[SPOILERS AHEAD] I am going back to the discussion of hegemonic masculinity on which I focused my last post, this time in connection to Tennessee Williams’s popular play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a Pulitzer-Award winner. The 2014 production by the Young Vic and Joshua Andrew, directed by Benedict Andrews, has been available online since […]
It seems that I have started this academic year in a metaphysical vein, concerned about time. Now it’s the turn of John Boynton Priestley’s suggestive play I Have Been Here Before (1937), which I have just seen in La Perla29’s effective production. Directed by Sergi Belbel, using Martí Gallén’s very good Catalan version, Priestley’s play […]
Sharing coffee with a friend who also loves science fiction, we end up wondering when the idea of the future died. The media have entered a phase which I can only call ‘punk’ (after the Sex Pistols’ 1977 hit song ‘No Future’), for its intense focus on the oncoming climate-change related apocalypse. Perhaps not oncoming […]
Today I begin from ignorance so profound that I have started by learning a concept I didn’t know: the ‘dialogue novel’. This should be familiar to me, as I read as a young girl in secondary school its main Spanish incarnation: Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina (1499), a tragic story entirely told through dialogue. I […]
I have just accepted tutoring an MA dissertation on how the new digital media conditions the task of the dancer and choreographer. What is an (English) Literature teacher doing supervising this? Let me retrace the steps. Since I have always been interested in the process of film adaptation, having published many articles about it, and […]
One month ago I published a post on Pablo Iglesias Simón’s monograph De las tablas al celuloide (2007). Iglesias devotes a good deal of his volume to Henry Irving (British) and David Belasco (American), both great stage-managers who shaped their local theatrical practice. Irving was, of course, also a star; for Belasco (1853-1931), in contrast, […]
I will not refer in this post to the film adaptation of stage plays, though if you’re curious, you may start by checking the IMDB list I opened last February with my students in the MA ‘Theatre Studies’ (UAB). Here it is: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls076798996/. I mean, rather, the poorly understood transition from the 19th century technologies […]
Last evening I saw ‘La ratonera’ at Teatre Apolo, here in Barcelona, the Spanish translation of Agatha Christie’s very famous The Mousetrap. I am really mystified that this absolutely mediocre play, to call it something polite, is still on 62 years after its opening night. That is the real mystery and not what the plot […]
A central scene in Simon Stephens’s Pornography is the monologue by a suicide bomber that I have mentioned in the previous post. As it is well known, the four terrorists who caused the 7/7 attacks were English men: non-white, like so many Britons, yet English all through. The point that Stephens wants to make with […]
This week we have been working on Simon Stephens’s play Pornography (2007) in class, within my elective subject ‘English Theatre’ (well, it’s ‘British Theatre’ but you know what labels are like, and it’s not really ‘Theatre in English’). The title can be quite misleading, as Pornography is actually a play dealing with the historic week […]