Contemporary Adaptations of King Lear: Power and Dramatic Space in William Shakespeare, Edward Bond and Elaine Feinstein

In his tragedy King Lear (1605) William Shakespeare explores the human psyche through a story of an old king who gives up his land to his two eldest daughters and finds himself forced to wander in the space of the outcasts. In his modern version of this play entitled: Lear, Edward Bond resumes Shakespeare’s analysis of space and power in the figure of a monomaniac father who raises a wall against his enemies. The division of inner-outer spaces present in Bond is further explored in Elaine Feinstein’s and the Women Theatre Group’s work: Lear’s Daughters, which immerses the audience into the early years of Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. In this contemporary prequel to Shakespeare’s play the three princesses discover the world and the space they occupy in it from their seclusion in the castle.

Darren Aronofsky's Dramatic Space

American cinema significantly makes use of universal narratives which originate from myths and religious stories. These narratives which are accepted universally address universe of common meaning values of humanity and people's common perceptions. Noah, directed by Darren Aronofsky, had a great box office success thanks to having a story which was based on a universally accepted holy narration. The director refictionalizes the narratives which serve as an inspirational source for the movie in order to adapt them to the cinematographic language and to express himself better through these narratives. Accordingly, Noah, the reinterpretation of a universal narrative by Aronofsky, is seen as a topic of analysis and evaluated from an intertextual perspective by a descriptive film analysis.

Réflexions sur l’espace comique. L’exemple du Mariage de Figaro

"Reflections on Comic Space. The Example of The Marriage of Figaro. This study shows from the example of the Marriage of Figaro how the space defined by the dramatic text within fiction has a creative energy and a range of meaning which can be compared to that of the speech or the acting of the characters. Suzanne’s armchair is the centre of a long play of scenes in the 1st act: this inert object then constitutes the crux of the action and embodies the force of chance fighting against the Figaro industry, a bit like fate in the tragedy fights against the active will of the heroes. The corner of the park under the chestnut trees in the last act plays the same role by precipitating all the intrigue and all the characters, in favour of the night, in a game of masks, misunderstandings and deceptions which summarize the issues of the intrigue and untie it. Figaro’s monologue located at the entrance to this dramatic space gives the key to its functioning: human life is governed by Chance, which is the god of comedy. Consequently, the question of Being becomes that of being there. This awareness by Figaro opens at the heart of comic space a subjectivation by spatialization, the secret of which is that we are spatial beings, that is to say social beings, defined in everything and for everything by our relationships and by the successive situations in which we form, act and live: lucid and disillusioned awareness of our constitutive “spatiality”. Keywords: Beaumarchais, The Marriage of Figaro, comic space, dramatic techniques, armchair, tragedy, spatial beings, social beings. "

Opening Spaces

This paper explores the construction of dramatic space in the prologues of classical Greek drama. Drawing from theater scholarship on the phenomenology of space, I show how tragedians and comedians alike experimented with how to shape their audience’s understanding of a play’s setting. I focus on opening scenes in plays by Sophocles and Aristophanes where a character sees with and for the audience, and demonstrate how these moments of staged spectatorship are not necessarily straightforward or seamless; they can facilitate the viewing of dramatic space but also, by laying it bare, reveal its complications. Sometimes there are multiple representational possibilities for physical space within and around the theater; sometimes physical and fictional space are to be seen simultaneously; sometimes the representational gap between physical and fictional space is kept open for a surprisingly long time. Such exposure of the process of theatrical representation, I argue, can draw the audience in as a co-participant in a drama’s production.

Espacios, sombras, no-lugares

The present contribution aims to study two pieces of the Catalan drama author Lluïsa Cunillé, Barcelona, mapa d’ombres and Islàndia, and the rhapsodic pulsion of these texts in their relation to space: dramatic space and literary space. It also focuses on non-places and the notion of nowhere, and finally we examine the function of some touristic guides.

The foration of signs in the litature of children by Mohammed Muwafaq selima: تشكيل العلامات في أدب الأطفال عند محمد موفق سليمة

This study points out the structure signs in children's literature by Mohammed Mowafaq Salima and is divided into preface and two large parts. The preface deals with the signs and the children's literature، then introduces the writer and children's literature according to him. Then comes the first chapter which is entitled The first signs from (3- 7 years) in two subjects، the first one studies the language; the word، and the simple sentence. While the second subject deals with the image and includes the image function، the solidarity of the word and the image. The second chapter deals with signs and language، and includes two sections: the language which begins by studying syntax، and style with its characteristics. Followed by the second section which studies the structure of the sign and includes directly، and symbol. The research concludes with the third chapter، which deals with composite marks from (8- 12 years). It also includes two sections. The first section deals with the narration and the sign to study the structure of storytelling، personality، events، time، and place. The second section examines the theater and the sign in drama structure، conflict، drama character، time، and dramatic space. The conclusion then presents the results and recommendations.

Staging the Liminal

Chapter 3 implements the notion of liminality (the experience or condition of the betwixt and between) in an analysis of character and diegetic space in Jarry’s Ubu roi and Maeterlinck’s one-acts. Both playwrights’ characters are uncanny schematizations of the human form that blur the distinctions between subject and object, human and non-human, animate and inanimate. I examine the uncanny as a category of liminality, invoking Victor Turner, Antonin Artaud, the ‘uncanny valley’ theory of Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, and the fin-de-siècle cult of the marionette. Both playwrights also refuse to localize dramatic space, to transform it into a specific Somewhere by means of consistent diegetic framing. Deliberately eschewing any geographical or historical consistency in his use of proper names and toponyms, Jarry foregrounds the liminal character of his ‘Poland’ by mixing and matching names, accents, and costumes from various periods and locales. Maeterlinck, meanwhile, underscores the neither-here-nor-there-ness or indeterminacy of the dramatic situations in L’Intruse, Intérieur, and Les Aveugles.

Dramatyczne przestrzenie Andrzeja Wajdy

This editorial is an impressionistic work on Andrzej Wajda’s output, predominantly emphasising its dramatic nature. The text presents the uniqueness of Andrzej Wajda’s creative work in such diverse forms of art as if they were one – his painting metamorphosed into film, drawing into screenplay, urban space into a theatre stage. Wajda is seen here not only as a director, but also as a contemporary dramatist, who creates the dramatic space of history’s traps, who dramatises the fate of the individual, and who interprets the drama of the philosophical stage.