Remembering Molly MacEwen: Sue Harries and Alasdair MacEwen in Conversation

Molly MacEwen’s design career took off after serving as Micheál mac Liammóir’s apprentice at the Dublin Gate during the mid-1930s and following her design work on the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. MacEwen went on to make a significant contribution to Irish and Scottish theatre design that has received little recognition in existing theatre scholarship. Illustrated by images of materials from (for the most part) the Scottish Theatre Archive’s Molly MacEwen collection (1948-1961), this article comprises an introduction to MacEwen, followed by a composite of selected conversations from interviews with MacEwen’s niece, Sue Harries, and nephew, Alasdair MacEwen. We learn of MacEwan’s familial and personal links to continental Europe, her unrequited devotion to mac Liammóir, and her successes in designing at Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre and for the Edinburgh International Festival after leaving the Gate in 1947 to work in Scotland. The dialogues in this article also reveal that MacEwen was a very shy and retiring woman, and that the men with whom she worked – including Edwards, mac Liammóir, and Tyrone Guthrie – took her for granted and possibly diminished the extent of her work. This situation, combined with gender inequalities and the collaborative nature of MacEwen’s design roles, may have led to her work being overlooked at the time and in pertinent publications on design and theatre. This article seeks to go some way towards recovering MacEwen’s important achievements for theatre history. Key Words: Molly MacEwen, Dublin Gate Theatre, Scottish theatre, design, women in theatre, Edinburgh International Festival, Michéal mac Liammóir

Song as a Register for Black Feminist Theatre-Making Aesthetic

This article looks at the play, Dipina tsa Monyanyako, which was made with a group of domestic workers in South Africa. The article explores how song is used as a strategy to locate ways of creating and making in South Africa. Song therefore registers a historical way of imagining and how marginalised groups; women have written themselves into history. The production is a creative conversation where song is used to express care and anger in everyday life. Current approaches to knowledge production are inadequate in capturing song, poetics, and interpreting the forms of performances black women engage. The article makes a case for song as a form of black feminist theatre-making aesthetic. Using Dipina tsa Monyanyako, I argue that songs, silence, sighs have important methodological implications for arts-based processes and research. In post-apartheid South Africa, performances are characterized by constant aesthetic reinvention. From precolonial expressions of life to protest theatre, performance aesthetics have been a way of revealing everyday life and struggles. For black women, theatre becomes the meeting place of the expression of their lives and a space of reflection and analysis of those lives, even though, historically, the presence of black women in theatre has been minimal. The creation of Dipina tsa Monyanyako allowed for the emergence of women as empowered subjects, and song became a portal for collective transformation.

Lithuanian Literature and Shakespeare: Several Cases of Reception

The article is based on the reception theory by Hans Robert Jauss and analyses how Shakespeare’s works were read, evaluated and interpreted in Lithuanian literature in the 19th to 21th centuries. Some traces of Shakespeare’s works might be observed in letters by Povilas Višinskis and Zemaitė where Shakespearean drama is indicated as a canon of writing to be followed. It is interesting to note that Lithuanian exodus drama by Kostas Ostrauskas is based on the correspondence between Višinskis and Zemaitė. The characters of the play introduce the principles of the drama of the absurd. Gell’s concept of distributed personhood offered by S. Greenblatt is very suitable for analysing modern Lithuanian literature that seeks a creative relationship with Shakespeare’s works. The concept maintains that characters of particular dramas can break loose from the defined interpretative framework. Lithuanian exodus drama reinterprets Shakespeare’s works and characters. The plays by Ostrauskas and Algirdas Landsbergis explore the variety of human existence and language, the absurd character of the artist, meaningless human existence and the critique of totalitarianism. Modern Lithuanian poetry interprets Shakespeare‘s works so that they serve as a way to contemplate the theme of modern writing, meaningless human existence, the tragic destiny of an individual and Lithuania, miserable human nature, the playful nature of literature, the clownish mask of the poet, the existential silence of childhood, the topic of life as a theatrical performance, the everyday experience of modern women in theatre. The most frequently interpreted dramas are Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth – Lithuanian literary imagination inscribed them into the field of existentialist and absurd literature.

The First Female Performers: Tumblers, Flute-girls, and Mime Actresses

Recovering the ‘lost’ female tradition has been one of the explicit goals of feminist scholarship in theatre history. Live Hov’s essay is a contribution to that line of research, focusing on the first female performers in the ‘illegitimate’ genres of Greek and Roman theatre. By surveying a number of relevant texts, she shows how these important ‘firsts’ are a neglected area in the theatre and performance studies curriculum. Specialized works by classical scholars provide more evidence on the matter, however, and in the second part of the essay Hov sketches the professional activities and social status of the first female performers. Finally she views the topic through the concept of the gaze, showing how the female performers of antiquity were the first ‘objects’ of the gaze, which in turn contributed to the persistent notion of the promiscuous actress. Live Hov is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Oslo, formerly holding a similar position at the University of Copenhagen. Prior to her academic studies she was trained as an actor at the National Theatre School, Norway. Most of her publications (mainly in Norwegian and Danish) pertain to the history and function of women in theatre, to the history of opera production, and to Henrik Ibsen as a man of the theatre.

Female Trance in Han Tae-Sook's Production of Lady Macbeth

In this article, Jung-Soon Shim indicates how Han Tae-Sook transforms Lady Macbeth's subconscious into an interculturally emotional space in which the Christian concept of guilt and the Korean ethos of Han intersect. In this way, the director conducts an intercultural dialogue, negotiating the Western world view in Shakespeare's Macbeth together with the traditional Confucian-shamanistic world view to be found in Korea. Jung-Soon Shim is Professor of English at Soongsil University in Seoul, currently President of the Korean Theatre Studies Association (KTSA), and a founding member and President of the Korean Association of Women in Theatre (KAWT). Her numerous books include Twenty-First Century Korean Women Theatre Directors (2004).

Performing Gender: A Discourse Analysis of Theatre-Based Sexual Violence Prevention Programs

Among the numerous approaches that are employed to prevent sexual violence, the performance of scenarios has become one of the ‘promising practices’ in U.S. postsecondary education. This article describes findings from a pilot study to analyze scripts used for theatre-based sexual violence prevention programs. Employing the method of discourse analysis, this study analyzed five sexual violence prevention scripts from three postsecondary institutions to identify the predominant discourses taken up to depict men and women in theatre-based sexual violence prevention programs. Analysis revealed dominant discourses of masculinity and femininity shaping images of men as heroes and abusers and women as vulnerable and victims. The article concludes with recommendations for student affairs practice.