Performing the Female Alternative in Victorian Popular Drama: The “Girl of the Period” and the “Fast Girl”

During the nineteenth century, theatregoing became the favoured entertainment of both the lower and upper classes in London. As Davis (1994, 307) suggests, the plays were a “mirrored reflection” of society, and they had the ability to reflect important socio-political issues on stage, while also influencing people’s opinion about them. Thus, by turning to the popular stage of the mid-century we can better understand social issues like the Woman Question, or the tensions around imperial policies, among others. As such, this article scrutinises the ways in which Victorian popular drama influenced the period’s ideal of femininity by using stock characters inspired by real women’s movements. Two such cases are the “Girl of the Period” and the “Fast Girl”, protofeminists that would go on to influence the New Woman of the fin-de-siècle. We analyse two plays from the mid-century: the Adelphi’s Our Female American Cousin (1860), by Charles Gayler, and the Strand’s My New Place (1863), by Arthur Wood. As this article attests, popular plays like these would inadvertently bring into the mainstream the ongoing political fight for female rights through their use of transgressive female characters and promotion of scenarios where alternative feminine identities could be performed and imagined.

‘No comfort talking when there’s a man around’: Maura Laverty’s Tolka Row (1951) and a neglected tradition of popular drama at the Gate Theatre, Dublin

This essay presents a case for Maura Laverty’s play Tolka Row (1951) to be recognised as a highly-accomplished prototype of the soap opera in Ireland. It argues that Tolka Row is an important Irish iteration of a quintessentially modern form that swept across Europe and the rest of the world in tandem with advances in broadcasting in the twentieth century. The analysis focuses on the unique way in which the play portrays the lived experiences of working-class women through unadorned, everyday ‘talk’. The innovative approach to dialogue in Tolka Row situates the play as an important precursor to the development of the television serial in Ireland – not merely due to its popularity and working-class milieu, as has been acknowledged in the past, but due to its creative formal characteristics. This paper thus suggests a reassessment of the legacy of the Gate Theatre, which has to date been defined primarily in relation to its production of avant-garde plays. While the Gate has been widely acknowledged as a bastion of European modernism in Ireland, Tolka Row forms part of the theatre’s contribution to the development of a different kind of response to modernization, in the form of popular culture. By drawing on previously unexplored archival material which shows evidence of significant cuts to the original script, this paper suggests that the directors of Gate Theatre Productions – Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Líammóir – either denied or disavowed the extent to which a more popular drama could impact Irish theatre and society. Keywords: Gate Theatre, Maura Laverty, Tolka Row, serial, soap, popular culture, consciousness raising.

A Brechtian perspective on London Road: Class representations, dialectics and the ‘gestic’ character of music from stage to screen

This article uses Brechtian philosophy to assess the role of music and song in the audience reception of the ‘verbatim musical’ London Road. The first section analyses class representations in London Road, with a particular focus on the dialectics and the ‘gestic’ role of the music and song. The second section explores how the adaptation from stage to screen further affects the dialectics of the musical and, paradoxically, serves key Brechtian aims. I focus on two dramaturgical changes in the adaptation from stage to screen: the chronological order of the narrative and the alternation of interview sections and dramatized sections, which resembles the structure of the popular drama-doc genre. Given that reordering and restaging the original verbatim numbers affected audience reception, I analyse the way the meaning is affected through the Brechtian notions of alienation and the gestic character of music. Throughout, I discuss class representations and relevant dialectical implications.

Fish, Firemen, and Prize Fighters

Burlesque drama—arguably the most widespread form of theatrical entertainment in nineteenth-century Britain—brought the Iliad and Aeneid to a wider range of spectators than those who traditionally encountered ancient literature and mythology at school. These entertainments both exploited contemporary performance culture and enacted the tensions between their composite ancient and modern sources. This chapter focuses on four successful examples of epic repackaged for the London stage, by renowned playwrights at leading theatres, who particularly revelled in negotiating the transformation of classical epic into popular drama: Thomas Dibdin’s Melodrama Mad! or, The Siege of Troy (1819, Surrey Theatre), Charles Selby’s Judgment of Paris; or, The Pas de Pippins (1856, Adelphi), Francis Cowley Burnand’s Dido (1860, St James’s), and his Paris, or Vive Lemprière! (1866, Strand). Analysis of these burlesques reveals deliberate anachronistic juxtapositions which turned the epic performances into complex games of identifying—or overlooking—their varied references.

Wacana Iklan Parodi Jepang Fanta Gakuen Sensei Series

Research aimed to understand the message sent by the sender by analyzing critically the substence used and built the situation inside Japanese parody advertisement titled Fanta Gakuen Sensei Series. This research used qualitative descriptive method and provided two parody advertisement videos as data. The data were described and analyzed with Guy Cook’s Advertising Discourse Theory to reveal the substance used and built the context and situation inside the advertisements and Foucault’s Power and Discipline Theory to understand the message trying to be conveyed by looking into relationship between teachers and students in Japan. Result of the analysis shows that to avoid monotonous advertisements, Fanta uses advertisements parodying a popular drama during that era and adding humor into them, so the receiver will remind it for a long time. This is not just persuasive, but the advertisement’s strategy in those advertisements is also informative and inviting the target group to think critically. Through social context, these advertisements are intended to remind children to be disciplined regarding their daily behaviors and to obey and respect their teachers all the time. The producer also intends to remind that during hardships or strange situation, children should not take them seriously and be happy with Fanta.