Elisabeth Angel-Perez (Sorbonne Université), elisabeth.angel-perez@paris-sorbonne.fr
Table ronde avec Chris Hannan
Notice biographique : Professeure de littérature anglaise (théâtre) à Sorbonne-Université, Elisabeth Angel-Perez a publié abondamment sur le théâtre moderne et contemporain. Ses domaines de prédilection sont théâtre et politique, théâtre du traumatisme, la voix au théâtre (Howard Barker, Edward Bond, Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill, Jez Butterworth, debbie tucker green) ou encore les nouvelles modalités de la tragédie (Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill, Tom Stoppard, Nick Gill). Sa dernière monographie s’intitule Le Théâtre de l’oblitération, essai sur la voix photogénique, un concept qui permet d’appréhender sous un jour nouveau les écritures qui frustrent le regard pour ne donner à voir que des voix. Elisabeth Angel-Perez a également traduit de nombreux textes pour le théâtre ou l’opéra (Barker, Crimp, Churchill, Gill, Harrower, Kirkwood, Mamet, Payne, etc.).
Lisa Bertucco (Sorbonne Université), lisa.bertucco6@gmail.com
« Have you forgotten your own history? » : transmissions historiques et transitions esthétiques dans The Ferryman de Jez Butterworth et The Children de Lucy Kirkwood.
The Children de Lucy Kirkwood et The Ferryman de Jez Butterworth, deux pièces jouées à un an d’écart, en 2016 et 2017 respectivement, au Jerwood Theatre Downstairs du Royal Court, opèrent selon une logique de transition. Dans The Ferryman, les membres d’une famille irlandaise célébrant la moisson voient leur quotidien basculer lorsque que leur passé avec l’Irish Republican Army refait irruption après dix années de silence. Pour The Children, c’est un couple de scientifiques retraités qui ne peut plus se voiler la face quand Rose, leur ancienne amie et collègue, brise l’équilibre fragile de leur foyer alors qu’elle leur demande de se tenir responsables des erreurs du passé. Dans les deux pièces, une transition s’opère d’une génération à l’autre (c’est précisément ce que le titre de Kirkwood soulève), engageant ainsi la question de la transmission – l’enjeu étant de ne pas répéter les erreurs de la génération précédente. La logique de transition qui sous-tend les deux pièces est aussi structurelle, dans la mesure où elles mettent en scène des événement historiques ancrés dans une histoire familiale, et perçus par ce seul prisme – de l’Histoire à l’histoire, et, là encore, les pièces se penchent sur la question de la responsabilité individuelle et collective face à un lourd passé historique. Thématique, puis structurelle, nous montrerons dans un troisième temps que la transition qui s’opère est aussi esthétique – les pièces témoignent d’un retour au théâtre dramatique. Les décors empruntent à l’esthétique du naturalisme, une attention particulière est prêtée à la psychologie des personnages – leurs tempéraments ont d’ailleurs des conséquences sur le déroulement de l’action – et les pièces font la part belle à l’intrigue. Ainsi, cette communication s’attachera à démontrer en quoi ces pièces attestent d’une transition esthétique sur les scènes britanniques contemporaines, au-delà du postdramatique.
Notice biographique: Agrégée d’anglais, Lisa Bertucco est en seconde année de thèse à Sorbonne Université et travaille sous la direction d’Elisabeth Angel-Perez et d’Aloysia Rousseau. Ses recherches portent sur le retour du théâtre dramatique sur la scène britannique contemporaine. Elle étudie les modalités politiques et esthétiques que ce retour implique dans le théâtre historique de Lucy Kirkwood, Winsome Pinnock, Jez Butterworth et Ella Hickson.
Anouk Bottero (INU Champollion, Albi / CAS, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès)
Who’s Afraid of the Musical? Circulations Between Straight Theatre and Musical Theatre on the Contemporary Anglophone Stage
In academia, musical theatre studies have traditionally been separated from the general study of text-based plays. The latter are often distinguished from musicals with the name “straight plays,” hinting at the musical’s “queer,” deviant position as regards to the canon of Anglophone plays. However, both the US and British contemporary stages have seen a wave of playwrights and/or directors usually associated with “serious” theatre try their hand at writing musicals: Tony Kushner, David Henry Hwang, Lindsey Ferrentino, Suzan Lori-Parks or Lynn Nottage in the US; Dennis Kelly or David Greig in the UK.
