Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Thursday, 25 March 2010 Does American drama have an annus mirabilis?
I'm currently
enjoying Dan Rebellato's
1956 and All That: The making of modern british
drama, a revisionist history of postwar British drama that
examines the status of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger as a
watershed work. Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court on 8
May 1956, though it was not the only significant theatrical event in
London that year: Brecht's Berliner Ensemble made its first appearance in
the city as well, and in August 1955 Waiting for Godot opened at
the Arts Theatre. An extraordinary twelve month period for any one theatre
capital indeed, even if it's only in hindsight: the English- There was no similar year in the U.S. (though that same year, 1956, saw
the Jose Quintero/Jason Robards revival of The Iceman Cometh at
Sheridan Square's Circle in the Square theatre, a production that,
according to legend, sparked the off- About ten years later, with the establishment of the off-Broadway scene and the off-off-Broadway scene at the Caffe Cino and La MaMa, a different sort of dramatic advance occurred, an advance which lashed out against the conformist spirit of the 1950s, when mass capitalism was in its ascendancy and the fear generated by the Cold War grew. Rebellato's book and similar revisionist histories of the English stage since 1956 make me curious as to what might be revealed by a similar reassessment of these plays and events and those that followed in their wake. As Rebellato writes in the introduction to his book, "As Foucault remarks, writing a history in terms of the present may simply reinforce conditions that obtain in the present. ... In this sense, writing an account of theatre in the fifties is also what Foucault calls a 'history of the present'; writing a history of the present that shows, as genealogy at its best can, that things could have been different, may also be an intervention in the present" — an intervention that may lead us to better understand the condition in which American drama finds itself today; after all, we do not know where we are until we understand where we've been. Posted in /Criticism |
