Jennifer De Reuck

This article offers a reading of John Webster‟s masterpiece, The Duchess of Malfi (1614), as an exemplification of an „aesthetics of sacrifice‟ in which human agency is first presented – in the character of the widowed Duchess – and then radically undermined. The reader/receiver of the text, it is argued, rather than encountering the ultimately positive, secular humanism that many critics have discerned in the play, is left with an impression of the dramatic world as devoid of purpose, its central character denied subjectivity as the playwright traces the tight arc of the Duchess‟s trajectory from the laughing decider of her own destiny in Act 1, to her abjection and death at the instigation of her murderous, controlling brothers in Act 4. In support of this reading of Webster‟s vision, the paper draws on the work of the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden‟s insights into the construction of the literary work of art, adapting his constructionist view of such works to the drama. Close textual analysis – augmented by the experience of two exceptional recent productions of the play – offers a rationale for a reading of The Duchess of Malfi as the depiction of a world ultimately devoid of meaning. While this chimes with early modern theorists‟ notions of „the‟ Jacobean world-view as nihilist, what is offered here is an explication of the underlying (dramatological) mechanisms that infuse and construct the reader/receiver‟s response to a work in which the central character retains a fascination for audiences, arguably equal to that usually reserved for the best of Webster‟s more famous contemporary, Shakespeare.

This paper comprises two inter-related parts. In the first section I discuss the development of the empathetic imagination in young people through the medium of drama. Referring to a selection of plays I have written, directed and published as e-books for theatre in education projects, I will examine how the narrative situation of such theatre-work, both facilitates and invokes the meaning structures through which a young person’s empathetic imagination can be epistemically and ethically schooled. Pre-given identity formations and socially endorsed ‘ways of seeing’ dictate the untutored imaginations of young people. This paper will argue for the value of generating an epistemically informed, empathetic imagination, as an ideal towards which theatre for young people should strive especially when its form is shaped into contemporary adaptations of the Shakespearean text or popular entertainment, which attract significant numbers of young viewers. The second section of the paper interrogates the design and representation decisions taken for an adaptation of Macbeth which imported Asian performance and visual arts traditions in an attempt to offer both student performers and audiences a thought-provoking perspective on traditional western interpretations of the play. Central to such an undertaking, I contend, is the ethical reconstruction through dramatic presentations of regimes of value reception. Cognitive respect for the young mind, together with a commitment to supporting the emerging autonomous judgement of the young viewer or performer requires the framing of the dramatic treatment in such a way as to present stage characters whose vulnerabilities resist marginalization through uninformed manoeuvres of exclusion. By questioning unreflexive, encultured identity formations, theatre for young people, I suggest, can enlarge the empathetic reach of the ‘youthful imagination’ and provide a justifiable ‘way of knowing’. Ideologically undistorted dramatized encounters - joyous and sad by turns – invite young actors and audiences to embrace differences with enlightened generosity.

This paper offers a critical evaluation of the challenges we confronted when bringing to the stage in Perth, Western Australia, an all-female production of Titus Andronicus in 2011. Aware of the strengths of a group of professional female actors whose gender denied them the powerful roles of the Shakespearean canon and infused with a vision to showcase the group’s abilities Titus Andronicus was selected for the inaugural performance of H.I.V.E. (Her Infinite Variety Ensemble) Perth’s first all-female performance group. The director and filmographer of this production revisit the conceptual and visual material that this complex process generated in order to address some of the significant questions it raised about cultural assumptions within audiences that make up the contemporary theatrical community in Western Australia, specifically regarding the production and circulation of the Shakespearean text. We explore the limits and possibilities of performing against conventional notions of gender and power relations when the iconic Shakespearean text is adapted for audiences today. The exquisite lyricism and dramatic scope of the lines provide a verbal feast for any actor and in the hands (or mouths) of powerful performers, we suggest, gender becomes immaterial. In this adaptation the actors were permitted to play not just ‘the woman’s part’, but the parts, too, that have traditionally been denied them. The challenges of this experiment in transgressing the conventional boundaries of performance revealed some disturbingly entrenched parameters within which the actors were ostensibly constrained; nevertheless, as this paper demonstrates, the liberating potential of the ensemble’s work allowed for a reinvention of (and refocussing upon) the brutality and violence of the dramatic world of this play. The outcomes endorse the view of the “infinite variety” of the Shakespearean text: a fitting insight for the ensemble’s inaugural production.

