Britain Had Talent: a History of Variety Theatre
The book makes fascinating and valuable read ing for the movement teacher as well as for the student of movement, performance, or dance searching for a deeper underpinning to their practice. In the introduction, Michael Y. Bennett defends his choice of illustration for the cover of the infamous phot...
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| Published in: | New Theatre Quarterly 2013, Vol.29 (3), p.304 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Review |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | The book makes fascinating and valuable read ing for the movement teacher as well as for the student of movement, performance, or dance searching for a deeper underpinning to their practice. In the introduction, Michael Y. Bennett defends his choice of illustration for the cover of the infamous photograph of the opera singer Alice Guszalewicz as Salome thought for a long time to be of Wilde himself posing in the role because it in a sense . . . best sums up the con tro -ver sies and issues of the past fty years sur round -ing Wildes Salome ambiguity, limin ality, opera/ play, hetero/homosexual and per verse desire, the gaze which Bennett wishes to revisit and develop through the book as a whole. Perhaps best read in conjunction with the more linear 1996 Cambridge Plays in Production stage history of Salome by John Tydeman and Stephen Price (who contributes the essay to this volume on Salome and Sunset Boulevard), this book opens up the play as, and for, performance. The book situates Artauds theatre, so often characterized as a liberating revolt or tragic promulgation of an impossible vitality, at the nexus between two seismic developments that dened the history of modern theatre: the emergence of newly passive bourgeois theatre audiences and the parallel rise of the gure of the theatre director with increasingly absolute power over the theatrical event. |
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| ISSN: | 0266-464X 1474-0613 |