Staging Arthur

In 2019, the author of this essay directed a rehearsed, script-in-hand performance of Thomas Hughes’s The Misfortunes of Arthur in Gray's Inn Chapel. This essay records the rehearsal process, staging, and design. It explains the choice of this play for revival and how text-cutting shaped the way the story was to be told. The author also discusses the play’s language, including echoes of it in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and asks what staging this play tells us about the relationship between Inns of Court drama and the wider world of English professional theatre and, more generally, European theatre of the time.

MILITARY MOBILITY IN THE EUROPEAN THEATRE

To ensure its defense and deterrence posture, NATO has to prove the ability to quickly deploy, reinforce and sustain its forces across the entire SACEUR Area of Responsibility. To ensure the end-state of free deployment of forces across Europe, the Alliance identified the need to abolish legal and administrative barriers and to improve the infrastructure status and transportations capacity. Both NATO and the European Union recognized the military mobility deficiencies as a strategic vulnerability for Europe in case of a peer-to-peer conflict scenario.

The Boundaries of Funniness and the Dilution of Audience Identity in the Musical-Dramatic Art

This paper sets out to examine the transformation of comedy in the history of European theatre. Musical performance extends the semiotic space of the original genre into a field of fluid and open meanings and signs incorporating and suggesting many interpretations, some of which are ironic. It is argued in contemporary aesthetics that, on the one hand, art cannot exist without a discourse interpreting it, while on the other, there exists the demand to avoid interpretation, which at once legitimizes the aesthetic effect and castrates the object of art. Provocation is used as an instrument for solving the problems of observing the object of art in a new way and understanding modern reality, and provocation is not complete without irony and self-irony. Wit, irony, and comicality are transformed as fitting into the style of the absurd and deconstructing the border between the funny and the serious. The purpose of such provocations is to put the viewer into a position of uncertainty and aesthetic shock, and this stupor inexorably leads the beholder to encounter the object of art and nurtures a new understanding of their own self. This clash of the spectator’s viewpoint created by provocative shows dispossesses theatre productions of the status of “museum exhibits”. This paper will examine the organicness of elements of the laughter culture and comic devices for musical and dramatic theatre.

Literary Musings and Critical Mediations: Interview with Rev. Fr Professor Amechi N. Akwanya

Reverend Father Professor Amechi Nicholas Akwanya is one of the towering scholars of literature in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world. For decades, and still counting, Fr. Prof. Akwanya has worked arduously, professing literature by way of teaching, researching, and writing in the Department of English and Literary Studies of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. To his credit, therefore, this genius of a literature scholar has singularly authored over 70 articles, six critically engaging books, a novel, and three volumes of poetry. His PhD thesis, Structuring and Meaning in the Nigerian Novel, which he completed in 1989, is a staggering 734-page document. Professor Akwanya has also taught many literature courses, namely: European Continental Literature, Studies in Drama, Modern Literary Theory, African Poetry, History of Theatre: Aeschylus to Shakespeare, European Theatre since Ibsen, English Literature Survey: the Beginnings, Semantics, History of the English Language, History of Criticism, Modern Discourse Analysis, Greek and Roman Literatures, Linguistics and the Teaching of Literature, Major Strands in Literary Criticism, Issues in Comparative Literature, Discourse Theory, English Poetry, English Drama, Modern British Literature, Comparative Studies in Poetry, Comparative Studies in Drama, Studies in African Drama, and Philosophy of Literature. A Fellow of Nigerian Academy of Letters, Akwanya’s open access works have been read over 109,478 times around the world. In this wide-ranging interview, he speaks to Andrew Bula, a young lecturer from Baze University, Abuja, shedding light on a variety of issues around which his life revolves.

A Stage of Transition: Locating European Identity, Culture and Memory at the Gate Theatre: Frank McGuinness’ ‘The Thrupenny Opera’ and Peer Gynt and Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People

