Books in the Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance series

By the end of the nineteenth century, Western-style playhouses were found in every Indian city. Professional drama troupes held crowds spellbound with their spectacular productions. From this colorful world of entertainment come the autobiographies in this book. The life-stories of a quartet of early Indian actors and poet-playwrights are here translated into English for the first time.The most famous, Jayshankar Sundari, was a female impersonator of the highest order. Fida Husain Narsi also played womens parts, until gaining great fame for his role as a Hindu saint. Two others, Narayan Prasad Betab and Radheshyam Kathavachak, wrote landmark dramas that ushered in the mythological genre, intertwining politics and religion with popular performance.These men were schooled not in the classroom but in large theatrical companies run by Parsi entrepreneurs. Their memoirs, replete with anecdote and humor, offer an unparalleled window onto a vanished world, where Indias late-colonial vernacular culture and early cinema history come alive. From another perspective, these narratives are as significant to the understanding of the nationalist era as the lives of political leaders or social reformers.This book includes four substantive chapters on the history of the Parsi theatre, debates over autobiography in the Indian context, strategies for reading autobiography in general, and responses to these specific texts. The apparatus, based on the translators extensive research, includes notes on personages, performances, texts, vernacular usage, and cultural institutions.

"On Beckett: Essays and Criticism" is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize-winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett.

This volume offers the first English translation of one of Indiäs most celebrated works of anticolonial resistance. It is also the first edition of the play to provide an extensive historical-critical commentary and to draw on a comprehensive range of colonial archival documents.

This volume offers the first English translation of one of India's most celebrated works of anticolonial resistance. It is also the first edition of the play to provide an extensive historical-critical commentary and to draw on a comprehensive range of colonial archival documents.

'World Cinema and the Visual Arts' combines new analyses of two subjects of ongoing research in the field of humanities: cinema and the visual arts. The films analysed encompass a wide geographical base, and have been drawn from a diverse array of cultural traditions.

'World Cinema and the Visual Arts' combines new analyses of two subjects of ongoing research in the field of humanities: cinema and the visual arts. The films analysed encompass a wide geographical base, and have been drawn from a diverse array of cultural traditions.

"On Beckett: Essays and Criticism" is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize-winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett. More has been written about Samuel Beckett than about any other writer of this century - countless books and articles dealing with him are in print, and the progression continues geometrically. "On Beckett" brings together some of the most perceptive writings from the vast amount of scrutiny that has been lavished on the man; in addition to widely read essays there are contributions from more obscure sources, viewpoints not frequently seen. Together they allow the reader to enter the world of a writer whose work has left an impact on the consciousness of our time perhaps unmatched by that of any other recent creative imagination.

What happens when the dramatic art of Moliere is unleashed onto the stage and explodes into new life? 'Moliere on Stage' takes the reader onstage, backstage and into the audience of Moliere's plays, analyzing the performance of his works in both his own time and ours. Written by a professional stage director with over fifty years of experience directing and translating Moliere, this original, in-depth study allows the reader to see how the playwright's lines have been brought to new life on stage throughout the centuries.The text explores how Molire strove to create a communal experience of shared laughter that fulfilled the universal need for union, and focuses on four key topics: the elements of Molire's early life that are evidenced in his later theater works; his great central plays that focus on love and lust; his comedic genius and his passion for the theater; and the final words and performances of his vivid and exceptional life. Inspired by the actions of the great French masters, the text pays homage to the interpretations of Molire offered by the playwright himself, Louis Jouvet, Jacques Copeau and Jean-Louis Barrault, as well as those staged by American actors and directors such as Ron Leibman, Stephen Epp, Steven Wadsworth, Robert Falls and the author.

