To imitate Jones' directors, you would need to be handed the
original script of Chekhov's The Seagull, Williams' A Streetcar
Named Desire (along with Marlon Brando), or to be Brecht mounting
his own Mother Courage in several productions over 20 years, or to
have the Royal Shakespeare Company at your complete disposal for a
year. This is a rich lode Jones is mining, of great directors
producing original works of great genius. First, though, he asks,
what exactly does a director do for a living? (Full-fledged
directors, like orchestra conductors, first appeared about a
century ago.) Well, they "enliven contemporary works, peel the
wallpaper off the classics, and show action, word, and character in
all their presentness." Thus, "1880-1980 is the third great age of
Western drama, an era comparable or superior to the eras of
Sophocles and Shakespeare in such respects as duration, number of
productions, cultural reverberation, and artistic achievement; and
the same century has been the century of the director." Jones
studies his directors mainly by texts they've produced: a puzzled
Stanislavky's vast preliminary notes for The Seagull, in which he
invented the subtext or spiritual thread that needed to be produced
physically on the stage; Brecht's three-volume modelbook for
productions of Mother Courage; Kazan's notes for directing
Streetcar and his energizing ideas for helping the actors grasp the
spine of their characters; and Peter Brook's workshop
investigations of Antonin Artaud's theater of cruelty, and their
role in the famous production of Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade. Among the
wonderful moments that Jones revives is Brando's gifted but
unpredictable genius in playing - reluctantly - a brute completely
strange to his own sensitive beatnik soul. Not ground-breaking, but
jampacked with lore and readable headstuff. (Kirkus Reviews)
The subject of this book is theatre directing in four
internationally famous instances. The four directors-Konstantin
Stanislavsky, Bertolt Brecht, Elia Kazan, and Peter Brook-all were
monarchs of the profession in their time. Without their work,
theatre in the twentieth century-so often called "the century of
the director" -would have a radically different shape and meaning.
The four men are also among the dozen or so modern directors whose
theatrical achievements have become culture phenomena. In
histories, theories, hagiographies, and polemics, these directors
are conferred classic stature, as are the four plays on which they
worked. Chekhov's The Seagull, Brecht's Mother Courage and Her
Children, and Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire have long been
recognized, in the theatre and in the study, as masterpieces. They
are anthologized, quoted, taught, parodied, read, and produced
constantly and globally. The culturally conservative might question
the presence of MaratiSade in such august company, but Peter
Weiss's play stands every chance of figuring in Western
repertories, classroom study, and theatrical histories until well
into the twenty-first century. In their quite different ways, these
are all classics of that Western drama which is part of our
immediate heritage.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
