Class, Culture and Tragedy in the Plays of Jez Butterworth
Class, Culture and Tragedy in the Plays of Jez Butterworth

Author: Sean McEvoy

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-12-29

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 303062711X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Jez Butterworth is undoubtedly one of the most popular and commercially successful playwrights to have emerged in Britain in the early twenty-first century. This book, only the second so far to have been written on him, argues that the power of his most acclaimed work comes from a reinvigoration of traditional forms of tragedy expressed in a theatricalized working-class language. Butterworth’s most developed tragedies invoke myth and legend as a figurative resistance to the flat and crushing instrumentalism of contemporary British political and economic culture. In doing so they summon older, resonant narratives which are both popular and high-cultural in order to address present cultural crises in a language and in a form which possess wide appeal. Tracing the development of Butterworth’s work chronologically from Mojo (1995) to The Ferryman (2017), each chapter offers detailed critical readings of a single play, exploring how myth and legend become significant in a variety of ways to Butterworth’s presentation of cultural and personal crisis.

Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy
Shakespeare, Education and Pedagogy

Author: Pamela Bickley

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-31

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1000856380

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume captures the diverse ways in which Shakespeare interacts with educational theory and practice. It explores the depiction of learning and education in the plays, the role of Shakespeare as pedagogue, and ways in which the teaching of Shakespeare can facilitate discussion of some of the urgent questions of modern times. The book offers a wide range of perspectives – historical, theoretical, theatrical. The Renaissance humanist learning underpinning Shakespeare’s own work is explored in essays that consider how the complexity of Shakespeare’s drama challenges early-modern pedagogical orthodoxies. From close analysis of individual, solitary reflection on Shakespeare’s writing, the book moves outward to engage with contemporary social issues around inclusivity, society, and the planet, demonstrating the many educational contexts in which Shakespeare is currently appropriated. Engaging with current questions of the value of literary study, the book testifies to the potentialities of an empowering Shakespearean pedagogy. Bringing together voices from a variety of institutions and from a wide range of educational perspectives, this volume will be essential reading for academics, researchers and post-graduate students of Shakespeare, literature in education, pedagogy and literary theory.

English Theatre and Social Abjection
English Theatre and Social Abjection

Author: Nadine Holdsworth

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-08-18

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1137597771

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Focusing on contemporary English theatre, this book asks a series of questions: How has theatre contributed to understandings of the North-South divide? What have theatrical treatments of riots offered to wider debates about their causes and consequences? Has theatre been able to intervene in the social unease around Gypsy and Traveller communities? How has theatre challenged white privilege and the persistent denigration of black citizens? In approaching these questions, this book argues that the nation is blighted by a number of internal rifts that pit people against each other in ways that cast particular groups as threats to the nation, as unruly or demeaned citizens – as ‘social abjects’. It interrogates how those divisions are generated and circulated in public discourse and how theatre offers up counter-hegemonic and resistant practices that question and challenge negative stigmatization, but also how theatre can contribute to the recirculation of problematic cultural imaginaries.

Mojo
Mojo

Author: Jez Butterworth

Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13: 9780822216612

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

THE STORY: Silver Johnny is the new singing sensation, straight out of a low-life Soho clubland bar in 1958. His success could be the big break for two dead-end workers in the bar, if they play their cards right and trust the owner of the place to

English Revenge Drama
English Revenge Drama

Author: Linda Woodbridge

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-09-16

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139493558

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Vengeance permeates English Renaissance drama - for example, it crops up in all but two of Shakespeare's plays. This book explores why a supposedly forgiving Christian culture should have relished such bloodthirsty, vengeful plays. A clue lies in the plays' passion for fairness, a preoccupation suggesting widespread resentment of systemic unfairness - legal, economic, political and social. Revengers' precise equivalents - the father of two beheaded sons obliges his enemy to eat her two sons' heads - are vigilante versions of Elizabethan law, where penalties suit the crimes: thieves' hands were cut off, scolds' tongues bridled. The revengers' language of 'paying' hints at the operation of revenge in the service of economic redress. Revenge makes contact with resistance theory, justifying overthrow of tyrants, and some revengers challenge the fundamental inequity of social class. Woodbridge demonstrates how, for all their sensationalism, their macabre comedy and outlandish gore, Renaissance revenge plays do some serious cultural work.

The Winterling
The Winterling

Author: Jez Butterworth

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 9781854599261

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"One of the most dazzling Royal Court debut in years" -Time Out London

Homebody/Kabul
Homebody/Kabul

Author: Tony Kushner

Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com

Published: 2010-10

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1458781380

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul is the most remarkable play in a decade...without a doubt the most important of our time.''--John Heilpern, New York Observer In Homebody/Kabul, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America, has turned his penetrating gaze to the arena of global politics to create this suspenseful portrait of a dangerous collision between cultures. Written before 9/11, this play premiered in New York in December 2001 and has had subsequent highly successful productions in London, Providence, Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles. This version incorporates all the playwright's changes and is now the definitive version of the text.

Jump Jim Crow
Jump Jim Crow

Author: W. T. Lhamon

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2003-07-31

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 9780674010628

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Beginning in the 1830s, the white actor Thomas D. Rice took to the stage as Jim Crow, and the ragged and charismatic trickster of black folklore entered—and forever transformed—American popular culture. Jump Jim Crow brings together for the first time the plays and songs performed in this guise and reveals how these texts code the complex use and abuse of blackness that has characterized American culture ever since Jim Crow’s first appearance. Along with the prompt scripts of nine plays performed by Rice—never before published as their original audiences saw them—W. T. Lhamon, Jr., provides a reconstruction of their performance history and a provocative analysis of their contemporary meaning. His reading shows us how these plays built a public blackness, but also how they engaged a disaffected white audience, who found in Jim Crow’s sass and wit and madcap dancing an expression of rebellion and resistance against the oppression and confinement suffered by ordinary people of all colors in antebellum America and early Victorian England. Upstaging conventional stories and forms, giving direction and expression to the unruly attitudes of a burgeoning underclass, the plays in this anthology enact a vital force still felt in great fictions, movies, and musics of the Atlantic and in the jumping, speedy styles that join all these forms.

Sweat
Sweat

Author: Lynn Nottage

Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

Published: 2018-02-07

Total Pages: 99

ISBN-13: 0822237644

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. Filled with warm humor and tremendous heart, SWEAT tells the story of a group of friends who have spent their lives sharing drinks, secrets, and laughs while working together on the factory floor. But when layoffs and picket lines begin to chip away at their trust, the friends find themselves pitted against each other in a heart-wrenching fight to stay afloat.