Transforming tradition: performances of Jingju ('Beijing Opera') in the UK

Jingju (‘Beijing opera’) is China's most iconic traditional theatre, marketed as a global signifier of Chinese theatre and national identity. Although troupes from mainland China regularly tour Europe, audiences in the UK have also had access to Jingju via two indigenous organizations: the UK Beijing Opera Society (now defunct) and the London Jing Kun Opera Association (now in its ninth year). These organizations consist of Chinese, overseas Chinese and Western performers performing both Jingju and Kunju (‘Kun opera’). Where there is a mix of ethnicity, can ‘traditional Chinese theatre’ still be conceived of as ‘traditional’? How is Jingju mapped onto non-Chinese bodies? Can Jingju performances by ethnically white performers reflect diasporic identities? Drawing on the theories of Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha, this article argues that by highlighting the performativity of identity, the performance of Jingju by non-Chinese performers challenges the notion of Jingju as a global signifier of ‘authentic traditional Chinese theatre’.

Mutated bodies: stage performances of Beckett's late prose texts by Mabou Mines (1984) and Gare St. Lazare Players, Ireland (2005)

An exploration of the stage adaptations of Beckett's fictional texts by the New York based Mabou Mines theatre company.

Beckett’s theatre: embodying alterity

An analysis of the ways in which Samuel becket's plays erode the boundaries of identity with particular reference to Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot and selected later plays.

Inverting the lives of 'others': retelling the Nazi past in 'Ehe im Schatten' and 'Das Leben der Anderen'

The article compares Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film Das Leben der Anderen (2006) with Kurt Maetzig's early post-war film Ehe im Schatten (1947). The comparison is based on significant narrative and thematic elements which the films share: They both have a ‘theatre couple’, representatives of the ‘Bildungsbürgertum’, at the centre of the story; in both cases the couple faces a crisis caused by the first and second German dictatorship respectively and then both try to solve the crisis by relying on the classical ‘bürgerliches Erbe’, particularly the ‘bürgerliches Trauerspiel’. The extensive use of the ‘bürgerliches Erbe’ in the films activates the function this heritage had for the definition of the German nation in the nineteenth century. However, while Maetzig's film shows how the ‘heritage’ and its representatives fail in the face of National Socialism, von Donnersmarck's film claims the effectiveness of this ‘heritage’ in the fight against the East German dictatorship. Von Donnersmarck thus inverts a critical film tradition of which Ehe im Schatten is an example; furthermore, as this tradition emerged from dealing with the Third Reich, von Donnersmarck's film, it will be argued, is more interested in the redemption of the Nazi past than the East German past.

From matron to matrix: gender, authority and (dis)embodiment in Beckett’s Theatre

An examination of Samuel Beckett's representation of women in a selection of his plays for stage and radio.