scholarly journals Staging the Delinquent: Edwardian Theatre and The Hooligan

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 344-354
Author(s):  
Martin Heaney
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Drama Education ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Commercial Theatre ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
Participatory Arts ◽  
Urban Working

W. S. Gilbert is best known as a dramatist and librettist who produced fourteen comic operas with his collaborator, composer Arthur Sullivan. Less familiar is his last work The Hooligan (1912), one of the first realist representations of the young urban working-class male seen on the twentieth-century British stage. This article explores the Edwardian conditions of social and cultural volatility reflected in the authoring and production of this play. It discusses the period as one where narratives of gender and class that underpin contemporary perspectives were shaped and contested. It demonstrates how hegemonic systems of cultural production created binary distinctions between the ‘ideal’ of the ‘Imperial Youth’ and the alien, working-class ‘other’. Gilbert’s authoring of the working-class male subject and his representation in a commercial theatre were subject to both market controls and middle-class ‘anxieties’. This historical perspective indicates continuities between these factors and the contemporary representation of the young urban working classes. Martin Heaney is a senior lecturer in Drama, Applied Theatre and Performance at the University of East London. He is co-director of the Centre of Applied and Participatory Arts and has published articles in various journals, including Research in Drama Education. His book chapter ‘Edward Bond and The Representation of Adolescence’ is forthcoming in The Routledge Guide to Theatre for Young People (2021).

Distance and Reflexivity: Creating the Stage World of Pantoland

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 331-339
Author(s):  
Millie Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
Extended Version ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Forthcoming Book ◽  
The World ◽  
Commercial Theatre ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

In pantomime the Dame and comics, and to a lesser extent the immortals, are positioned between the world of the audience and the world of the story, interacting with both, forming a link between the two, and constantly altering the distance thus created between audience and performance. This position allows these characters to exist both within and without the story, to comment on the story, and reflexively to draw attention to the theatricality of the pantomime event. In this article, Millie Taylor concludes that reflexivity and framing allow the pantomime to represent itself as unique, original, anarchic, and fun, and that these devices are significant in the identification of British pantomime as distinct from other types of performance. Millie Taylor worked for many years as a freelance musical director in repertory and commercial theatre and in pantomime. She is now Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and Music Theatre at the University of Winchester. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Conference on Arts and Humanities in Hawaii (2005), and an extended version will appear in her forthcoming book on British pantomime. Her research has received financial support from the British Academy.

A working-class artist is something to be

2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenn Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Real Power ◽  
The Real ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Rightful Place ◽  
Cultural Sector

The creative and cultural sectors in the United Kingdom largely exclude the working classes. Even the small number of working-class people who do ‘make it’ into these sectors often find themselves and their work badly treated by those who hold the real power. This article explores some of the experiences of working-class artists navigating the cultural sector and how exclusion, prejudice and precarity impacted and continue to impact them. It takes as its focus the filmmaker Alan Clarke and the playwright Andrea Dunbar, who were at the height of their success in the 1980s. It also considers the writers Darren McGarvey and Nathalie Olah, whose work has achieved prominence in recent years. It is through this focus I hope to demonstrate the long continuum of challenges for working-class creatives. This article also considers how, on the occasions when they are allowed the space they deserve, working-class artists have created powerful shifts in cultural production. Finally, it details some of the changes needed for working-class people to be able to take their rightful place in contributing to cultural life and the societal risks involved if they are denied that place.

Retroactivating the Idea of the Avant Garde

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Marc James Léger
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
Sociology Of Culture ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Contemporary Situation ◽  
Field Of Cultural Production ◽  
The University ◽  
Four Discourses

Abstract In the late 1970s, Pierre Bourdieu argued that the field of cultural production was distinguished along class lines by three different modes of cultural habitus: bourgeois disinterestness, petty-bourgeois allodoxia and working-class necessity. Since that era, the petty-bourgeois habitus has become the dominant predisposition. Adding Bourdieu’s sociology of culture to Peter Bürger’s historicized theory of the emergence of the avant garde as a critique of the “institution art,” a new “avant garde hypothesis” becomes possible for today’s age of post-Fordist biocapitalism. Based on Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses, the contemporary situation is shown to privilege specific forms of cultural production, in particular an activist Discourse of the Hysteric and a technocratic Discourse of the University. Psychoanalysis reveals the limits of these tendencies while also underscoring the archaic aspects of an aestheticist Discourse of the Master and the transferential logics of Analyst avant gardes.

‘First-Class Evening Entertainments’: Spectacle and Social Control in a Mid-Victorian Music Hall

2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Till
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
National Opera ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
Urban Working

First-Class Evening Entertainments was the title given to a variety programme presented at Hoxton Hall in East London when it first opened in 1863. In 2000 Nicholas Till and Kandis Cook were commissioned by Hoxton Hall and the English National Opera Studio to make a new music theatre piece for the Hall, which led to an investigation of the content and context of the original programme. In the following article Nicholas Till offers a reading of the 1863 programme as an example of the mid-Victorian project to exercise social control over the urban working classes. Nicholas Till is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Wimbledon School of Art, and co-artistic director of the experimental music theatre company Post-Operative Productions. He is the author of Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart's Operas (Faber, 1992), and is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Opera.