This paper explores contemporary Irish-European identity as staged at the Gate Theatre, Dublin. The selected plays challenge contemporary Irish perspectives on form, style, politics and scenography and as the paper argues, highlight the interconnected influence of European theatre, culture, and identity as performed at the Gate Theatre. This paper examines European and Irish memory and identity with specific attention to the ‘language’ of performance as it is transposed cross-culturally and as performed to Irish audiences. Questions explored include the adaptation of memoir for/in performance, within German-Irish identity and as explored in The Speckled People (2011), a stage adaptation of family memoir by the German-born Irish-based writer, Hugo Hamilton. The paper, moreover, excavates the representation of identity and home in Frank McGuinness’ adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1988) and in the 2014 Gate production of Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s The Three Penny Opera. Drawing on newly released archive materials, this paper puts forward theoretical questions around the performance and reception of the concepts of home, memory and identity in the broader European context. This paper argues the Gate brought European stories and experimental styles to the Irish stage, but also how these identities and modes interacted and engaged audiences in new dialogues. Keywords: European Theatre, Gate Theatre Dublin, Frank McGuinness, Bertolt Brecht, Hugo Hamilton, Joe Vaněk, Scenography

BREXIT DEAL AND THE EUROPEAN UNION: PROSPECTS & CONCERNS

The approach to Brexit in the current political dilemma is challengeable for the seekers who want to understand the problem with clarity and perceptibility with the very nature of the European politics. It’s under process of becoming coherent and unprecedented in terms of its consequences. Although the opening and ending of the curtain of the European theatre has always been spectacular for its peoples and to the peoples of nearby continents connected to it by a vicarious cycle and in an extended perspective to the rest of the world, but this time the actors are emerging with a new play with a new set of performances. This research is tend to apply the analytical and argumentative approach for the issue in consideration to take into account the different perspectives of the problem in order to perceive and suggest the divergent possibilities involved in a particular issue not only for the EU members but also for other powers. Explained in it are the factors that at first provide impetus for integration despite the presence of the disintegrating elements at the first place, and then the consideration of emerging politics of preferences, evolved with a passage of time, and let those disintegrating forces overcome.

Von der Rezitation auf die Bühne. Ein übersetzungstheoretischer Werkstattbericht zu zeitgenössischen deutschen Theaterversionen von Senecas Tragödien

Seneca’s dramas brood in the shadows of the Attic tragedies, which are frequently played in theatres all over the world. To this day, it is controversial whether Seneca’s plays were intended for the stage or only for recitation. But the enormous after-effect of these texts in the literature devoted to European theatre (above all in Shakespeare) shows that they themselves are not only part of our cultural heritage, but that it is worthwhile to consider how one might propose a more contemporary staging of these works in order to afford an authentic reception for the first time – and indeed, for a broader public. Admittedly, the texts can and will only find a larger audience if Seneca’s recitation dramas are brought to the contemporary stage in a form and language appropriate to this audience. In a project undertaken by Saarbrücken Classical Philology since 2011, for the first time directly playable German translations are to be produced for this purpose. These take into account the dramaturgical peculiarities of the plays by negotiating between philological considerations and the requirements of performance itself. At the same time, philologically flawless translations of the Latin text into German emerge as the crux of the matter. The present essay will discuss this multiplex process of translation on the basis of an example already tested in a stage performance and in the light of various theories of translation

Las traducciones de teatro español en la Biblioteca Digital EMOTHE

This article describes nineteen translations of plays of Spanish classical theatre offered by the open-access EMOTHE Digital Library of early modern European theatre that is being developed at the Universitat de València (Spain). The commentary focuses on aspects such as the provenance of translations, their translators, their skopos or purpose in relation to theatrical character of the playtexts, and the criteria for selection. It pays special attention to the problem of translating texts with polymetry, following the approaches proposed by James Holmes (1970): mimetic, analogical, organic and extraneous.

SUZANNE BING, EL LEGADO DE UNA MAESTRA OLVIDADA

This article focuses on the life and legacy of Suzanne Bing. She was the pedagogical director and driving force behind the actor’s training research at Théâtre du Vieux Colombier. She played a deci- sive role in the apprenticeship and pedagogical process of an entire ge- neration of practitioners that changed 20th-century European theatre. This brief overview is revealed as a necessity because her figure, despite being crucial in the emergence of physical theatres, has been excluded and forgotten by Theatre’s history. It is a need to restore and contribute to the diffusion of her eminently pedagogical legacy that is linked to the practices of gestural theatre and corporeal mime. Such obliteration leads us to inquire about the mechanisms that made it possible as well as to consider new perspectives in theatre studies. In this path, we em- brace the consideration of a maternal and multiple embodied genealogy of actor's training enabling theatre studies to consider in a more com- plete perspective the great practical innovations that took place in co- llaborative and collective ecosystems where men and women activated and multiplied the practical transmission of their embodied knowledge and acting reforms.