A Day Off in the Life
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival works six days a week. (Apparently, they had to fight to get a day off and still have to ward off suggestions from the Board of Directors that they go back to working seven days a week.) Monday is its day off ... it's Monday.
Things are great so far. I'm only working on one of my two shows (The Philanderer) until the director for the other one gets here next week. When he comes in, I'll be working on both shows at once, one in the afternoon and one at night. As it is, I've been using the time that I have not been in rehearsal to get settled and to work on my thesis, the first draft of which is due Feb. 1st.
I like The Philanderer. It's Shaw's second play. (It isn't until his third, Mrs. Warren's Profession, that we start getting into shows that he's known for.) Originally, The Philanderer (1893?) didn't pass the official censor due to its controversial subject matter ... women. It wasn't allowed a public performance until 1907 though it had been previously published with Mrs. Warren and Shaw's first play, Widower's Houses under the title, Plays Unpleasant.
You see, theater in Britain in that time was made up of melodrama and sentimental comedies. I believe this is the time of the versions of Romeo and Juliet and Othello that were played with happy endings. Some playwrights like Pinero wanted a more serious, more realistic theatre but audiences weren't used to it and producers didn't want to chance it. When Ibsen's realistic plays finally hit English shores (A Doll's House and Ghosts) and saw productions, the way was opened up for a more realistic drama that involved itself with social critique. Shaw reworked Widower's Houses, a play about slum landlords in London, to be more Ibsen-esque. He then wrote The Philanderer, which, as I said, was kept off the stage for some 6 years. Mrs. Warren's Profession, a play that took a markedly unsentimental and nonmoralistic look at prostitution and didn't see a public performance until 1925, over 20 years after it being written. For a country that is so prominent in the history of Western theatre, it's fascinating to realize that the government exercised official censorship from before Shakespeare's time down into the 1960s.
The Philanderer is about the jolt that Ibsen's plays and the views they prompted ("No woman is the property of a man. A woman belongs to herself and no one else.") gave to conventional London society. It's title character, Leonard Charteris, is a young "Ibsenist philosopher" who is drawn to a beautiful, sexy, young, unmarried woman, Julia Craven. She informs him that she is "a woman of advanced views" and thus objects to marriage and attachments and all that sort of rubbish. With no hope to carry on a respectable relationship with her, he engages in a "philander" ... and finds that he quite likes this whole notion of fooling around and no attachments. Since he doesn't treat women as the children that other men do, they are attracted to him, and he gets to philander a lot. Unfortunately, Julia's pretentions to advancement are sturdier than her resolve as she falls in love with Leonard and is devestated by his philandering when she desires a very traditional, sentimental attachment. This ... is all backstory. The play begins with Charteris in the arms of another woman (a committed and resovled New Woman), whom he not just enjoys but loves. Julia strongly objects, protesting her love and demanding (in a most womanly and non-Ibsenist way) that Leonard is hers, hers, hers! It then traces Julia's battle to reconcile her love and desires with her professed ideals.
Like I said, I like the play. It's cleverly funny; it's sexy; it concerns itself with struggles that some feminists still deal with; and its characters are all interesting with depth, especially Julia, who's a nice portrait of someone in flux, someone who's trying to make love and relationships work and make sense when the concepts for her are in the process of changing. Plus, it's led me to coin a new term -- myshawgeny. Myshawgeny is Shaw's mix of advanced views and Victorian conditioning, where women are strong, powerful creatures with a right to self-possesion and self-determination ... who are the moral center of a man's world, and as that center will eventually lead to a man's destruction as they need and shall concern themselves with nothing but their own advancement. I like also like our director's approach. She's made some really bold and creative decisions to try to highlight the conventional society that the play is reacting against, but that may be distant to modern audiences. So, I like her production. I like her. It's fun to watch her work.
So far, this internship thing is so far from sucking.
Things are great so far. I'm only working on one of my two shows (The Philanderer) until the director for the other one gets here next week. When he comes in, I'll be working on both shows at once, one in the afternoon and one at night. As it is, I've been using the time that I have not been in rehearsal to get settled and to work on my thesis, the first draft of which is due Feb. 1st.
