washington.
May 4 - The FA Cup Liverpool beats Newcastle 3-0 to win the FA Cup final at Wembley.
May 7 - West German Chancellor Willy Brandt resigns.
May 9 - The United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee opens formal and public impeachment hearings against President Richard M. Nixon.
May 12 - Fire damages the carousel in Port Dalhousie, Ontario, Canada, injuring 20 animals.
May 15 - West German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel is elected President of Germany for a term beginning July 1.
May 15 – Ma'alot massacre: In an Arab terrorist attack and hostage taking at an Israeli school, a total of 31 people are killed, including 22 schoolchidren.
May 16 - Helmut Schmidt is elected West German Chancellor.
May 17 - Los Angeles, California police raid Symbionese Liberation Army headquarters, killing 6 members, including Camilla Hall.
May 17 - Thirty-three people die and over 300 are wounded in the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings in the Republic of Ireland. Members of the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force are behind the blast, allegedly in collusion with members of the British intelligence service.
May 18 - Nuclear test: Under Project Smiling Buddha, India successfully detonates its first nuclear weapon, becoming the 6th nation to do so.
May 18 - The Warsaw radio mast is completed, the tallest structure ever built (it collapses on August 8, 1991).
May 19 - In the second round of the presidential elections in France, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing wins over François Mitterrand, but by a close margin.
May 19 - The Philadelphia Flyers defeat the Boston Bruins, thereby becoming the first expansion team to win the Stanley Cup.
May 28 - The Italian fascist organization Ordine Nuovo bombs demonstrators in Brescia, killing 6 people.
May 30 - NASA's ATS-6 satellite is launched.
•

JUNE
June 1 - Flixborough disaster: A chemical plant explosion in Flixborough, UK, kills 28 people.
June 4 - The Cleveland Indians stage an ill-advised Ten Cent Beer Night for a game against the Texas Rangers at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Cleveland forfeits after alcohol-fueled mayhem and violence spreads from the stands onto the field.
June 6 - A new Instrument of Government is promulgated, making Sweden a parliamentary monarchy.
June 13 - The 1974 FIFA World Cup begins in West Germany.
June 15 - Red Lion Square disorders: Members of the fascist National Front clash with leftist counter-protesters in London's West End; one student is killed.
June 17 - A bomb explodes at the Houses of Parliament in London, damaging Westminster Hall. The Provisional Irish Republican Army claims responsibility for planting the bomb.
June 26 - The Universal Product Code is scanned for the first time, to sell a package of Wrigley's chewing gum at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
June 29 - Isabel Peron becomes interim president of Argentina, when Juan Peron falls seriously ill.
June 30 - Alberta Williams King, mother of the late Martin Luther King, Jr., is killed during a church service in Atlanta, Georgia

JULY
July 1 - Juan Peron, President of Argentina, dies and is succeeded by his wife, Vice President Isabel Peron (the first female head of state in South America).
July 7 - West Germany beats the Netherlands 2-1 to win the 1974 FIFA World Cup.
July 14 - In Issaquah, Washington, serial killer Ted Bundy abducts Janice Ott and Denise Naslund in broad daylight at Lake Sammamish State Park.
July 15 - Christine Chubbuck, U.S. television presenter for WXLT-TV, draws a revolver and shoots herself in the head during a live broadcast. She dies in a hospital 14 hours later.
July 15 - A military coup overthrows President Makarios in Cyprus.
July 17 - A Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb explodes in the White Tower at the Tower of London, killing 1 person and injuring 41. Another bomb explodes outside a government building in South London.
July 20 - Turkish invasion of Cyprus: Forces from Turkey invade Cyprus after the coup d'etat by EOKA B.
July 22 - Ethiopian Prime Minister Endelkachew Makonnen is replaced with Mikael Imru.
July 23 - The Greek military junta government collapses.
July 24 - Constantine Karamanlis is sworn in as interim Prime Minister of Greece.
July 24 - Watergate scandal - United States v. Nixon: The United States Supreme Court unanimously rules that President Richard Nixon can not withhold subpoenaed White House tapes, and orders him to surrender them to the Watergate special prosecutor.
July 27–30 - Watergate Scandal: The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee adopts 3 articles of impeachment, charging President Richard M. Nixon with obstruction of justice, failure to uphold laws, and refusal to produce material subpoenaed by the committee.
•

