Suchergebnisse

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." (Article 19, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights) / "Dear President Bush, I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood." (Harold Pinter, the Guardian, 18 November 2003) / Two years after composing the above letter Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Many had thought that his outspoken views might preclude any chance of such an honour, but in the last decade the Nobel Prize judges have increasingly linked the award with a politics of human rights, and a championing of freedom of expression. In their citation the judges praised Pinter as a dramatist 'who uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms'. Pinter's insistence on speaking out, like other recent Nobel prize-winners, exemplifies the spirit of article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His blunt rage against the American/British invasion of Iraq had been made public in his poetry, in letters, and in speeches long before public opinion in the West turned anti-war; and his castigation of American imperialism has not ceased since the 1980s. In his controversial Nobel acceptance speech Pinter contended that 'the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought' in communist Eastern Europe since 1945 have been fully acknowledged and documented, but that US crimes in the same era have scarcely been admitted, 'let alone recognised as crimes'.

Caryl Churchill has shown a sustained interest in the inter-connections between self-definition, identity politics and revolution. In her career she has repeatedly examined revolutionary conditions, and engaged ambitiously with the artistic dilemma of how to represent political turmoil on stage. This chapter investigates three of her plays about revolution: The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Mad Forest. /The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution / Hospital was written in 1972 though, inexplicably, it has never been staged. It draws on the writings of the celebrated psychiatrist and champion of the Algerian struggle for independence, Frantz Fanon, who was an inspirational figure not just for black revolutionaries but also for Churchill's generation of white, western political radicals in the 1960s. The decolonization of Africa followed Indian independence in 1947, and when, in 1960, seventeen former African colonies became independent members of the United Nations, it marked a turning point in the post-war world, re-mapping power relations between Europe and Africa. The Algerians' fight for autonomy was particularly complex since French occupation dated from 1830 and French trade and investment in Algeria had matched economic commitments in all of France's other imperial territories combined. French emigration to Algeria had far exceeded the scale of emigration to other French colonies and colonial legal policy even upheld that Algeria was an integral part of France - an ideological position that created a panoply of contradictions and paradoxes.

Brecht was the most radical theorist and practitioner of twentieth-century theatre. His methods of writing and developing plays, his training for writers, actors and directors, his interrogation of design and stage lighting, and his collaborations with composers, singers and musicians defined a particular kind of political theatre - and practitioners the world over continue to modify and rework Brecht's theory and praxis to make interventionist theatres of their own. Central to his theatre-making, and the vital motor for the articulation and dissemination of his ideas, is the dramaturg - but curiously this centrality is not highlighted in literature about Brecht. This essay will address that neglect by examining Brecht's own employment as a dramaturg, his writings on dramaturgy, and his organisation and training of dramaturgs within the Berliner Ensemble. Brecht's reinvention of the dramaturg rewrote a theatrical role first adopted by the German Enlightenment playwright and critic Gotthold Lessing. From 1767 to 1769 Lessing was the official dramaturg at the Hamburg National Theatre and, in an extraordinarily ground-breaking experiment, wrote plays and published critiques of the National Theatre's repertoire, its actors' performances and the creative processes undertaken in each production. Lessing's objective was to articulate the artistic travails normally hidden from the public and to generate a critical discourse on the repertoire and working practices of the institution itself.