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The new playhouse is a very small venue in which the potential commercial success of a given play is not as determinant a factor in programming it as it is in the larger main house, in which a sustained inflow of cash from the box office is needed to keep the unsubsidized theater afloat. Eventually, he stormed off the stage yelling, \"My best speech ruined!\" The rest of the cast provided other riotously funny moments, such as the wooing of Princess Pompiona, played by Tim the Squire from the gallery in cloth of gold and a pointy hat but with a very obvious beard and a strong Eastern European accent. In the middle of Rafe's battle with Barbaroso, Tim was lowered from the heavens through the trapdoor, somersaulting in mid-air while hanging from two ropes, and came to the rescue, only to disappear again through the ceiling after picking up the board announcing the fifteen-minute \"Privy Break\" at the end of act three. The addition of interludes between each of the acts-three fourminute intervals one longer break-clearly delineated the structure of the play and provided further opportunities for musical and comic entertainment.

The opening of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in January 2014 cemented the connection between Wanamaker’s name and historically informed, reconstructionist approaches to staging Shakespeare and early modern drama. In the two decades since his death in 1993, Wanamaker has been routinely depicted in academic and journalistic accounts as The Man Who Built the Globe, the theater for which he campaigned tirelessly in the last third of his life. Stories about that life tend to begin and end with the Globe project. What is lost in these stories–and what this article seeks to remember and celebrate–is Wanamaker’s earlier career as a stage actor and director, in particular his reputation as the foremost exponent of the Method on the English stage in the 1950s, a decade that climaxed with his appearance at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959 as Iago to Paul Robeson’s Othello. Drawing on previously unseen archive material, this account of Wanamaker’s preparatory work on Iago reveals a politically engaged and progressive naturalistic actor: one whose intellectual and emotional engagement with the major theorists of twentieth-century performance is at some odds with his current reputation as a preeminent advocate of “Original Practices.” Remembering Wanamaker’s earlier work as an actor and director serves as a salutary reminder that no approach to acting is inherently conservative or revolutionary, and that Stanislavsky’s work in particular has been, and can be again, mobilized to progressive political effect.

The opening of the Wanamaker together with the renewed commitment of the RSC Swan auditorium to the early modern canon heralded a new era for Shakespeare's contemporaries onstage. [...]when Aebischer and Prince ask \"what is being forgotten when Shakespeare's contemporaries move into spaces-whether on shelves or on stages-hitherto reserved for Shakespearean performances\" (10), we need to remember that though the Wanamaker playhouse, in its first two seasons, was explicitly reserved as a space predominantly for plays contemporary to but, crucially, not written by Shakespeare, it was nevertheless a playhouse built by a company named after Shakespeare himself. Television audiences may have had difficulty, however, understanding characters' relations to one another in crowd scenes, as with Ferdinand's first entrance, and Bosola's opening conversation with Antonio and Delio was filmed in close up and therefore denied the audience the reaction of the men to whom he is grandstanding. When does he identify his familial relationships with the Duchess and Ferdinand, his past histories with Bosola or Julia, his curiously marginal place in his sister's court in the first act, his even less certain part in the plot to punish her, his tendency to dominate the stage despite his absence of dialogue, while paradoxically lurking to the side of the stage as well as the story? Since these questions all concern the ways an actor responds to a character's refusal or disinclination to respond, how might these challenges to early modern performance practice play out in a modern production and its representation in televised form? Like his diction, Webster's dramaturgy is distinctive, and the first act in particular sets up a series of interlocking scenes in which the stage represents multiple locations within a single court and repeatedly engages with the pragmatics of watching, in which the act of observation-of seeing and being seen-almost obsessively concerns identity.

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century stagings of early modern plays tend to signal the presence of an aside both physically and vocally: actors speaking asides might step away from their scene partners and change their vocal pitch or volume, for example, in order to indicate that the other characters on stage are not meant to hear those lines. [...]asides can sometimes feel stilted, old-fashioned, and out of place, especially in an otherwise naturalist production. In defiance of critics who came to the Royal Court that year to see a rendering of a \"classical\" text, Richardson and his team worked to enable the kind of naturalist performance described by Escolme in a play written before concerns about subtext, character motivations, or super-objectives-the hallmarks of Stanislavsky's system-were part of the theatrical vocabulary. The cast never participated in \"table work,\" a convention for text-based drama in which the actors, director, and dramaturg spend a week or even two sitting around a table analyzing the script; instead, the first part of the rehearsal period consisted of \"a series of improvisations around the text\" (Svendsen).

