Synopses & Reviews
The book focuses on Martin Crimp's plays, translations, adaptations and versions from 1985 to the present. It contends that Crimp's is a theatre of radical defamiliarization and proposes that to understand how this materializes both textually and in performance we need to refresh our understanding of the term. The book therefore draws upon phenomenology to locate the intensity and efficacy of Crimp's writing. Each chapter focuses on case studies contextualized in relation to other texts linked by their content so as to weave the inner narrative of Crimp's theatre. Through an examination of the rich, ambiguous content and formal experimentation of Crimp's work, the book proposes that defamiliarization in his plays serves to engage audiences in ideas relating to the commercialization of daily life, the artist's consumption by the entertainment industry, the inherent violence in domestic environments, the restrictiveness of social class, and the understanding of a nation's own identity through its encounter with the Other.
Review
"Throughout, Angelaki's deep admiration for and sustained engagement with Crimp's work is evident. This has its most positive effects in her combination of textual and performance analysis: for this reason, her book makes an extremely useful contribution to which future scholars will no doubt be indebted." - Rachel Clements, New Theatre Quarterly
Synopsis
This book rigorously examines the work of leading contemporary playwright Martin Crimp. It examines his plays, adaptations, translations and versions, treats them as texts and performance events and argues that their challenge to audiences derives from their 'making strange': producing theatrical innovation, thus rendering the familiar unfamiliar.
Synopsis
Children's texts are highly responsive to social change and to global politics, and are implicated in shaping the values of children and young people. New World Orders, now in paperback for the first time, shows how texts for children and young people have responded to the cultural, economic and political movements of the last fifteen years. With a focus on international children's texts produced between 1988 and 2006, the authors discuss how utopian and dystopian tropes are pressed into service to project possible futures to child readers. The book considers what these texts have to say about globalization, neocolonialism, environmental issues, pressures on families and communities, and the idea of the posthuman. This fascinating volume is the first thorough study of how children's books imagine and propose possible worlds and societies.
About the Author
VICKY ANGELAKI is Lecturer in Drama at the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, University of Birmingham, UK. She publishes on modern, recent and contemporary British and European theatre in relation to audience perception, spectatorship and citizenship, politics and aesthetics, as well as translation and adaptation within a broader cultural context.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Reaching Beneath the Surface
Urban Materialism and the Self as Commodity
The Artist and the Industry of Mass Consumption
(Un)Spoken Violence and Domestic Power Relations
Urban Violence, Social Class, Political Transgressions
Translating There and Then into Here and Now
In Lieu of a Conclusion: Spectator as Character
Appendix: Details of Original Staging for Plays, Adaptations, Translations and Versions by Martin Crimp
Notes
Selected Critical Sources on Martin Crimp
Index