Prospero's "True Preservers": Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, and Giorgio Strehler--Twentieth-Century Directors Approach Shakespeare's The Tempest (review)

2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 134-137
Author(s):  
Marianne Szlyk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Peter Brook ◽  
Giorgio Strehler

THE TEMPEST AND THE BRITISH IMPERIUM IN 1611

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
TRISTAN MARSHALL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Proper Context

Recent moves by New Historicists to evaluate theatrical material from the early modern period have been at the expense of what historians would recognize as acceptable use of historical context. One of the most glaring examples of the dangers of taking a play out of such a proper context has been The Tempest. The play has had a great deal of literary criticism devoted to it, attempting to fit it into comfortable twentieth-century clothing in regard to its commentary on empire, at the expense of what the play's depiction of imperialism meant for the year 1611 when it was written. The purpose of this paper will therefore be to suggest that the play does not actually call into question the Jacobean process of colonization across the Atlantic at all, and suggests that of more importance for its audience would have been the depiction of the hegemony of the island nation of Great Britain as recreated in 1603. Such a historical reconstruction is helped through contrasting Shakespeare's play with the Jonson, Chapman, and Marston collaboration, Eastward Ho, as well as with the anonymous Masque of Flowers and Chapman's Memorable Masque. These works will be used to illustrate just what colonialism might mean for the Jacobean audience when the Virginia project was invoked and suggest that an American tale The Tempest is not.

scholarly journals “Decipher its noises for us”: Understanding Sycorax’s Island in Marina Warner’s Indigo

2012 ◽  
pp. 269
Author(s):  
Erin M. Presley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Gloria Naylor ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The People ◽  
Personal Histories ◽  
The Caribbean

The Marina Warner’s novel Indigo, or Mapping the Waters (1992) explores the effects of colonialism on the islanders of Liamuiga and the Everard family through a complex retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest that spans over three hundred years. Much like the appropriative novels of Gloria Naylor, in which past and present blend and meld, Indigo also suggests that time is not linear in its development. The subtitle, or Mapping the Waters, positions a sense of place at the crux of Warner’s novel. Moving back and forth between the twentieth century and the dawn of the seventeenth century, the novel also shifts between London and the Caribbean, suggesting the global import of Shakespeare’s late romance. The scene, in the Burkean sense, influences the actions of the characters as they struggle to be heard in their respective settings. Language also affects the ways in which these characters come to terms with their personal histories. Ultimately, the novel seeks to displace the hopelessness of Caliban’s decree in The Tempest —“You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse” (1.2.364-65)— by giving a voice to the people silenced by colonialism.

Beerbohm Tree's Production of ‘The Tempest’, 1904

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (44) ◽  
pp. 299-308
Author(s):  
Brian Pearce
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Board Of Directors ◽  
Positive Influence ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Board Of Directors ◽  
The Right ◽  
The University

Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917) is remembered today as a great character actor, as a personality, and as a wit: but as a producer he is seldom considered an important or even a positive influence on the course of Shakespearean interpretation in the twentieth century. Focusing on Tree's 1904 production of The Tempest, Brian Pearce argues that Tree was in fact an original and inventive director. Contrasting the faint praise or contempt of theatre historians with the adoption of many of Tree's ideas in later literary criticism of The Tempest, Pearce also suggests that the acceptance of the right of contemporary experimental directors to act in effect as ‘scenic artists’ sits oddly with attitudes to Tree's work, in which he fulfilled precisely such a role. Brian Pearce completed his PhD at the University of London in 1992, and since returning to South Africa has worked as a theatre director. He is a member of the board of directors of the Durban Theatre Workshop Company, and also teaches drama at Technikon Natal.

Any Event Stems from Combustion: Actors, Audiences, and Theatrical Energy

1992 ◽  
Vol 8 (30) ◽  
pp. 107-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Brook
Keyword(s):  
The Tempest ◽  
Peter Brook ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Cherry Orchard

In the first issue of New Theatre Quarterly (February 1985), David Williams presented a conspective overview of the work of Peter Brook at the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris. More recently, in NTQ26 (May 1991), Paul B. Cohen analyzed Brook's evolving views on the interaction between performers and audience – the worlds of the imagination and the everyday. Here, Peter Brook himself, in conversation with Jean Kalman, discusses with a characteristically eclectic range of references and comparisons the idea of the theatrical ‘event’ and how it is generated, touching in passing on subjects as diverse as the construction and deconstruction of linear narrative and the significance and nature of improvisation. The interviewer, Jean Kalman, is a lighting designer who has collaborated with Peter Brook on many of his productions in recent years, including The Cherry Orchard, The Mahabharata, Woza Albert! and The Tempest.

scholarly journals The Medieval Space: Early Medieval Documents as Stages

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle A. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Empty Space ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Performance ◽  
Theatrical Space ◽  
Postwar Europe ◽  
Peter Brook ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Performance

Peter Brook begins the second chapter ofThe Empty Space,“The Holy Theatre,” with a lament for the loss of sacred approaches to theatre; approaches that satisfy a community's need to make visible its identity, its hope, and its history. In describing the vacuum within the modern theatre once occupied by ceremony—what he defines as the importance of a noble aim for theatre—Brook critiques hollow and backward attempts to fill new and grand spaces with old and meaningless ritual. In postwar Europe, he saw a need for new spaces that “crie[d] out for a new ceremony, but of course it is the new ceremony that should have come first—it is the ceremony in all its meanings that should have dictated the shape of the place.” Brook's assessment of postwar European bourgeois theatre and its search for new and meaningful agendas is framed by conceptions of space as antecedent to action, requiring only performer and audience in order for theatre to occur, and for a space to be called a theatre. Indeed, theatrical space is always a product of well-established cultural performance conventions—a phenomenon common throughout history. Brook's critique focuses on the conventions of theatrical space that developed from the romantic dramas and spectacle-driven performances of the late nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth century. Echoing Bertolt Brecht, Brook rejected theatres that predetermined the limits of drama and performance, arguing that it was necessary to strip them of conventional expectations in order to lay bare their potential. Essentially, he asks: When and how does a space become a theatre?