Such a trend seems to reveal that there is more fluidity than what initially appears between text-based theatre, often envisioned as the superior form of drama, and musical theatre, (mistakenly) thought of as light entertainment or “commercial” theatre. Yet, the reasons behind this porosity between genres have not been commented upon by critics and scholars.
This paper aims to explore this transition to musical theatre on the American and British contemporary stages: what triggers playwrights and/or directors’ interest in the musical? In an article about avant-garde director Daniel Fish’s revival of the musical Oklahoma! in 2019, Jennifer Schuessler mentioned that the director felt like “his [previous, more experimental] work and the audience were parting ways”: does the musical hold a special place as regards to the connection with the audience? Is it because, in the words of Tony Kushner in the foreword to his musical Caroline, or Change (2004), “there are places inside us only song can reach” (xiii)? David Henry Hwang has often insisted that his 2018 play Soft Power (which critics in The New York Times had no problem categorizing as a “musical”) was more of a “play with a musical”: does this nuance betray a distanced, even parodic perspective on the musical? Or, on the contrary, does it reveal the powerful potential contained in the interlacing of both theatrical genres?
Notice biographique : Anouk Bottero is Associate Professor of English at the Champollion National University Institute (Albi, France), where she teaches Anglophone literature. She researches the politics and aesthetics of musical theatre, with a focus on the performance of gender and race in contemporary US musicals. She has published in several international and French peer-reviewed journals, including Studies in Musical Theatre, Coup de Théâtre and the Revue Française d’Études Américaines.
Marion Coste (IHRIM), marion.coste@ens-lyon.fr
Before/After the Act: transition and queer dramaturgy in After the Act (2023)
Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988 stated that local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales should “not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. Twenty years after the repeal of Section 28, After the Act, created by Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens in 2023, intends to “dan[ce] and sin[g] over the grave of [the] national anniversary” of this turning point in LGBTQIA+ British history.
Drawing on the traditions of verbatim, musical and agit-prop theatre, After the Act uses transition as the cornerstone of its dramaturgy. The shifts from spoken verbatim testimonies to sung ones, the use of furniture that can easily be rearranged to evoke different locations (from a school gym to the British Parliament), the scenic devices that in turn shield or expose the characters, the actors’ switch from one character to another, and the tonal shifts from rousing activism to quiet confessions, all add up to convey the seismic and dramatic consequences Section 28 had on the British queer community, from the homophobic political discourse in the House of Commons and the House of Lords leading up to the vote, to the implementation of the Clause. Transition is therefore, in After the Act, at the heart of a radically queer dramaturgy, in so far as queerness “has come to encompass numerous strategies, all of which carry the charge of multiplicity, openness, contradiction, contention” (Dolan quoted in Solomon and Minwalla, 2002, 5). The play aims at representing through fast-paced vignettes the lasting effects of Section 28 over the years, while resisting dominant modes of representation by being radically hybrid. It is also very carefully historically situated, in order to celebrate and commemorate the history of the queer community, while drawing a parallel between Section 28 and the treatment of the trans community in the UK today.
Notice biographique : Marion Coste has completed her PhD entitled “Immediate history in theatre: Representations of the Iraq war in contemporary British plays” at Sorbonne Université. She is a member of the research unit IHRIM (Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités), and is the editor of the website La Clé des langues, co-founded by the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the Ministère de l’Éducation nationale.
Marianne Drugeon (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) – Présentation en binôme avec Déborah Prudhon, marianne.drugeon@univ-montp3.fr
From Page to Stage: Emma Rice’s Theatrical Adaptation of The Buddha of Suburbia
This paper explores the adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s award-winning 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia, as reimagined for the stage by Emma Rice in collaboration with the author. Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and Wise Children, this theatrical version dramatizes Hanif Kureishi’s narrative through Emma Rice’s signature use of physical theatre and music.
The analysis examines how the play reinterprets the story’s exploration of identity, culture, and self-discovery through theatrical language. It explores the process of turning one form into another. It also considers how the adaptation transposes the novel’s satirical tone and humour to the stage, especially given its reliance on a first-person narrative voice. Insights are drawn from an exclusive interview with set designer Rachana Jadhav
Notice biographique: Marianne Drugeon is a Lecturer in English Studies at Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University, France. Her research focuses on politically committed British playwriting from the 19th century to the present. She has published articles and edited and co-authored books on David Edgar, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard. She also edited Medieval and Early Modern England on the Contemporary Stage (Cambridge Scholars, 2021) and an issue of the review Coup de Théâtre entitled Seriality, Reboots and Iterability on the Anglophone Contemporary Stage (2024). As a member of the Maison Antoine Vitez, she has co-translated several plays including Stoppard’s The Hard Problem (Nouvelles Scènes, PUM, 2017) and The Invention of Love (Nouvelles Scènes, PUM, 2022) as well as documentary plays, including Wolé Oguntokun’s The Chibok Girls: Our Story (Nouvelles Scènes, PUM, 2024). She is currently working on community plays and other experiments in amateur theatre.
