Exposed by the Mask: Form and Language in Drama (Playwrights Canada Press)

Hall, Peter

ISBN 10: 1559361905 / ISBN 13: 9781559361903

Published by Theatre Communications Group, 2000

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Exposed by the Mask: Form and Language in Drama (Playwrights Canada Press)
• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1559361905
• ISBN 13: 9781559361903
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

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 his latest work, Sir Peter Hall ranges over the extraordinary history of world drama to find the common experiences that are able to create the theatrical form. This series of 4 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.

Peter Hall is currently in Denver, Colorado, in rehearsals for the world premiere production of Tantalus, a 15 hour, 10 play cycle based on Greek tragedy to open at the Denver Center Theatre in October 2000.

About the Author

Peter Hall (1930-2017) was a leading theatre director, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and director of the National Theatre from 1973-88. He formed the Peter Hall Company (1998–2011) and was the founding director of The Rose Theatre, Kingston, in 2003. He directed the world premiere of many of the most significant post-war plays, staging, amongst many others, the English-language premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and the world premiere of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. He was awarded the CBE in 1963 and knighted in 1977 for his services to the theatre.