Archer, William (1856–1924)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Postlewait
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
British Drama ◽  
Elizabeth Robins ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
Bernard Shaw ◽  
A Doll's House

Born in Edinburgh, William Archer served as a London theater critic from 1881 to 1920. He retired from weekly reviewing when his melodrama The Green Goddess was a major success in New York (1920–1922) and London (1923–1924). His translations of Henrik Ibsen’s plays began to be published in 1888 and culminated in The Works of Henrik Ibsen (twelve volumes, 1906–1908). He translated and helped to stage the first London productions of A Doll’s House (1889), Ghosts (1891), and Rosmersholm (1892), and in close partnership with the actress Elizabeth Robins co-directed the productions of Hedda Gabler (1891), The Master Builder (1893), Little Eyolf (1896), and John Gabriel Borkman (1898). He also translated and published plays by Maurice Maeterlinck and Gerhart Hauptmann. In his advocacy for modern English drama, Archer supported the plays of Arthur Wing Pinero, Oscar Wilde, James Barrie, Harley Granville Barker, and Bernard Shaw. He led the British campaigns against stage censorship and for a national theater. In 1907 he and Barker published A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates. In the mid-1880s he and Shaw drafted a play entitled Rhinegold that Shaw later transformed into Widowers’ Houses (1892), the play that launched his playwriting career. Between 1892 and 1924 Archer wrote well over 100 articles and reviews on Shaw and his plays. Although he criticized some of the plays, he repeatedly praised Shaw as a modern dramatic genius. Their abiding friendship thrived on their debates about all aspects of modern drama, including Shaw’s plays. In 1923 Archer published The Old Drama and the New, a historical survey of British drama with a lengthy (and still argumentative) section on Shaw.

Robins, Elizabeth (1862–1952)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne E. Gates
Keyword(s):  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Stage Management ◽  
Rebecca West ◽  
American Theater ◽  
Joint Management ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Elizabeth Robins ◽  
Nora Helmer ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
A Doll's House

Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1862, Elizabeth Robins established herself in the American theater and then relocated to London in 1888. She epitomizes the grasp that the plays of Henrik Ibsen held on performers in the 1890s. Indeed, she outshone other professionals by laying claim to performing and producing the first English-speaking Hedda Gabler (1891) and the first Hilda Wangel (1893, in The Master Builder). She felt that the stage-management system prevented women from having a say in their profession, and therefore she welcomed the Independent Theatre Movement. She formed the Joint Management Company with American actress Marion Lea, her stage partner and co-producer for Hedda Gabler, and she organized several subscription series to mount not only Ibsen’s plays but also other artistic theater. Her feminist play Votes for Women (1907) was at the vanguard of pro-suffrage drama. Performances organized by Robins of Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder were rivaled in impact only by the initial sensation created by Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer in her London production of A Doll’s House in 1889. Robins’ other Ibsen roles included Martha in The Pillars of Society, Asta in Little Eyolf, Agnes in a production of Act 4 of Brand, Ella Reintheim in John Gabriel Borkman, Mrs Linde in A Doll’s House, and Rebecca West in Rosmersholm.

Elizabeth Robins

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr ◽  
Alexandra Paddock
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Hereditary Disease ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
New York University ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
Elizabeth Robins