Véronique Duché (The University of Melbourne), veronique.duche@unimelb.edu.au
Theatre from a land Down-Under
Australian contemporary theatre is a dynamic and evolving field that reflects the country’s diverse cultural heritage and complex history. Yet very few Australian plays have made their way to France, let alone been performed in French. In addition, Australian playwrights are hardly known in France, including Nobel prize winner Patrick White. A search in the BnF catalogue reveals that there are only a small number of Australian playwrights represented, and even fewer of their works are available in French translation – among them Andrew Bovell, Daniel Keene, Karin Mainwaring, Janis Balodis, Elaine Acworth, and Angus Cerini.
In this paper I will explore the reason for this scarcity. I will examine the processes of translation and adaptation of contemporary Australian theatre, with a focus on the transitions that occur when works cross cultural, linguistic, and geographical boundaries. Through a comparative approach, it will address how these transitions affect theatrical genres, structural conventions, and audience reception. With a focus on case studies of Australian plays translated or adapted for a French context, this paper will reveal the creative strategies employed by playwrights, translators, and directors to navigate the complexities of cross-cultural transfer. It will investigate what is ‘lost’ in translation—the nuances, cultural references, and linguistic textures that resist transference.
This research contributes to broader discussions on translation studies, global theatre practices, and the evolving dynamics of contemporary Anglophone drama in an increasingly interconnected world.
Notice biographique : Véronique Duché is A.R. Chisholm Professor of French at the University of Melbourne. She has published many articles on French Renaissance literature and is the author of a monograph examining Spanish novels and their early modern translation into French. She also researches the language of Australian Soldiers during the First World War. She is currently engaged in a research project exploring Australian contemporary theatre and focusing on its reception in the Francosphere.
Dinah Pedarros (Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès), dinahpedarros@hotmail.fr
Angels in America de Tony Kushner sur la scène française actuelle : le transfert culturel en question(s)
Les mises en scène françaises d’Angels in America offrent un champ d’étude privilégié pour explorer les dynamiques de transition et d’altérité dans le passage du théâtre américain à la scène française. Cette pièce de théâtre, emblématique des crises identitaires, sociales et politiques de la période reaganienne, est un bon exemple pour mettre en exergue la nécessité des transferts culturels dans la mise en scène afin d’assurer la compréhension et la réception du public, en l’occurrence français. Ce processus interroge la manière dont un texte profondément enraciné dans la culture étasunienne peut être réinventé tout en préservant son caractère universel. Les metteurs en scène français, en travaillant à partir de leurs propres esthétiques et sensibilités, tentent de fusionner le respect de l’œuvre – ou du moins l’essence de l’œuvre – avec l’innovation artistique et créatrice. Les choix dramaturgiques, en particulier le découpage scénique, qui signifie passer d’une scène à une autre et d’un acte à un autre, témoignent d’une perspective critique et personnelle sur la structure fragmentée de Tony Kushner par les metteurs en scène français. Dans ce processus de transitions et de transferts culturels, le jeu des acteurs français joue également un rôle fondamental : la capacité d’incarner un personnage, une histoire, ou au contraire de s’en distancier, crée des liaisons entre sensibilités culturelles américaines et françaises, générant à la fois des points communs et des différences notables. L’intime devient politique, et le local, universel. Ces mises en scène deviennent ainsi un laboratoire de transition où l’altérité est abordée comme un espace de dialogue esthétique et politique. L’exemple d’Angels in America nous permet de questionner la manière dont le théâtre américain, à travers sa dimension à la fois communautaire et identitaire, est réinventé en France, mettant en lumière les processus complexes de transition, d’adaptation et de transfert culturel.