“New Historical” approaches have allowed for the reinvention of Shakespearean productions in a variety of adaptive processes that operate in many instances "against the grain". The politics of performance has never been more visible than in many recent productions both in Australia and internationally. This paper argues that the "space" between the actor and the character in Shakespeare's dramas is most creatively negotiated with young performers if the excitement of Shakespeare's intersubjective potential is unleashed and their performances are allowed the freedom of expression that more overtly politicised constraints may inhibit. Drawing on the praxis-led research undertaken with final year, Honours and postgraduate students in the Creative Arts at Murdoch University (2009) this paper will offer a case study of a production of Twelfth Night.1 "Space" in this context is presented as a field of orientation whose alignments flow from the central sensibilities of the dominant characters in the play.

After the re-presentation of a version of Witness in the Murdoch TV Studio as part of the Dialogics II Conference, (2010), and with a view to incorporating the reflections of their performance by the Director, Serge Tampalini and the actors, David Moody and Martin Mhando in this issue, I asked them a series of questions which they answered in a variety of ways. Serge Tampalini provided a meta-commentary of the research-as-praxis that informed „the making of‟ Witness, and it is offered in full in Part 2 of this section. Part 1is a blend of the actors‟ responses to some of the questions I had regarding the interlinked processes that had resulted in their provocative postcolonial piece, Witness, first performed at The Blue Room Theatre, Perth 4-22 May 2010.

Using an oppositional figure derived from Robert Graves' poem, ‘In broken images’, as a heuristic device, this article explores the clash between dogmatic methodologies on the one hand and liberating methodologies on the other in order to expose as unproductive an opposition that arraigns the political discourses of ‘truth’ against the literary discourses of justification. In doing so the article locates the tension between an aesthetic orientation in the study of literature and that, particularly in postcolonial studies, which has gained critical ascendancy: namely a material or political orientation in the study of literature. In order to minimize the marginalization of so‐called‘art talk’ (Chapman 2006. Art Talk, Politics Talk.) when confronted by the ‘real politik’ of ‘politics talk’ I argue that these two apparently antagonistic discourses are essentially part of a single, ordered discourse that, if allowed to achieve its full potential, advances through continual self‐correction to an ever‐deepening emancipation of the species. I suggest, further, a program for the recovery (or recuperation) of aesthetics in the study and analysis of literary discourse so that we can begin the reconfiguration of what I take to be at present a self‐defeating agenda. What I argue for is a project that embraces difference and which seeks to locate the emancipatory potential of the individual within the communal process of social inquiry.

Athena Emu has one ambition - to compete at the Athens Olympics. She and her friends have been training hard and their coach, Miss Severity, the Ferret, is optimistic …. But the road to Athens and sporting glory is anything but smooth! There's evil afoot in the Outback as a feral coach, Zorba the Fox, and his wicked side-kick, Aeschylus the Cat, try to sign up Athena and her friends in a sponsorship deal that will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. Somewhere in all the hype the original intention of the Olympic Games seems to have been lost. Using the notion that "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game" as a starting point, the play focuses on a group of young Australians (represented by some recognizable Australian animals) whose dreams of success are as yet uncorrupted by the harsh world of sponsorship, financial incentive and economic gain. They become the objects of a wager between the Olympians (represented by Zeus and his wife, Hera). The plot evolves from Zeus's despair at the prospect of anyone in the 21st century recalling the true nature of the games (first played in 776BC) and which were originally conceived as a tribute by humanity to him. Hera, unwilling to believe that the spirit of the earlier games is entirely lost, sends Hermes, their messenger (represented by a galah) to find "someone who remembers what the games are really about" and he becomes the mediator between the mortals and the immortals of the play.