Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1955. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [466]-483).

Diss. Göteborg : Göteborgs universitet, 2010.

No description available.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Baylor University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 118-121).

Between 2000 and 2015 twelve of the UK’s leading producing theatres premiered twenty three plays by British playwrights where the action was set between 1882-1928. This historical period is significant; in 1882 the Married Women’s Property Act was passed and in 1928 equal enfranchisement for men and women was granted in the United Kingdom, hence, the historical period traces a shift in women’s rights from property ownership to the vote. This thesis investigates narratives within these plays and explores the development of a normative historiography that is drawn on, but predominantly left unquestioned, by playwrights as Britain’s past is reimagined. It is this normative historiography, operating in a theatrical context, which the thesis problematises and interrogates through the lens of contemporary British playwriting. This lens facilitates an exploration of the manner in which the representation of the past mirrors and/or challenges current feminist discourse and considers the cultural implications of the structures and techniques employed to retell women their history through this medium. Scholarship from the fields of academic and popular feminism, theatre studies, history and historiography shape the analytical framework of the thesis. Drawing on literature from these fields, this study conducts historically informed performance analysis that seeks to discover the sociocultural work done by contemporary plays that engage with the past. Archives of thirty British theatres have been surveyed to produce a database of plays that fall within the project boundaries; working with this data, trends and recurring themes have been identified, and subsequently chapters have been shaped to investigate dramaturgical questions in response to the field research. The dramaturgical questions explore: recurring modes of representation in plays that reimagine World War One; the representation of opposition in depictions of historical conflict; the retelling of specific historical narratives in relation to the challenge of staging ideas; and the recurrence of the heteronormative romantic plot. This thesis argues that when the playwright interrogates the normative dramaturgies and tropes they have inherited for historical representation, they assumes the role of historiographer and from this self-reflexive position recurring theatrical conventions for retelling the past are challenged. This perspective shifts attention beyond central patriarchal narratives of the past and facilitates engagement with the multiple avenues of enquiry regarding a historical moment. Engagement with the work of playwrights who foreground a historiographic awareness in their process, further illuminates the dialogue between representations of women in a historical context and contemporary feminist debate.

This thesis examines how mental illness has been represented in British theatre from c. 1960 to the present day. It is particularly concerned with the roles played by space and embodiment in these representations, and what emerges as bodies interact in space. It adopts a mixed methodology, drawing on theoretical models from both continental philosophy and contemporary cognitive and neuroscientific research, in order to address these questions from the broadest possible range of perspectives. The first part of the thesis draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre to explore the role of institutional space, and in particular its gendered implications, in staging madness. The second part introduces approaches to the body drawn from the cognitive turn in theatre and performance studies. These are connected to the approaches of the first section through phenomenology’s concern with lived experience. Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher’s work on ‘the phenomenological mind’ provides important context here. In addition, Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of ontology offers a solid basis from which to think about how to act ethically as both a producer of, and an audience member for, representations of mental illness. Through these explorations, this thesis suggests a model of madness, not as something to be bracketed as ‘other’ and belonging to a deviant individual, but as emerging between bodies in space – there is no madness outside of social, spatial and embodied contexts. This in turn suggests a new approach to understanding the role theatre can play in addressing the lived experience of mental illness. While many productions currently attempt, unilaterally, to reduce the ‘stigma’ of mental illness, this thesis suggests that that, in fact, discrimination against people experiencing mental illness is more likely to be reduced through the interaction between an ethically minded production and an ethical spectator. Such a model does not claim to be able to reduce the experience of madness to a totalising concept which can be communicated through theatre, but rather insists that it is only through an embodied, empathic interaction that a true concern for the (‘mad’ or ‘sane’) Other can emerge.