Notice biographique: Dinah Pedarros a soutenu un mémoire de Master 2 Recherche – Écriture et Représentation à l’université Paris 10 Nanterre, sous la direction d’Emmanuel Wallon en 2022. Ce mémoire portait sur le théâtre afro-américain à New York au cours des vingt dernières années. Elle a intégré l’année suivante le Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Nice en cycle spécialisé et a eu l’opportunité de diriger une pièce américaine traduite par la Maison Antoine Vitez mais encore jamais jouée en France : SEULE : Paroles de soldates en Iraq, de Helen Benedict. Actuellement inscrite en Master 2 Culture, Patrimoine et Médiation à l’Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, Dinah Pedarros consacre son mémoire de fin d’étude aux échanges culturels entre la France et les États-Unis, en se concentrant principalement sur le rôle de la Villa Albertine. Elle prépare dans le même temps une thèse de doctorat sous la direction d’Émeline Jouve et de Christophe Triau, sur le théâtre américain sur la scène française actuelle.
Déborah Prudhon (Aix-Marseille Université), deborah.prudhon@gmail.com
From Page to Stage: Emma Rice’s Theatrical Adaptation of The Buddha of Suburbia
This paper explores the adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s award-winning 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia, as reimagined for the stage by Emma Rice in collaboration with the author. Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and Wise Children, this theatrical version dramatizes Hanif Kureishi’s narrative through Emma Rice’s signature use of physical theatre and music.
The analysis examines how the play reinterprets the story’s exploration of identity, culture, and self-discovery through theatrical language. It explores the process of turning one form into another. It also considers how the adaptation transposes the novel’s satirical tone and humour to the stage, especially given its reliance on a first-person narrative voice. Insights are drawn from an exclusive interview with set designer Rachana Jadhav
Notice biographique : Déborah Prudhon teaches at Aix-Marseille University, France. She holds a PhD in English literature from Sorbonne University – her thesis explored the relation between fiction and reality in contemporary English theatre. She has published several articles on the work of Tim Crouch and Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre, and has co-organised a symposium on immersive theatre in Paris in January 2020. In addition to these topics, her current research interests include the intersections between theatre and psychology.
Aloysia Rousseau (Sorbonne Université), aloysia.rousseau@gmail.com
“There’s nothing but delight and desire”: the poetics and politics of pleasure in Charlie Josephine’s Cowbois
Charlie Josephine’s queer western Cowbois premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company in October 2023 to critical and popular acclaim before transferring to the Royal Court Theatre in January 2024 where it received equally rave reviews. Critics unanimously praised Cowbois’ boisterous and joyous celebration of gender and genre fluidity yet many of them also described the play as one which aroused a visceral rather than intellectual reaction, as though these two notions were necessarily disconnected. By foregrounding pleasure and entertainment as essential theatrical components, Josephine has created a play that dismantles binary categories on various scales. Cowbois is a western / romantic comedy which shows how male versus female but also highbrow versus lowbrow or performance versus reality have become obsolete dichotomies.
This paper looks into happiness, enjoyment, pleasure, elation and other emotions often considered as unworthy of consideration in academic discourse, as politically and intellectually effective. It sheds light on Cowbois’ poetics and politics of pleasure both on and off stage, from the rehearsal process to the “trans joy” depicted on stage and the audience’s elation brought about by the music, song and dance. Josephine’s “queertopia”, to borrow the playwright’s words, offers a wilfully optimistic – yet by no means escapist – stance on the LGBTQ+ experience. Cowbois’ politics lie in “that feeling of desire” that drops the audience “into an erotics of connection and commonality”, hence our perception of the play as a “utopian performative” (Dolan 2005, 20). Instead of defining happiness as a neo-liberal construct (Ahmed 2005, Illouz 2018), self-professed optimist Charlie Josephine has chosen to shed light on pleasure and happiness as spontaneous and potentially progressive.
Notice biographique : Aloysia Rousseau is a Senior Lecturer at Sorbonne University (Faculty of Arts and Humanities) where she teaches British literature and drama. She specialises in Contemporary British Theatre with a particular interest in popular genres and audience response. She has published Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (2011) and co-edited The Renewal of the Crime Play on the Contemporary Anglophone Stage (Coup de théâtre, 2018), Scènes britanniques et irlandaises contemporaines (Théâtre/Public, 2021) as well as The New Wave of British Women Playwrights (De Gruyter 2023). Her latest monograph is Dennis Kelly in the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists Series (2024).
