Displaying Midsummer Night's Dreams

Autor(en)

Susanne Vill

Abstrakt

Motifs from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, its sources and its reception over four-hundred-years became the material of a creative writing process in Ewald Mengel's and my seminar. The principal impulses for conceiving a new play came from Molière's Le Misanthrope ou l'Atrabilaire amoureux, Marivaux's Le Triomphe de l'amour and La Dispute, Goethe's Stella, Schiller's Kabale und Liebe, Beaumarchais' La folle journée ou le Mariage de Figaro, da Ponte's and Mozart's Cosí fan tutte, Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Schnitzler's Reigen and Liebelei, Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, Dario Fo's and Franca Rame's Coppia aperta, quasi spalancata and Botho Strauß' Der Park. Following the postmodern theatre aesthetics which offers a large variety of transformational modes for weaving plays, the students chose specific motifs and I merged them into a sequence of dramatic scenes. We improvised and tidied up the dialogues. With a regular training program we enhanced the actors' technique and prepared the staging, props, and costumes. After successful performances in Bayreuth and Munich, Ewald Mengel organized an invitation of the German association of anglicists (Deutscher Anglistenverband) to present our play at the Anglistentag 1998 in Erfurt. The essay describes the production process and explains the quotations and intertexts and their function in the play. The complete German text can be found in the appendix.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft

Seiten

337-370

Anzahl der Seiten

34

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004292307_016

Publikationsdatum

02-2015

ÖFOS 2012

604029 Theaterwissenschaft

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Allgemeine Kunst und Geisteswissenschaften

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/75cca36f-4cd0-4cf8-a2f8-183f666be3a2