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Exposed By The Mask
Exposed By The Mask
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Author: Peter Hall Publisher: Theatre Communications Group Format: Softcover # of Pages: 136 Pub. Date: 2000 ISBN-10: 1559361905 ISBN-13: 9781559361903
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About the book:
Britain's Sir Peter Hall is considered by many the most important director in his generation. As the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and the Old Vic, he has directed the greatest actors of our time in numerous seminal interpretations of Shakespeare and the Classics.
In the book Exposed By The Mask he ranges over the extraordinary history of world drama to find the common experiences that are able to create the theatrical form. This series of four lectures were delivered at Trinity College in Cambridge as part of the famed Clark Lectures which began in the nineteenth century.
The argument of the lectures is that theatre is only created when emotions are contained by a form. That very form paradoxically gives freedom of expression. Thus the Greek mask enables the actor to express hysteria. The mask, whether it may be the actual physical mask on the face, or the form of the drama itself, makes expression possible. Shakespeare's verse is his mask. Mozart's sonata is his. And Beckett and Pinter (by the metaphors of their plays) have brought poetry back to the theatre. Without form there can be no freedom.
What people say:
"Exposed by the Mask… contains illuminating passages about theatre spaces,… the dead weight of naturalism, and a keen analysis of the speaking of Shakespearean verse. Hall falls back on a jargon — 'challenge, disturb, provoke' — which makes theatre-going sound like a moral duty. But when he flares up against his nightmare vision of the theatre of the future — 'a computer-driven populist miracle of lasers and acrobats' — he is completely persuasive." — The Observer
About the Author:
Sir Peter Hall (1930-2017)
was an internationally celebrated stage director and theatre
impresario, whose influence on the artistic life of Britain in the
20th century was unparalleled. The former director of the National
Theatre and founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he directed
over two hundred productions, including the world premiere in English
of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and the
premieres of most of Harold Pinter's plays. Knighted in 1977
for his service to the theatre, he was a vociferous champion of
public funding for the arts.
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