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The definitive guide to the life and work of Antonin Artaud Antonin Artaud's theatre of cruelty is one of the most vital forces in world theatre, yet the concept is one of the most frequently misunderstood. In this incisive study, Albert Bermel looks closely at Artaud's work as a playwright, director, actor, designer, producer and critic, and provides a fresh insight into his ideas, innovations and, above all, his writings. Tracing the theatre of cruelty's origins in earlier dramatic conventions, tribal rituals of cleansing, transfiguration and exaltation, and in related arts such as film and dance, Bermel examines each of Artaud's six plays for form and meaning, as well as surveying the application of Artaud's theories and techniques to the international theatre of recent years.
Farce elicits an immediate, elemental response from all age levels, cutting across national and intellectual boundaries. It dates back to people’s first attempts to scoff in public at whatever their neighbors cherished in private: social prestige, eccentricities, virtues that are vices, friendships, and enmities. Albert Bermel, teacher, writer, and translator of farce, takes readers on an instructive and hilarious voyage from the classical Greek stage through English Restoration and French farce, to the young Hollywood of Mack Sennett, Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, the other silent farceurs of the Jazz Age, and on to W. C. Fields, Mae West, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Monty Python—including other greats along the way like Hope and Crosby, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers.
This collection brings together for the first time modern English translations of five Gozzi's most famous plays: The Raven, The King Stag, Turandot, The Serpent Woman, and The Green Bird, each annotated by the translators and preceded by the author's preface.
Providing an interpretation of the modern theatre, this is a new edition of a classic work of drama criticism.
Provides reviews of six works by the poet Moliere along with criticism and thematic analysis of other works and a short biography of the poet.
"In this book, Gene A. Plunka argues that the most important single element that solidifies all of Genet's work is the concept of metamorphosis. Genet's plays and prose demonstrate the transition from game playing to the establishment of one's identity through a state of risk taking that develops from solitude. However, risk taking per se is not as important as the rite of passage. Anthropologist Victor Turner's work in ethnography is used as a focal point for the examination of rites of passage in Genet's dramas." "Rejecting society, Genet has allied himself with peripheral groups, marginal men, and outcasts--scapegoats who lack power in society. Much of their effort is spent in revolt or d...
Luigi Pirandello is best known for his ability to create farcical tragedies that pit reality against appearance in such a way that objective truth is never revealed. Time magazine called Pirandello's work a fascinating precursor of the entire theater of the absurd -- the anguish over existence in Sartre and Camus, the guerilla warfare against ossified language and the mass mind in Ionesco, the bleak, alienated vision of Beckett, the sense of man eternally acting a role in Genet, and the use of the stage as a self-contained universe in Pinter. In new translations by acclaimed playwright and translator Eric Bentley, these versions of four of Pirandello's most celebrated plays -- Six Characters in Search of an Author, Emperor Henry, The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, and Right You Are -- are considered to be the standards for American productions. They capture the playwright's unique voice with remarkable precision, while at the same time attending to the rigors of the American stage.
(Applause Books). Albert Bermel writes comedies with a dark twist. The Times of London hailed Bermel's Workout as "one of the most expert pieces of comic writing to come out of America for some time." This volume includes nine witty, suspenseful plays six of them full length, three short. Bermel's plays and translations have been performed throughout the world, including the Royal Court Theatre in London; Spoleto Festival, Italy; and on Broadway. Thrombo , a food farce, is set in a fictional African nation; Shoots , in a Hollywood agent's office; Several other plays offer actors meaty historical roles the charismatic king Charlemagne in One Leg Over the Wrong Wall ; in Herod the Great , a towering figure and an Arab who became king of the Jews; and hot-tempered Alexandre Dumas in The Dumas Inheritance , to name but a few. The short plays Body Chop , Stumped , and Snipers are chilling entertainments, a heady mix of comedy and violence. As one New York critic put it, Snipers is "brilliant... a gem of a one-act . . . a tale of subtle horror... Bermel's text is devastating poetry."
Jean Genet is a writer known for contradictions in his life and in his creative endeavours. As a playwright, he has been classified in various categories: as a part of the Theatre of the Absurd, as a representative of the rights of the gay community, as a spokesperson of the Palestinian cause, and so on. His comments about his life and works further complicate things. This book frees Jean Genet’s plays from the overpowering Sartrean perspective, and offers an interpretation that reveals the otherwise hidden spaces of the prison, brothel or the maid’s garret ingrained in them. The plays selected for analysis in this study make a bold statement about areas in society that escaped the atten...
Farce has always been relegated to the lowest rung of the ladder of dramatic genres. Distinctions between farce and more literary comic forms remain clouded, even in the light of contemporary efforts to rehabilitate this type of comedy. Is farce really nothing more than slapstick-the "putting out of candles, kicking down of tables, falling over joynt-stools," as Thomas Shadwell characterized it in the seventeenth century? Or was his contemporary, Nahum Tate correct when he declared triumphantly that "there are no rules to be prescribed for that sort of wit, no patterns to copy; and 'tis altogether the creature of imagination"? Davis shows farce to be an essential component in both the comedi...