In this book, Jeanette Malkin considers a broad spectrum of post-war plays in which characters are created, coerced and destroyed by language. The playwrights examined include Handke, Pinter, Bond, Albee, Mamet and Shepard, as well as Vaclav Havel and two of his plays: The Garden Party and The Memorandum. These playwrights portray language's power within our political, social and interpersonal worlds. The violence that language does, the 'tyranny of words', grabs centre stage in their plays. Characters are manipulated and defined through language, their actions and identity limited by verbal options, in order to reveal the links between language and power. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of drama, theatre history, American and European literature, and comparative literature.
How does Shakespeare’s ambivalent character Shylock affect British theatre artists of Jewish heritage today? Since the 1970s, stage adaptations of The Merchant by British Jewish directors and actors have struggled to glean an interpretation that would make The Merchant relevant or palatable for a post-Shoah generation. This article has a double focus: we discuss the difference between the adaptations of the older generation – Arnold Wesker’s character rewriting in The Merchant (1976) and Charles Marowitz’s deconstruction in Variations on the Merchant of Venice (1977) – and the contemporary revision in Julia Pascal’s 2008 The Shylock Play. Secondly, we focus on the reaction of contemporary Jewish theatre artists in Britain to the centrality of Shylock as the canonical figure of the Jew in Britain. We asked a number of contemporary British Jewish theatre artists – from Tom Stoppard to Samantha Ellis – about their personal relationship to Shylock and we present a digest of their responses.
Heiner Müllier, who died at the end of December 1995, was Germany's most acclaimed and controversial contemporary playwright. Before the political unification of 1989, he held the anomalous position of a writer, thinker, and practitioner of theatre who was at home, and extolled, in both East and West. Pre-1989 Müllier, occupied, as he put it, that chasm between the "two German capitals Berlin," whose "shared and not shared history" he saw — and portrayed as — "piled up by the latest earthquake as a borderline between two continents.” As in much of Müllier's writing (and directing), Walter Benjamin's "piled up" ruins of history became the image that connected the memories of a catastrophic past to the failures and repressions of the present. And as in much of his writing (and directing), Müllier used a postmodem theatre aesthetic to recover the repressions and betrayals of Western (and especially German) history. In his quasi-autobiographical play The Foundling, that ruinous past returns as highly concentrated layers of memory — as an act of mourning by a "foundling" son self-exiled from East to West Berlin. Centered on the broken body of the stepfather figure, and on the historical ideologies that tortured and disciplined it, The Foundling is a bitter elegy to the terrors of German history as translated into the flesh of its victims/perpetrators.
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