In Simon Shepherd's “The Avant-Garde Practices of Gwendolen Bishop,” Bishop is discussed as a model of what others began to call the “new” woman. She was what Shepherd calls a changemaker: “Her involvement with . . . the performance of Salome was part of the process that culturally pushed back against the vilification of [Oscar] Wilde and his sexuality.” Bishop was an early twentieth-century advocate for what we might now call gender indeterminacy and nonbinary sexuality. Married twice, her strongest relationships were with female friends who lived their lives outside the cramped quarters of heteronormative culture. She was a public spokesperson, an organizer, and a campaigner for body liberation, spontaneous dance, and the founder of the People's Free Theatre movement that sought the foundation of a state-supported theatre. She inaugurated performances in a People's Hall to dockworkers in London's East End, and by the end of the first year had played ten different productions to five thousand people. She also went public with her mixed-race Hindu heritage, another one of her statuses as a woman in between identities.
Matt Cornish's “Love Me: From Politics to Ethics at the Berliner Ensemble” examines The Berliner Ensemble's change from making political theatre to making politicized theatre, deemphasizing politics in favor of ethics. Cornish examines what happens to Brecht's political plays when reframed as moral texts. As Cornish suggests, “Brecht made politics into a verb,” whereas today's Berliner Ensemble produces “moralist theatre with political content.” Now it is ethics that is used as a verb. In effect, this article is about “what happens when a political play is moralized” and offers “the aesthetic and philosophical potential of ethicized theatre.” The Berliner Ensemble began as a research laboratory or workshop where the focus was always on process before product. It has now realigned itself with ethics and a pronounced care for its audience. However, since Brecht never made ethics “the servant of economics,” his belief held that “good ethics emerge from good politics, and good politics from good ethics.” Cornish suggests that “good art comes first.” According to Brecht, “theatre needed to stage its revolution on aesthetic grounds.” Today's political issues turn Brecht's The Mother of 1951 into a revolutionary manual on how to address the climate crisis, sexual and bodily autonomy, gender and social equality, and self-empowerment. This is an ethicized theatre with emphasis on the individual rather than a demand for systemic political change—a theatre of care rather than politics.
William Lewis's “(Re)imagining the Polis: Audience Participation as Postdramatic Discourse” asks, Might we reimagine a time when theatre was the only type of social media? Could we reinvest in a theatre with ethicopolitical capacity where the audience is “a (re)imagined polis, where communal understanding developed through difference guides future potentials”? Lewis's answer to this is Yes, absolutely. In his analysis of the postdramatic production How Much Is Enough? Our Values in Question, he argues that this show “represents a symbolic return to a predramatic form of politics framed within a set of postdramatic aesthetics . . . through rhetorical questioning and dissensual participation.” The script in this production takes the form of a “set of questions posed to the audience as crucial members of the performance situation.” In this scenario, audience members’ answering “becomes the postdramatic action where a (re)imagined polis comes to life . . . encouraging participatory dialogue that can lead to a democratic community of participant-spectators with the capacity to promote social and civic change.” But how? you might ask. Lewis begins by reminding us that there has been a “historical trajectory of theatre as a civic and political agent for social discourse” that started as early as predramatic Greek theatre, where theatre existed not just as an entertainment but as a form of social dialogue. He trades Aristotle's cathartic reception model of theatrical spectatorship for an approach that favors an experiential and more discursive model. This postdramatic structure, which harks back to Greek predramatic forms, “requires a participating audience to complete the circuits of understanding.” It is, in effect, a conversation with the audience, a “discursive situation for the working through of community values.” Lewis argues for a communal identification through dissensual discourse that takes difference of opinion and experience into account in audience viewership in ways that, by returning political agency to viewers, successfully promote civic dialogue and social change. How Much Is Enough, first produced at the American Repertory Theater in Boston, subverts “the spectacle–spectator dynamic” that leads to political passivity. Instead, the “participant's answers help coauthor a narrative . . . inside the postdramatic frame.” The players present an unfinished script to “introduce a virtual guide to dialogue through the whole of the event,” allowing the performance an ethicopolitical efficacy.
