Download Free John Whiting On Theatre Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online John Whiting On Theatre and write the review.

This book is a complete and comprehensive projection of John Whiting as an absurdist playwright. It is a round and unvarnished story of a prodigious playwright who within a short span of his life, did much to outshine his contemporaries. His journey was not limited to stage and theatre. He also wrote for the films, television and even radio. The journey began with The Conditions of Agreement in 1946 and ended with The Devils in 1961. In between he wrote many landmark plays through which one can trace the evolutionary trajectory of a legend in the making who was a confluence of mind and mystery, love and revenge, sentimentality and blood lust. His plays are replete with sin and sleaze, callousness and collusion. This was because in Whiting, one also comes across the diminution of norms owning to ethical elasticity and dispensability of principles. In his plays the pathology of power is matched by the ethos of human failings as is exemplified by the rise and fall of Grandier in The Devils. Here the banality of power fails to keep distance between pretense and principles. Bereft of the romance of renewal and predictability, many of his plays end up on disjointed note in the best tradition of the theatre of the absurd. The playwright's obsession with pre-mediated violence creates a disconnect between storyline and characterization. In practically every plays of Whiting creates a heady cocktail of fear, violence, loathing and paranoia and yet they make for a compelling reading. This book is a summary of my findings regarding John Whiting with terse comments on his qualities as an absurdist playwright. It has been my endeavor to assess him both as a literary figure and a playwright, wedded to the absurdist tradition.
The year 1956 marked a point when British drama and theater fell into the hands of a group of young playwrights who revolutionized the stage. During that time, playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter made the British theater as rich, varied, and vital as any national theater in history. This reference chronicles the history of British theater from 1956 to 1995 by providing detailed information about the playwrights of that period. Included are entries for some three dozen British playwrights active between 1956 and 1995. Entries are arranged alphabetically to facilitate use. Each entry supplies biographical information, the production history for particular plays, a survey of the playwright's critical reception, an assessment of the dramatist's work, and primary and secondary bibliographies. A selected, general bibliography at the end of the volume directs the reader to important sources of additional information about this period in theater history.
English Drama Since 1940 considers the bids of successive post-war dramatists to find language and images of remorseless disclosure, appropriate to the public manifestation of sensed crisis and the interrogation of the ideal of renewal. This book introduces the period and its discourse whilst redefining them, to give proper consideration to developments of themes, styles, concerns and contexts from the 80s to the present. The book offers succinct and analytical introductions to the work of 60 dramatists, whilst arguing for (re)appraisal of many dates critical perspectives, in order to stimulate further argument in the field.
Publisher Description
Derived from The Cambridge guide to theatre_
This book, first published in 1981, sets out the critical reaction to some fifty key post-war productions of the British theatre, as gauged primarily through the contemporary reviews of theatre critics. The plays chosen are each, in their different ways, important in their contribution to the development of the British theatre, covering the period from immediately after the Second World War, when British theatre fell into decline, through the revival of the late 1950s, to the time in which this book was first published, in which British theatre enjoyed a high international reputation for its diversity and quality. This book is ideal for theatre studies students, as well as for the general theatre-goer.
Ur innehållet: J. Scandinavian drama (s. [398]-423).
A compendium of information on all the main events, individuals, political groupings and issues of the 20th century. It provides a guide to current thinking on important historical topics and personalities within the period, and offers a guide to further reading.