The Misted Stage: Eirik Stubø’s Stagings of Tragedy (original) (raw)
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Stage Appropriations of Shakespeare's Major Tragedies, 1980-2010
Lund studies in English; 119 (2020), 2020
ReWriting History in Macbeth and Its Appropriations 'How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me': The Missing Child 'Look to the Lady': Who is Lady Macbeth? 4. OtheLLO and Desdemona's Lost Handkerchief 'Did it have to happen?' 'When you shall these unlucky deeds relate': Othello as an Appropriation 'Villainy, villainy, villainy': Ideological Challenges and Opportunities in Othello '[O]r say they strike us': Men, Women and Domestic Violence 'I took you for that cunning whore of Venice': Reimagining Desdemona 'Sure there's some wonder in this handkerchief ': Saving Desdemona 5. rOMeO and JuLiet and the Possibility of Romantic Comedy 'What might have happened?' 'From ancient grudge': Romeo and Juliet's Sources and Appropriations 'An if thou dar'st, I'll give thee remedy': The Friar's Plan 'Younger than she are happy mothers made': Children and Adults 'For never was a story of more woe': Romantic Love 'Henceforth I never will be Romeo': Transforming Gender and Genre 6. haMLet and The Question 'Did it happen?'
STAGING HENRIK IBSEN'S AND JOHN FOSSE'S MENTAL LANDSCAPES NORDIC THEATRE STUDIES
Nordic Theatre Studies, 2018
Nordic Theatre Studies Vol. 30, No.1. 2018, 184–203. Norway’s best-known contemporary playwright Jon Fosse has often been compared to Henrik Ibsen, no less because of the two dramatists’ common emphasis on their native physical landscape as a mirror of the protagonists’ emotional and existential conflict. In Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea (1888) and in Fosse’s Someone is Going to Come (1996) in particular, characters and actions—although generated within specific geographical and cultural co-ordinates—rise to the level of archetypes and acquire timeless significance. This comparative study traces a continuum from the Modernist Ibsen to Fosse’s humanistic postmodernism in so far as the authors’ treatment of psychology, structure, and landscape exposes ideas and endorses themes and images, which in turn account for similar patterns of staging. In a context whereby myth and allegory are projected against a background defined by the ocean and unfamiliar horizons, the markedly schematic representation of existential dread in both plays reveals strong visual conceits that are uncannily similar to the effect that one cannot really read or direct Fosse without making a mental note of Ibsen’s drama. The “haunted” nature of the spectator’s experience notwithstanding, both texts seem to be a director’s ideal material, hosting the natural environment so intensely so that it becomes an extension of the characters, punctuating the important stations in their lives and adding emotional and sensory texture to their words and their actions. From the point-of-view of a theatre director, decoding the plays’ imagistic identity becomes primarily an immersive experience in the Nordic landscape –of both nature and the mind.
Obscene beasts: the stage behind the scenes in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Mimesis, the art of imitating the real world on the stage, is all the more difficult if this real world consists of a beast—a wild, dangerous, supposedly “obscene” animal in the Latin sense: literally off-stage. Such is the challenge faced by the amateur company of mechanicals who are producing the love tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s play within the play featuring a fearful lion. For all the efforts the mechanicals have engaged in the project, their rendition of the lion is such a failure that it has the on-stage spectators roar with laughter. This is a fairly convincing anticipation of Gaston Bachelard’s statement in Water and Dreams, “a ghost [a beast in this particular instance] complacently described loses its effect.” Thus, through the mechanicals’ theatrical misadventure, Shakespeare ironically includes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream a “how-not-to” guide for mimesis, a reversed mise en abyme of his own challenging conception of a play teeming with an unstageable and infinite variety of creatures great and small, wild and tame, familiar and fantastical, its presence all the more haunting as it is never staged strictly speaking. Neither staged nor completely off-scene, the bestiary of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, emblematized by the “enamel skin” shed “there” by the elusive “snake” (2.1.254), is featured on a subliminal and simultaneous scene, a sub-stage as it were, an Other Scene, involving humankind in a liminal confrontation with its own animality. This paper aims to explore the strategies—whether rooted in the Elizabethan worldview, or amazingly modern—through which Shakespeare stages this inward confrontation, while involving us in vertiginous reflexions on the theatre.
Stage Appropriations of Shakespeare’s Major Tragedies, 1979-2010
2017
This dissertation examines appropriations of five of Shakespeare's tragedies (King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet), written for the stage between 1979 and 2010 and set in Shakespeare's playworlds. The aim of the study is to investigate how these appropriations are used as a strategy for discussing issues that are central both to Shakespeare's plays and to the present gender-political climate, with particular focus on the depiction of women and familial relationships. Appropriations of Shakespeare's major tragedies, especially feminist revisions , from the decades around the turn of the millennium often treat Shakespeare's tragedies as domestic drama, which brings out the gender-and familyrelated issues in them; and there is a parallel tendency in productions of Shakespeare's tragedies from the same time period. Feminist revisions sometimes draw on perceived inherent feminism in Shakespeare's plays and sometimes challenge perceived patriarchal values reproduced in them; the same tension can be found in feminist criticism and performance of Shakespeare. I introduce the concept of 'the appropriative impulse', which I argue often stems from unanswered questions and unsatisfying solutions in Shakespeare's plays. These are often connected to gender issues and resonate with appropriators owing to the connections to contemporary concerns. The appropriations in turn often introduce a new condition that could have an impact on spectators'/readers' future perception of Shakespeare's plays. The study is divided into seven chapters: five chapters on the five Shakespearean tragedies and their appropriations, preceded by a chapter putting Shakespeare appropriation into the context of the relation between Shakespeare and gender in today's theatre and followed by a chapter on the strategies employed in feminist revisions .
