Matthew Franks. Subscription Theater: Democracy and Drama in Britain and Ireland, 1880–1939

Matthew Franks’s Subscription Theater: Democracy and Drama in Britain and Ireland, 1880–1939 argues that subscription reflected and nurtured the democratic impulses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both challenged and contributed to the commercial theatre, and established the canon of modern drama.

Entertaining Prospects: Garrison and Gold Town Theatre in New Zealand c.1850–1870

<p><b>Theatres established throughout New Zealand during the mid-nineteenth century offered colonial audiences, even those in smaller settlements, access to a vast array of live performance and popular dramatic amusements. Examining several garrison and gold towns and experimenting with the use of various digital quantitative and spatial methodologies, this thesis explores the interplay between playhouses and colonial audiences. The study focuses particularly on the extent to which theatre operated as a vehicle and arena for the spread of Anglo culture, performance of gendered work, and the production or degradation of colonial respectability. Providing collective excitement, diversion, and respite from otherwise monotonous or solitary activities, theatres were significant features of civic society and cultural life between 1850 and 1870. Garrison amateur dramatics in Auckland and New Plymouth performed by soldiers stationed in New Zealand during the quieter 1850s proved that there were prospective constituencies of theatregoers with both appetite and appreciation sufficient to support regular theatrical amusements. Theatre expanded as gold fever spread across Otago and then the West Coast during the 1860s. From 1862, Dunedin’s theatre scene exploded as gold attracted diggers and auxiliaries from far and wide. </b></p> <p>Theatres were prominent markers of civic development. Whether in transient gold town settlements or commercial urban centres, playhouses shared a common repertoire introduced by performers and managers from across the Anglo-world. Performing contemporary plays from Britain, Australia, and North America, theatre companies in colonial New Zealand brought with them experience and reputations cultivated on touring circuits elsewhere. Analysing how these theatre people acted as conduits of cultural transmission, the study utilises network and spatial analyses to demonstrate how theatre provided access to contemporary theatre culture and thus situated playgoers within a constituency of cultural consumers throughout a vast Anglo-theatre network.</p> <p>The thesis also investigates the characteristics of theatres as colonial workplaces. Focusing predominantly on commercial theatre, the study explores how, in operating outside broader social conventions, playhouses enjoyed flexibility in defining acceptable work. Quantitative analyses of house size data highlighting the fluctuation of audiences, and debtors’ petitions filed by theatre professionals, demonstrate the economic precarity of theatre business. Nonetheless, theatre women enjoyed greater freedom and opportunity for advancement than in other professions. The analysis demonstrates the uneven extent to which gender was used as grounds for criticism in New Zealand. </p> <p>Colonial settlements were sensitive to ideas of reputation and progress. As public spaces, theatres featured heavily in contemporary discussion and debate which interpreted venues and repertoire as variously civilizing and corrupting. Alongside amusement and leisure, playhouses were also sites of commerce, social mixing, heightened emotion, drunkenness, and disorder. Assessing how theatre and theatregoing played into a broader discourse of respectability reflecting societal anxiety over colonial reputation, the study argues that theatres were hotly debated because public entertainments were taken to reflect the general character of colonial inhabitants.</p>

Entertaining Prospects: Garrison and Gold Town Theatre in New Zealand c.1850–1870

<p><b>Theatres established throughout New Zealand during the mid-nineteenth century offered colonial audiences, even those in smaller settlements, access to a vast array of live performance and popular dramatic amusements. Examining several garrison and gold towns and experimenting with the use of various digital quantitative and spatial methodologies, this thesis explores the interplay between playhouses and colonial audiences. The study focuses particularly on the extent to which theatre operated as a vehicle and arena for the spread of Anglo culture, performance of gendered work, and the production or degradation of colonial respectability. Providing collective excitement, diversion, and respite from otherwise monotonous or solitary activities, theatres were significant features of civic society and cultural life between 1850 and 1870. Garrison amateur dramatics in Auckland and New Plymouth performed by soldiers stationed in New Zealand during the quieter 1850s proved that there were prospective constituencies of theatregoers with both appetite and appreciation sufficient to support regular theatrical amusements. Theatre expanded as gold fever spread across Otago and then the West Coast during the 1860s. From 1862, Dunedin’s theatre scene exploded as gold attracted diggers and auxiliaries from far and wide. </b></p> <p>Theatres were prominent markers of civic development. Whether in transient gold town settlements or commercial urban centres, playhouses shared a common repertoire introduced by performers and managers from across the Anglo-world. Performing contemporary plays from Britain, Australia, and North America, theatre companies in colonial New Zealand brought with them experience and reputations cultivated on touring circuits elsewhere. Analysing how these theatre people acted as conduits of cultural transmission, the study utilises network and spatial analyses to demonstrate how theatre provided access to contemporary theatre culture and thus situated playgoers within a constituency of cultural consumers throughout a vast Anglo-theatre network.</p> <p>The thesis also investigates the characteristics of theatres as colonial workplaces. Focusing predominantly on commercial theatre, the study explores how, in operating outside broader social conventions, playhouses enjoyed flexibility in defining acceptable work. Quantitative analyses of house size data highlighting the fluctuation of audiences, and debtors’ petitions filed by theatre professionals, demonstrate the economic precarity of theatre business. Nonetheless, theatre women enjoyed greater freedom and opportunity for advancement than in other professions. The analysis demonstrates the uneven extent to which gender was used as grounds for criticism in New Zealand. </p> <p>Colonial settlements were sensitive to ideas of reputation and progress. As public spaces, theatres featured heavily in contemporary discussion and debate which interpreted venues and repertoire as variously civilizing and corrupting. Alongside amusement and leisure, playhouses were also sites of commerce, social mixing, heightened emotion, drunkenness, and disorder. Assessing how theatre and theatregoing played into a broader discourse of respectability reflecting societal anxiety over colonial reputation, the study argues that theatres were hotly debated because public entertainments were taken to reflect the general character of colonial inhabitants.</p>

