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This thesis examines post-war black British theatre through a transnational lens. It argues that the hitherto prioritization of a national paradigm in discussions of black British theatre is not sufficiently complex to chart the historical processes that have shaped it and the multiple spatial, cultural, and political contexts in which it has been generated. This thesis finds that a transnational optic exposes a network of connections – physical, ideological and psychic – between blacks in Britain and other global black communities which have shaped and transformed the lives of Britain’s black communities and their cultural production. The thesis is divided into three chapters: the USA (chapter 1), the Caribbean (chapter 2), and Africa (chapter 3). Each chapter represents a specific geo-cultural-political space with which black British theatre has an important relationship. Each chapter follows the same broad structure: the first half of the chapter establishes a particular transnational process and mode of analysis which frames the ensuing historical discussion; the second half is devoted to an analysis of two contemporary black British dramatists. The USA chapter examines black British theatre through the lens of Americanization and Black Power. The first half traces the influence of black America on black British theatre’s formation, organization and expression in the post-war period. The second half examines works by Kwame Kwei-Armah and Mojisola Adebayo. The Caribbean chapter applies the process and theory of creolization to a discussion of the rise and consolidation of Caribbean culture in black British theatre. The chosen case studies for this chapter are Roy Williams and Bola Agbaje. Finally, the African chapter discusses the recent flux of immigrants from Africa since the 1990s and, using the concept of diaspora as an analytic model, explores the impact this has had on black British theatre. The second half focuses on works by Inua Ellams and debbie tucker green. Dividing the thesis into the spaces of the USA, the Caribbean and Africa allows one to filter and track the origination and circulations of particular sets of ideas, practices and / or people. The divisions reiterate that I am looking at complex heterogeneous material informed by multiple strands of influence. Nevertheless, connections between the chapters emerge, which illustrate historically embedded circuits of influence and exchange that have routinely transgressed national borders. Taken as a whole, the thesis supports the idea that black British theatre not only merits a transnational approach, but is, in fact, a transnational practice in itself.

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The plays of James Boaden, an author all too often forgotten in the pages of theatre history, are usually dismissed by scholars as mercenary adaptations of popular Gothic novels for the stage. Boaden’s plays of the 1790s—Fontainville Forest (1794), The Secret Tribunal (1796), The Italian Monk (1797), Cambro-Britons (1798) and Aurelio and Miranda (1799)—were certainly popular successes in their own time, but this should not discount them from serious consideration as aesthetic and ideological objects. In fact, these plays are intelligently wrought, using popular Gothic conventions to further a conservative ideology that was not originally associated with this genre. This fact has gone unrecognized by scholars partly because these plays have not been previously analysed for their dramaturgical structure as adaptations: Boaden borrows conventions from the Gothic, to be sure, but he also borrows dramaturgical techniques from Shakespeare. In so doing, Boaden harnesses both popular appeal and theatrical legitimacy to write Tory propaganda at a time when the stage was a key tool in the ideological war against France and French sympathizers in Britain. Political threats, both domestic and foreign, were of ongoing concern in Britain in the years following the French Revolution. Immediately after 1789, the Gothic was ideologically charged in ways that promoted revolutionary thinking. Boaden’s adaptation of the Gothic form responds to the revolution and the Reign of Terror by replacing the genre’s iconoclasm with a strongly nationalist orientation, drawn, in part, from eighteenth-century Shakespeare reception, itself often strongly nationalist in tone. Boaden’s plays are reactionary in that they comment on the current political situation, using allegory to play on the audience’s emotions. In his first phase, Boaden depicts the demise of a villainous usurper, a scapegoat figure, but his second phase reintegrates the villain into domestic and social harmony. In so doing, Boaden serves as a case study in the shifting attitude towards Britain’s revolutionary sympathizers, the Jacobins, and illustrates the important use of the Gothic mode for conservative purposes. Boaden emerges, in this study, as a figure whose relevance to theatre history in this fraught period requires reassessment.

