Three of my first year students were supposed to offer a dramatised reading of Pygmalion’s Act IV. In it, after her successful impersonation of a lady at a posh party, Eliza quarrels bitterly with her teacher Higgins because she thinks he’s not considered in depth what’s to become of her once this odd experiment is […]
I show to my first year students the glamourous Ascot sequence of My Fair Lady and the moment I write ‘Cecil Beaton’ on the blackboard, I wonder once more why Shaw neglects to explain in further detail Col. Pickering’s role in Eliza’s transformation. We do know he is the one paying for the whole experiment, […]
Josep María Pou has staged J.B. Priestley’s classic An Inspector Calls at Teatre Goya here in BCN for the first time in Spain, with the exception of a 1973 version for TVE’s Estudio 1 (um, the good old times when drama had a place on Spanish TV… The new version didn’t apparently get the expected […]
Yesterday four students offered us Scene 1 and Scene 2 of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, with a courage and enthusiasm far beyond my expectations. Josep and Helena, Julia and Isabella played Ian and Cate, with Julia doubling as the Soldier. To begin with, in Scene 1 we had a young couple (happy, I assume!) playing the […]
Last week we witnessed in class the struggle, brilliantly solved, of four students –Sara, David, Carla and, secondarily, María– with Terry Johnson’s demanding intellectual farce Hysteria (1993). They made the most of a plot which narrates Freud’s morphine-induced circular dream (or nightmare); in it, his subconscious or, rather, his conscience embodied by a naked woman, […]
Two years ago I had the great pleasure of writing with my friend Gerardo Rodríguez a paper on Kylie Minogue, which we presented at the 2009 AEDEAN at Cádiz. Yesterday, we both had the pleasure of seeing Kylie perform here in Barcelona to a full Palau Sant Jordi (her boyfriend, top model Andrés Velencoso, included!!!). […]
Introductions to particular literary periods, genres or schools make me as nervous as a party where I don’t know anyone: I want to meet everyone but I know that I’ll end up mixing up faces and stories and making serious gaffes (um, same problem with academic conferences, apologies to all concerned…). I’m currently going through […]
This week the experiment of having students perform scenes from a selection of contemporary British plays in class has started… with top results!! The first texts were Act I and Act III of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and I can only say that the women students playing the roles turned out to be top performers […]
I invite to my Contemporary British Theatre class Prof. Mireia Aragay and Prof. Enric Monforte of the University of Barcelona, two of the best Spanish specialists in the field and co-authors of the excellent collection of interviews with directors, playwrights, critics and academics, British Theatre of the 1990s (Palgrave, 2007) I interview them with interventions […]
I assume that what I’m going to complain about here is something that British Theatre specialists know very well. Yet, since I am not really a specialist and only teach theatre now and then, I must say that I’m surprised by the lack of good material on YouTube. The last time I taught a drama […]