Suppressed Desire: Inscriptions of Lesbianism in the British Theatre of the 1930s

2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 310-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Freshwater
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Academic Press ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Theoretical Structure ◽  
Edinburgh Review ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

In this response to John F. Deeney's article, ‘Censoring the Uncensored: the Case of Children in Uniform’, which appeared in NTQ 63 (August 2000), Helen Freshwater enters the growing debate over our reclamation of historical depictions of homosexuality. She questions Deeney's contention that our contemporary critical prejudices obscure the circulation of dramatic images of lesbianism during the 1930s, proposing that the Lord Chamberlain's difficulties in identifying lesbianism demonstrate the impossibility of dispensing with the theoretical structure that informs our understanding of this identity. Her archival research also reveals that there were in fact many efforts to put the lesbian on the stage during this period, but that these were effectively suppressed by the Lord Chamberlain, who refused to contemplate the performative enactment of lesbianism, no matter how indistinct or conventionalized in form. Her article addresses the challenges faced when addressing these dramatic inscriptions of lesbian desire, which are often homophobic, prurient, and unquestioning in their affirmation of the heterosexual norm. Helen Freshwater has recently completed her PhD on performance and censorship in twentieth-century Britain at the University of Edinburgh, and now lectures in drama and performance at the University of Nottingham. Her ‘The Ethics of Indeterminacy: Theatre de Complicite's Mnemonic’ appeared in NTQ67. She is also a contributor to the Edinburgh Review and to the anthology Crossing Boundaries (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).

The Ethics of Indeterminacy: Theatre de Complicite's ‘Mnemonic’

2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 212-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Freshwater
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Academic Press ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Theatre Companies ◽  
Edinburgh Review ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact

Theatre de Complicite was founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden, and Marcello Magni, and has since established its reputation as one of Britain's leading experimental physical theatre companies. Here, Helen Freshwater discusses the construction, performance, and implications of one of their recent works, Mnemonic, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1999, and has since toured to London's National Theatre and the John Jay College Theatre in New York. The work questions our metaphorical conceptualization of memory, displacing the conventional model of retrieval with an understanding of memory based upon a performative paradigm. This is memory as an act of imagination: transient; grounded upon narrative; open to interpretation; intrinsically corporeal. Freshwater interrogates the impact of the performance's incompletion, addressing the ethical issues raised by recognzing the indeterminacy of the past. Under Simon McBurney's direction, the original cast comprised Catherine Schaub Abkarian, Katrin Cartlidge, Richard Katz, Simon McBurney, Tim McMullan, Kostas Philippoglou, and Daniel Wahl. Helen Freshwater is currently completing her PhD on performance and censorship in twentieth-century Britain at the University of Edinburgh and will shortly be taking up a post as Lecturer in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. She is a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and the forthcoming anthology Crossing Boundaries (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).

scholarly journals Granville Barker's Ensemble as a Model of Fabian Theatre

2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 307-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippa Burt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Dialogical Relationship ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
Fabian Society

While the dialogical relationship between the early twentieth-century British theatre and the rise of socialism is well documented, analysis has tended to focus on the role of the playwright in the dissemination of socialist ideas. As a contrast, in this article Philippa Burt examines the directorial work of Harley Granville Barker, arguing that his plans for a permanent ensemble company were rooted in his position as a member of the Fabian Society. With reference to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and Maria Shevtsova's development of it in reference to the theatre, this article identifies a correlation between Barker's political and artistic approaches through extrapolating the central tenets of his theory on ensemble theatre and analyzing them alongside the central tenets of Fabianism. Philippa Burt is currently completing her PhD in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. This article is developed from a paper presented at the conference on ‘Politics, Performance, and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ at the University of Lancaster in July 2011.

Archive or Memory? The Detritus of Live Performance

2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Reason
Keyword(s):  
Human Memory ◽  
Special Edition ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
A Value ◽  
Edinburgh Review ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
New Formulation ◽  
The University ◽  
International Festival

The positive valuation of theatre as live performance, and therefore also its transience, is frequently accompanied by the urgent expression of the need to counter that transience by means of documentation. This desire to ‘save’ theatre reaches its most fervent expression (and hope of authority and permanence) with the live performance archive. Archive theory, however, now insists on the instability and uncertainty of the archive, which not only documents but also constructs its subject. In this article, Matthew Reason argues that, by tracing comparisons between archives and human memory, it is possible to establish a new formulation of the archive – as detritus, not completeness – that puts a value on mutability as a reflection of theatre's liveness. Matthew Reason is currently completing a PhD on representations of live performance at the University of Edinburgh. He has edited a special edition of the Edinburgh Review (ER106) on Theatre in Scotland, and has previously worked at the Edinburgh International Festival, where his responsibilities included maintaining the archive.

scholarly journals ‘The Power of Attraction’: the Staging of Wilde and his Contemporaries at the St James's Theatre, 1892–1895

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucie Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Financial Data ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Commercial Theatre ◽  
Regional Performance ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Significant Attention

The actor-manager system remained pivotal to West End production throughout the later nineteenth century. Focusing on one actor-manager, George Alexander, and using records of his expenditure on productions during the early 1890s, Lucie Sutherland demonstrates how financial data can be used to examine evolving relationships between industry leaders and dramatic authors in this era. She argues that this kind of evidence demonstrates not only the fiscal dimension to such relationships – level of investment per production, percentage of royalties paid – but also that the data may be analyzed to ascertain the responsiveness of an actor-manager to income generated. Here, significant attention is paid to box-office revenue and expenditure for the first productions of Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, exploring the income Alexander achieved by staging Wilde's drama prior to the arrest and trials of 1895. The use of quantitative data allows for close scrutiny of the work undertaken by prominent figures in the professional theatre; familiar narratives can be contested and endorsed through engagement with this type of material. Lucie Sutherland is a Teaching Associate in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. She has written on aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British theatre, including regional performance cultures and the impact of increasing professional regulation (for example the emergence of an actors' union) upon commercial theatre. She is currently completing a critical biography of Alexander.

