The masterworks

The Living Theater.

I am not in opposition to the post-dramatic interpretation of classic texts. On the contrary, I adore what has become the New Independent Theatre movement of our time – The Rabble with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Daniel Schlusser Ensemble with Menagerie, and Simon Stone with an adaptation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector. All of those individuals and companies are successfully burning up the stage with hugely guttural responses to their world, skillfully done and appreciated by massive sell-out audiences.

_________________

Konstantin Stanislavski performing in The Lower Depths.

Chekhov and The Moscow Art Theatre Ensemble, 1899.

Moscow Art Theatre, The Seagull premiere, December 17 1898, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.

George Bernard Shaw

 Oscar Wilde

 Nikolai Gogol

August Strindberg

 

 

 

 

 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

 

 

 

 Henrik Ibsen

 

 

 

 

Goethe's Faust

Fundamentally I do not dislike difference, I love it. Yet I also love History, and all of the centuries of concentrated intelligence compressed into the masterworks of scripts for the theatre.

_________________

Virginia Woolf, 1902.

To quote Virginia Woolf from her novelette A Room of One’s Own: “ … masterpieces are not single and solitary births, they are the outcome of many years of thinking by the body of the people so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. For works of art continue each other in spite of our habit of judging them separately”. 

_________________

 

Anton Chekov's The Cherry Orchard, Moscow Art Theatre, 1904.

What I will highlight within the context of this project, is that great Writing, Acting and Directing for the stage can only be achieved through the study of the masters.

As I have worked with many new Australian Theatre practitioners, I constantly see the massive hole left in the quality of a work delivered by the inexperience of, and lack of information in, those artists that came before them. I, too, must eat from this plate I lay before you, as the older I get, the more I realise I do not know. 

— Peta Hanrahan