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Mirroring Romania's drastic transition from totalitarianism to Western-style freedom in the late 1980s, Mr. K Released captures the disturbingly surreal feeling that many newly liberated prisoners face when they leave captivity. Employing his trademark playful absurdity, Mat i Visniec introduces us to Mr. K, a Kafkaesque figure who has been imprisoned for years for an undisclosed crime in a penitentiary with mysterious tunnels. One day, Mr. K finds himself unexpectedly released. Unable to comprehend his sudden liberation, he becomes traumatized by the realities of freedom--more so than the familiar trauma of captivity or imprisonment. In the hope of obtaining some clarification, Mr. K keeps waiting for an appointment with the prison governor, however, their meeting is constantly being delayed. During this endless process of waiting, Mr. K gets caught up in a clinical exploration of his physical surroundings. He does not have the courage or indeed inclination to leave, but can move unrestricted within the prison compound, charting endless series of absurd circles in which readers might paradoxically recognize themselves.
Focusing on post-1956 British women playwrights, this book questions to what extent transformations in women's lives have impacted on theatre. Contributing to a range of discourses, including gender studies, cultural studies and theatre and performance studies, this timely volume is crucial to our understanding of women's drama in this period.
A novel of growing up a Hungarian in Romania under Communism. In the novel Story of a Stammer, Gábor Vida asks a fundamental question: Where does stammering come from? In the process of answering this question, he discovers that an entire historical period and an entire world has been stammering, too. Through Vida's eyes, we see that stammering comprises all the lies accumulated over time and over generations, because nobody had ever articulated what they felt or thought, nor done what they really wanted. Nobody, Vida shows, had ever told the truth. Describing life in the 1970s and '80s under Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauçescu's authoritarian regime, Vida writes with disarming h...
Focusing on post-1956 British women playwrights, this book questions to what extent transformations in women's lives have impacted on theatre. Contributing to a range of discourses, including gender studies, cultural studies and theatre and performance studies, this timely volume is crucial to our understanding of women's drama in this period.
Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 is one of two text anthologies that trace the reception of American art in Europe during the Cold War era through primary sources. Translated into English for the first time from sixteen languages and introduced by scholarly essays, the texts in this volume offer a representative selection of the diverse responses to American art in Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Soviet Union (including the Baltic States), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany (GDR). There was no single European discourse, as attitudes to American art were determined by a wide range of ideological...
Dramatist, poet, novelist and journalist Matei Visniec, born in Romania and living in France since seeking political asylum in 1987, has been one of the most trenchant voices of Europe, condemning the atrocities of totalitarianism as well as excesses of consumer culture. This first anthology of his dramatic work made available in English collects seven of his plays. "Decomposed Theater or The Human Trashcan "is a modular text that explores forms of brainwashing and alienation both in totalitarian and consumerist societies. "The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War "deals with the atrocities of war that addresses witnessing trauma, the complicated relationship between East and ...
The essays collected in this volume include a selection of those presented at a conference in the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain, in 2002. They highlight the existence of a European network of women's writing which became a valuable source of consciousness-raising, not only for European women writers, but also for their readers. The main theme running through the essays is love: women loving against the odds and transcending all kinds of obstacles. Does love speak a common language or is it inevitably linked to social mores and individual experience? Does desire work in the same way? Do love and desire have the power to subvert dichotomous thinking and motivate real change? The texts studied in this volume are both fictional and factual, from plays and novels to diaries, letters and drama performances. The countries the essays travel through, and the languages they encounter, all contribute to forming a magic web of connections, solidarities and ideas that truly cross boundaries.
Exploring theater practices in communist and post-communist Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, this book analyzes intertextuality or "inter-theatricality" as a political strategy, designed to criticize contemporary political conditions while at the same time trying to circumvent censorship. Plays by Romanian, Hungarian and Bulgarian dramatists are examined, who are "retrofitting" the past by adapting the political crimes and horrifying tactics of totalitarianism to the classical theatre (with Shakespeare a favorite) to reveal the region's traumatic history. By the sustained analysis of the aesthetic devices used as political tools, Orlich makes a very strong case for the continued relevance of the theater as one of the subtlest media in the public sphere. She embeds her close readings in a thorough historical analysis and displays a profound knowledge of the political role of theater history. In the Soviet bloc the theater of the absurd, experimentation, irony, and intertextual distancing (estrangement) are not seen as mere aesthetic language games but as political strategies that use indirection to say what cannot be said directly.
Two scripts were created in 2017 from the same source materials: preserved song lyrics from a performance created in 1943 in the Terezin Ghetto called Prince Bettliegend (the Bedridden Prince), the popular 1930s jazz melodies to which those lyrics were set, and fragments of testimony by survivors who performed in or witnessed that production. The development processes took place under the auspices of the £1.8 million AHRC-funded project Performing the Jewish Archive. PtJA co-investigator Lisa Peschel has spent the past two decades researching theatrical performance in Terezin, and the project’s planned performance festivals in Australia and South African in the summer of 2017 afforded a u...
Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka, eds., Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter / Reviewed by Danny Devlin