Early political plays worked in creating an emotional engagement with their audience. This was achieved by many political theatre movement to stage their performances in unconventional stages. The ‘stages’ were from streets to rallies, often portable and flexible to endure the circumstances. Political theatre impacted specific audiences that shared, “a radical re-visioning of the relationship between the individual and the society in which they live (Deeney & Gale 327).” Specifically, this genre of theatre engaged the audience by issues of government as well as influences of party politics. In this paper, I will talk about three movements that impacted the early twentieth century. Suffragette theatre involved women’s rights in plays that were …show more content…
To clarify, majority of the play focuses on the General Strike by the women in Brixton, yet the setting of the play was in the home of a traditional household of Horace and his wife, Ethel. This is a change that first starts in a traditional way and then working its way outside of a traditional environment. Another example of this is through the character Ethel and the other women relatives of Horace. Apart from Ethel, these women are self-reliant and are not in need of a man to be successful. Yet, Ethel maybe want to speak out about the inequalities and the strike, but since she is married she believes that it would not apply to her, “But I do, Aunt; only I have always said that as I was happily married I thought it had very little to do with me” (Hamilton & Cicely 355). Moreover, it allows the audience to see the contrast of the perspectives of women who are married, like Ethel, who did not consider the strike and how it would impact her. How the Vote was Won, is a satirical play on the social inequalities faced during the early 1900s. It is comical in the sense that the Horace’s female relatives allow him to believe in the women’s right to vote, though when Horace finally agrees in women having the right to vote, he thinks that it is a man who is going to make a difference. In the …show more content…
Agitprop was a good method in achieving this. However, plays such as Love on the Dole by Ronald Gow and Walter Greenwood, were performed in theatres helped display the perspectives of working class and the inequalities to middle class and bourgeoisie audiences. This play focused on the struggles of the working class, during the economic crisis in the 1920s and the 1930s. It displayed how difficult it was to rise from an unsteady job and environment, it illustrated a grey scale environment in which the characters had no luck in escaping. Love on the Dole focuses on the Hardcastle family and how the family is supported by Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastles’ daughter Sally. Deeney and Gale summarize the play of “exploring the value of female labour within the context of a traditionally patriarchal culture” (332). These issues are the main driving forces of the play as it displays an opposition of what traditional culture is through the character Sally, who becomes the breadwinner of the family. “SALLY Only that it’s my money that runs this house” (Gow & Greenwood 439). The conflict between female labour and tradition seen as a “prison house realism” a different reality that the audiences of this play has seen. It shows the deprivation of differences in social class, gender, and environment. Hanky Park, a manufacturing town that is considered “rubbish heap” an inescapable place,
While plays have commonly been held as a form of entertainment, with the rise of the anti-suffrage movement, they also served a practical use. Anti-suffragists took pen to paper and began to compose propagandistic theatrical works. The most prominent at the time was a play titled The Spirit of Seventy Six. In 1868, Ariana and Daniel Curtis wrote this play as a role reversal hypothesizin...
The women’s job in that era are meant keep her house clean and feed her children (Doc C). They are also dependent on the city administration to make their lives decent (Doc C). The women’s suffrage movement fought because woman needed to fulfil her traditional responsibilities in the house and to her children, which makes it a must to use the ballot and have the home safe (Doc C). All women needs to have a chance to voice their opinion to help the community strive, and one way to do that is making them able to vote.
Butler, Judith. "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory." Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519-31. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Web. 11 May 2011.
Women's slow reluctance to cooperate across class even in the face of male oppression, as depicted in Glaspell's play, symbolizes the difficulty women had in creating a united "cross class sisterhood" when struggling for suffrage during the Gilded Age. This class conflict was exacerbated by the socio-economic dynamics of the day. Middle class women often employed working class women in their homes as servants. Employing women with hypothetically oppressive wages in their "private lives," while at the same time fighting for the economic freedom of all women in their "public lives" placed middle class women in a hypocritical bind. As historian Lois Banner reports, "In the 1900s and 1910s there was an outpouring of writings on the so-called servant problem--the shortage of women willing to work as cooks and maids. . . .It was not simply that they [servants] were expected to be paid long hours and were not well paid; they were subject to the whims and status anxieties of their mistresses" (52). The control that middle class women reportedly bestowed upon their domestic laborers extended into the larger picture; much of middle class club work focused on the "reform" of working class women. The imposition of middle class values onto working class and black women's lives alienated these women--making the feelings of sisterhood necessary for solidarity, nearly impossible. As historian Nancy Hewitt explains, "When 'true women' [i.
