Navigating New Approaches for Grassroot Community Theatre in a (Post-)Covid World

The cultural revolution of 1968 paved the way for many artists to reconsider how and where theatre was made. Community theatre gained currency and one company who became prominent during this cultural shift was Welfare State, later Welfare State International. They were one of the theatre companies who focused not only on a community theatre aesthetic but a grassroot one. I examine the radicality of community theatre and consider the efficacy of the historical approaches to engaging with communities in a (Post-)Covid world. I acknowledge and explore the shifting understanding of communities and assert that a deeper engagement is needed to foster collectivity (Tannahill 2016; Fişek 2019; Weston 2020; Bartley 2021). To reconsider the role that theatre may play in the future, I focus on a grassroot approach to community-led work and posit that location will be a key component to how theatre is made as we emerge from a pandemic.

Performative Encounters: Memory Violence in Sleep Deprivation Chamber

In their biographical play Sleep Deprivation Chamber (1996), Adrienne Kennedy and her son Adam P. Kennedy retrace family memories to describe the aftermath of police brutality in 1990s America. They narrate the brutal beating of a middle-class, young Black man named Teddy and the events taking place later at trial. The playwrights make use of “memory violence” (Olick 2018) to elicit the spectators’ emotional response and construct a performative encounter in which the figures of perpetrator, survivor and bystander are questioned and redefined. Through this violence of remembering, they manage to insert unrecorded moments of abuse in our collective imaginary, moving from staged nightmares, distant courtrooms and individual sleep deprivation chambers into a figurative shared space where Black lives do matter.

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.

“Come, Dark-eyed Sleep”: Michael Field and the Performance of the Lyric as a Radical Fantasy

This article seeks to illustrate how the Michael Fields articulate their Sapphic poetry in Long Ago (1889) not only in keeping with their own Shakespearean aspirations and with Robert Browning’s hybrid formula of dramatic lyrics, but also in connection with Jonathan Culler’s theory of the lyric as a performative genre. Much recent scholarship has broken ground in the rediscovery and reappraisal of the Fields’ literary stature, yet the general critical approach has been divisive in addressing their poetry and their verse dramas separately. Some critics have taken heed of how their lyrics in general exhibit an intrinsic dramatic temper, yet no systematic inquiry has discussed how this lyrical dramaticity is manifest in any particular instance. Thus, this article singles out Long Ago’s second poem for its powerful performative energy, offering a close reading of each line, and demonstrating that it amounts to a hybrid dramatic lyric, as well as a tragic and transgressive performance in which a new Sappho takes centre stage as a Dionysian apologist of radical erotic fantasies.

Adaptation against Myth: Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott and the Violence of Austerity

This article explores, from the standpoint of socio-political myth-criticism, the processes of revision and adaptation carried out in Gary Owen’s 2015 play Iphigenia in Splott. The play, a dramatic monologue composed in the rhythms of slam poetry, rewrites the classical Greek myth of Iphigenia in order to denounce the profound injustice of the sacrifices demanded by austerity policies in Europe—and more specifically, in Britain—in the recession following the financial crash of 2008. Reassessing contemporary social, economic and political issues that have resulted in the marginalisation and dehumanisation of the British working class, this study probes the dramatic and mythical artefacts in Owen’s harrowing monologue by looking back to Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, the classical play which inspires the title of Owen’s piece and which serves as the mythical and literary background for the story of Effie. The aim is to demonstrate how Owen’s innovative adaptation of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, slurred out in verse, resentful and agonising, speaks out a desperate plea against myth, that is, against a dominant social ethos that legitimises its own violence against the most vulnerable—those who, as in the classical myth, suffer the losses that keep our boats afloat.

Theatre and Performance Studies in English: An Introduction

Theatre and Performance Studies in English: An Introduction.