AUGUST
August 4 - A bomb explodes in an Italicus Expressen train between Italy and West Germany. Italian neo-fascist terrorists take responsibility.
August 5 - Watergate scandal: The "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972, is revealed, in which U.S. President Richard M. Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman discuss using the Central Intelligence Agency to block a Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into Watergate. Nixon's support in Congress collapses.
August 7 - Three Republican congressional leaders (Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott and John Rhodes) visit President Richard Nixon in the White House. They inform him that he lacks the votes to escape impeachment in the United States House of Representatives and conviction in the Senate.
August 7 - French acrobat Philippe Petit walks across a high wire slung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York.
August 8 - Watergate scandal: U.S. President Richard Nixon announces his resignation (effective August 9).
August 9 - Richard M. Nixon becomes the first President of the United States to resign from office, an action taken to avoid being removed by impeachment in response to his role in the Watergate scandal. Vice President Gerald R. Ford becomes the 38th President, taking the oath of office in the East Room of the White House.
August 14 - Turkey invades for the second time in Cyprus, occupying 37% of the island's territory.
August 15 - Seoul Metropolitan Subway Line 1 is opened.
August 28 - Geir Hallgrímsson becomes Prime Minister of Iceland.
August 30 - An express train bound for Germany from Belgrade derails in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia), killing more than 150 passengers.
August 30 - A powerful bomb explodes at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries headquarters in Marunouchi, Tokyo, Japan; 8 are killed, 378 injured. Eight left-wing activists are arrested May 19, 1975 by Japanese authorities.
•

SEPTEMBER
September 1 - Daredevil Bob Gill fails a world-record attempt to jump Appalachia Lake in West Virginia.
September 8 - Watergate Scandal: U.S. President Gerald Ford pardons former President Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while in office.
September 8 - TWA Flight 841 crashes into the Ionian Sea 18 minutes after take off from Athens, after a bomb explodes in the cargo hold, and kills 88 people.
September 8 - Stuntman Evel Knievel fails in his attempt to rocket across the Snake River Canyon in Idaho.
12 September - Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia is deposed by the Derg. The imperial throne is offered to his son, Crown Prince Asfa Wossen, on the condition that the Crown Prince returns to Ethiopia.
September 13 - Japanese Red Army members seize the French Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands. They secure the release of member Yatuka Fumiya, $300,000 and a flight to Aden.
September 16 - In Newport, Rhode Island, America's Cup defender "Courageous", skippered by Ted Hood, wins over Australian challenger "Southern Cross" .
September 23 - Ceefax (one of the first public service information systems) is started by the BBC.

OCTOBER
October 5 - The Guildford pub bombings at The Horse and Groom and The Seven Stars kill 5 people, and lead to the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of the Guildford Four the next year.
October 8 - Franklin National Bank collapses due to fraud and mismanagement (the largest bank failure at that time in the history of the United States).
October 10 - The second United Kingdom general election of the year results in a narrow victory for Labour, still led by Harold Wilson.
October 15 - U.S. President Gerald Ford signs a federal campaign reform bill, which sets new regulations in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
October 30 - The Rumble in the Jungle takes place in Kinshasa, Zaire, where Muhammad Ali knocks out George Foreman in 8 rounds to regain the Heavyweight title, which had been stripped from him 7 years earlier.

NOVEMBER
November 5 - Democrats make significant gains in the U.S. Congressional midterm elections, as the Grand Old Party suffers significant losses over the Watergate scandal.
November 7 - A Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb explodes at the Kings Arms, Woolwich.
November 8 - Richard Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan disappears in England.
November 8 - In Salt Lake City, Utah, Carol DaRonch narrowly escapes abduction by serial killer Ted Bundy.
November 10 - Movement 2 June members try to kidnap Günter von Drenkmann, the president of West Germany's Superior Court of Justice, at his home, but he is fatally shot during the attempt.
November 13 - Ronald DeFeo, Jr. murders his parents and his 4 siblings in what is later known as "The Amityville Horror House".
November 16 - The Arecibo radio telescope sends an interstellar radio message towards the M13 Great Globular Cluster. The message will reach its destination around the year 27,000.
November 17 - In Dublin, Ireland, President Erskine H. Childers dies suddenly of a heart attack in the middle of a public speech.
November 19 - In Baitadi, Makahali, Nepal, 140 are killed when the Makahali River bridge collapses.
November 20 - The United States Department of Justice files its final anti-trust suit against AT&T. This suit later leads to the break up of AT&T and the Bell System.
November 21 - In Birmingham, England, 2 pubs are bombed, killing 21 people (the Birmingham Six are later sentenced to life in prison for this).
November 22 - The United Nations General Assembly grants the Palestine Liberation Organization observer status.
November 24 - A skeleton from the hominid species Australopithecus afarensis is discovered and named Lucy.
November 27 - The Prevention of Terrorism Act is passed in the United Kingdom.