Puppets and Machines of the Mind: Robert Lepage and the Modernist Heritage

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER INNES
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
Robert Wilson ◽  
Peter Brook ◽  
Post Modernism ◽  
The Mind

The work of Robert Lepage is examined in the context of the avant-garde, from Robert Wilson and Peter Brook, through the French Surrealists, back to Edward Gordon Craig. As well as being an icon of post-modernism, analysis of productions such as Needles and Opium, Elsinore and Zulu Time show the degree to which Lepage has realized Craig's ideals of the Übermarionette, and his screens, as well as ‘Scene’, his concept of a flexible, mechanized performance space. What this demonstrates is the unity of the modernist movement throughout the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Karl Goldmark and Czech national opera: The final operas of Antonín Dvořák and Zdeněk Fibich

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 349-359
Author(s):  
Jiří Kopecký
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Antonin Dvorak ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
International Recognition ◽  
Richard Strauss ◽  
National Opera ◽  
Grand Opera ◽  
The Devil

If Bedřich Smetana is thought to be the father of Czech national opera, Antonín Dvořák and Zdeněk Fibich would be his sons. Czech critics as well as the public expected that Smetana’s successors would bring Czech opera to international recognition. Dvořák and Fibich gave increased attention to opera composition during the 1890s and the beginning of the twentieth century. They both crowned their achievements with monumental operas on subjects with historical settings: Fibich’s The Fall of Arkona (1900) and Dvořák‘s Armida (1904). The reason for this apparent coincidence was, in part, that these works were written after Wagner’s operas and before the operatic successes of Richard Strauss, when it was possible to devise free combinations of symphonically composed scenes, arioso-like vocal lines influenced by verismo, and the dramaturgical effects of grand opera. As a praised model for successful historical opera might have served Karl Goldmark’s famous work Die Königin von Saba, especially in the case of Fibich’s last opera, which was explicitly compared with Goldmark’s opera. Operas on historical subjects form a little-known part of the works of Czech composers, but they extend from Smetana’s piece The Brandenburgers in Bohemia through the late operas of Dvořák and Fibich to Janáček’s two-part opera The Excursions of Mr Brouček. It is a line of operas that present an unforgettable counterpart to many successful Czech theatrical compositions – representative operas and intimate tragedies, comic operas and fairy tales, generally written on subjects from Czech villages and mythology, including Smetana’s Bartered Bride and Libuše, Fibich’s The Tempest and Šárka, Dvořák’s Jakobín, Kate and the Devil and Rusalka, Josef Bohuslav Foerster’s Eva, as well as Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa.

Andres Neumann’s Theatrical Archive. Sources for the History of Contemporary Performing Arts

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-110
Author(s):  
Andrea Giovanni Strangio
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
First Year ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
Peter Brook ◽  
History Of ◽  
University Of Florence ◽  
The University ◽  
Pina Bausch

"The paper, at the conclusion of the work conducted during the first year of the PhD course in Storia delle Arti e dello Spettacolo (History of Cinema, Music, Fine and Performing Arts) at the University of Florence, briefly describes the structure and content of the theatrical archive of Andres Neumann, preserved at the il Funaro Centro Culturale of Pistoia. The fund is a precious instrument of historiography, because it contains documents relating to the main plays of the international theatre of the last thirty years of the twentieth century. After having presented and discussed some examples of documentary types contained in the archive, in particular regarding Tadeusz Kantor and Anatoly Vasiliev, the paper illustrates the prospects for development of this research project. Keywords: Andres Neumann, contemporary theatre, Tadeusz Kantor, Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, Anatoly Vasiliev, il Funaro Centro Culturale, Rondò di Bacco. "

Prospero’s Island as Self-referential Space of Trauma and Despair in Warlikowski’s Production of The Tempest

Tekstualia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 105-116
Author(s):  
Anna Suwalska-Kołecka
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
European Theatre ◽  
Canonical Texts

The main aim of this paper entitled “Prospero’s Island as Self-referential Space of Trauma and Despair in Warlikowski’s Production of The Tempest” is to investigate the solutions that Krzysztof Warlikowski adopted as a director in his production of The Tempest at the Rozmaitości Theatre in Warsaw (2003) to explore the abyss of pain, trauma, and the improbability of forgiveness. Warlikowski, considered today as one of the most distinguished European theatre and opera directors, fi lters the canonical texts of the past through contemporary sensitivity and checks how they can resonate now. Notorious for his drawing on Shakespeare, Warlikowski imbues his 2003 production of The Tempest with the twentieth century experience of terror and totalitarianism. In the analysis, special attention will be paid to the strategies Warlikowski employs to enhance the selfreferential character of the production and to convey a consistent artistic message about forgiveness that may as well be harnessed to obtain power.

Shakespeare in a Fountain: The First Italian Production of The Tempest Directed by Giorgio Strehler in 1948

2004 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-185
Author(s):  
GIAN GIACOMO COLLI
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Giorgio Strehler

The Italian director Giorgio Strehler (1921–97) staged more plays by Shakespeare than by any other playwright, but only a few of his most recent and successful Shakespearean stagings have received international critical attention. By focusing on one of Strehler's early productions, The Tempest of 1948, this article has a double purpose: to examine the cultural context of a production that was quite anomalous for the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, then in its second season, and to underline how, from the beginning of his career, Strehler developed a crucial attention for a mutable theatre space.

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