Author : Steve Nicholson
Publisher :
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 38,93 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Communism and culture
ISBN :
This book examines how communism was portrayed in plays in the British theatre between 1917 and 1945, and how the theatre played a significant part in communicating and manipulating political propaganda in order to influence orders.
Author : Jane Milling
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 597 pages
File Size : 35,71 MB
Release : 2004-12-09
Category : Drama
ISBN : 0521651328
Publisher Description
Author : Rebecca D'Monte
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 15,1 MB
Release : 2015-02-26
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1408166011
British theatre from 1900 to 1950 has been subject to radical re-evaluation with plays from the period setting theatres alight and gaining critical acclaim once again; this book explains why, presenting a comprehensive survey of the theatre and how it shaped the work that followed. Rebecca D'Monte examines how the emphasis upon the working class, 'angry' drama from the 1950s has led to the neglect of much of the century's earlier drama, positioning the book as part of the current debate about the relationship between war and culture, the middlebrow, and historiography. In a comprehensive survey of the period, the book considers: - the Edwardian theatre; - the theatre of the First World War, including propaganda and musicals; -the interwar years, the rise of commercial theatre and influence of Modernism; - the theatre of the Second World War and post-war period. Essays from leading scholars Penny Farfan, Steve Nicholson and Claire Cochrane give further critical perspectives on the period's theatre and demonstrate its relevance to the drama of today. For anyone studying 20th-century British Drama this will prove one of the foundational texts.
Author : Robert Leach
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 1004 pages
File Size : 24,94 MB
Release : 2018-12-21
Category : Art
ISBN : 0429873336
An Illustrated History of British Theatre and Performance chronicles the history and development of theatre from the Roman era to the present day. As the most public of arts, theatre constantly interacted with changing social, political and intellectual movements and ideas, and Robert Leach’s masterful work restores to the foreground of this evolution the contributions of women, gay people and ethnic minorities, as well as the theatres of the English regions, and of Wales and Scotland. Highly illustrated chapters trace the development of theatre through major plays from each period; evaluations of playwrights; contemporary dramatic theory; acting and acting companies; dance and music; the theatre buildings themselves; and the audience, while also highlighting enduring features of British theatre, from comic gags to the use of props. Continuing on from the Enlightenment, Volume Two of An Illustrated History of British Theatre and Performance leads its readers from the drama and performances of the Industrial Revolution to the latest digital theatre. Moving from Punch and Judy, castle spectres and penny showmen to Modernism and Postdramatic Theatre, Leach’s second volume triumphantly completes a collated account of all the British Theatre History knowledge anyone could ever need.
Author : Robert Gordon
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 777 pages
File Size : 43,89 MB
Release : 2016-11-21
Category : Music
ISBN : 0199988765
The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical provides a comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre offering both a historical account of the musical's development from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of the unique forms and features of British musicals, which explore the aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings of a tradition that initially gave rise to the American musical and later challenged its modern pre-eminence. After a consideration of how John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) created a prototype for eighteenth-century ballad opera, the book focuses on the use of song in early nineteenth century theatre, followed by a sociocultural analysis of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; it then examines Edwardian and interwar musical comedies and revues as well as the impact of Rodgers and Hammerstein on the West End, before analysing the new forms of the postwar British musical from The Boy Friend (1953) to Oliver! (1960). One section of the book examines the contributions of key twentieth century figures including Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Joan Littlewood and producer Cameron Macintosh, while a number of essays discuss both mainstream and alternative musicals of the 1960s and 1970s and the influence of the pop industry on the creation of concept recordings such as Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Les Misérables (1980). There is a consideration of "jukebox" musicals such as Mamma Mia! (1999), while essays on overtly political shows such as Billy Elliot (2005) are complemented by those on experimental musicals like Jerry Springer: the Opera (2003) and London Road (2011) and on the burgeoning of Black and Asian British musicals in both the West End and subsidized venues. The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical demonstrates not only the unique qualities of British musical theatre but also the vitality and variety of British musicals today.
Author : Andrew Maunder
Publisher : Springer
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 41,62 MB
Release : 2015-08-22
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1137402008
British Theatre and the Great War examines how theatre in its various forms adapted itself to the new conditions of 1914-1918. Contributors discuss the roles played by the theatre industry. They draw on a range of source materials to show the different kinds of theatrical provision and performance cultures in operation not only in London but across parts of Britain and also in Australia and at the Front. As well as recovering lost works and highlighting new areas for investigation (regional theatre, prison camp theatre, troop entertainment, the threat from film, suburban theatre) the book offers revisionist analysis of how the conflict and its challenges were represented on stage at the time and the controversies it provoked. The volume offers new models for exploring the topic in an accessible, jargon-free way, and it shows how theatrical entertainment of the time can be seen as the `missing link’ in the study of First World War writing.
