Creativity Has No Expiry Date: Directing Escaped Alone at Western Gold Theatre

Dans ce texte, Kathryn Bracht offre une réflexion sur l’expérience qu’elle a vécue en signant la mise en scène de la pièce Escaped Alone de Caryl Churchill au Western Gold Theatre de Vancouver, l’une des seules compagnies de théâtre professionnelles du Canada ayant pour mandat d’offrir un soutien aux artistes de théâtre de plus de cinquante-cinq ans. La pièce met en scène quatre femmes d’environ soixante-dix ans, de sorte à offrir un défi pour des interprètes de cette tranche d’âge. Bracht examine comment la compagnie continue d’explorer les moyens de valoriser les artistes d’un âge plus avancé non seulement en leur offrant des rôles, mais aussi en mettant l’accent ailleurs que sur l’apprentissage par cœur du texte et en cherchant à créer un meilleur équilibre entre la vie familiale et celle sur scène pendant les répétitions et les représentations, de manière à répondre aux besoins des interprètes plus âgés.

«Come muovermi nel mio corpo da uomo»: il corpo maschile travestito nel teatro inglese, dai ragazzi attori a Caryl Churchill

Among the many traditions of cross-dressing in performing practices, English Renaissance theatre plays a central symbolic role, especially considering the Shakespearean canon; however, only through the disruptive reading of gender and queer studies Shakespeare’s theatre has been studied as a transvestite theatre in which all female parts were played by boy actors. This article intends to show how this transvestite body opens a diachronic perspective on those theatrical practices of the second half of the twentieth century that rediscover the Elizabethan stage as a locus of artifice. Renaissance and twentieth-century theatre thus share the transvestite male body, not following a linear dynamic of model and imitation, but in a much more complex interweaving of echoes and returns. Through an analysis of two works by the playwright Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine (1979) and A Mouthful of Birds (1986), the essay explores the transvestite male body as a place of dialogue between the Shakespearean and the contemporary scene, which share effeminacy -here understood as the staging of femininity on a male body- as a detonator for a wider crisis of binary categories.

“THATCHERISM AND ITS IMPACT ON CHURCHILL’S TOP GIRLS AND COULD NINE”

Thatcherism era regards one of the great political and economic trends which have transformed a new lifestyle of British society to be adopting the individualism instead of the socialism. On another word, it is a transformation from welfare capitalism to privatization. This trend strategy has reflected new criteria inside the society. As a result, Thatcherism has given a new transformation concerning the Feminism and its role in the society. The research will shed light on the new concepts of this type of literature. Thus, the discussion and tackling are directed to the selected plays of the playwright Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and Cloud Nine. The first chapter will discuss the phenomena of Thatcherism during 1979 until 1990. Then, the rest of chapter will mention the impact of Thatcherism on the second wave of feminism and the biography of Caryl Churchill. In second chapter, the focusing will be on the Thatcherism and its relationship towards the voice of woman. Also, the character Marlene in Churchill’s Top Girls will be the point of discussion in terms of the resembling the image of woman that may stand on the next shore to Marlene. The conclusion will sum up the main finding.

Churchill’s Wars

This is the first of three chapters which focus, in their different ways, on the writing of history in contemporary theatre. This chapter concentrates on two ‘history’ plays written by Caryl Churchill during the 1970s; Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Vinegar Tom. Churchill emerged as one of the most influential voices in radical British theatre during the closing decades of the last century. Both plays were set in the mid-seventeenth-century, but were written to resonate with themes familiar in modern legal and political thought. The title of the first play is taken from a Leveller tract published in the second part of the 1640s. Churchill uses it to explore the state of radical politics in later twentieth-century Britain. The second play, Vinegar Tom, is a contribution to a distinctive sub-genre of ‘witchcraft’ plays, which use the ‘crime’ of witchcraft as a vehicle for revisiting the relation of law and gender in modern society.

The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre

The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre investigates the place and purpose of law in a range of modern dramatic settings and writings. Each chapter, which focusses on a particular area of law and the work of a particular playwright, illustrates the important role of theatre in articulating legal and political issues to a modern audience. The encompassing aspiration of The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre introduces the reader to a variety of genres in modern dramatic writing. From the ‘state of the nation’ plays of the 1980s and 1990s, to ‘verbatim’ and modern historical drama, to the calculated violence of ‘in-yer-face’, and associated expressions of radical and feminist theatre. Amongst those playwrights whose work is considered are David Hare, Richard Norton-Taylor, Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton, Mike Bartlett, Sarah Kane, Bryony Lavery and Evan Placey. Along the way the reader is introduced to an equally wide range of areas of political and legal debate; from constitutional reform, to the present state of international law, to a variety of familiar controversies in associated areas of law, society, and gender.

Means of simile actualization in the language of modern social groups in England

The purpose of the article is to reveal the means of expressing simile in the speech of characters belonging to modern upper, middle and lower classes, based on the texts of contemporary English fiction: Caryl Churchill «Top Girls», Patrick Marber «Dealer’s Choice» and India Knight «Comfort and Joy». Conducting speech analysis, the authors use the sociolinguistic approach, allowing to take into account the social class of the speaker. The article demonstrates that the choice of different language means for conveying simile is dictated by such specific characteristics of the social layer to which communicants pertain as leading values, level of education, income, and the degree of freedom in expressing emotions. The article concludes that simile in speech of upper class representatives is expressed by neutral vocabulary to convey positive emotions and informal vocabulary to demonstrate hyperbolized negative evaluation, reflecting a critical and ironic evaluation of everyday events. Simile in the statements of middle class speakers is expressed in formal vocabulary, French words, rhymes, political terms, clichés, deformed phraseological units, which reflect the desire to imitate the upper classes, indicate modesty and self-doubt of the communicants. Simile in the judgments of lower-class Englishmen is conveyed by argotisms, helping to express an outburst of negative emotions, as well as by religious and literary allusions that are misused and contain an abundance of logical errors.

In Conversation on the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

Sarah Frankcom worked at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester between 2000 and 2019, and was the venue’s first sole Artistic Director from 2014. In this interview conducted in summer 2019, she discusses her time at the theatre and what she has learned from leading a major cultural organization and working with it. She reflects on a number of her own productions at this institution, including Hamlet, The Skriker, Our Town, and Death of a Salesman, and discusses the way the theatre world has changed since the beginning of her career as she looks forward to being the director of LAMDA. Rachel Clements lectures on theatre at the University of Manchester. She has published on playwrights Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp, among others, and has edited Methuen student editions of Lucy Prebble’s Enron and Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange. She is Book Reviews editor of NTQ.

The Identity Issue of the Colonized and the Colonizer in Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill

One of the significant points in post-colonial literature is identity issues. The analysis of these identity issues should be focused not only on the colonized character but also the colonialist. It is obvious why post-colonial scholars are concerned with the colonized as they are the victims of colonialism. However, the colonizer must also face complex issues of identity when arriving in the colonial place. The purpose of this article is to examine the identity issues undergone by Joshua, the colonial subject, and by Clive, the colonizer, with reference to Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill in the colonial period. The concept of hybridity by Homi Bhabha can explain the issue of Joshua’s identity since he has “double” portrays of the identity as legacy of colonialism. Bhabha created the terms the “third space” or the “in-between” to describe the condition of the colonized people. Clive as the colonizer used to be a person without particular authority in his own country before arriving to the colonial land. Suddenly, his identity has shifted into someone who has privileges and authority. The colonizer’s identity is not complete without the colonized. The colonized and the colonizer depend on each other. The colonized and the colonizer’s identities will be fragmented if one of them is missing.