|
Showing 1 - 5 of
5 matches in All Departments
In Reliving the Trenches, three plays written by returned soldiers
who served in the Great War with the Canadian Expeditionary Force
in France and Belgium appear in print for the first time. With a
critical introduction that references the author's service files to
establish the plays as memoirs, these plays are an important
addition to Canadian literature of the Great War.Important but
overlooked war memoirs that relive trench life and warfare as
experienced by combat veterans, the three plays include The P.B.I.,
written and staged in 1920 by recently returned veterans at the
University of Toronto. Parts of this play appeared in print in
serial form in 1922. Glory Hole, written in 1929 by William Stabler
Atkinson, and Dawn in Heaven, written and staged in Winnipeg in
1934 by Simon Jauvoish, have never been published. These plays
impact Canadian literature and theatre history by revealing a body
of previously unknown modernist writing, and they impact life
writing studies by showing how memoirs can be concealed behind
genre conventions. They offer fascinating details of the daily
routines of the soldiers in the trenches by bringing them back to
life in theatrical re-enactment.
Committing Theatre offers the first full-length historical
study of political intervention theatre and theatrical
spectatorship in English Canada. Building on twenty years of
research and engagement in the field, this book's historical
narrative frames close-up examples of how theatre artists have
intervened in and engaged with political struggle from the mid-19th
century to the present. Lumber-camp mock trials, Mayday parades and
street protests, the Workers Theatre Movement, agitprop theatre,
the counter-culture theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent
anarchist theatre collectives all played a role in a vibrant and
unique radical theatre culture that went largely unnoticed,
unrecorded, and undocumented by the professional theatre
establishment.
This volume comprises a reprinting and gloss of the original text
of the 1933 Communist play Eight Men Speak. The play was banned by
the Toronto police after its first performance, banned by the
Winnipeg police shortly thereafter and subsequently banned by the
Canadian Post Office. The play can be considered as one stage-the
published text-of a meta-text that culminated in 1934 at Maple Leaf
Gardens when the (then illegal) Communist Party of Canada
celebrated the release of its leader, Tim Buck, from prison. Eight
Men Speak had been written and staged on behalf of the campaign to
free Buck by the Canadian Labour Defence League, the public
advocacy group of the CPC. In its theatrical techniques,
incorporating avant-garde expressionist staging, mass chant,
agitprop and modernist dramaturgy, Eight Men Speak exemplified the
vanguardist aesthetics of the Communist left in the years before
the Popular Front. It is the first instance of the collective
theatrical techniques that would become widespread in subsequent
decades and formative in the development of modern Canadian drama.
These include a decentred narrative, collaborative authorship and a
refusal of dramaturgical linearity in favour of theatricalist
demonstration. As such it is one of the most significant Canadian
plays of the first half of the century, and, on the evidence of the
surviving photograph of the mise-en-scene, one of the earliest
examples of modernist staging in Canada.
Since its inception in 1974, "Canadian Theatre Review" has been one
of the most important publishers of new Canadian plays. With a
script in each issue, CTR has introduced new writers and advocated
new approaches to Canadian drama. This volume brings together
fifteen of the most significant plays published in CTR between 1974
and 1991. Most have been out of print since their appearance in the
journal. They include recognized classics that have transformed
Canadian theatre, such as "Ten Lost Years" and "This is for You,
Anna," and lesser-known plays by such major writers as Robert
Lepage and George F. Walker. Taken together these plays not only
expand the boundaries of Canadian drama; they also document an
important and exciting period in Canadian theatre. They are vivid
testaments to the diversity of contemporary theatrical practice in
Canada.
Sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field
readily available.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Tenet
John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, …
DVD
R53
Discovery Miles 530
|