Theatrical Milieu: Investigating Drama and Theatre in tandem with Socio-Political Landscape of Pakistan

This study is an attempt to trace the impacts of socio-political conditions in the formation and evolution of drama and theatre traditions in Pakistan. It provides the genesis of theatre and drama in Pakistan intertwining it with the past and present situations of this genre of literature. It also ventures at the inert position of drama and theatre in English in Pakistan. Qualitative textual analysis is conducted to analyze and highlight the major available critical acumen in the genre of Pakistani drama and theatre. The methodology adopted is interpretive of the theatrical performances by major theatre groups, and the contributions of key playwrights in cementing the foundation of drama and theatre traditions. The major findings are related to the socio-political situations prevalent since the inception of Pakistan and their significance in shaping both dramas in writing and drama in performance. It also examines the role of pioneer theatrical groups and their projects that carved a niche in the theatrical landscape of Pakistan. As compared to fiction theatre and drama remained sporadic and lackluster affair in Pakistan, it is vital to have a deeper understanding and clarity of the socio-political issues that shaped resistance &political theatres and later commercial theatre groups.

Performing Conversion

This volume asks, how did theatrical practice shape the multiplying forms of conversion that emerged in early modern Europe? Each chapter focuses on a specific city or selection of cities, beginning with Venice, then moving to London, Mexico City, Tlaxcalla, Seville, Madrid, Amsterdam, Zürich, Berne, and Lucerne (among others). Collectively, these studies establish a picture of early modernity as an age teeming with both excitement and anxiety over conversional activity. In addition to considering the commercial theatre that produced professional dramatists such as Lope de Vega and Thomas Middleton, the volume surveys a wide variety of other kinds of theatre that brought theatricality into formative relationship with conversional practice. Examples range from civic pageantry in Piazza San Marco, to mechanical statues in Amsterdam’s pleasure labyrinths, to the dramatic dialogues performed by students of rhetoric in colonial Mexico. As a whole, the volume addresses issues of conversion as it pertains to early modern theatre, literature, theology, philosophy, economics, urban culture, globalism, colonialism, trade, and cross-cultural exchange.

César Falcón and the Theatre Company Nosotros

In the theatre scene of the 1930s in Spain, in addition to the traditional commercial theatre and the republican avant-garde of Las Misiones Pedagógicas or La Barraca, an alternative proposal emerged whose objectives went beyond the pedagogical and the artistic. Proletarian, or political theatre, linked to European theatrical avant-garde with Soviet roots, was inspired by the principles of Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. They proposed, from a Marxist perspective, class struggle as means to achieve an alternative socialist model. The theatre company Nosotros, directed by Peruvian exile César Falcón, is the best example of this theatrical avant-garde.

Staging the Delinquent: Edwardian Theatre and The Hooligan

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).

The Politics of Happiness in Richard Brome’s The Queen and Concubine

In this article, I discuss Richard Brome’s tragicomedy The Queen and Concubine (1635–1636), focusing on how the play reflects the iconography of Charles I as well as Stuart ideals of statecraft. I argue that the play’s representation of a royal ruler in a pastoral setting draws on Van Dyck’s portraiture and on Charles I’s masques, as well as on Lipsius’s political concept of ‘love’. I claim that the play promotes a ‘politics of happiness’ which affirms the Caroline ideology of royal rule. My reading of Brome’s play aims at furthering the critical understanding of the cultural and political concerns shared by court drama and drama written for the commercial theatre in the Caroline period.

International tours of theatre as a means of intercultural cooperation

The 21st century theatre is open to new ideas, new findings and presentation of own works to the consumer on not only the national, but also international level. This stands for communication and cooperation with the consumer and organisations. Theatre tours abroad are one of the forms of intercultural cooperation among organisations and consumers. The article analyses the peculiarities of organising theatre tours, its benefit and levels of cooperation. The study includes an analysis of organising national and commercial theatre tours on an international level which allows concluding that intercultural cooperation can occur on the following three levels: interpersonal (micro), interinstitutional (macro) and international (mezzo). The study reveals another new – mixed – level; however, a new mediating element can be seen in cooperation on micro or macro levels. Both types of theatre (state and non-state) see evident benefit of international tours for the theatre, the troupe and the country. A country can use this as a means of soft power in its foreign policies.