The Royal Court Theatre has forged its reputation on its ability to source and produce some of the most important new plays of the last sixty years. Its long-standing identity as a ‘writers’ theatre’ has cemented the Court’s allure to playwrights from across the world. Indeed, it is due to the theatre’s, at times, contentious history and continuous dedication to the playwright that the Court has also received substantial academic attention, which has resulted in extensive scholarship and interrogation of the theatre’s work. However, very little consideration has been given to the Royal Court Young Peoples’ Theatre and it is through engagement with this initiative and its development into the Young Writers’ Programme that this thesis provides a long-overdue assessment of this overlooked strand of the Court’s work. This thesis presents an original account of the Royal Court’s history from the perspective of its work with young people and playwrights. Primary sources of material for this thesis are shared between information gathered from the archive of the Royal Court, housed within the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collections at Blythe House, and interviews conducted by the author with key figures from this part of the Royal Court Theatre’s work. This material is located alongside the changing contexts of education, politics, the Royal Court and British theatre more widely, between 1966 and 2007, and looks to assess how each of these areas came to inform and influence the policy of the Young Peoples’ Theatre (YPT). The thesis proposes that the YPT adopted an unusual and alternative approach to working with young people that was at times both radical in its practice and fiercely political. The nature of its work often saw the Scheme ostracised from both a growing theatre-in-education movement and the Royal Court itself, where its survival is often credited to the tenacity of certain individuals. Indeed, the thesis posits that the YPT, despite its breadth of activity, was most welcomed within the theatre’s eco-system during the periods in its history when it focused its policy on young writers and therefore fed into the Court’s fundamental identity as a writers’ theatre.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University

