Performance and Politics in Popular Drama :Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800–1976

Publication subTitle :Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800–1976

Author: David Bradby; Louis James; Bernard Sharratt  

Publisher: Cambridge University Press‎

Publication year: 1981

E-ISBN: 9780511866036

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780521285247

Subject: I106.3 dramatic literature

Keyword: 各国戏剧艺术

Language: ENG

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Performance and Politics in Popular Drama

Description

Since the beginning of the nineteenth-century, many forms of theatre have been called 'popular', but in the twentieth-century the term 'popular drama' has taken on definite political overtones, often indicating a repudiation of 'commercial theatre'. Does this mean that political theatre is or tries to be more attractive to more people than commercial theatre? Does it conversely mean that commercial theatre has no political effects? The articles in this book were submitted as papers for a conference on the theme of 'popular' theatre, film and television. Contributions came from people with very different types of experience: from an ex-animal trainer to a lecturer in film studies; from playwrights, directors and actors to professional critics and academics. Each author focused on a particular problem of defining drama in performance, drawing together the conditions of performance, the types of audience and the political effects of the plays or films in question. The result was a series of fruitful connections and juxtapositions that shows the remarkable continuity of the problems raised in attempts to create a popular political drama.

Chapter

Postscript

Joseph Bouchardy: a melodramatist and his public

I

II

III

The music of melodrama

Popular theatre in Victorian Birmingham

I

II

III

IV

V

Water drama

Equestrian drama and the circus

Theatre of war: the Crimea on the London stage 1854-5

Popular drama and the mummers' play

I

II

III

THE ANTROBUS SOULCAKING PLAY

IV

V

VI

PART TWO

Politics and performance in twentieth-century drama and film

Introduction

Meyerhold and Eisenstein

Erwin Piscator's 1927 production of Hoppla, We're Alive

Prolet Buehne: agit-prop in America

Workers' theatre 1926-36

The October Group and theatre under the Front Populaire

Cultural policies

Front Populaire policy on theatre

Theatre patronised by the Front Populaire

Agit-prop theatre: October

Conclusion

Only the stars survive: disaster movies in the seventies

The present cycle and its predecessors

PART THREE

Problems and Prospects

Introduction

The politics of the popular? — from melodrama to television

Escapism, dream and nightmare

Expertise and intimacy

Television

Problems of popular political drama

Your Move

After Fanshen: a discussion

Appendix: Tempo, Tempo

Select bibliography

General index

Index of titles of plays, films, sketches

Index of theatres, theatre companies and groups

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