I like The Philanderer. It's Shaw's second play. (It isn't until his third, Mrs. Warren's Profession, that we start getting into shows that he's known for.) Originally, The Philanderer (1893?) didn't pass the official censor due to its controversial subject matter ... women. It wasn't allowed a public performance until 1907 though it had been previously published with Mrs. Warren and Shaw's first play, Widower's Houses under the title, Plays Unpleasant.
You see, theater in Britain in that time was made up of melodrama and sentimental comedies. I believe this is the time of the versions of Romeo and Juliet and Othello that were played with happy endings. Some playwrights like Pinero wanted a more serious, more realistic theatre but audiences weren't used to it and producers didn't want to chance it. When Ibsen's realistic plays finally hit English shores (A Doll's House and Ghosts) and saw productions, the way was opened up for a more realistic drama that involved itself with social critique. Shaw reworked Widower's Houses, a play about slum landlords in London, to be more Ibsen-esque. He then wrote The Philanderer, which, as I said, was kept off the stage for some 6 years. Mrs. Warren's Profession, a play that took a markedly unsentimental and nonmoralistic look at prostitution and didn't see a public performance until 1925, over 20 years after it being written. For a country that is so prominent in the history of Western theatre, it's fascinating to realize that the government exercised official censorship from before Shakespeare's time down into the 1960s.
The Philanderer is about the jolt that Ibsen's plays and the views they prompted ("No woman is the property of a man. A woman belongs to herself and no one else.") gave to conventional London society. It's title character, Leonard Charteris, is a young "Ibsenist philosopher" who is drawn to a beautiful, sexy, young, unmarried woman, Julia Craven. She informs him that she is "a woman of advanced views" and thus objects to marriage and attachments and all that sort of rubbish. With no hope to carry on a respectable relationship with her, he engages in a "philander" ... and finds that he quite likes this whole notion of fooling around and no attachments. Since he doesn't treat women as the children that other men do, they are attracted to him, and he gets to philander a lot. Unfortunately, Julia's pretentions to advancement are sturdier than her resolve as she falls in love with Leonard and is devestated by his philandering when she desires a very traditional, sentimental attachment. This ... is all backstory. The play begins with Charteris in the arms of another woman (a committed and resovled New Woman), whom he not just enjoys but loves. Julia strongly objects, protesting her love and demanding (in a most womanly and non-Ibsenist way) that Leonard is hers, hers, hers! It then traces Julia's battle to reconcile her love and desires with her professed ideals.
Like I said, I like the play. It's cleverly funny; it's sexy; it concerns itself with struggles that some feminists still deal with; and its characters are all interesting with depth, especially Julia, who's a nice portrait of someone in flux, someone who's trying to make love and relationships work and make sense when the concepts for her are in the process of changing. Plus, it's led me to coin a new term -- myshawgeny. Myshawgeny is Shaw's mix of advanced views and Victorian conditioning, where women are strong, powerful creatures with a right to self-possesion and self-determination ... who are the moral center of a man's world, and as that center will eventually lead to a man's destruction as they need and shall concern themselves with nothing but their own advancement. I like also like our director's approach. She's made some really bold and creative decisions to try to highlight the conventional society that the play is reacting against, but that may be distant to modern audiences. So, I like her production. I like her. It's fun to watch her work.
So far, this internship thing is so far from sucking.
posted by - caj at 1:05 PM
1 Comments:
"For a country that is so prominent in the history of Western theatre, it's fascinating to realize that the [British] government exercised official censorship from before Shakespeare's time down into the 1960s."
---cut here---
And the UK is also a country that figures prominently in the history of classical liberalism (i.e., libertarianism, e.g., "civil" libertarianism) so the irony has multiple sources and directions.
The UK government may have shut down the official censor's office in the 1960s, but that wasn't the end of official censorship. During Margaret Thatcher's era, songs were banned from the radio for being "pro-terrorist" including at least one song that proclaimed the innocence of the accused. That's like equating "I didn't do it!" with "I was right to do it!"
PS I wanted to double-check your claim of official censorship from before Shakespeare to the 1960s. It's not quite right. What ended in the 1960s was prior restraint -- meaning that a play needed official permission to be staged beforehand. That was not true in Shakespeare's time. It was illegal in the Elizabethan era to stage a play without a license ("patent") from the monarchy, but there was no prior restraint. So I would say either that the British government practiced official censorship from 1737-1968, or that it practiced official censorship from before Shakespeare's time to the present day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom
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