Offstage Space Narrative And The Theatre Of The Imagination

Offstage Space, Narrative, and the Theatre of the Imagination is a study of extrascenic space and how playwrights have used narrative as an alternative to conventional scenic enactment. The book covers the work of writers as diverse as Euripides, Plautus, Shakespeare, Susan Glaspell, Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Brian Friel, and Thomas Bernhard. William Gruber offers a wide-ranging overview of the dramaturgical choices dramatists make when they substitute imagined events for perceptual ones.

Site Unscene: The Offstage in English Renaissance Drama explores the key role of dramatic episodes that occur offstage and beyond the knowledge-generating faculty of playgoers’ sight. Does Ophelia drown? Is Desdemona unfaithful to Othello? Does Macbeth murder Duncan in his sleep? Site Unscene considers how the drama’s nonvisible and eccentric elements embellish, alter, and subvert visible action on the stage. Jonathan Walker demonstrates that by removing scenes from visible performance, playwrights take up the nondramatic mode of storytelling in order to transcend the limits of the stage. Through this technique, they present dramatic action from the subjective, self-interested, and idiosyncratic perspectives of individual characters. By recovering these offstage elements, Walker reveals the pervasive and formative dynamic between the onstage and offstage and between the seen and unseen in Renaissance drama. Examining premodern dramatic theory, Renaissance plays, period amphitheaters, and material texts, this interdisciplinary work considers woodcuts, engravings, archaeology, architecture, rhetoric, the history of the book, as well as plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Kyd, Ford, Middleton, and Webster, among others. It addresses readers engaged in literary criticism, dramatic theory, theater history, and textual studies.

This volume explores the constitutive role played by space in the performance of Kutiyattam. The only surviving form of Sanskrit theatre, Kutiyattam is distinctive in terms of its performance conventions and its unique culture of extensive elaboration and interpretation. Drawing upon the concepts of phenomenology on the processes of perception, particularly on the works of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it analyses the role of space in the communicative structures of performance of Kutiyattam and its contribution to the production of meaning in theatre, especially in the context of contemporary theatre. The book explores the theatrical event as a phenomenon that comes into existence through a triangular relationship among the ‘ways of being’ of the performers, the ‘ways of seeing’ of the audience, and the space which brings them together. Based on this formulation, Kutiyattam is approached as a ‘theatre of elaboration,’ made possible by the ‘intimate,’ ‘proximal’ ways of seeing of the audience, in the particular theatrical space of the kūttampalaṃs, the temple theatres, where Kutiyattam has customarily been performed for more than five centuries. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural anthropology, phenomenology and South Asian studies.

Meditations on those entities the audience does not see—and their profound significance in the theater

Confinement appears repeatedly in Samuel Beckett's oeuvre – from the asylums central to Murphy and Watt to the images of confinement that shape plays such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Drawing on spatial theory and new archival research, Beckett in Confinement explores these recurring concepts of closed space to cast new light on the ethical and political dimensions of Beckett's work. Covering the full range of Beckett's writing career, including two plays he completed for prisoners, Catastrophe and the unpublished 'Mongrel Mime', the book shows how this engagement with the ethics of representing prisons and asylums stands at the heart of Beckett's poetics. "James Little's Beckett in Confinement offers a brilliant analysis of the politics behind Beckett's production of closed space, both as a writer and as a director. It carefully examines the move from writing about closed space to creating an art of confinement. To argue that Beckett's use of confined space is central to the political dynamics of his works, James Little also superbly employs genetic criticism to open up the confined space of the published text and bring highly relevant draft materials back into the critical conversation." Dirk Van Hulle, Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History, University of Oxford, UK "The many characters Beckett invented share one characteristic: they are all imprisoned or trapped in some way, no matter where they are. Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space draws on untapped riches from Beckett's correspondence and the archives to reconsider the obsession with entrapment, coercion and detention central to Beckett's varied oeuvre. In this exciting and illuminating analysis, James Little offers a fresh and original reading of the work's ethical and political dimensions, and shows us why we need to stop thinking about confinement as a metaphysical metaphor." Emilie Morin, Professor of Modern Literature, University of York, UK "Little breaks new ground in this expansive investigation to explore how confinement is a central component of Beckett's political aesthetics ... The reader is guided by a crisp and easy style of writing as Little demonstrates a command of sources which are broad in scope, but negotiated to form a compelling and impactful study." Journal of Beckett Studies

Shakespeare's characters are thought to be his greatest achievement—imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality, while his plots are said to be second-hand and careless of details of time and place. This view has survived the assaults of various literary theories and has even, surprisingly, been revitalized by the recent emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatre. But belief in the autonomous imaginative life of Shakespeare's characters depends on another unexamined myth: the myth that Shakespeare rejected neoclassicism, playing freely with theatrical time and place. Circumstantial Shakespeare explodes these venerable critical commonplaces. Drawing on sixteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy, it reveals the importance of topics of circumstance (of Time, Place, and Motive, etc.) in the conjuring of compelling narratives and vivid mental images. 'Circumstances' — which we now think of as incalculable contingencies — were originally topics of forensic inquiry into human intention or passion. In drawing on the Roman forensic tradition of circumstantial proof, Shakespeare did not ignore time and place. His brilliant innovation was to use the topics of circumstance to imply offstage actions, times and places in terms of the motives and desires we attribute to the characters. His plays thus create both their own vivid and coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the unconscious feelings of characters inhabiting them. Circumstantial Shakespeare offers new readings of Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Lucrece, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Macbeth, as well as new interpretations of Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy. It engages with eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism, contemporary Shakespeare criticism, semiotics of theatre, Roman forensic rhetoric, humanist pedagogy, the prehistory of modern probability, psychoanalytic criticism and sixteenth-century constitutional thought.

The Transformations of Tragedy explores different Christian influences, from the Early Modern to Modern periods, upon the development of post-classical Western tragedy.

This book is the first full-length monograph to focus on Punchdrunk, the internationally-renowned theatre company known for its pioneering approach to immersive theatre. With its promises of empowerment, freedom and experiential joy, immersive theatre continues to gain popularity - this study brings necessary critical analysis to this rapidly developing field. What exactly do we mean by audience “immersion”? How might immersion in a Punchdrunk production be described, theorised, situated or politicised? What is valued in immersive experience - and are these values explicit or implied? Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience draws on rehearsals, performances and archival access to Punchdrunk, providing new critical perspectives from cognitive studies, philosophical aesthetics, narrative theory and computer games. Its discussion of immersion is structured around three themes: interactivity and game; story and narrative; environment and space. Providing a rigorous theoretical toolkit to think further about the form’s capabilities, and offering a unique set of approaches, this book will be of significance to scholars, students, artists and spectators.