Author : Susan Cannon Harris
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 49,18 MB
Release : 2017-06-23
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1474424481
The first modern Irish playwrights emerged in London in the 1890s, at the intersection of a rising international socialist movement and a new campaign for gender equality and sexual freedom. Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions shows how Irish playwrights mediated between the sexual and the socialist revolutions, and traces their impact on left theatre in Europe and America from the 1890s to the 1960s. Drawing on original archival research, the study reconstructs the engagement of Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Synge, O'Casey, and Beckett with socialists and sexual radicals like Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Florence Farr, Bertolt Brecht, and Lorraine Hansberry.
Author : Marta Petricioli
Publisher : Peter Lang
Page : 662 pages
File Size : 33,19 MB
Release : 2007
Category : History
ISBN : 9789052013640
Le processus d'union européenne voit aujourd'hui un point d'arrêt sur le plan politique et institutionnel, malgré les étapes décisives réalisées après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Il reste en effet à affronter des thèmes et des problèmes qui, pendant l'entre-deux-guerres, animèrent le débat entre les pionniers de l'européanisme. Si, à l'époque, leurs propositions restèrent sans suite, ayant une issue destructrice pour la paix et l'Europe, cet héritage idéal si précieux a permis une continuité et de germer par la suite. Ce livre a pour but de présenter une série d'idées, d'initiatives, de programmes, qui entre les deux guerres entendirent promouvoir le maintien d'un ordre international pacifié, partant du névralgique contexte européen. Il en ressort ainsi un humus significatif et transversal, opposé aux tendances inexorablement prédominantes dans la politique et les institutions, mais aussi dans la société civile. Ses animateurs oeuvrèrent dans les organisations internationales, les partis, les mouvements, les associations de type non seulement politique, de même que dans l'historiographie, la littérature, le théâtre, le cinéma, le sport, signalant les éléments en vue d'une renaissance de la cohabitation pacifique sur le plan européen et international. Despite the decisive steps forward made since the Second World War, the process of European unification has come to a standstill at a political and institutional level. Issues and problems which were already the subject of debate among the pioneers of Europeanism between the two wars have still to be addressed. Although at the time their proposal as a whole went unheeded, with destructive consequences for peace and for Europe, this valuable legacy of ideals has nevertheless guaranteed a continuity and a subsequent blossoming. The purpose of this book is to examine a series of ideas, initiatives and programmes which, between the two World Wars, aimed to promote the maintenance of a pacified international order, starting from the crucial European context. What emerges is a significant and transversal humus, that countered the inexorably prevailing tendencies in politics and institutions, and even in society. Its exponents operated in international organisations, in parties, and in movements and associations not necessarily of a political stamp, as well as in historiography, literature, theatre, cinema and sport, laying the foundations for a rebirth of peaceful co-existence at European and international level.
Author : Paul Long
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 15,58 MB
Release : 2008-12-18
Category : History
ISBN : 1443802980
“corrupt and moronic though the common people are seemingly becoming ... only in the common people can the true work be rooted, the true tradition rediscovered and re-informed” Charles Parker, BBC Radio Producer 1959. In 1958, in his best-selling book Culture and Society, Raymond Williams identified working-class culture as ‘a key issue in our own time’. Why this happened and how this subject was thought about and acted upon is the focus of this book. Paul Long investigates a variety of projects and practices that were designed to describe, validate, reclaim, rejuvenate or generate ‘authentic’ working-class culture as part of the re-imagining of Britishness in the context of the post-war settlement. Detailed case studies cover the wartime cultural activities of CEMA – the forerunner of the Arts Council - the Folk Revival, the impact of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, broadcasting and the radio work of Charles Parker, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, the roots of modern arts festivals in Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 project as well as the impact of progressive education on children’s writing and the politics of the English language. ‘Only in the Common People: The Aesthetics of Class in Post-War Britain’ examines the assumptions, idealism and prejudices behind these projects and the terms of class as ‘the preoccupation of a generation’. This approach offers a historicisation of the broader ideas and debates that informed the development of the New Left and British social history and cultural theory, offering an understanding of the rise of respect for ‘the common man’.
Author : Claire Warden
Publisher : Springer
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 33,38 MB
Release : 2016-10-13
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1137385707
Exploring the experiences of early to mid-twentieth century British theatre-makers in Russia, this book imagines how these travellers interpreted Russian realism, symbolism, constructivism, agitprop, pageantry, dance or cinema. With some searching for an alternative to the corporate West End, some for experimental techniques and others still for methods that might politically inspire their audiences, did these journeys make any differences to their practice? And how did distinctly Russian techniques affect British theatre history? Migrating Modernist Performance seeks to answer these questions, reimagining the experiences and creative output of a range of, often under-researched, practitioners. What emerges is a dynamic collection of performances that bridge geographical, aesthetic, chronological and political divides.
