Description
Book Synopsis On an April evening in 1934, on the River Arno in Florence, an air squadron, an infantry, a cavalry brigade, fifty trucks, four field and machine gun batteries, ten field radio stations, and six photoelectric units presented a piece of theatre. The mass spectacle, 18 BL involved over two thousand amateur actors and was performed before an audience of twenty thousand.
18 BL is one of eleven extraordinary essays collected together for the first time. The essays have been selected and edited from a wide range of publications dating from the 1940s to the 1990s. The authors are academics, cultural historians, and theatre practitioners - some with direct experience of the harsh conditions of Europe during the war. Each author critically assesses the function of theatre in times of world crisis, exploring themes of Fascist aesthetic propaganda in Italy and Germany, of theatre re-education programmes in the Gulags of Russia, of cultural "sustenance" for the troops at the front and interned German refugees in the UK, or cabaret shows as a currency for survival in Jewish concentration camps.
Table of Contents Introduction
PART I: THE AESTHETICS OF FASCISM
Chapter 1. The Adventures of Mother Cartridge-Pouch
Jeffrey T. Schnapp
Chapter 2. Theatre and Politics of the Mussolini Regime
Pietro Cavallo
Chapter 3. Towards an Aesthetic of Fascist Opera
Erik Levi
Chapter 4. Hitler’s Theatre
Bruce Zortman
PART II: THEATRE, OCCUPATION AND CURFEW
Chapter 5. The War Years
Andrew Davies
Chapter 6. The Role of Joan of Arc on the Stage of Occupied Paris 65
Gabriel Jacobs
PART III: THEATRE BEHIND BARBED WIRE
Chapter 7. German Refugee Theatre in British Internment 83
Alan Clarke
Chapter 8. Thespis Behind the Wire – A Personal Recollection
George Brandt
Chapter 9. The Muses in Gulag
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Chapter 10. Cabaret in Concentration Camps
Peter Jelavich
PART IV: THEATRE AT THE FRONT
Chapter 11. Brigades at the Front
Joseph Macleod
Index