DECEMBER
December 1 - A Boeing 727 carrying TWA Flight 514 crashes 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Dulles International Airport during bad weather, killing all 92 people on board.
December 8 - Greek voters reject a proposal to restore the Greek monarchy.
December 9 - The Paris summit, reuniting the European communities' heads of state and government, commences.
December 19 - Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh becomes the 5th President of Ireland, in a state inauguration in Dublin Castle.
December 19 - Former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller is sworn in as Vice President of the United States.
December 23 - Former British minister John Stonehouse, who faked his drowning in Florida, is arrested in Melbourne, Australia.
December 24–25 - Darwin, Australia is almost completely destroyed by Cyclone Tracy.
December 31 - Restrictions on holding private gold within the United States, implemented by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, are removed.

Free form improvisation from Robin Williams

2009-01-23T15:43:00.002Z

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=p8KM_bpX5Xk

Have a look at the physical quality of his comedy and his clever use of props. This use of the whole body to create the comedy and character visually is very similar to Dario Fo clowning techniques

Episodes for Can't Pay Won't pay

2009-01-23T14:22:00.001Z

Act One

1 Supermarket
2 Hiding the goods/explaining to Margerita
3 The pregnancy
4 Giovanni and the sergeant
5 Pregnancy turns to labour hiding from the inspector
6 going to hospital
7 luigi finds out about the pregnancy

Act two

1 Transferring the goods to the sheds
2 Giovanni and Luigi steal from a lorry
3Inspector intervenes
4Antonia and Margerita fool the inspector with the St Eulalia
5Hiding the inspectors body
6Giovanni and Luigi buy a coffin
7old man brings the food back
8All is revealed
9They all sing song of rebellion

Photos to follow

links to Italian politics 1974

2009-01-20T15:15:00.002Z

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Italy_(1970s-1980s)#1974_Piazza_della_Loggia_bombing

http://www.britishcouncil.org/learnenglish-central-history-aldo-moro.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Moro

dario fo info

2009-01-12T13:47:00.002Z

http://www.dariofo.it/

Have a look at Dario Fo's website and especially the youtube example of Dario Fo in performance.

2009-01-12T13:34:00.000Z

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OCc-fj0HLHk

cant pay wont pay

2009-01-09T15:45:00.006Z

CANT PAY CANT PAY

Synopsis:
Can't Pay? Won't Pay! is set in Milan during the 1970s-a period of political radicalization and frequent strike actions in Italy; but "the problems are desperately familiar...Fo-faced farce wears a broad smile and proceeds at breathtaking speed" (Michael Coveney, Financial Times) and these themes are not confined to Italy, the play has more universal issues and could easily be set in England against the backdrop of the 1974 "Who Governs Britain?" general election and the collapse of the Heath government in the face of nationwide strikes, an energy crisis, rising unemployment and the three day week. Can't Pay? Won't Pay? like all Fo's plays is a didactic piece of situation theatre based around working class issues. Economic crisis, price increases, feminism, religion, the ineffectual nature of the police force as well as a general dissatisfaction with the state are highlighted by Fo's relentless use of farce, ridicule and slapstick comedy. The play predicted the spread of an incredulous phenomenon. Italy's economic crisis forced the redundancy of many factory workers, the huge increase in price of many services such as public transport, gas and electricity by up to 50% saw outrage and uproar, but it was the increase of supermarket prices that was the rationale for Can't Pay? Won't Pay! As Fo had predicted two weeks after the opening of the play, people took to paying what they considered to be a reasonable price and no more.

PICTURES:

CAST:
Kate Bone as Antonia
James Boston as The Inspector
Emma Christer as Margarita
Dave Pepper as Luigi
Rainer Wiseman as Giovanni

Theatre visits for year 9 and 12

2009-01-09T15:28:00.005Z

THEATRE SHOWS FOR YEARS 9 and 12

SHUNKIN

Synopsis:
Inspired by the work of one of the most important Japanese writers of the twentieth century, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, Shun-kin tells the tale of devotion, passion and power, where beauty is unforgiving and love is blinding.Moving between the neon glow of Japan and the vanished world of Meiji, Shun-kin discovers the moments of light in a world of darkness. Emerging from traditional Japanese culture, this powerful performance shows us just how close beauty and violence can really be.

