{"title":"John Freedman, ed. A Dictionary of Emotions in a Time of War: Twenty Short Works by Ukrainian Playwrights Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Laertes Press, 2023. 299 p. £20.00. ISBN 978-1-942281-44-3.","authors":"Bryan Brown","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000179","url":null,"abstract":"Edward and Farrier’s second edited volume turns attentions to historical drag with a collection of examples ranging from nineteenth-century Japan via Barbados to the ‘FunPubs’ofNorthernEngland and panto in Belfast. Reflecting the first volume’s desire to investigate lesser-known drag practices, these fifteen chapters act to illuminate and preserve the historical and cultural multiplicity of drag. Despite the range of examples, overarching themes do emerge. Jacob Bloomfield’s investigation of ex-service men performing drag after the Second World War counterpoints Isabelle CoyDibley’s detailed examination of the Japanese allfemale Takarazuka Revue. While they stand at the opposing ends of queening and kinging practice (to say nothing of stylistic and cultural differences), both cases are set against heavily patriarchal societies but can promote themselves as ‘family fun’ due their heavily staged nature. This acceptability, though, only highlights the limitations of drag, as the Japanese women are encouraged to renounce their masculine roles to be dutiful wives and mothers once again. The importance of staging is foreshadowed in Penny Arcade’s foreword when she recalls the impact of Billy Hansen. Billy was a young man who won the tri-state drag competition in Hartford, Connecticut, by eschewing the fashionable impressions of Hollywood stars and embracing his ability to pass as a woman without makeup and go shopping, complete with lady wallet. Hansen’s victory indicated a shift in the dragworld from entertainment, as seen in Bloomfield andCoyDibley’s chapters, to also embrace a more selfaware and political drag. As with the first volume, this collection has sought to represent many facets of drag. Farrier’s own chapter on the importance of kinging is an important one that, along with Isabelle CoyDibley’s, points to the different challenges faced by kings when performing drag within a patriarchal system. While drag has developed a subgenre of lifelike imitation, in the art of kinging a difficult and politically charged tightrope is being walked where imitation often tellingly stops short of a lifelike imitation of the hegemonic male. Complicating drag further is Nando Messias’s powerful narrative, which explores the intersections of drag, race, and cultural variations of gender expression from a first-person perspective. Nick Ishmael-Perkins follows by peeling away the layers of Mother Sally, the ‘undersexed and hypersexual’ character of Barbadian carnival, revealing her to be a contested character that negotiates with the competing interests of folklore tradition, carnival, colonialism, Christianity, tourism, and shifting social attitudes to the LGBTQ movement. Meanwhile Simon Dodi’s chapter on camp as a culturally contested and evolving phenomenon that traces four approaches, from Sontag’s aesthetic reading to Meyer’s camp as strategic performance, is a particular highlight of the volume. This chapter is arguably a key by which to unlock the po","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"280 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42911574","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Generational Drag’: All-Child Performances in the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Britain","authors":"Katie Knowles","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000106","url":null,"abstract":"Separated by almost three hundred years and by significant developments in the construction of childhood as an identity distinct from adulthood, the early seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries stand out as periods of intense and popular activity by child actors, and specifically by companies of child actors who played adult roles and deliberately juxtaposed the age categories of performer and character. While much excellent period-specific work has been accomplished during the last twenty years on early modern boy actors and on the ‘infant phenomena’ of the Victorian stage, there has as yet been no attempt to compare children’s professional performance during these two periods. This article contrasts the repertoire of the boy companies of Jacobean London with that of the children’s opera companies who toured the UK and Ireland throughout the 1880s performing comic operas such as H.M.S. Pinafore and Les Cloches de Corneville. It also explores what it meant for children to perform as adults during these two periods, and what the latter reveals about the historical construction and policing of age categories.","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"181 - 199"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44158017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"City Women: Managers and Leading Ladies at the City of London Theatre, 1837–1848","authors":"Stephen Ridgwell","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000118","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1830s and 1840s, the female management of London theatres, conducted singly or in partnership, was surprisingly common. Charismatic actress-managers such as Madame Vestris and Mrs Keeley have long been familiar to students of British theatre, as too the establishments they managed. Much less well known is the City of London Theatre in Norton Folgate, one of several minor playhouses then active in the East End. Opened in the year that Victoria came to the throne (1837), during its first decade the City was unrivalled as a home for the so-called ‘wo-manager’. Although largely forgotten today, Lucy Honey, Eliza Vincent, Harriett Lacy, and Maria Honner added much to the cultural vibrancy of an important theatre district at a moment of significant social change. Stephen Ridgwell here explores an under-researched world of theatre enterprise, and argues that the marginality subsequently conferred upon these women in no way reflects their contemporary visibility and standing. The article also highlights the importance of Eliza Vincent’s collaborations with George Dibdin Pitt, a dramatist of growing interest to scholars across a range of fields, and proposes that further consideration of this partnership might usefully be undertaken.","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"200 - 215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47791037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Sideshow to Centre Ring: The Historiography of Popular Entertainment","authors":"L. Senelick","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000167","url":null,"abstract":"The academic interest in popular entertainment was long retarded by a class attitude that regarded it as a cultural phenomenon of inferior quality. Those who researched it were collectors and enthusiasts rather than professional scholars. The disdain of the Frankfurt School was also a factor. In the 1960s, with the rise of leisure studies and a Marxist-inflected interest in working-class culture, this began to change. The study of popular forms is now an accepted, even dominant part of the humanities curriculum, though still occasionally tinged with