Academic literature on the topic 'Bell's English theatre'

In spring 2018, Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters, an adaptation of Michel Tremblay’s landmark Les belles-sœurs (1968), was performed in the Abbey Theatre. A “smash hit” (Abbey programme) with the Irish audience, it was restaged in summer 2019. The Dublin version by a young and accomplished Irish playwright stages the comparability of the language register and of the socioeconomic and cultural circumstances that inspired the original thus underlining the connection between the two theater communities. It also demonstrates theater’s role in voicing the language, lives, and daily traumas of impoverished, undereducated, and marginalized women. This study contends that Tremblay’s and Kinahan’s success is attributable to the dramaturges’ understanding, interpretation, and staging of the intersectionality of the issues addressed. Intersectionality focuses on the layering and interaction of multiple sources of power, oppression, and marginalization. Previous English translations did not capture the intersectionality central to the original.

In 1882, Walter Besant declared that the hinterland beyond Aldgate had two million people yet “no institutions of their own to speak of, no public buildings of any importance, no municipality, no gentry, no carriages, no soldiers, no picture-galleries, no theatres, no opera—they have nothing.” The fact that Whitechapel first appeared in the theatrical annals in 1557, Stepney contained several of the largest engineering projects in Regency London, and Shoreditch's Britannia was one of the most successful theatres in Victorian Britain belies the prejudice in Besant's statement. Cultural historians of all types need to resist such propaganda and have good cause to suspect the entire record of life, leisure, and entertainment in the industrialized inner suburbs. The history of nineteenth-century English theatre has—with very few exceptions—focussed on London, yet apart from essays by Michael Booth and Clive Barker little serious attention has been paid to theatre in the East End. Booth points out the limitations arising from scholarship that ignores the area where half of the metropolitan theatre seats were located, while Barker shows the methodological difficulties that arise once a redressive investigation into the audience is undertaken. The omissions from the historical record are compounded by narrow selectivity of enquiries: leading performers receive scholarly attention while supernumeraries (supers), ballet dancers, front of house staff, property makers, and the many functionaries who made up the whole community responsible for running a theatre are consistently neglected. These characteristics are somehow more evident in scholarship on the East End, where no matter how sociogeographically biased the enquirers may be the working class and its conditions are central themes, and the repertoire has always been allowed (perhaps stereotyped) as sensational.

In one of his essays, Piotr Mitzner reminds us that life, or being, according to Rilke, is supposed to be a theatre. This statement encourages a variety of digressions that pertain to a poem by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and another by Aleksander Wat, an essay about aging by Ryszard Przybylski including a recollection of the last visit that Wat’s wife paid Iwaszkiewicz; another quote from Rilke in Ronald Harwood’s Quartet with entails references to Rilke and Jens Peter Jacobsen, Jacobsen and Iwaszkiewicz, Rilke’s English translator Karl Werner Maurer and his translation of The Death and the Ploughman by Johannes von Tepl; Rilke’s letter to the Princess Marie von Thun und Taxis-Hohenlohe about Büchner; an October 1st, 1956 entry in Iwaszkiewicz’s journal, written in Zurich, with an evocation of Paul Fenneberg, with remarks on an unfi nished Iwaszkiewicz’s short story On the balcony, about his meetings with Emil Młynarski, Grzegorz Fitelberg and Karol Szymanowski; another oblique quotation from Rilke in another Wat’s poem with comments on Rilke and Ibsen, Ibsen and Nietzsche, Leopold Staff and Rilke; fi nally, Luise Büchner’s poem on the bells in Zurich and on the grave of her brother – to name only a few.

In the early 1890s Emma Calvé’s emergence coincided with the ascent of Spanish dancing stars, Carmencita Dausset and Carolina “la Belle” Otero, on the international music-hall circuit. All three enjoyed careers and celebrity that took them from Paris across the English Channel and the Atlantic. Their influence can be seen in the two major adaptations that form the subject of Chapter 6. Famed in both London and New York, English dramatic actress Olga Nethersole starred in a lurid adaptation of the opera for the legitimate stage in the mid-1890s, while the young Spanish dancer Rosario Guerrero reinterpreted Carmen in mime and dance in a ballet version devised for London’s Alhambra Theatre in 1903, the dramatic intensity of her performance inflected by newly emerging flamenco styles.