Elizabeth Robins (b. 1862–d. 1952) was an American actress, novelist, playwright, short story author, suffragist campaigner, journalist, and theatre manager who spent most of her career in Britain. A key champion of Ibsen’s plays in England, she founded her own theatre company along with fellow actress Marion Lea in order to produce some of Ibsen’s plays, premiering roles such as Hedda Gabler and Hilde Wangel. As a dramatist, she is best known for her play Votes for Women! (1907), which played a central role in the suffrage movement. Her anonymously published and performed play Alan’s Wife (1893), coauthored with Lady Florence Bell, explored taboo themes such as infanticide, postpartum depression, and euthanasia. She wrote many works of fiction under the pseudonym C. E. Raimond. Her unpublished works, housed in the New York University Library’s Fales Collection, are extensive and largely unexplored, and include letters, diaries, journals, promptbooks, plays, novels, and other prose works. Robins was born in Kentucky, and spent much of her childhood on Staten Island, New York. Her mother’s mental health in decline (she died in an institution in 1901), Robins developed a close relationship with her youngest brother, Raymond, and also found support in her grandmother. Robins grew interested in drama and at age nineteen embarked on a stage career, first in New York and then in Boston. She married fellow actor George Richmond Parks in 1885. Two years later, he committed suicide by walking into the Charles River wearing a suit of stage armor. Robins then went on a grueling tour across the country with Edwin Booth before making England her home from the mid-1880s onward, though she remained an American citizen. Her lucky break came with the plays of Ibsen, who was then beginning to be staged in Britain. Robins’s last stage appearance was in 1902. For the remainder of her long career, Robins wrote constantly, both nonfiction and fiction, and continued to spearhead the women’s suffrage movement. She helped direct the feminist journal Time and Tide in the 1920s. Although firmly aligned with feminism and a leading New Woman writer, Robins moved in circles whose members have become part of a male-centric canon (James, Shaw, Wilde, Masefield, and many others), and critical reception and interpretation of her work have often been fractured because of this diffused identity across many different areas of work, as well as her own ambivalence about marriage and motherhood (she remained single and childless). Robins has long been studied by theatre historians, feminist studies scholars, and Ibsen specialists and is now receiving attention for her relevance to medical humanities, as her work deals extensively with hereditary disease, euthanasia, women and illness, female alcoholism, biological determinism, and mental disorder. Much scholarship still remains to be done, particularly on her prose fiction and in mining the vast archives of unpublished material in the Fales Collection.

The Works of Henrik Ibsen. Volume VII: The Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, the Master Builder

1968 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 776
Author(s):  
Brian W. Downs ◽  
James Walter McFarlane ◽  
Henrik Ibsen
Keyword(s):  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Master Builder

Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia: Coolness, Cruelty, and the 'Nineties

2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 354-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Urban
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Rutgers University ◽  
British Drama ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
Sarah Kane ◽  
The University

The explosion of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre that dominated the British stage in the 'nineties has had both vocal champions and detractors. Here, Ken Urban examines the emergence of this kind of theatre within the cultural context of ‘cool Britannia’ and suggests that the plays of writers such as Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane explore the possibilities of cruelty and nihilism as a means of countering cynicism and challenging mainstream morality's interpretation of the world. Ken Urban is a playwright and director, whose plays The Female Terrorist Project and I [hearts] KANT are currently being produced by the Committee Theatre Company in New York City. His play about the first US Secretary of Defense, The Absence of Weather, will premiere in Los Angeles at Moving Arts Theatre Company, which has named it the winner of its national new play award. At the request of the Sarah Kane Estate, Urban directed the New York premiere of her play Cleansed. He teaches Modern Drama and Creative Writing in the English Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. An early version of this article was first presented at the ‘In-Yer-Face? British Drama in the 1990s’ conference at the University of the West of England, Bristol, in September 2002.

An American Actress at Balmoral

1977 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-131
Author(s):  
Michael Jamieson
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Railway Line ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Elizabeth Robins ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
The Stranger ◽  
Terminal Station

