This book explores the connection between politics and theatre by looking at the works and lives of Shaw, Brecht, Sartre, and Ionesco, providing a cultural history detailing the changing role of political theatre in twentieth-century Europe.
This book explores the connection between politics and theatre by looking at the works and lives of Shaw, Brecht, Sartre, and Ionesco, providing a cultural history detailing the changing role of political theatre in twentieth-century Europe.
The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Spanish Theater argues that twentieth-century artists used the Golden Age Eucharist plays called autos sacramentales to reassess the way politics and the arts interact in the Spanish nation's past and present, and to posit new ideas for future relations between the state and the national culture industry. The book traces the phenomenon of the twentieth-century auto to show how theater practitioners revisited this national genre to manifest different, oftentimes opposing, ideological and aesthetic agendas. It follows the auto from the avant-garde stagings and rewritings of the form in the early twentieth century, to the Francoist productions by the Teatro Nacional de la Falange, to postmodern parodies of the form in the era following Franco's death to demonstrate how twentieth-century Spanish dramatists use the auto in their reassessment of the nation's political and artistic past, and as a way of envisioning its future.
When considering the role music played in the major totalitarian regimes of the century it is music's usefulness as propaganda that leaps first to mind. But as a number of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, there is a complex relationship both between art music and politicised mass culture, and between entertainment and propaganda. Nationality, self/other, power and ideology are the dominant themes of this book, whilst key topics include: music in totalitarian regimes; music as propaganda; music and national identity; émigré communities and composers; music's role in shaping identities of 'self' and 'other' and music as both resistance to and instrument of oppression. Taking the contributions together it becomes clear that shared experiences such as war, dictatorship, colonialism, exile and emigration produced different, yet clearly inter-related musical consequences.
In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class’s time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century political theater censorship at a time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the European population was becoming increasingly politically active.
This major study reconstructs the vast history of European drama from Greek tragedy through to twentieth-century theatre, focusing on the subject of identity. Throughout history, drama has performed and represented political, religious, national, ethnic, class-related, gendered, and individual concepts of identity. Erika Fischer-Lichte's topics include: * ancient Greek theatre * Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre by Corneilli, Racine, Molière * the Italian commedia dell'arte and its transformations into eighteenth-century drama * the German Enlightenment - Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Lenz * romanticism by Kleist, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, de Vigny, Musset, Büchner, and Nestroy * the turn of the century - Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Stanislavski * the twentieth century - Craig, Meyerhold, Artaud, O'Neill, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Müller. Anyone interested in theatre throughout history and today will find this an invaluable source of information.
This volume offers critical and theoretical perspectives on some of the major figures in European drama in the twentieth century. There are thirteen essays covering Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Anouilh, Fernando Arrabal, Jean Genet, Peter Weiss, Vaclav Havel, comtemporary German theatre, and Dario Fo and Franca Rame. These specially commissioned essays combine contemporary theory with a discussion of the dramatic work of the playwrights who created modern drama in Europe.
Until the dramatic fall of Communist regimes in the East placed the possibility of revolution on the agenda once again, sudden and decisive political change had appeared a largely anachronistic phenomenon in Europe. Looking back over the twentieth century, it is plausible to argue that the twentieth, rather than the nineteenth, has been the 'most revolutionary of centuries'. In this volume, leading specialists from a variety of disciplines examine the changing and conflicting meanings of revolution in modern and contemporary Europe. Contributions include both broad essays on the global and historical context of European revolution and specific case studies reinterpreting a variety of revolutionary experiences.
By comparing the literary works of two of the greatest playwrights of our time, Önder Cakirtas reveals the similarities and contrasts between their political views and the political backdrop of their respective nations. In Britain, George Bernard Shaw, the leading British dramatist for the first half of the twentieth century, wrote his plays to explicitly reflect his socialist political and economic views, and highlight the need for equal rights for women. In Turkey, decades later, Orhan Asena confronted similar issues with plays that challenged the dominant political powers of his time - a stance which ultimately led to his political exile from Turkey.
This is a comprehensive history of political violence during Europe's incredibly violent twentieth century. Leading scholars examine the causes and dynamics of war, revolution, counterrevolution, genocide, ethnic cleansing, terrorism and state repression. They locate these manifestations of political violence within their full transnational and comparative contexts and within broader trends in European history from the beginning of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth-century, through the two world wars, to the Yugoslav Wars and the rise of fundamentalist terrorism. The book spans a 'greater Europe' stretching from Ireland and Iberia to the Baltic, the Caucasus, Turkey and the southern shores of the Mediterranean. It sheds new light on the extent to which political violence in twentieth-century Europe was inseparable from the generation of new forms of state power and their projection into other societies, be they distant territories of imperial conquest or ones much closer to home.