The plays of James Boaden, an author all too often forgotten in the pages of theatre history, are usually dismissed by scholars as mercenary adaptations of popular Gothic novels for the stage. Boaden’s plays of the 1790s—Fontainville Forest (1794), The Secret Tribunal (1796), The Italian Monk (1797), Cambro-Britons (1798) and Aurelio and Miranda (1799)—were certainly popular successes in their own time, but this should not discount them from serious consideration as aesthetic and ideological objects. In fact, these plays are intelligently wrought, using popular Gothic conventions to further a conservative ideology that was not originally associated with this genre. This fact has gone unrecognized by scholars partly because these plays have not been previously analysed for their dramaturgical structure as adaptations: Boaden borrows conventions from the Gothic, to be sure, but he also borrows dramaturgical techniques from Shakespeare. In so doing, Boaden harnesses both popular appeal and theatrical legitimacy to write Tory propaganda at a time when the stage was a key tool in the ideological war against France and French sympathizers in Britain. Political threats, both domestic and foreign, were of ongoing concern in Britain in the years following the French Revolution. Immediately after 1789, the Gothic was ideologically charged in ways that promoted revolutionary thinking. Boaden’s adaptation of the Gothic form responds to the revolution and the Reign of Terror by replacing the genre’s iconoclasm with a strongly nationalist orientation, drawn, in part, from eighteenth-century Shakespeare reception, itself often strongly nationalist in tone. Boaden’s plays are reactionary in that they comment on the current political situation, using allegory to play on the audience’s emotions. In his first phase, Boaden depicts the demise of a villainous usurper, a scapegoat figure, but his second phase reintegrates the villain into domestic and social harmony. In so doing, Boaden serves as a case study in the shifting attitude towards Britain’s revolutionary sympathizers, the Jacobins, and illustrates the important use of the Gothic mode for conservative purposes. Boaden emerges, in this study, as a figure whose relevance to theatre history in this fraught period requires reassessment.

The plays of James Boaden, an author all too often forgotten in the pages of theatre history, are usually dismissed by scholars as mercenary adaptations of popular Gothic novels for the stage. Boaden’s plays of the 1790s—Fontainville Forest (1794), The Secret Tribunal (1796), The Italian Monk (1797), Cambro-Britons (1798) and Aurelio and Miranda (1799)—were certainly popular successes in their own time, but this should not discount them from serious consideration as aesthetic and ideological objects. In fact, these plays are intelligently wrought, using popular Gothic conventions to further a conservative ideology that was not originally associated with this genre. This fact has gone unrecognized by scholars partly because these plays have not been previously analysed for their dramaturgical structure as adaptations: Boaden borrows conventions from the Gothic, to be sure, but he also borrows dramaturgical techniques from Shakespeare. In so doing, Boaden harnesses both popular appeal and theatrical legitimacy to write Tory propaganda at a time when the stage was a key tool in the ideological war against France and French sympathizers in Britain. Political threats, both domestic and foreign, were of ongoing concern in Britain in the years following the French Revolution. Immediately after 1789, the Gothic was ideologically charged in ways that promoted revolutionary thinking. Boaden’s adaptation of the Gothic form responds to the revolution and the Reign of Terror by replacing the genre’s iconoclasm with a strongly nationalist orientation, drawn, in part, from eighteenth-century Shakespeare reception, itself often strongly nationalist in tone. Boaden’s plays are reactionary in that they comment on the current political situation, using allegory to play on the audience’s emotions. In his first phase, Boaden depicts the demise of a villainous usurper, a scapegoat figure, but his second phase reintegrates the villain into domestic and social harmony. In so doing, Boaden serves as a case study in the shifting attitude towards Britain’s revolutionary sympathizers, the Jacobins, and illustrates the important use of the Gothic mode for conservative purposes. Boaden emerges, in this study, as a figure whose relevance to theatre history in this fraught period requires reassessment.

