Migration and Opera Old and New : Repertoire Revivals and Eva Noer Kondrup’s Den Rejsende

This article uses Eva Noer Kondrup’s chamber opera Den Rejsende (Copenhagen 2018) to examine the challenges and opportunities provoked by the operatic form when attempting to create socially responsible theatre. Focusing on how opera reflects and contributes to contemporary discourse on migration, it examines how opera’s unusual performance and reception demands differentiate it from, for example, spoken verbatim theatre. The article first considers the most common way opera companies today engage with migration – through productions of existing operas – in which socially responsible decisions are primarily in the hands of directors and designers and relate mostly to interpretation, and it explores some of the risks and opportunities of engaging with migration in recent revivals of repertoire works. It then analyses how questions of social responsibility in new operas extend to structural issues that are the field of the composer and librettist. The article examines Kondrup’s decisions as librettist-composer of Den Rejsende, demonstrating the potential for opera to use non-realist operatic techniques to engage with some of the issues with which spoken verbatim theatre has wrestled, including questions of authority, authenticity and authorship, and of empathy, engagement, and identification. The production, performed by two Swedish singers from non-refugee backgrounds in multiple roles, favoured distanciation techniques over “authenticity effects” and avoided tensions between giving voice to and speaking for contemporary refugees that can arise in spoken verbatim theatre. While the libretto contained found text, this was from historical refugee situations, and from the words of Inger Støjberg in her role as Danish Minister for Immigration, Integration and Housing. By throwing a spotlight on the words of an elected representative, Den Rejsende indicated an area in which audience members of what is often thought of as an affective theatrical form might have some influence in effecting practical change

Basic science232. Certolizumab pegol prevents pro-inflammatory alterations in endothelial cell function

Background: Cardiovascular disease is a major comorbidity of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and a leading cause of death. Chronic systemic inflammation involving tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNF) could contribute to endothelial activation and atherogenesis. A number of anti-TNF therapies are in current use for the treatment of RA, including certolizumab pegol (CZP), (Cimzia ®; UCB, Belgium). Anti-TNF therapy has been associated with reduced clinical cardiovascular disease risk and ameliorated vascular function in RA patients. However, the specific effects of TNF inhibitors on endothelial cell function are largely unknown. Our aim was to investigate the mechanisms underpinning CZP effects on TNF-activated human endothelial cells. Methods: Human aortic endothelial cells (HAoECs) were cultured in vitro and exposed to a) TNF alone, b) TNF plus CZP, or c) neither agent. Microarray analysis was used to examine the transcriptional profile of cells treated for 6 hrs and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) analysed gene expression at 1, 3, 6 and 24 hrs. NF-κB localization and IκB degradation were investigated using immunocytochemistry, high content analysis and western blotting. Flow cytometry was conducted to detect microparticle release from HAoECs. Results: Transcriptional profiling revealed that while TNF alone had strong effects on endothelial gene expression, TNF and CZP in combination produced a global gene expression pattern similar to untreated control. The two most highly up-regulated genes in response to TNF treatment were adhesion molecules E-selectin and VCAM-1 (q 0.2 compared to control; p > 0.05 compared to TNF alone). The NF-κB pathway was confirmed as a downstream target of TNF-induced HAoEC activation, via nuclear translocation of NF-κB and degradation of IκB, effects which were abolished by treatment with CZP. In addition, flow cytometry detected an increased production of endothelial microparticles in TNF-activated HAoECs, which was prevented by treatment with CZP. Conclusions: We have found at a cellular level that a clinically available TNF inhibitor, CZP reduces the expression of adhesion molecule expression, and prevents TNF-induced activation of the NF-κB pathway. Furthermore, CZP prevents the production of microparticles by activated endothelial cells. This could be central to the prevention of inflammatory environments underlying these conditions and measurement of microparticles has potential as a novel prognostic marker for future cardiovascular events in this patient group. Disclosure statement: Y.A. received a research grant from UCB. I.B. received a research grant from UCB. S.H. received a research grant from UCB. All other authors have declared no conflicts of interes

All Shook Up and the unannounced adaptation : engaging with Twelfth Night’s unstable identities

The jukebox musical All Shook Up challenges current definitions of what constitutes an adaptation. Not only have most productions refrained from announcing the musical as an adaptation, but the question of what All Shook Up is an adaptation of is almost infinitely contestable, given the sheer number of potential combinations of source texts that any one audience member is capable of recognizing. This essay argues that All Shook Up engages with the unstable identities of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night by playing with its own status as an unannounced adaptation: by inviting audiences to recognize All Shook Up’s status as an adaptation—not only of Twelfth Night, but of multiple other works—as the work unfolds itself, the musical reveals the queer potential of adaptation, its potential to destabilize categories of identity. All Shook Up, ostensibly a light-hearted Elvis Presley vehicle, carries out quiet political work, harnessing this queer potential and expanding on Twelfth Night’s unstable identities in order to destabilize various forms of modern identity-markers, including gender, sexuality, race, class, region, and age. All Shook Up thus makes a claim for the adaptation as an art form in itself, with its own particular aesthetic and political strengths and values.17 page(s

Salieri’s Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle and The Merry Wives of Windsor : operatic adaptation and/as Shakespeare criticism

Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor contains several features that make it unusual within his dramatic output and that thus render problematic the idea of a unified ‘Shakespearean’ canon. Until very recently, literary criticism has either largely ignored or denigrated the play, with a sustained interest in its portrayal of female agency, family life and the natural world only consolidating in the early twenty-first century. However, earlier operatic adaptations, such as Salieri and Defranceschi’s Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle, demonstrate an engagement with those issues which literary criticism has only lately addressed. While approaches to adaptations of The Merry Wives often focus primarily on the character of Falstaff, Salieri and Defranceschi’s opera’s engagement with the play’s issues beyond Falstaff suggests it might give added weight to a growing awareness of a positive alternative reception history of the play beyond literary criticism. At the same time, a consideration of the opera’s engagement with the play’s themes of female agency, family life and the natural world might shed light on Falstaff, ossia Le tre burle beyond the shadow cast by Verdi’s central character.30 page(s

Beyond Falstaff in 'Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor' : Otto Nicolai's revolutionary 'Wives'

This article explores how Otto Nicolai and Salomon Hermann von Mosenthal’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (Berlin, 1849) might contribute to an alternative reception history of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which the play’s unusual features—in particular the central role it gives to female agency, family life, and the natural world—are positively valued. These unusual aspects have long been overshadowed in critical approaches to both the play and its operatic adaptations by their focus on the character of Sir John Falstaff, particularly in the wake of Verdi’s Falstaff. However, this article demonstrates that Die lustigen Weiber, by placing its women firmly at its heart, reveals an engagement with those issues which literary criticism has only lately addressed. This article also suggests that approaching the opera in its 1849 post-revolutionary historical context reveals nuanced resonances both with Shakespeare’s play and the opera’s own moment of production, particularly in the opera’s storyline of assertive bourgeois women resisting an abusive aristocrat, culminating in a bourgeois-led reconciliation of the classes. The opera thus reveals the radical potential in Shakespeare’s comedy.27 page(s

A (White) woman’s (ironic) places in Kiss Me, Kate and post-war America

Kiss Me, Kate, a 1948 musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew with music and lyrics by Cole Porter and book by Sam and Bella Spewack, responded not only to Shakespeare’s play’s gender conflict, but also to post-war discourses concerning the return to domesticity of women mobilized into the wartime workforce, anxieties around female fidelity for returning servicemen and issues of racial equality and integration. By setting up contrasting onstage and offstage storylines, the former all-white, focussed on domesticity and full of double entendres, the latter multiracial, focussed on professional life and characterized by plain speaking, the musical-within-a-musical format accommodated conflicting approaches to theatrical, political and social integration, suggesting the viability, for white Americans at least, both of an ironic performative assimilation to hegemonic social norms as a cover for an unassimilated lifestyle, and the creation of an open society in which individuals negotiate their own paradigms for living with others. In the process, the musical also draws attention to the role of cultural products in maintaining a white hegemonic order and in the ‘taming’ of women. The radical nature of the original production is emphasized by the changes imposed for the highly conservative 1953 Hollywood film version.14 page(s

Interrogating escapism : rethinking Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost

In a departure from the widespread critical readings of Kenneth Branagh's cinematic adaptation of Love's Labour's Lost (2000) as a failed attempt to recreate the 1930s Hollywood film musical, this article takes a hermeneutic, rather than evaluative, approach in centralising the fragmented elements of pastiche which destabilise the film's readability as a unified text. Engaging with the manifold criticisms levelled against Branagh's fourth and arguably most radical Shakespearean adaptation, the argument emphasises the film's discontinuities and the often-questioned performance skills of its actors, positing these as strengths which respond directly to the metatheatricality and pastiche of Shakespeare's texts. Through a rejection of monologic readings of the film, the article instead places value on its apparent disjunctions, which create an interrogative text and invite the viewer to engage with the concept of escapism: a concept often obstructed by Branagh's knowing subversions of genre. By placing a play about a failed attempt at escapism in conversation with the Depression-era Hollywood film musical, one of the most escapist of film genres, Branagh's film, the article argues, opens itself up to interpretations of the film itself, Shakespeare's play, the musical genre, and spectator relationships to escapism.31 page(s

Adaptation studies, convention, vocal production and embodied meaning in Verdi’s Macbeth : rehabilitating the Brindisi, or, Lady Macbeth unsexes herself

17 page(s

Effect of aluminum alkyls on a homogeneous and silica-supported phenoxy-imine titanium catalyst for ethylene trimerization

A phenoxy-imine titanium catalyst (FI-catalyst) for selective ethylene trimerization was immobilized on methyl aluminoxane (MAO) pretreated silica and its activity and selectivity was compared with that of the corresponding homogeneous catalyst system. The homogeneous and heterogeneous ethylene oligomerization was conducted in the presence of different aluminum alkyls, commonly used as scavengers during olefin polymerization to remove residual oxygen and moisture from the reaction medium. Both the homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts were strongly affected by the presence of scavenger in the reaction medium. Upon activation with R3Al/MAO (R= Et, nOct, iBu), the homogeneous catalyst switches selectivity from ethylene trimerization to polymerization. NMR spectroscopic investigations indicate that this change of selectivity can be attributed to ligand exchange between the precatalyst and the aluminum alkyl and reduction of the titanium species. The thereby formed ligand-free and/or reduced titanium alkyls act as polymerization catalysts and are responsible for the increasing polymer formation. Using the heterogeneous catalyst, the scavenger employed during ethylene trimerization was found to be of crucial influence regarding the activity of the catalyst and the occurrence of reactor fouling. Employing aluminum alkyls like iBu3Al and nOct3Al resulted in catalyst leaching and homogeneous polymer formation. The latter was prevented using Me3Al or Et3Al as scavengers; however, in general the supported catalyst was poisoned by aluminum alkyls, resulting in a low overall activity. It was found to be beneficial for the heterogeneous trimerization system to employ silica-supported scavengers. By physical separation of the catalyst and the scavenger this poisoning effect was effectively prevented, resulting in a highly active heterogeneous catalyst