Throughout the plays, the reader can visualize how men dismiss women as trivial and treat them like property, even though the lifestyles they are living in are very much in contrast. The playwrights, each in their own way, are addressing the issues that have negatively impacted the identity of women in society.
Millions of people across the country roamed the streets in search of jobs, hoping to find some way to get the money they needed to feed their families. The Great Depression in the United States during the 1930s affected not only those who worked in jobs requiring physical labor, but those involved with theatre and the arts as well. The Federal Theatre Project was one of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)'s projects that was created to help deal with the economic turmoil caused by the Great Depression. Thousands of artists, whether it was in the form of writing, music, or performing arts, were put out of work. The Federal Arts projects were created to reinstate jobs for unemployed artists as well as create displays of art for the public. "The Federal Theatre Project, directed by the former head of the Vassar College Experimental Theatre, Hallie Flanagan, was the most important, the most controversial, and hence, the shortest-lived of the Federal One Projects" (Gerdes, 155). Though the Federal Theatre Project caused a large amount of controversy among people in America, it was very important because during its short life it supplied jobs for many people working in the arts and it brought free theatre to America.
When Karl Marx wrote “the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” he interpreted the historical stage and his writing of history as parts of a theatre: he writes;
The American regional theatre system built a strong foundation for many years with a loyal audience base of season subscribers. The income and devotion generated by subscribers gave these theatre companies a sturdy financial foundation allowing these organizations to grow and develop artistically ambitious seasons. Recently the world is experiencing a time of cultural, economic and societal change. Between 2005-2010 American regional theatres reported an 8.5 percent drop in season subscriptions and other funding sources are shifting (Voss, 2013). How do these once robust arts organizations stay viable with their artistic mission in the face of declining audience base of season subscribers?
This fact plays a crucial role in the mood of the play. If the reader understands history, they also understand that women did not really amount to any importance, they were perceived more as property.
Theatre, throughout history, has been used as an implement to stimulate social change. Though, one may wonder: how can a simple play spark social change? “Waiting for Lefty,” a Great Depression-Era American play about labor strikers confronting the corruption of the United States government and unions, uses various techniques to trigger social commotion. Among these are the use of agitprop, defined as “agitative propaganda” and audience participation. In sum, “Waiting for Lefty” stimulates social change by strategically implementing agitprop and audience participation, and it does so effectively.
In this paper, I will be focusing briefly on my knowledge and understanding of the concept of Applied theatre and one of its theatre form, which is Theatre in Education. The term Applied Theatre is a broad range of dramatic activity carried out by a crowd of diverse bodies and groups.
In 1979, Caryl Churchill wrote a feminist play entitled Cloud Nine. It was the result of a workshop for the Joint Stock Theatre Group and was intended to be about sexual politics. Within the writing she included a myriad of different themes ranging from homosexuality and homophobia to female objectification and oppression. “Churchill clearly intended to raise questions of gender, sexual orientation, and race as ideological issues; she accomplished this largely by cross-dressing and role-doubling the actors, thereby alienating them from the characters they play.” (Worthen, 807) The play takes part in two acts; in the first we see Clive, his family, friends, and servants in a Victorian British Colony in Africa; the second act takes place in 1979 London, but only twenty-five years have passed for the family. The choice to contrast the Victorian and Modern era becomes vitally important when analyzing this text from a materialist feminist view; materialist feminism relies heavily on history. Cloud Nine is a materialist feminist play; within it one can find examples that support all the tenets of materialist feminism as outlined in the Feminism handout (Bryant-Bertail, 1).
Theatre will always survive in our changing society. It provides us with a mirror of the society within which we live, and where conflicts we experience are acted out on stage before us. It provides us with characters with which we identify with. The audience observes the emotions and actions as they happen and share the experience with the characters in real time.
For thousands of years, people have been arguing that theatre is a dying art form. Many people think theatre is all just cheesy singing and dancing or just boring old Shakespeare, but there is much more to theatre than those two extremes. Theatre is important to our society because it teaches us more about real life than recorded media. Theatre has been around for thousands of years and began as a religious ceremony that evolved into an art form that teaches about the true essence of life. Theatre can incorporate profound, and provocative, observations of the human condition that can transcend time; lessons found in Greek plays can still be relevant to the modern world. People argue that the very essence of theatre is being snuffed out by modern
My experience watching a live theatre performance on stage was a fascinating one, most especially since it was my first time. I attended a staged performance of “The History Boys” in a small theatre called “The Little Theatre of Alexandria” at 8:00 pm on Wednesday June 8, 2016 in Alexandria, Virginia. The overall production of the play was a resounding experience for me particularly the performance of the actors and the design of the scene made the play seem real.