The resilient character of Christopher Beeston is demonstrated during the struggles to erect and consolidate his playhouse. The proofs can be glimpsed in surviving documents analysed in this article including, for example, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) MJ/SB/R/002, p.344. This records the arrest of the bricklayer digging the playhouse's foundations. Foundations denote a new playhouse built; other documents, however, relating to the building, record a theatre connected to an arena for fighting cocks. Yet another document records a conversion. These texts will be discussed to examine a confusing progression of understanding about the playhouse, leading scholars and those interested in reconstruction along diverse ways. Throughout all these pieces of evidence the determination of Beeston in the effort to build and succeed with the erection of his indoor venue, not far from Queen Anna's new residence in the Strand, is obvious. On a day less than a year after the building of the playhouse in Drury Lane, however, interruptions of another kind struck. On Shrove Tuesday 1617, according to reports, between 3,000 and 4,000 people rioted in at least two different parts of London. These included Drury Lane and the riot affected its theatre which was nearly destroyed. According to legal documents, some of those arrested (which never went into the 1000s) were women. Despite the arrest of the builder digging the Cockpit's foundations, legal challenges to its erection, and a riot, Beeston persevered and, ultimately, triumphed. The work of those engaged in pinpointing the Cockpit-Phoenix during the twentieth to twenty-first century will also be alluded to such as that of Graham F. Barlow, tracing plots of ground in the Drury Lane area. The question of the extent of the \"success\" of these kinds of effort remains, however, a subject for debate.

In 2017, Tanika Gupta’s premiered at London’s candle-lit, neo-Jacobean Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which, at first glance, seems ill suited to house a play which is set in pre-Partition Bengal and which depicts both rioting mobs and machine gun shootings. This essay looks at the ways in which, contrary to such initial associations, text and performance space supplement each other. In this case, supposedly cosy candlelight and close proximity to the audience engender feelings of fear and anxiety that can be framed with Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘affective politics of fear.’ Continuously interwoven with negotiations between the leading figures of the Indian National Congress, Gupta’s play is firmly set in its own historical context. On the other hand, its climate of boiling nationalism and close parallels to make it equally relevant to the present day. It is because of this contemporaneous historicity that Gupta’s play proves so gripping: through their ostensibly homely seventeenth-century staging, terror and political unrest become all too close to home, and so is as much a play that uncovers the hidden stories of Indian Partition as it speaks to the here and now.

The company Salon Collective, for instance, stages Shakespearean plays by providing the actors with only their speeches and cues- and has to scour the country to find actors who do not know the play in question (currently Two Gentlemen of Verona). At the Globe and its new indoor space, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, \"authentic\" lighting, open air or candles, and acting techniques of direct-front or front-side stage address seek to reproduce the intimacy, conviviality, and interaction experienced between players and audiences in the plays' original settings. [...]we are who we are, taking our seats and watching Royal Shakespeare Company actors who are playing eighteenth-century actors, but who are also reverting to being \"real\" people asking for help from the audience-\"Are my stockings straight?\" \"Can you help me tie my cravat?\" \"Can you give a hand moving the stuffed stag?\"-as well as chatting informally-\"What is the weather like?\" \"Is it still raining?\" (a pretty safe question at this time of year in England) \"Did you find decent parking?\" (an even safer question).

[...]the following analyses of productions of Pericles and The Tempest suggest that the potential for the object of the male gaze to render herself a subject by looking back at the audience in an \"intimate\" theater space foregrounds acts and states of privacy and publicity, complicating the economic and cultural transition of the female from the public to the private sphere which, as West-Pavlov demonstrates, has been a significant recent assumption of cultural historians (West-Pavlov 37, 43). The comic, metatheatrical relationship between the brothel owners and the audience allowed the comedy of their increasing exasperation at Marina's refusal to conform to her trafficked state to erase even the violence of the exchange in which Bawd orders Bolt to rape Marina: Bawd: Bolt, take her away; use her at thy pleasure: crack the glass of her virginity, and make the rest malleable. In Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance, Kim Solga argues that rape's dramatic representation among the early moderns reflects not what a modern audience might understand about the experience – the victim's heinous bodily and psychic suffering – but rather what rape means to those to whom it is reported, who can access it only as vicarious witnesses but who also bear the heavy responsibility to absolve the victim of any potential complicity and to mobilize the force of the law (31). [...]he himself is exposed where he would rather remain private, an exposure that becomes unnervingly relevant in a year when the coercive sexuality of a number of men in the arts and public life has been revealed.