The Reinvention of Shakespeare in Traditional Asian Theatrical Forms

1998 ◽  
Vol 14 (55) ◽  
pp. 274-284
Author(s):  
Min Tian
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
University Of Illinois ◽  
Doctoral Candidate ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

Especially during the later decades of the twentieth century, Shakespeare's plays have been adapted for production in many of the major Asian traditional theatrical forms – prompting some western critics to suggest that such forms, with their long but largely non-logocentric traditions, can come closer to the recovery or recreation of the theatrical conditions and performance styles of Shakespeare's times than can academically derived experiments based on scantily documented research. Whether in full conformity with traditional Asian styles, or by stirring ingredients into a synthetic mix, Min Tian denies that a ‘true’ recreation is possible – but suggests that such productions can, paradoxically, help us to ‘reinvent’ Shakespeare in fuller accord with our own times, notably by exploiting the potential of stylized gesture and movement, and the integration of music and dance, called for by proponents of a modernistic ‘total’ theatre after Artaud. In considering a wide range of Shakespearean productions and adaptations from varying Asian traditions, Min Tian suggests that the fashionably derided ‘universality’ of Shakespeare may still tell an intercultural truth that transcends stylistic and chronological distinctions. Min Tian holds a doctorate from the China Central Academy of Drama, where he has been an associate professor since 1992. The author of many articles on Shakespeare, modern drama, and intercultural theatre, he is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

scholarly journals Nikolai Evreinov and Edith Craig as Mediums of Modernist Sensibility

2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 203-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Marina Tsvetaeva ◽  
Man Ray ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
The University

Nikolai Evreinov (1870–1953) was a Russian playwright, director, and theorist of the theatre who played a leading part in the modernist movement of Russian theatre. Evreinov's 1911 monodrama The Theatre of the Soul(V kulisakh dushi) was staged by the Crooked Mirror theatre in St Petersburg in 1912. It was also performed in London (1915) and Rome (1929), and inspired Man Ray to create his aerograph The Theatre of the Soul (1917). In this article Alexandra Smith links Evreinov's play to Russian modernist thought shaped by the atmosphere of crisis associated with the Russo–Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution. It demonstrates that Edith Craig's production of Evreinov's play suggests that the philosophy of theatricalization of everyday life might enable modern subjects to overcome the fragmentation of modern society. Craig's use of the montage-like techniques of Evreinov's play prefigures cinematographic experiments of the 1920s and Marinetti's notion of synthetic theatre. Alexandra Smith is a Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and is the author of The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Works of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994) and Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006), as well as numerous articles on Russian literature and culture.

scholarly journals T B Smith and Max Rheinstein: Letters from America

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-65
Author(s):  
Alisdair D J MacPherson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

In this article, Alisdair MacPherson draws on his research of archival records to examine the correspondence between two great legal scholars of the twentieth century, Professor Max Rheinstein of the University of Chicago and Professor Sir T B Smith of the University of Edinburgh. MacPherson explores how Smith used a contact such as Rheinstein to develop a network of international scholars with whom he could collaborate, to whom he could promote the virtues of Scots law as a mixed legal system, and to whom he could extend invitations to visit Scotland.

John Robertson Henderson (1863–1925): Scotland, India and anomuran taxonomy

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-75
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Christian College ◽  
Apparent Absence ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
Marine Station ◽  
The University ◽  
Crustacean Taxonomy

John Robertson Henderson was born in Scotland and educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he qualified as a doctor. His interest in marine natural history was fostered at the Scottish Marine Station for Scientific Research at Granton (near Edinburgh) where his focus on anomuran crustaceans emerged, to the extent that he was eventually invited to compile the anomuran volume of the Challenger expedition reports. He left Scotland for India in autumn 1885 to take up the Chair of Zoology at Madras Christian College, shortly after its establishment. He continued working on crustacean taxonomy, producing substantial contributions to the field; returning to Scotland in retirement in 1919. The apparent absence of communication with Alfred William Alcock, a surgeon-naturalist with overlapping interests in India, is highlighted but not resolved.

The training of a polar scientist: Patrick Geddes and the student career of William Speirs Bruce

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. N. SWINNEY
Keyword(s):  
Future Career ◽  
New Information ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

ABSTRACT: The university career of the polar scientist William Speirs Bruce (1867–is examined in relation to new information, discovered amongst the Bruce papers in the University of Edinburgh, which elucidates the role played by Patrick Geddes in shaping Bruce's future career. Previous accounts of Bruce's university years, based mainly on the biography by Rudmose Brown (1923), are shown to be in error in several details.

Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

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