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Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre

Edited by Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton and Claire Warden

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£34.99

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About this book

Explores modernism’s complex relationship with contemporary theatre
  • Includes consideration of canonical as well as lesser-known theatre artists
  • Offers an expansive range of case studies, featuring examples of theatre from around the world
  • Connects modernist studies with theatre and performance studies
  • Methodologically varied, including historiography, performance analysis, textual analysis, and practice as research
  • Includes essays by leading theatre scholars, modernist specialists, and theatre practitioners, providing an eclectic mix of essay formats and approaches, including creative contributions

This volume highlights modernism as an impulse that can be carried forward to the present, re-embodied and re-encountered in theatrical performance. It demonstrates how modernist impulses spark contemporary theatre in dynamic ways, continuing the modernist imperative to ‘make it new’ and to engage meaningfully with the complicated situation of living in the contemporary world. A diverse set of contributions from scholars and theatre practitioners examines the legacy of modernism on the world stage in acts of remembrance, restaging, transmission and slippage. It investigates both well-known and less familiar aspects of modernist theatre history, engaging topics such as the revival of the first Black American musical, feminist and disability-led reinterpretations of canonical modernist plays, the use of modernist-inspired performance practice in contemporary university arts education and the continually contested meaning and importance of the avant-garde.

Reviews

The playful spirit of modernism is alive and well in this multi-faceted consideration of that movement's aftershocks on the contemporary stage. If modernism was a provocation and a rupture, this impressive assemblage makes it clear that it is one that is with us still, as theatre artists the world over continually strive to ‘make it new’.
Table of contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

(anti-)capitalsism: a manifesto

Introduction: Sensing Modernism in Theatre

Claire Warden, Nicholas Johnson, Adrian Curtin and Naomi Paxton

Part I: Remembrance and Reconfiguration

1. Introduction: Playing with the Past, Attending to the ‘Lost’

Claire Warden

2. ‘The Right to Revolution’: Ernst Toller’s Legacy on the British Stage

Claire Warden

3. Legacy, Embodiment, Activism: Pageant of Agitating Women

Monica Prince and Anna Andes

4. Modernist Nostalgia and Contemporary Irish Dance

Chris Collins

5. Reaching Out in Both Directions: Suffrage Theatre in the Twenty-First Century

Naomi Paxton

6. Shuffle Along (1921) and the Challenges of Black Modernist Performance on the Contemporary Stage

Carrie J. Preston

7. ‘Who Was This Woman?’ A Conversation about Remembering Modernist Figures through the Body

Jessica Walker and Claire Warden

8. An Ode to Black Women Modernists

Adjoa Osei

Part II: Restaging Drama

9. Introduction: Acts of Translation, Reimagining and Creative Destruction

Adrian Curtin

10. Restaging Futurism and Joan Brossa: Provocation or Observation with a Glass of Champagne or a Cup of Tea

John London

11. Marguerite Duras’s Theatre and the Boundaries of Modernism

Lib Taylor

12. The (Dead) Centre Cannot Hold: Ontological Insecurity in Chekhov’s First Play

Adrian Curtin

13. En-Staging Nora: Unruly Modernisms in Theodoros Terzopoulos’s Nora

Konstantinos Thomaidis and Maria Vogiatzi

14. After and Against Strindberg: A Conversation about Missing Julie

Kaite O’Reilly and Adrian Curtin

15. ‘A Voice She Did Not Recognise At First’: Touretteshero’s Neurodiverse

Presentation of Samuel Beckett’s Not I

Matthew Pountney

16. Pushing the Boundaries: Staging Western Modern(ist) Drama in Contemporary China

Shouhua Qi

Part III: Transmission

17. Introduction: (Im)material Legacies, Living Traditions

Claire Warden, Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson and Naomi Paxton

18. The Theatre of Tadashi Suzuki at the Crossroads of Modernism

Burc İdem Dincel

19. Stanislavski on Skype

Mark Westbrook

20. Raising Her Voice: Presenting the Lives and Writings of Virginia Woolf and Dame Ethel Smyth for a Contemporary Theatre Audience

Lucy Stevens

21. Embodied Knowledge: A Brechtian Approach to Making Theatre with Young People

Kerry Frampton

22. Appropriation, Abstraction and Appraisal: Modernist Legacies of Contemporary Dance

Hanna Jarvinen

23. Shaw and the Early-Twentieth-Century British Regional Repertory Movement

Soudabeh Ananisarab

24. ‘Aqui no estamos en el teatro’: Impossible Plays, Queer Ghosts and Haunted Practices

Jonathan Heron

Part IV: Slippages

25. Introduction: How Movements Might Move

Nicholas Johnson

26. Ages of Arousal

Penny Farfan

27. ‘Make the New Legible through Experimentation’: A Conversation on the (Ongoing) Avant-Garde

Sascha Bru and Nicholas Johnson

28. Brecht as Slippage: Interrobang’s Dialogues with Modernist Theatre Machines

Ramona Mosse

29. ‘What Could Be the Theatre of Contemporary Life?’ A Conversation about the Work of Studio Oyuncuları Istanbul

Şahika Tekand and Burc İdem Dincel

30. ‘How Do We Make a Room in the Theatre?’ A Conversation about Design for Pan Pan Theatre, Dublin

Aedin Cosgrove and Nicholas Johnson

31. Samuel Beckett and Border Thinking

Nicholas Johnson

32. The Writing on the Wall Isn’t There to Be Read: Unworking the Theatrical in the Figures of Adrienne Kennedy

Kevin Bell

Afterword

Olga Taxidou

Event Scores (after fluxus)

Notes on Contributors

About the contributors

Adrian Curtin

Adrian Curtin is Associate Professor in Drama at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality (2019) and Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (2014). He has co-edited special issues of Theatre and Performance Design and the Open Library of Humanities. He is a contributing editor for New Theatre Quarterly.

Nicholas Johnson

Nicholas Johnson is Associate Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, where he co-founded the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies. His books include Experimental Beckett (with Jonathan Heron, 2020) and Bertolt Brecht’s David Fragments (1919–1921) (with David Shepherd, 2020), as well as several edited collections on Beckett. Directing credits include Virtual Play (2017–19), The David Fragments (2017) and Enemy of the Stars (2014–15). He works as dramaturg with Pan Pan, OT Platform and Dead Centre.

Naomi Paxton

Naomi Paxton is Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama at the University of London. She received the TaPRA Early Career Research Prize in 2019 for her body of work on suffrage theatre, which includes events and curated exhibitions at the National Theatre and UK Parliament, a monograph with Manchester University Press (2020) and two edited collections of suffrage plays with Methuen Drama (2013 and 2018). Naomi is also a professional broadcaster, cabaret performer, comedian and magician

Claire Warden

Claire Warden is is Professor of Performance and Physical Culture at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary modernism, performance practices and the intersection of sport and art. She is the author of three monographs, including the British Academy-funded Migrating Modernist Performance: British Theatrical Travels through Russia. She is also the founder and academic lead of the Arts Council-funded Wrestling Resurgence project and a past chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies.

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