The Play out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture

by Edited by Hanna Scolnicov , Peter Holland

• ISBN13: 9780521038683
• ISBN10: 0521038685
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is a volume of essays, which examines the relationship between the play and its historical and cultural contexts. Transferring plays from one period or one culture to another is so much more than translating the words from one language into another. The contributors vary their approaches to this problem from the theoretical to the practical, from the literary to the theatrical, with plays examined both historically and synchronically. The articles interact with each other, presenting a diversity of views of the central theme and establishing a dialogue between scholars of different cultures. With play texts quoted in English, the range of themes stretches from a Japanese interpretation of Chekhov to Shakespeare in Nazi Germany, and Racine borrowing from Sophocles. Most of the essays are based on papers presented at the Jerusalem Theatre Conference in 1986. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of the theatre and of literature and literary theory as well as to theatregoers.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

List of contributors

Introduction Hanna Scolnicov

The play: gateway to cultural dialogue Gershon Shaked, translated

Problems of translation for the stage: interculturalism and post-modern theatre Patrice Pavis, translated

Space: the final frontier

'If the salt have lost his savour': some 'useful' plays in and out of context on the London stage

Mimesis, mirror, double

Greek drama in Rome: some aspects of cultural transposition

Shakespeare and theatre politics in the Third Reich

The generation of Life Is a Dream from Oedipus the

Claudel and Vitez direct

The role of the target-system in theatrical adaptation: Jalal's Egyptian-Arabic adaptation of Tartuffe

Chekhov in limbo: British productions of the plays of Chekhov

Intercultural aspects in post-modern theatre: a Japanese version of Chekhov's Three Sisters

Mr Godot will not come today

The adaptation and reception in Germany of Edward Bond's

Whose Life is it Anyway? in London and on Broadway: a contrastive analysis of the British and American versions of Brian Clark's play

Index

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