‘Gratuitous Assistance’? The West End Theatre Industry, Late Victorian Charity, and Patterns of Theatrical Fundraising

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Hindson
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Economic Potential ◽  
The West ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
And Performance ◽  
End Stage ◽  
University Of Bristol ◽  
The University

London's theatre industry and charity culture have been closely connected since the mid-nineteenth century. In this article Catherine Hindson explores the nature of this relationship in the later years of the century. Focusing on a charity bazaar held at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1899 to raise funds for the Charing Cross Hospital, she argues that extra-theatrical occasions staged for charity organizations were firmly located within the stage culture of the day. Rather than peripheral occasions, high-profile, public charity events functioned as significant forces in the reputation and success of the West End theatre industry and its personnel. They held cultural, social, and economic potential for theatrical performers and represent a key factor in the improvement in the moral and social status of the stage in this period. Catherine Hindson is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on popular performance between 1820 and 1930 and is currently completing a monograph on the actress, the West End stage, and charity between 1880 and 1930.

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.

scholarly journals Acting Law | Law Acting: A Conversation with Dr Felix Nobis and Professor Gary Watt

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-200
Author(s):  
Sean Alexander Mulcahy ◽  
Sean Mulcahy
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Royal Shakespeare Company ◽  
Choral Ensemble ◽  
True Story ◽  
Police Shootings ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
Medical Defence

Dr Felix Nobis is a senior lecturer with the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University. He has worked as a professional actor for many years. He previously played an assistant to the Crown Prosecutor in the Australian television series, Janus, which was set in Melbourne, Victoria and based on the true story of a criminal family allegedly responsible for police shootings. He also played an advisor to a medical defence firm in the Australian television series MDA. He is a writer and professional storyteller. He has toured his one-person adaptation of Beowulf (2004) and one-person show Once Upon a Barstool (2006) internationally and has written on these experiences. His most recent work Boy Out of the Country (2016) is written in an Australian verse style and has just completed a tour of regional Victoria. Professor Gary Watt is an academic in the School of Law at the University of Warwick where his teaching includes advocacy and mooting. He also regularly leads rhetoric workshops at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is the author of Dress, Law and Naked Truth (2013) and, most recently, Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance (2016), which explores rhetoric in law and theatre. He also co-wrote A Strange Eventful History, which he performed with Australian choral ensemble, The Song Company, to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.  

All about Eve: Apple Island and the Fictions of Lesbian Community

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 (37) ◽  
pp. 28-32
Author(s):  
Stacy Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
University Of Wisconsin ◽  
Doctoral Candidate ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
Lesbian Community ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
Cultural Feminism

We continue our occasional series on the actuality and the ideology of lesbian performance with a study of Apple Island, a performance space in Madison, Wisconsin. Many of the productions of this ‘women's cultural and art space’ could, suggests Stacy Wolf, be categorized as performance art: she looks at these in the context of other modes and definitions of cultural production, and at the ‘complex interplay of identity and knowledge’ which constructs Apple Island's potential spectators. Looking at both positive negative critiques of its work, she concludes that the activity through which its refusal of political and performative divisions is best exemplified is the weekly class-cumperformance of country western line dancing, and suggests through folkloric analogy how this helps to define or redefine the meaning of cultural feminism. Stacy Wolf is a doctoral candidate in Theatre and Drama and a lecturer in Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has also published articles in Theatre Studies, Women and Performance, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

scholarly journals Active Experiencing in Postdramatic Performance: Affective Memory and Quarantine Theatre's Wallflower

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
Tracy Crossley
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

Postdramatic approaches to performance and Stanislavsky's methodology seemingly occupy divergent performance traditions. Nonetheless, both traditions often require performers to mine their own lives (albeit to different ends) and operate in an experiential realm that demands responsiveness to and within the live moment of performing. Tracy Crossley explores this realm through an analysis of Quarantine Theatre's Wallflower (2015), an example of postdramatic practice that blends a poetics of failure with a psycho - physical dramaturgical approach that can be aligned with Stanislavsky's concepts of affective memory and active analysis.Wallflower provides a useful case study of practice that challenges the binary opposition between the dramatic and postdramatic prevalent in theatre and performance studies scholarship. Aspects of Stanislavsky's system, nuanced by cognitive neuroscience, can expand the theorization of postdramatic theatre, which in turn generates techniques that can prove valuable in the rehearsal of dramatic theatre itself. Tracy Crossley is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Salford, Manchester. She is currently developing a practical handbook, Making Postdramatic Theatre, for Digital Theatre Plus.

DIVERTING THE DRUNKARD'S PATH: CHARTIST TEMPERANCE NARRATIVES

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Breton
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Spousal Abuse ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Family ◽  
Urban Working

In the anonymous “The Charter and the Land” (1847), a story about the Chartist Land Co-operative Society, William Wright's drunkard's path is remarkably short and his subsequent journey to teetotalism is astonishingly easy. Displaced in urban London and without sustainable work, Wright slowly and somewhat predictably takes to the bottle. The lack of detail the author gives regarding Wright's waywardness suggests that the narrative was common enough to be truncated. Unemployment, poverty, and forced idleness receive a good deal more attention than the ensuing moral downfall. Still, Wright's wife grows increasingly worried as the small amount of money she brings home is cruelly taken from her and spent by her husband in the alehouse, and not on food for the children. After witnessing familial conflicts over spending, readers familiar with the drunkard trope might expect spousal abuse, crime, and death. But one day, out of the blue, Wright says he has for weeks given up drink, instead using the family money to purchase lottery tickets for a stake in the Land Co-operative Society, what was to become the National Land Company in 1846. Feargus O'Connor founded the Company in 1845 in part to allow urban working classes to return to a more rural and stable way of life and in part to create working-class landowners who could subsequently qualify for the franchise. Wright wins a few acres of land outside of London and though the work promises to be challenging, he is happy to have it. The Wright family settles happily in their new home and has nothing but the possibility of more unmitigated happiness to celebrate. Pleasing his wife to no end, Wright promises total abstinence and the story comes to an abrupt conclusion.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document