Nuevas tendencias de la puesta en escena de las tragedias de William Shakespeare
Dilemas contemporáneos: Educación, Política y Valores, 2019
El artículo analiza el proceso de puesta en escena de las tragedias “Hamlet”, “Othello”, “Richard III” de W. Shakespeare en el teatro kazajo. Los autores pusieron especial énfasis en la demostración de la renovación espiritual de la sociedad y la realidad del período histórico del escenario del teatro nacional a través de las obras del gran dramaturgo. Es obvio que la dramaturgia de W. Shakespeare ha requerido una línea especial de pensamiento, enfoque cultural y lógica psicológica profunda por parte de los actores kazajos. Esta tendencia ha durado hasta hoy en día. Este documento justifica que es crucial para el teatro nacional kazajo considerar e investigar las preocupaciones comunes de la humanidad a través del gran dramaturgo inglés.
Encapsulation of Shakespearean Tragedies
William Shakespeare is well known for his tragedies, especially for Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear. These tragedies have been translated and creatively adapted into almost all regional languages in India including Marathi and in foreign languages as well. Shirwadkar's Natsamrat (the play) is the most well-known adaptation based on King Lear and it has been filmed as Natsamrat in Marathi. Yet some worthy Marathi translations/ adaptations are still in the dark. Vasant Kanetkar's Gaganbhedi is a little-known play and it is based on all four tragedies of Shakespeare. It is a play divided into three acts with Vikram as its protagonist. The first act of the play is based on Hamlet. Kanetkar's second act of the play is based on Macbeth and Othello. The last act of the play is reminiscent of King Lear. The other characters in Gaganbhedi, those of Jaee (she is like Ophelia, Lady Macbeth and Desdemona) and Rupali (daughter of Vikram) too are well developed. What Hamlet says about Ophelia (in Hamlet) applies well to Vikram and it can be said aptly, "What a noble mind is here overthrown!" My paper is an attempt to study Gaganbhedi as a creative adaptation of these Shakespearean tragedies.
"European tragedy as requiem, ruin, revenant in Magnet Theatre’s Antigone (not quite/quiet) and Thomas Köck’s antigone. a requiem." South African Theatre Journal 35:3 (2022): 212-226, 2023
Offering a comparative case study of two different postcolonial responses to Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone from European and African perspectives, this article brings together Magnet Theatre’s Cape Town production of Antigone (not quite/quiet) with Thomas Köck’s play antigone. a requiem that premiered almost simultaneously in September 2019 in Hannover, Germany. Both re-examine Sophocles’s tragedy to come to terms with their respective colonial histories and postcolonial challenges: while Magnet Theatre engages with the ancient material to reflect on the difficulties of fully overcoming the legacies of colonialism in post-apartheid South Africa, Köck explores the afterlives of ‘thebaneuropean’ colonialism as manifested in current European migration policies. Comparing the adaptation principle of Magnet Theatre’s ‘ruinous’, fragmenting approach to the literary and theatrical archive of European colonialism to Köck’s postdramatic recomposition of Antigone as a requiem for migrant deaths and for European tragedy itself, the article discusses the productions in their respective contexts of political protest movements. Drawing on cultural theory of ungrievability, domopolitics, and postcolonial shame, it explores the central functions of the chorus – indecisive Europeans on the verge of anagnorisis in Köck’s play, the post-apartheid South African generation caught between rage and disillusionment in Magnet Theatre’s production – and as well as the prominence of Ismene as a problematic survivor figure in both adaptations.
Destroying Myself; Staging Hamlet in Three Works
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the most influential and known works regarding drama and more precisely tragedies. Its central character, Hamlet, is a many-faced protagonist whose actions, emotions and perceptions will shape the narrative arc of the play. By ‘many-faced’ I mean that he is a tortured soul going through an existential crisis of which stems a seemingly irrational desire for vengeance and of proving of oneself; Hamlet is emotional, melancholic, overtly dramatic, lost. Yet our main character is also lyrical, prone to fight to save his honour and he is willing to accomplish his goals however brutal and self-destructive they are. This prince of Denmark could well be compared to Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac in his fencing capabilities and his prowess with poetry. Nonetheless, the main point of this essay is not to write an ode to Hamlet as a character however utterly magnificent he is, the goal here is to uncover how one stages and represents this rich and visceral mind. To do so, three performances have been chosen by myself which are all significantly different in their meanings and ambitions. One of those is meant as an accurate and passionate portrayal of Hamlet, another is a free adaptation taking place in Japan in the ‘60s, showing a corporate and manipulative depiction. Finally, the last version is an utter failure and complete misunderstanding of everything that Shakespeare represents; it will serve as a yardstick of what one should not do when representing Shakespeare. In the correct order, those versions are Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well and Hamlet in its “Letní shakespearovské slavnosti” version (In English: Summer Shakespeare Festival) as performed on the night of the 11th August 2020 at the Castle of Prague, staged by Michal Vajdička. In a nutshell, I will uncover how one stages Hamlet almost perfectly, how one reinvents it, and how one completely fails to represent it. To do so, a few scenes have been selected for comparison purposes in chronological order. The many faces of Hamlet will be explored, analyzed, and deconstructed.