Henrik Ibsen’s PEER GYNT in a new version

ABSTRACT: This version of Peer Gynt is one of many adaptations of Ibsen’s original “dramatic poem” into a stage presentation of the archetypal journey, spread over a lifetime, of a man in search of himself. Ibsen was the first to transform his lesedrama into a theatre piece (by omitting one entire act and commissioning a musical score from Grieg to cover the gaps). There have since been numerous modern innovations of Peer Gynt, each with its own emphasis. This current version attempts to reconcile Ibsen’s Norwegian concerns and mythology with a series of Canadian references, and the challenges facing the translator/adaptor and his solutions are recorded in the introduction to the play. It has been staged in Canada and Norway (the last act only) and won Vancouver’s Jessie Award for the best production of 2006

Ibsen’s Evangelical Detective: Evidence and Proof in The Wild Duck

ABSTRACT: The forensic language in The Wild Duck—its emphasis on the search for “proof” and “evidence” in uncovering a number of putative crimes and misdemeanours—relates the play to the Detective Fiction genre of the late nineteenth-century. The argument of the paper suggests that Ibsen calls in question the basic premises of the genre (the need, for example, to uncover truth and trace evil to its source thereby restoring a chaotic world to a form of Edenic order) and subverts the most fundamental expectations of the crime fiction reader. Gregers Werle acts on the assumption that the investigator can redeem a fallen humanity by uncovering incontrovertible fact and revealing undisclosed motives; but his deeply subjective, evangelical methods disorient the world even further, leaving the audience with the sense that the uncertainties of existence make such “detection” both irrelevant and dangerous

Shylock's origins and evolution : the image of the Jew in English literature from the middle ages to the mid-seventeenth century

[From Preface]. Any study centred in the exploratlon and analysis of the medieval and Elizabethen images of the Jew might, with some justification. seem redundant and impertinent to a modern reader; for the third quarter of this century has witnessed the almost total obviatlon of a great many such time-honoured images and symbols. The immemorial figure of the Wandering Jew, to cite a sIngle instance, has for the past two decades, attained his country and place of destination - history no longer condemning him to tarry until the Second Coming of the Messiah. Even the deicide Jew has been granted complete absolution, by an offlcial decree from the Vatican, for his complicity in the killing of Christ. It would seem, moreover, that the atrocities perpetrated against the Jews during the course of the Second World War have resulted in an alteration of the Jewish image radically transforming It from one of contempt into one of compassion a living symbol of "man's inhumanlty to man"; and the modern European dramatist has revived the Jewlsh figure on the stage as an instance of almost personal atonement or, alternatively, as a means of scourging the state of middle-class mind which abetted the persecution of the Nazi regime, attacking state policies of inactio and deploring the failure of influentlal powers to resist the blatant inhumanlty perpetrated within Its boundaries. Max Frisch's Andorre and Rolf Hochhuth's The Representative embody, each in its own way the 2Oth century's sense of shame and horror at those events with which the century has yet to come to terms. They are both extreme reactions agalnst the image of the Jew whlch the Nazi propogandized in the 1930s. And the image which the Nazis propogandized was curiously consistent wlth the medieval and Elizabethan images of the Jew

The theatre experience: Or, why do we enjoy watching real people counterfeiting fictional people?

Item consists of a digitized copy of an audio recording of a Vancouver Institute lecture given by Errol Durbach on October 4, 2003. Original audio recording available in the University Archives (UBC AT 2665).Theatre, Film and Creative Writing, Department ofArts, Faculty ofUnreviewedOthe