I have attempted a reading of Aristotle in terms of mimesis, ethos, mythos, lexis, hamartia, anagnorisis, peripeteia, catharsis and anamnesis - as an existential “being there” (Dasein) of the characters’ freedom and actual historicity - in three of my plays in which I performed or witnessed in productions in England, Wales, three Scandinavian countries, the U.S. and South Africa. I have analysed other Southern African “womanist” performative drama and feminist theatre. I assume with the ancient Greeks that in serious theatre there is theoria, an educated, discursive looking, which involves a dialectics of logos in dianoia intertwined in the mythos – ethical truth in the discourse of the plot. Whilst aesthetics cannot be reduced to psychobiography, creative writing is motivated in part by the author’s and the dramatic subjects’ psychoanalytically understood personal and political unconscious placed in the ethos – the character on the stage. The aesthetics of tragedy relate to both peripeteia (reversals) and anagnorisis (recognition of responsibility) which occur within an arc of development, crisis and denouement of the vicissitudes of purported wisdom in understanding how performative drama and critical theatre have been presented in what has become known as The Struggle in a post-apartheid South Africa and post-colonial Zimbabwe by comparison with historical conditions in South America, India, even China. The values of nous, phronesis and sophia, intuitive, practical and interpretative wisdom are connected to the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics with which the tragic-comic hero and his Other are imbued or violate. The post-structuralist aesthetic as developed in the literary theory of the twentieth century is essentially the interaction of synchronic and diachronic language emerging from the signifiance and the semiosis of the chora (the feminine or maternal unconscious) within the de-familarisation techniques of Russian and Czech Formalism. This provides a creative and meaningful limit to a consciousness of being-white and beingblack- in-the-world against disempowering Nothingness or perceived Otherness threatening moral beings. Nothingness and the Other are characterised magically and as witch-craft in oral-cultures which deny the unconscious and resort to paranoia and persecution of Otherness in the subject projected onto the other – the “colonial personality”. Shades of Brown has been re-written as Jannie Veldsman – A Film 8 Scenario and I have incorporated into a revised The Cape Orchard a retrospective anticipation of the coming of the new South Africa. I reflect on what tragic drama on the stage and in real life in South Africa means now that the new South Africa is over its honeymoon period and faces serious problems of failed governance. Within the dialectic of an enlightened rabbinical morality of Hillel the Elder (“What is hateful to you do not do to others….” and “If I am not for myself who will be for me…?”) and Kant’s categorical imperative of human beings as a priori ends, I follow the fortunes of an old Jewish veteran of The Struggle, dating back to the Defiance Campaign of 1952/3. Fugard’s work is exemplary in fostering a sense of Sartre’s Nothingness and nihilation which “haunts” Being and is the space of undecidability in relation to my condition of freedom allowing the transcendence of Being. Being asserts reparation and redemption in the face of the depressive and paranoid subject/object split in the subject’s being-in-the-world. Plays ideally submerge this existentialist, psychoanalytic and Aristotelian dramaturgy in the form of Kierkegaard’s faith and Nietzsche’s will which are part of the Encompassing in Karl Jasper’s metaphysics - the residue of a Judaeo-Christian ethics facing the anomie and aporia of the postmodern. The new South Africa was only ostensibly built on Greek and Judaeo- Christian secular ethics – “truth and reconciliation”. It inherited state, revolutionary and criminal violence, as well as a sophisticated economic infrastructure, masspoverty and a segregated educational, social and welfare system which in the milieu of ANC incompetence and corruption have for the very poor got worse but to the benefit of a new African oligarchy, the beneficiaries of a dysfunctional affirmative action policy. What is to be done? Irigaray’s striking metaphor “the speculum of the Other woman” suggests that we are reflected by the instrument we use for investigating what may be Other to us: “we” are westerners trying to live in Africa. “We” are Other – not as autochthonous as the African majority. But the autochthonous can also behave as Other and may even fail to recognise the Other in themselves. Franz Fanon’s “colonial personality”, like ex-president Thabo Mbeki, misunderstands the colonial Other in himself which, disastrously, he projects and attacks in the imaginary and persecutory Other, only to suffer the return of the Real, as do the dramatic fictions Van Tonder in Shades of Brown, Dianne Cupido in The Cape Orchard and Harry Grossman the old man’s son in The Zulu and the Zeide (inspired by a short story by Dan Jacobson). 9 The Russian and Czech Formalists and Structuralists show us how to foreground the Real through techniques of de-familiarisation which can be applied to modernist and post-modernist “womanist” performance drama and feminist theatre. Defamilarisation, especially in an Africa struggling between failed and successful colonialism and often ruled by more or less corrupt elites, sensitizes us to a moral nihilism which characterises the failed African state - described by Conrad as a “heart of darkness” transcended in aletheia – being oneself in the self-showing light of one’s ethos operating through a personal and political unconscious mystified in the rhetoric of oral-cultures. Playwrights such as Yael Farber, Fraser Grace, Aletta Bezuidenhout and Fatima Dike express a semiosis of the unconscious and the signifiance and “absurdity” of logos suggesting that all is not lost in post-apartheid Southern Africa as regards human values, whilst struggling with the political correctness demanded in The Struggle. A partially successful colonialism in parts of Africa could within a British education system, produce a Wole Soyinka who transcends the propaganda of agit-prop by showing the parabolic arc of tragedy afflicted with peripeteia. The weight of African backwardness is not only the negative heritage of colonialism and slavery but Africa’s immersion in traditional partially modernised, but still patriarchal, often tribally and religiously split oral-cultures. These enable the colonial personality to unconsciously or opportunistically exploit his paranoiac sense of his victimage at the expense of the writing-cultures of development which entail anamnesis and the redemption through anagnorisis.

This thesis questions how theatre can act as a site of resistance against the political structures of madness. It analyzes a variety of plays from the past 25 years of British and Irish theatre in order to discern what modes of resistance are possible, and the conceptual lines upon which they follow. It questions how these modes of resistance are imbibed in the representation of madness. It discerns what way these modes relate specifically to the theatrical, and what it is the theatrical specifically has to offer these conceptualizations. It achieves this through a close textual and performative analysis of the selected plays, interrogating these plays from various theoretical perspectives. It follows and explores different conceptualizations across both political and ethical lay lines, looking at what composes the theatrical practical critique, how theatre can alter and play with space, how theatre capacitate the act of witnessing, and the possibility of re-invigorating the ethical encounter through theatrical means. It achieves this through a critical engagement with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. Engaging with the heterogeneity of madness, it covers a variety of madness’s different attributes and logics, including: the constitution and institutional structures of the contemporary asylum; the cultural idioms behind hallucination; the means by which suicide is apprehended and approached; how testimony of the mad person is interpreted and encountered.