On the afternoon of Wednesday, 25 October 1893, a well-dressed young woman alighted at the terminal station of the Great North of Scotland Railway line to Ballater. A discerning London playgoer, seeing her in the unlikely setting of this remote Scots village, would have recognised the stranger as Elizabeth Robins, one of the three most ‘interesting’ and advanced actresses of the day. American by birth and early stage training, she had passed through London in the summer of 1888 on her way to and from a Norwegian holiday and, encouraged by Oscar Wilde, she had remained to try her luck in the English theatre. Her moment had come in April 1891 when she had triumphantly created Hedda Gabler on the British stage, and early in 1893 – a year she afterwards referred to as ‘outstanding’ – she had won a still greater triumph when she acted Hilda Wangel in her own presentation of The Master Builder. Pioneering matinées, however, could not in themselves support an independent, impecunious and expatriate actress, and Miss Robins, who was now thirty-one, had appeared in two Adelphi melodramas as well as for fashionable actor–managers. In May of this very year she had magnanimously yielded the dazzling part of Paula in Pinero's new and adult drama The Second Mrs Tanqueray to her friend Mrs Patrick Campbell and so had lost, perhaps for ever, the chance of becoming a celebrated and modish actress.

Polite Gaiety: Cultural Hierarchy and Musical Comedy, 1893-1904

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Newbury
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The State ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Cultural Divide ◽  
Cultural Hierarchy ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Musical Comedy ◽  
National Theater ◽  
The Brain

In 1903, Alan Dale, the theater critic for the New York American and Journal, when contemplating the state of the American stage, came to the conclusion that “the only national theatre I can find, after severe cogitation, is that beautiful, flip, and classic commodity known as musical comedy.” Dale pointed out that musical comedy's exorbitant popularity was a recent development, emerging only in the previous five or ten years, and that his anointing of the form as the national theater would not sit well with more serious-minded devotees of drama. “Well read gentlemen with heavy minds,” wrote Dale, would prefer different sorts of productions, plays that “mere commercial managers don't want to stage and mere amusement seekers don't want to see.” Seeking an improbable bridge over this cultural divide, Dale suggested that “[Henrik] Ibsen might air his neat little views on heredity in happy verse set to music…[His] favorite subject of maggots on the brain” could feature a “chorus of pretty girls disguised as maggots.”

scholarly journals Parody as Translation: Ibsen’s new woman in the pages of Punch

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
Rebecca Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Women ◽  
Woman Character ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
Cultural Medium ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Doll's House

“Parody as Translation: Ibsen’s new woman in the pages of Punch” examines four comic parodies of Ibsen written by Thomas Antsey Guthrie, a British journalist and humourist also known as F. Antsey. The plays examined include parodies of Rosmersholm, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, and The Master Builder — comically abbreviated renditions of Ibsen originals that featured striking new women characters. Reading these parodies as responses to their originals, I examine what happens to the new woman character when she is subjected to comic parodic treatment. Although the parodies do not directly focus on the alteration of these key female characters, I argue that Antsey’s parodic critique of Ibsenian dramaturgical mechanics, conventions, and tropes indirectly impacted their representation, transforming them from tragic heroines to comic figures and raising further questions about the relationship between gender and comedy. In each parody, the psychological complexity of the new woman character is compromised through Antsey’s alteration of one or more of her key purposes within Ibsen’s text. Overall, I argue that the reassessment and reinterpretation of these key Norwegian texts can be viewed as a mode of transition between Ibsen and those impacted and influenced by him, providing a cultural medium or “buffer” that helped connect the notably “serious” Scandinavian playwright with British audiences.

Representing Sexuality in Shakespeare's Plays

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (51) ◽  
pp. 205-213
Author(s):  
John Russell Brown
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The University ◽  
Associate Director

Sexuality resides in much more than what is spoken or even enacted, and its stage representation will often work best when the minds of the spectators are collaboratively engaged in completing the desired response. John Russell Brown, founding Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and a former Associate Director of the National Theatre, here explores Shakespeare's arts of sexual obliquity, whether in silence, prevarication, or kindled imagination, and their relationship both with more direct forms of allusion and with an audience's response. John Russell Brown, currently Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, is author of numerous books on Shakespeare and modern drama, and editor of many Elizabethan and Jacobean texts – most recently a new edition of Shakespeare for Applause Books, New York.

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