A presente tese analisa a peça We Are Three Sisters - escrita em 2011 pelo poeta e dramaturgo britânico Philip Blake Morrison - com o objetivo de discutir as ligações entre as instâncias do ficcional, do real, do imagético e do biográfico. Morrison utiliza como pano de fundo para a elaboração de We Are Three Sisters o texto As Três Irmãs (1902) do dramaturgo russo Anton Chekhov. Morrison preenche sua peça com dados sobre a vida das irmãs Brontë, como retratados pela historiadora e biógrafa Juliet Barker em The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (2010). Barker, que foi curadora da biblioteca da Brontë Society durante anos, confiou a Morrison os dados de sua pesquisa e o auxiliou a transportá-los para a peça que ele estava escrevendo. Considero importante examinar como se dá esse processo de esgarçamento das fronteiras entre o real e o ficcional através do conteúdo simbólico e imagético, porque ele reflete um tipo de prática cada vez mais utilizada por autores contemporâneos. O diálogo entre a Rússia de Chekhov da virada do século XIX/XX e o cenário (interiorano) do norte (industrial) da Inglaterra no período vitoriano, quando equacionados por Morrison no contexto dos dias de hoje, convidam-nos a traçar considerações que muito têm a nos dizer sobre os parâmetros da dramaturgia contemporânea. Além de serem três grandes autoras do cânone vitoriano, as irmãs Brontë surgem também como ícones culturais britânicos, tantas vezes já representadas como personagens em biografias ficcionais, romances, filmes, balés e peças de teatro. Para escrever sua apropriação da vida das Brontë, Morrison ampara-se na biografia de Juliet Barker, ao mesmo tempo em que utiliza a peça de Chekhov como um texto-sombra, uma matriz que serve como base para sua criação, um andaime em torno do qual constrói seu enredo. O movimento de entrelaçamento de realidade e ficção realizado por Morrison e a produção do conteúdo simbólico através da análise de imagens arquetípicas são o principal foco de interesse desta tese. Escolhi como metodologia de trabalho a aproximação entre os três textos, o de Morrison, o de Barker e o de Chekhov, através de ferramentas dos Estudos do Imaginário, representados pela análise de conteúdos imagéticos nos termos propostos por Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Carl Gustav Jung e Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, uma vez que a tese aponta para possibilidades dialógicas entre imagem e palavra dentro dos paradigmas da cena teatral contemporânea. / This PhD dissertation analyzes the play We Are Three Sisters, written in 2011 by the poet and British playwright Philip Blake Morrison, in order to discuss the links between the instances of the fictional, the real, imagery and biography. Morrison uses as a backdrop for the elaboration of We Are Three Sisters the text Three Sisters (1900), by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Morrison fills his play with data on the life of the Brontë sisters, as depicted by the historian and biographer Juliet Barker in The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (2010). Barker, who was for years curator of the library of the Brontë Society, entrusted Morrison data from her research and helped Morrison to transport them to the play he was writing. I consider it important to examine how this process of fraying of the borders between the real and the fictional, through symbolic imagery and content, takes place, because it reflects a kind of practice increasingly used by contemporary authors. The dialogue between the turn of Chekhov’s Russia of the nineteenth/twentieth century and the (countryside) scenario (industrial) north of England in the Victorian period, when equated by Morrison in the context of today, invites us to make some considerations that have much to tell us about the parameters of contemporary dramaturgy. Besides, being three great authors of the Victorian canon, the Brontë sisters also come as British cultural icons, so often represented as characters in fictional biographies, novels, movies, ballets and plays. To write his appropriation of the Brontë’s life, Morrison is supported by Juliet Barker’s biography, while using Chekhov’s play as a shadow text, a matrix which serves as the basis for its creation, a scaffold around which he builds its plot. The intertwining movement of reality and fiction conceived by Morrison and the production of symbolic content through the analysis of archetypical images are the main focus of this PhD dissertation. I chose as a working methodology the approach of the three texts, Morrison’s, Barker’s and Chekhov’s, through the tools of the Studies of the Imaginary, represented by the analysis of imagery content as proposed by Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Carl Gustav Jung and Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, since the work points to dialogic possibilities between image and word within the paradigms of the contemporary theater scene.