Reviews:
‘A multi-layered portrayal of the psychology of human relationships.’ Mainichi Shimbun, Japan ‘Extraordinary staging…a sensual theatrical world steeped in shadow.’ Asahi Shimbun, Japan

Cast: Directed by Simon McBurneyComposer Hidetaro HonjoSet Design Merle Hensel and Rumi MatsuiLighting Paul AndersonSound Gareth FryProjection Finn Ross for mesmerCostume Christina CunninghamPuppetry Blind Summit TheatrePerformed by Kaho Aso, Songha Cho, Eri Fukatsu, Hidetaro Honjo, Yoshi Oida, Yuko Miyamoto, Kentaro Mizuki, Yasuyo Mochizuki, Keitoku Takada, Ryoko Tateishi Based on the writings of Jun'ichiro TanizakiCo-produced by Complicite, Setagaya Public Theatre and barbicanbite09 Supported by The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, Japan Foundation, Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation

Company:
Under the artistic direction of Simon McBurney, Complicite is one of the world’s leading theatre companies. Shun-kin is the second collaboration with the Setagaya Public Theatre, Tokyo. Performed by an entirely Japanese cast including film actress Eri Fukatsu, the production opened with a short sell-out run in Tokyo in February 2008. Complicite returns following the success of multi-award winning A Disapperaring Number (bite07 and bite08) and the critically acclaimed The Elephant Vanishes (bite03 and bite04).

Pics:

A VIEW
FROM A BRIDGE
Synopsis:
Acknowledged as one of the great classics of the twentieth century, Arthur Miller’s electrifying and deeply moving play A View From The Bridge proved to be a milestone in American theatrical history: it will be rediscovered in a new production starring Ken Stott, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Hayley Atwell, directed by Olivier Award-winning Lindsay Posner.Dockworker Eddie Carbone has made a good life for himself and his wife and niece in 1950’s Brooklyn. From an immigrant family himself, Eddie is happy to house and protect his wife’s Italian cousins who arrive illegally in pursuit of the ‘American Dream’. What Eddie doesn’t know is that this act of kindness will have a shattering effect on his whole life, and the lives of those he loves.Arthur Miller is arguably America’s finest playwright, with his other landmark works including The Crucible and Death of a Salesman. Lindsay Posner (Death and the Maiden, Fiddler on the Roof and Carousel) directs an all-star cast, with Ken Stott (Rebus, Messiah, God of Carnage) as Eddie, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Perfect Storm) as Beatrice and Hayley Atwell (Brideshead Revisited, The Duchess) as Catherine.

Show Poster:

LORD OF THE FLIES

Synopsis:
All hell breaks loose when British schoolboys including Ralph, Piggy and Jack get stranded on a desert island in William Golding's Lord of the Flies. The battle for civilisation versus savagery is played out and the boys' attempt at self-rule ends in total disaster. This is perfect material for the violently choreographed piece of physical theatre by Pilot Theatre, a national touring theatre, based at York Theatre Royal.
It relies on eight adult actors, performing against the backdrop of a shiny plane-crash set. "It is the tail section and the fuselage of a crashed aeroplane. The tail section pivots, twists and turns 360 degrees. The aeroplane represents all areas and aspects of the island. They climb over it. They strip everything off it. They make their spears from the metal struts. They tie people up with the seat belts from the aeroplane," explains Pilot's artistic director, Marcus Romer.
His award-winning production kicks off its 10th-anniversary national tour this month in York, complete with a constant soundtrack, representing the spirit and the sounds of the island. "It begins with angelic and beautiful harmonies and becomes more discordant as the story progresses. It has sounds of the sea, animals, life on the island, drumming and banging."
Video images are projected on to the stage to set various island scenes. "We project the sea for Piggy's death. He is pushed off the cliff having asked for his stolen glasses back. There is rain and thunderstorm for Simon's murder. He is kicked and beaten to death with spears. It is projected in black and white. The absence of colour makes it quite stark," he says.
Romer, who is also a published playwright and adapts books for his Pilot Theatre productions, also directed Pilot's touring production of Roy Williams's play Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads in 2006. "We are taking Lord of the Flies to Bermuda, the Isle of Man and Jersey," says Romer. "This is our island tour!"

URL AND EMBED FOR VIDEO

Embed:

Url: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OeDY2JSl0Fk

Reviews:

“William Golding meets Quentin Tarantino" -Financial Times
"Brilliantly evoked...see it and weep" - Time Out
"Terrifying and exhilarating production...heart stopping" -The Guardian
"Visceral production...thrillingly choreographed" -The Independent

Cast:
Book by: William GoldingCompany: Pilot Theatre (in association with York Theatre Royal)Adapted by: Nigel WilliamsDirector: Marcus RomerDesign: Ali AllenDesign: Marise RoseMusic: Sandy NuttgensPerformer: Dominic DoughtyPerformer: Davood GhadamiPerformer: Tony HasnathPerformer: Mark KnightleyPerformer: Lachlan McCallPerformer: Elliot QuinnPerformer: Ben SewellPerformer: Michael Sewell