James Hudson's “The British Council and the Marat/Sade Controversy” plunges us into an examination of Peter Brook's Royal Shakespeare Company staging of Marat/Sade in light of its censorship affair, allowing “for a much fuller appreciation of the precariousness of the [British Council's] role as a nexus between culture and politics, and the inherent fault lines in its position as a supposedly disinterested broker amid an increasingly competitive ecology of artists, agents, and institutions.” To use theatre as an “agent of soft power” by touring shows out to other parts of Europe during the Cold War period, the BC navigated a sticky web of politics, national ideologies, protocols, and financial concerns. In so doing, Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade did not qualify as diplomatic cultural propaganda. It didn't help that some claimed the works of de Sade had corrupted the notorious Moors murderer, Ian Brady. And, of course, “Brook used the piece as an opportunity to detonate the ideas of Antonin Artaud on the British stage and to fuse it, unexpectedly, with supposedly incompatible Brechtian techniques.” His version “‘was a fashionable mixture of all the best theatrical ingredients around—Brechtian, didactic, absurdist, Theatre of Cruelty.’” Weiss's play has a long history of controversy, yet this particular censorship of Brook's version in 1965–6 was thought to be in response to the Moors Murders trials’ worldwide recognition: both play and trials included the Marquis de Sade, and the trials were scheduled for the same weekend the play would have opened. Paris was more than happy to receive Brook's production, but the British Council worried Marat/Sade ran counter to the British way of life. The play itself, completely aside from Brook's staging, was adjudged a “hieroglyphic for a broader descent into cultural depravity” by the British Council's Vice-Chairman Maurice Edelman, who criticized it as “erotic cruelty” and therefore not a respectable choice for the BC to support as a touring production. This debate came at a time when the whole idea of what counted as British theatre was caught between what Hudson refers to as an “increasingly outmoded idea of the playwright considered as the authorizing and authorial hand” versus “a quintessentially collaborative pursuit” that Brook's style represented.
Elif Baş İyibozkurt's “Pioneering Turkish Muslim Actresses: Afife Jale and Bedia Muvahhit's Trajectories in the Turkish Stage” posits that a recognition for Turkish Muslim actresses was a key component of nation building. The relationship between nationalism and feminism explored a gendered construction of Turkish nationalism itself. The result of this pairing fostered a feminist nationalism in Turkey. Baş İyibozkurt starts by focusing on the Ottoman feminist movement in the late imperial period, between 1869 and the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923. A group known as the Young Ottomans “vigorously denounced customs that victimized women and actively endeavored to alter the traditional status of women within the family and broader social spheres.” Apparently, this approach included a “dissemination of translated works, the production of plays, stories, novels, and newspaper articles” that resulted in women-centered journals. Theatre then also became a contested space for women's rights. The first state conservatory initially accepted only male students, and women who wanted to attend its productions “either disguised themselves as men or tried to appear as female non-Muslim minorities.” It took until 1918 for this conservatory, the Dârülbedâyi, to admit five Turkish Muslim women to study theatre. Afife Jale was one of these five and “made history as the first Turkish Muslim woman to perform onstage.” The year 1921 brought a reversal of this equal opportunity, but Afife Jale continued to perform in other venues. It was not until the establishment of the Turkish Republic two years later that the conservatory doors were once again open to actresses. During the shift from the empire to the republic, the increased visibility of Turkish Muslim actresses was employed to “project a distinct national identity” that had begun its “secular project of modernization.” This new female ideal required education, a respectable profession, and modern clothing that eventually encouraged women to appear in public unveiled. Theatre held a great potency for establishing this ideal image, and Bedia Muvahhit “was the first to be given the responsibility of helping to convey this new image of women” onstage. She became a theatrical icon who played a crucial role in securing Turkish women's right to vote, beginning in 1934.