Jeanne Schaaf (Université Lumière Lyon 2), jeanne.schaaf@univ-lyon2.fr
Table ronde avec Chris Hannan
Notice biographique : Jeanne Schaaf a soutenu une thèse sur le théâtre écossais contemporain intitulée « Lieux et non-lieux du théâtre écossais : constellations identitaires à l’ère postnationale » en 2018. Ses domaines de recherche incluent le lien entre théâtre et nation, la tension entre scènes locales et globales, ainsi que l’émergence de nouvelles communautés artistiques à l’ère technologique. Elle a publié des articles en France et au Royaume-Uni et a contribué à des publications scientifiques telles que The New Wave of British Women Playwrights -2008-2021 (De Gruyter 2023), Scottish writing After Devolution : Edges of the New ( Edinburgh University Press 2022) ou Inspiring Views from “a’the airts” on Scottish Literatures, Art & Cinema. (Peter Lang 2017). Elle a co-traduit avec Elisabeth Angel Perez les pièces Ciara (2013) de David Harrower et What Shadows (2016) de Chris Hannan. Elle occupe actuellement un poste de maîtresse de conférences à l’Université Lyon 2
Anna Street (Le Mans Université), Anna.street@univ-lemans.fr
Slippery when wet: Watery transitions in contemporary anglophone performance
As the element of transition par excellence, water is ground zero for metamorphosis. Providing the conditions of possibility for transformation while itself in constant flux, water’s performative capacities are attracting unprecedented attention in the realm of theater and performance. From melting ice to migratory flows, the transitions caused and carried by water resonate with the new materialist turn in post-humanist philosophy as well as new ways of curating and critically appraising artistic practice. Tracing the aquatic turn over recent years in anglophone productions, we will explore the reasons why watery imaginaries are flooding our performance spaces before taking a closer look at how the notion of transitions itself mutates in the waters of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, Lars Jan’s Holoscenes and Travis Alabanza’s Overflow.
Notice biographique : Anna Street is Lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies at Le Mans University. She completed her double doctorate from the Sorbonne University in Paris and the University of Kent in Canterbury after obtaining a M.A. in philosophy from the Sorbonne. Translator of ten volumes in Les Petits Platons collection, her publications also include the co- edited volumes Inter Views in Performance Philosophy (Palgrave 2017), Genre Transgressions: Dialogues on Tragedy and Comedy (Routledge 2023) as well as articles on comedy and philosophy and, more recently, immigrant and refugee theatre. Co-convener of the Performance Philosophy network and coordinator of the HydroArts project, her current research focuses on the role of non-human agency in art and performance, notably that of water.
Arthur Togores (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), arthurtogores@gmail.com
“A small catastrophe”: Theatre as a transitory place in Lippy (2013) by Bush Moukarzel and Mark O’Halloran
In this paper, I intend to analyse the transitory aspects in the play Lippy, written by Bush Moukarzel and Mark O’Halloran for the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2013, considering both the written text, published in 2014 by Oberon, and a recording of the play filmed by Dead Centre. I will argue that theatre, in the play, becomes a transitory place between the outside world and the audience through a questioning of issues of interpretation.
Lippy was indeed written after a real-life tragedy in which three sisters and their elderly aunt starved to death in their home in 2000, and the playwrights aim to interpret this event through the character of the Lip Reader, who finds himself trying to understand the words they would have exchanged through CCTV and relaying them to the audience. By fictionalising a real-life tragedy and focusing on the search for meaning, the play becomes a transitory space between fiction and reality where the audience can hope to find some sort of explanation for something which will never be explainable in the outside world.
Mainly through Brechtian techniques, the story transitions from past (when the women were alive and filmed) to present (when the Lip Reader is interviewed in front of the audience), and looks to the future with the underlying worry of making sure something like this never happens again.
However, there is no real closure nor catharsis in the play. Theatre becomes a liminal space where reality and performance intersect, and where the audience is left with the unreliability of interpretation as its only answer. The play itself, then, becomes a transition between the facts of the real-life tragedy and the multitude of possible reasons for it that each audience member is left with once the stage goes dark.
Notice biographique : Arthur Togores is in the third year of his PhD at Université Bordeaux Montaigne, under the supervision of Professor Pascale Sardin (Bordeaux Montaigne) and Professor Alexandra Poulain (Sorbonne Nouvelle). His doctoral thesis focuses on the evolution of the trope of martyrdom for female characters in Irish theatre from the 1910s to today. His work exists at the crossroads of theatre studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies and analyses this trope as a dramaturgy which subverts the hegemonic discourse of the nation.