A presente tese analisa a peça We Are Three Sisters - escrita em 2011 pelo poeta e dramaturgo britânico Philip Blake Morrison - com o objetivo de discutir as ligações entre as instâncias do ficcional, do real, do imagético e do biográfico. Morrison utiliza como pano de fundo para a elaboração de We Are Three Sisters o texto As Três Irmãs (1902) do dramaturgo russo Anton Chekhov. Morrison preenche sua peça com dados sobre a vida das irmãs Brontë, como retratados pela historiadora e biógrafa Juliet Barker em The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (2010). Barker, que foi curadora da biblioteca da Brontë Society durante anos, confiou a Morrison os dados de sua pesquisa e o auxiliou a transportá-los para a peça que ele estava escrevendo. Considero importante examinar como se dá esse processo de esgarçamento das fronteiras entre o real e o ficcional através do conteúdo simbólico e imagético, porque ele reflete um tipo de prática cada vez mais utilizada por autores contemporâneos. O diálogo entre a Rússia de Chekhov da virada do século XIX/XX e o cenário (interiorano) do norte (industrial) da Inglaterra no período vitoriano, quando equacionados por Morrison no contexto dos dias de hoje, convidam-nos a traçar considerações que muito têm a nos dizer sobre os parâmetros da dramaturgia contemporânea. Além de serem três grandes autoras do cânone vitoriano, as irmãs Brontë surgem também como ícones culturais britânicos, tantas vezes já representadas como personagens em biografias ficcionais, romances, filmes, balés e peças de teatro. Para escrever sua apropriação da vida das Brontë, Morrison ampara-se na biografia de Juliet Barker, ao mesmo tempo em que utiliza a peça de Chekhov como um texto-sombra, uma matriz que serve como base para sua criação, um andaime em torno do qual constrói seu enredo. O movimento de entrelaçamento de realidade e ficção realizado por Morrison e a produção do conteúdo simbólico através da análise de imagens arquetípicas são o principal foco de interesse desta tese. Escolhi como metodologia de trabalho a aproximação entre os três textos, o de Morrison, o de Barker e o de Chekhov, através de ferramentas dos Estudos do Imaginário, representados pela análise de conteúdos imagéticos nos termos propostos por Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Carl Gustav Jung e Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, uma vez que a tese aponta para possibilidades dialógicas entre imagem e palavra dentro dos paradigmas da cena teatral contemporânea. / This PhD dissertation analyzes the play We Are Three Sisters, written in 2011 by the poet and British playwright Philip Blake Morrison, in order to discuss the links between the instances of the fictional, the real, imagery and biography. Morrison uses as a backdrop for the elaboration of We Are Three Sisters the text Three Sisters (1900), by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Morrison fills his play with data on the life of the Brontë sisters, as depicted by the historian and biographer Juliet Barker in The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (2010). Barker, who was for years curator of the library of the Brontë Society, entrusted Morrison data from her research and helped Morrison to transport them to the play he was writing. I consider it important to examine how this process of fraying of the borders between the real and the fictional, through symbolic imagery and content, takes place, because it reflects a kind of practice increasingly used by contemporary authors. The dialogue between the turn of Chekhov’s Russia of the nineteenth/twentieth century and the (countryside) scenario (industrial) north of England in the Victorian period, when equated by Morrison in the context of today, invites us to make some considerations that have much to tell us about the parameters of contemporary dramaturgy. Besides, being three great authors of the Victorian canon, the Brontë sisters also come as British cultural icons, so often represented as characters in fictional biographies, novels, movies, ballets and plays. To write his appropriation of the Brontë’s life, Morrison is supported by Juliet Barker’s biography, while using Chekhov’s play as a shadow text, a matrix which serves as the basis for its creation, a scaffold around which he builds its plot. The intertwining movement of reality and fiction conceived by Morrison and the production of symbolic content through the analysis of archetypical images are the main focus of this PhD dissertation. I chose as a working methodology the approach of the three texts, Morrison’s, Barker’s and Chekhov’s, through the tools of the Studies of the Imaginary, represented by the analysis of imagery content as proposed by Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Carl Gustav Jung and Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, since the work points to dialogic possibilities between image and word within the paradigms of the contemporary theater scene.

This dissertation examines a very popular and widespread trend in contemporary British and Irish theatre - monologue plays. One of the reasons of the recent boom of monologue-based theatre performances might be the fact that the condensed theatrical form presents a challenge for everyone involved - the playwrights, actors, and crucially also for the audience. The diversity and quantity of such plays present an obstacle that has deterred most theatre scholars from systematic analysis as it is difficult to decide on what ground such widespread phenomenon might be critically approached. Given the essential role the audience have as the only communication partner of the lonely monologists on stage, this work attempts to analyse the contemporary boom of monologue plays in the U.K. and Ireland by using a systematic framework, based on the various incorporations of the monologue, which enables examination of how specific strategies of the realisation of the monologue elicit audience engagement. First it explores monologue plays in which one actor/actress performs one character, then it deals with plays in which the performer re-enacts other characters, subsequently this work focuses on very rare experiments in the monologue form, where the performer re-enacts conflicting versions of their split selves and...