apology.","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"272 - 279"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47671757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shimella Community Theatre of Israeli-Ethiopian Jews","authors":"Naphtaly Shem-Tov","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000131","url":null,"abstract":"Shimella (‘stork’ in Amharic) is an Israeli community theatre of Ethiopian Jews residing in Netanya and directed by Chen Elia. Shimella was founded in 2010, and has produced four different performances focusing on the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. Ethiopian Jews suffer from racism and discrimination in all areas of life, including housing, employment, education, and healthcare. These issues surfaced in Shimella’s performances, and the political aspect of Shimella’s performances therefore ranges from performing critical protest against the attitudes of the Israeli state and society toward Ethiopians, to a utopian performative moment, which emotionally and physically dramatizes the community’s desired future.","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"223 - 242"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43252349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stanislavsky’s Failed Bildungsroman","authors":"Tomasz Kubikowski","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X2300012X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X2300012X","url":null,"abstract":"Disabled for the last nine years of his life, Konstantin Stanislavsky struggled to verbalize his artistic experience and record it in writing. This experience mostly concerned acting, itself extremely hard to conceptualize and explain, and, to his mind, the core of human existence. Stanislavsky looked for the proper literary vehicle to contain this abundance. Initially, he hoped he had found adequate means in the form of the educational novel – the Bildungsroman. However, in the course of his writing, he gradually abandoned this form, as well as any literary aspirations he may have had. What we can find in An Actor’s Work are only remnants of the original concept. Nevertheless, they are still present. Looking closer at these ruins can bring interesting insights into the aura and mood of Stanislavsky’s theorizing about art.","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"216 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49265329","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier, eds. Drag Histories, Herstories, and Hairstories: Drag in a Changing Scene Volume 2 London: Methuen Drama, 2021. 215 p. £67.50. ISBN: 978-1-350-10436-5.","authors":"Daniel Nield","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000180","url":null,"abstract":"Edward and Farrier’s second edited volume turns attentions to historical drag with a collection of examples ranging from nineteenth-century Japan via Barbados to the ‘FunPubs’ofNorthernEngland and panto in Belfast. Reflecting the first volume’s desire to investigate lesser-known drag practices, these fifteen chapters act to illuminate and preserve the historical and cultural multiplicity of drag. Despite the range of examples, overarching themes do emerge. Jacob Bloomfield’s investigation of ex-service men performing drag after the Second World War counterpoints Isabelle CoyDibley’s detailed examination of the Japanese allfemale Takarazuka Revue. While they stand at the opposing ends of queening and kinging practice (to say nothing of stylistic and cultural differences), both cases are set against heavily patriarchal societies but can promote themselves as ‘family fun’ due their heavily staged nature. This acceptability, though, only highlights the limitations of drag, as the Japanese women are encouraged to renounce their masculine roles to be dutiful wives and mothers once again. The importance of staging is foreshadowed in Penny Arcade’s foreword when she recalls the impact of Billy Hansen. Billy was a young man who won the tri-state drag competition in Hartford, Connecticut, by eschewing the fashionable impressions of Hollywood stars and embracing his ability to pass as a woman without makeup and go shopping, complete with lady wallet. Hansen’s victory indicated a shift in the dragworld from entertainment, as seen in Bloomfield andCoyDibley’s chapters, to also embrace a more selfaware and political drag. As with the first volume, this collection has sought to represent many facets of drag. Farrier’s own chapter on the importance of kinging is an important one that, along with Isabelle CoyDibley’s, points to the different challenges faced by kings when performing drag within a patriarchal system. While drag has developed a subgenre of lifelike imitation, in the art of kinging a difficult and politically charged tightrope is being walked where imitation often tellingly stops short of a lifelike imitation of the hegemonic male. Complicating drag further is Nando Messias’s powerful narrative, which explores the intersections of drag, race, and cultural variations of gender expression from a first-person perspective. Nick Ishmael-Perkins follows by peeling away the layers of Mother Sally, the ‘undersexed and hypersexual’ character of Barbadian carnival, revealing her to be a contested character that negotiates with the competing interests of folklore tradition, carnival, colonialism, Christianity, tourism, and shifting social attitudes to the LGBTQ movement. Meanwhile Simon Dodi’s chapter on camp as a culturally contested and evolving phenomenon that traces four approaches, from Sontag’s aesthetic reading to Meyer’s camp as strategic performance, is a particular highlight of the volume. This chapter is arguably a key by which to unlock the po","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"280 - 280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46922868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Artaud’s Civil War: ‘Theatre and the Plague’ in the Time of Covid-19","authors":"Sam Haddow","doi":"10.1017/S0266464X23000155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X23000155","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theatre and the Plague’ in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic and through the Ancient Greek term stasis, which describes a civil war between domestic and public spaces. Once initiated, it was believed that this conflict would spread from household to household like a contagion; city states thus implemented draconian measures in the name of preventing stasis. Giorgio Agamben argues that such measures were embedded in subsequent theories of the state, fuelling ever more oppressive policies throughout history. Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ energizes a force comparable to this stasis, both in terms of its latency and its contagiousness, activating dormant conflicts in the individual that are expressed through networks of infection and create frontiers of shared resistance to institutional authority. ‘Theatre and the Plague’, read through the lens of stasis, can thus offer valuable contributions to current debates around biopolitics, particularly those seeking collective forms of agency during and beyond the current pandemic.","PeriodicalId":43990,"journal":{"name":"NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"262 - 271"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45886191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}