Manderley production. The function of the lighting technician

2009-01-09T14:23:00.001Z

A lighting technician I somebody who programs the lighting to the directors wishes

The biggest play he did was phantom of the opera
And his favourite show was time

He has worked with allot of people and types of lighting boards

He did not want to become a lighting technician until he was 18 the studied near a theatre he got to know the people there and they gave him a part time job

He trained hear and when it became a theatre he allayed for a job here

When he came here he was new but he slowly became a common name here

Are lighting technician
By Alexander Sternberg

Manderley production directors interview

2009-01-09T14:15:00.001Z

Q&A for Debby

Q what is the story?
A now, the story of is a thriller about a man who gets married to a young, innocent girl but this is his second marriage, his first wife died under suspicious circumstances, did he murder her?

Q what do you hope to achieve with this play?
A I want it to be a mix of thriller and comedy and very entertaining.

Q did you chose this play, if so why?
A yes I did, I adapted the book and wrote the script.
I chose it because it is a good story and one of my favourites.

Q who are the people in your cast?
A they are students from years 7 to 11 and we have a professional actor called Richard eckels playing the lead, maxim.

Q what style are you using for this play?
A it’s a mix of physical theatre and realistic acting.

Q how is it going so far?
A it’s going very well, the actors are brilliant and we are having fun.

Q what costumes and props are you using?
A our costumes have all been collected by Jeanette in a 1930 style.

Q is there anything else you would like to say about this play?
A yes, I hope all of the school will come to see it; all the actors have worked hard.

Plautus

2009-01-09T09:25:00.002Z

http://www.san.beck.org/EC26-Cicero.html

Plautus is considered one of Dario Fo's influences and is an influence on the structure of modern comedy. Have a look at this link to help understand the plot and structure of his comedies

Dario Fo artwork

2009-01-06T15:28:00.002Z

rehearsal schedule for Can't pay won't pay

2009-01-06T12:53:00.001Z

Rehearsal Schedule “Can’t pay! Won’t pay!”

Jan 5-9th
Commedia Intro/ Dario Fo
Intro to monologues/ duo/portfolio
Jan 12-16th
Casting and reading / “can’t pay won’t pay”
Monologues/duologues
Jan 19th-23rd
Act one scene one/Meisner technique workshop 20th jan
Monologues/duo chosen and researched
Jan 26th-30th
Pages 4-15
Monologues/duo indiv tut
Feb 2nd-6th
Pages 15-25 (4th feb shunkin)
Portfolio session
Feb 9th-13th
Pages 25-41
Indiv /tut mon/duo
Feb 16th-20th
Half term ( learn lines)
Learn lines
Feb 23rd-27th
Pages 42-55
Indiv tut/mon/duo
March 2nd-6th
Pages 55-75

March 9th-13th
Pages 75-82
Portfolio session
March 16th-20th
Full run through
Perf mon/duo
March 23rd-27th
Full run through
Perf mon/duo
March 30th-3rd April
Work on difficult/ full run through
Perf mon/duos indiv sessions
6th April- 17th April
Easter learn lines
Learn lines
22nd April-24th April
Full run through
Perf to each other
Sat/sun 25th/26th april
Dress rehearsals
Dress rehearsals
27th April
Dress rehearsals
Dress rehearsals
28th April
Perf to examiner
Perf to examiner

2008-10-17T06:44:00.001Z

A big thank you to kevin McNally for talking to year 12 theatre studies students after the amazing performance of Ivanov this week. The students were blown away with his and Kenneth Branagh's performances. It helped consolidate all the work on Naturalism done this half term.

Year 12 Assessment theatre studies

2008-09-29T09:12:00.002Z

Seminar on Stanislavski and his life and techniques

In groups you will create a seminar using power point and practical means including use of text and acting to explore:

A) Stanislavski’s life both professionally and private
B) The difference between realism and naturalism
c) The Stanislavski system exploring all the main techniques and how they were used in rehearsing a text.

Use all techniques including non naturalistic means in order to create an interesting and informative seminar.

Date to be performed: 7th October 2008

Acting Practical

Recreate a scene from a Doll’s house. You will be working in pairs and one three. You will create a naturalistic scene using the Stanislavski system to performance standard.

1 create the given circumstances and historical/social/cultural and economic plan of the times
2 create a character biography
3 work out the units and objectives for the scene
4 do practical exercises using the units and objectives
5 utilise the magic if and adaption and communion.

Document all parts of the rehearsal process in detail to enable you to write your exploration notes.

Date to be performed:14th October 2008