The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, being closely bound with the concept of the limit of inescapable necessity that has been embodied in and expressed through theatre since the time of the ancient Greeks. This book addresses the question of how the twentieth century - one of the most violent periods of human history - dealt with the fundamental structure that is the tragic. Examining the consciousness of the era through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century's most outstanding texts - including works by Ibsen, Claudel, O'Neill, Brecht, Camus, Beckett, Pasolini, Grotowski, Delcuvellerie and Josse De Pauw - 'Modern European Tragedy' draws a vivid picture of the development that tragedy experienced during this time. Along the way, the book engages with some of the prominent currents of twentieth-century thought and philosophy that can still be found in the varied map of contemporary thought today: the ideas of modern Christianity, psychoanalysis, the theory of the Absurd, nihilism, Marxism and the acceptance of the limit. Together, analyses of these currents serve to support the book's key avenues of investigation: its explorations of what inspired these key authors to engage with the idea of the tragic; and its explanation of why the contemporary tragic no longer bears the form of classic tragedy.

"e;Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography"e; examines theatrical biography as a nascent genre in eighteenth-century England. This study suggests a visible-but not impermeable-teleology from Thomas Davies to James Boaden in the development of theatrical biography as a professional enterprise. Chapter One explores Davies, the first significant biographer to throw off the shadows of anonymity and weld his own image to his subject, David Garrick. The second chapter traces three biographies of Charles Macklin written by biographers dueling amongst themselves for the right to tell Macklin's story in the post-Davies competitive market. Finally, the third chapter tells the story of the serial biographer James Boaden's attempts to build a professional reputation for himself as a biographer and prominent participatory character in the multiple "e;Lives"e; he tells, including those of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, and Elizabeth Inchbald. In each instance of producing a theatrical biography, the author is confronted not only with his duty to represent the actor, but the need to do so in an original, compelling manner that sets his account apart from other contenders and guarantees the permanency of his account as a treasured artifact of the stage rather than a disposable commodity.The willful encouragement of viewing literary materiality as an antidote to ephemeral stage-business leads in turn to the absorption of prior biographical works and letters by authors, and reverberates in their readers' quests to augment their copies of theatrical biographies through adding playbills, marginal notes, etchings, paintings, newspaper clippings, and even funerary souvenirs that not only testified to their interest in the stage, but secured their existence as well by evidence of participation. Thus, the author at once guaranteed the thespian's legacy would live on while hitching his own likelihood of being remembered to the actor. The audience followed suit by adding their own personal touches, forming a palimpsest of participants. Drawing heavily on primary sources, then-contemporary reviews, and archival material in the form of extra-illustrated or "e;scrapbooked"e; editions of the biographies, this book is invested in the ways that the increasing emphasis on materiality was designed to consolidate, but often challenged, the biographer's authority.The book provides an introduction to theatrical biography as an immensely popular genre in the eighteenth century that deserves more scholarly attention. Currently, theatrical biography is usually overlooked or encountered solely in excerpts offered to advance individual research goals; the texts are perceived as repositories of facts or the odd opinion, more akin to a reference work than anything innately artistic. This study's contribution is to read these biographies in context, exploring their participation in a developing poetics of a new artistic subgenre, from the content of the works and the concerns of its authors to the responses that these biographies elicited from their readers.

A primary focus of this book is on the impact of time and memory as they intersect and constitute the spaces of theatre. These spaces include more traditional sites of theatre, such as those involving stages and curtains, actors and audiences, as well as those other theatres or spaces of performance that range from performance and installation art, to the performance of a string quartet, and from the writing of performance, to the performance of writing. What unites them is the presence of time as the constant and corrosive agent of theatrical absence, a vanishing site that finally affirms these theatres as theatres of thought, as spaces of thoughtful and mirroring reflection. With such time in mind, attention is directed toward theatre's own blurred and porous boundaries and, implicitly, that most conventional theatrical form, the proscenium itself, evoking questions such as: where does the performance begin and where does it end? Who is watching and who is being watched? And what, as time takes its toll, is there to be seen at all? For it is from this demarcating line of representation that - like a 'line in the sand' - such spaces of thought, theatrical or not, largely determine where the various forms of representation begin and end, where time is told of others, and where time is finally told of each of us.