Disrupting Temporalities, Multiplying the Self: An Age-Studies Approach to Two Contemporary Plays

In our increasingly aged societies, old age continues to be equated with decline (Gullette 2004) and becomes the source of the most invisible yet persistent forms of discrimination, namely, ageism (Butler 1969). Even though theatre, like other artistic forms, has traditionally promoted a negative image of ageing (Mangan 2013), some contemporary plays have begun to favour more complex portrayals of old age. Nevertheless, when considered from a gender-based angle, these portrayals often acquire quite a problematic undertone: while roles for older female actors remain exceptional, many peripheral or, if centred, mainly problematic dramatizations of ageing femininity in the theatre arena fuel age prejudice against older women on and off stage. This article offers an age-focused analysis of two plays that counteract stereotypical images of female ageing through various dramaturgical strategies: Michel Tremblay’s Albertine in Five Times (1984) and Matt Hartley’s Here I Belong (2016). Through a comparative analysis of the Naturalistic and Non-Naturalistic devices employed in the two plays, and the examination of the meanings of age generated by the characterization of the two female protagonists, we hope to demonstrate that Tremblay’s and Hartley’s texts contribute to creating a truly anti-ageist theatre while at the same time enhancing the visibility of the older woman on the stage.

Performing Political Persuasion in the United States in the Early Years of the Republic

Theater productions were born out of a paradox in the United States of the Revolutionary War and shortly afterwards. While the nation’s dominant ideology was anti-theatrical, theater often served a nationalist agenda, co-defining the new American nation and its nascent identities – such were, for example, productions of Joseph Addison’s Cato at Valley Forge in 1778 and William Dunlap’s André at the New Park in New York in 1798. These theater events empowered the audience to publicly perform their national identity as Americans and exercise their republican fervor. Similarly, a production of Bunker-Hill by J. D. Burk at the Haymarket in Boston in 1797 was crucial in helping define the social and political identities of its audiences, who were motivated to attend the performances as an expression of their partisan preferences. This article shows that literary, theatrical and social practices served to constitute performatively the early American national identity.

An Exploration into the Satiric Significance of Abuse in Selected Nigerian Drama

A general survey of the contemporary Nigerian theatre and drama reveals that several contemporary Nigerian dramatists have harnessed the art of abuse—invectives— as a device for conveying meanings in their works and achieving their satiric goals. These dramatists create characters that engage abuse to articulate the thematic concerns of their drama, accentuate the conflicts in them, and establish the socio-cultural and political setting of their drama. Although extant works on satiric plays have focused on the use of language, and other satiric devices such as grotesque, irony, burlesque, innuendo, sarcasm, among others (Adeoti 1994; Adenigbo & Alugbin 2020; Mireku-Gyimah 2013; Nyamekye & Debrah 2016), sufficient scholarly attention has not been given to the art of abuse as a trope in Nigerian drama. The article explores the artistic significance of abuse and its forms in selected works of two contemporary Nigerian dramatists: Femi Osofisan’s Altine’s Wrath (2002) and Ola Rotimi’s Who is a Patriot? (2006). These two plays are selected because they manifest ample deployment of the art of abuse and engage various sociopolitical issues. Hence, the article discusses how the art of abuse in these plays projects and addresses such sociopolitical realities as oppression, exploitation, resistance, self-interest versus national interest, and capitalism, among others. The article engages the principles of superiority theory of humour as espoused by Henri Bergson (2003) for textual analysis. It contends and concludes that abuse, as an inherent part of social and human interactions, has been an effective tool in satirising ills in individuals and society at large.

Lecturers’ Training Needs in EMI Programmes: Beyond Language Competence

This paper reports the results of an analysis of English as a Medium Instruction (EMI) lecturers’ training needs at a Spanish state university. In order to carry out this analysis, participants were asked to complete a quantitative questionnaire and participate in a survey with open questions adapted from Pérez-Cañado 2020). Both analysis tools explored the lecturers’ needs in relation to specific areas: linguistic competence, methodology, materials and resources, continuing professional development training and their overall rating of the EMI programme. The results show that, on the one hand, EMI teachers feel that their linguistic competence is sufficient to conduct classes in English. On the other hand, participants seem less confident as far as their methodological competence is concerned and call for more specific ongoing training. These findings are mostly in consonance with the results of other studies carried out in similar contexts (Dafouz 2018; Macaro et al. 2019; Pérez-Cañado 2020; Coelho in preparation) but they also provide some new insights which should be taken into consideration in the design of specific training programmes for lecturers involved in EMI in Higher Education.