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Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre : Writing and Directing in Contemporary Theatre Practice
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'In Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre, Richard Murphet presents a close analysis of the theatre practice of two ground-breaking artists – Richard Foreman and Jenny Kemp – active over the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century. In addition, he tracks the development of a form of ‘epileptic’ writing over the course of his own career as writer/director.
'Murphet argues that these three auteurs have developed subversive alternatives to the previously dominant forms of dramatic realism in order to re-think the relationship between theatre and reality. They write and direct their own work, and their artistic experimentation is manifest in the tension created between their content and their form. Murphet investigates how the works are made, rather than focusing upon an interpretation of their meaning. Through an examination of these artists, we gain a deeper understanding of a late modernist paradigm shift in theatre practice.'
(Source: publisher's blurb)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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[Review] Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre : Writing and Directing in Contemporary Theatre Practice
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , October no. 77 2020; (p. 352-361)
— Review of Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre : Writing and Directing in Contemporary Theatre Practice 2020 single work criticism'While this historiographic imprecision is a drawback, the density of analytic detail and informed criticism which Murphet offers makes the book a crucial contribution to performance studies of Australia and the USA. Murphet's dramaturgy fractures events and experience into a series of not necessarily continuous tableaux or filmic frames, which may then be enacted as theatre (as in his first two plays, Quick Death and Slow Love) or are cinematically projected and layered on to a complex, stratified live performance (The Inhabited Woman and The Inhabited Man). [...] even if Murphet's theoretical architecture is not altogether persuasive from a historiographic perspective, the author's detailed focus on process and his cross-referencing between chapters illuminates a number of varying responses to thematic concerns characteristic of twentieth-century dramaturgy as a whole. [...] it is the amplified commentary from the otherwise unnamed figure of the Voice (often Foreman himself) which links his examination of objects, poses, mute positions, entrances, exits, with the subjectivity which is forced to endure them as an audience.' (Publication abstract)
-
[Review] Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre : Writing and Directing in Contemporary Theatre Practice
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: Australasian Drama Studies , October no. 77 2020; (p. 352-361)
— Review of Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre : Writing and Directing in Contemporary Theatre Practice 2020 single work criticism'While this historiographic imprecision is a drawback, the density of analytic detail and informed criticism which Murphet offers makes the book a crucial contribution to performance studies of Australia and the USA. Murphet's dramaturgy fractures events and experience into a series of not necessarily continuous tableaux or filmic frames, which may then be enacted as theatre (as in his first two plays, Quick Death and Slow Love) or are cinematically projected and layered on to a complex, stratified live performance (The Inhabited Woman and The Inhabited Man). [...] even if Murphet's theoretical architecture is not altogether persuasive from a historiographic perspective, the author's detailed focus on process and his cross-referencing between chapters illuminates a number of varying responses to thematic concerns characteristic of twentieth-century dramaturgy as a whole. [...] it is the amplified commentary from the otherwise unnamed figure of the Voice (often Foreman himself) which links his examination of objects, poses, mute positions, entrances, exits, with the subjectivity which is forced to endure them as an audience.' (Publication abstract)
