Alfred Jarry first presented his absurdist, expletive-filled play King Ubu in Paris in 1896, and instantly ignited a literary scandal. King Ubu not only influenced artistic movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and the Absurd Theater of Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett, but it anticipated, with frightening perspicacity, the catastrophic political madness of the 21st century. Written in a rudimentary and comically nonsensical way-it even incorporates some of Jarry's high-school stunts-the play lends itself to updating with contemporary slang and subjects. About 10 years ago, Rainer Ganahl rewrote Jarry's text as Ubu Lenin, with Vladimir Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya as the protagonists. Now, the advent of Donald Trump has presented an even more appropriately divisive, madcap, narcissistic stand-in for King Ubu. Ganahl's Ubu Trump will take place in Harlem, a neighborhood filled with many of the very people Trump supporters would like to see deported, banned, or put behind "big, beautiful walls." Just like Jarry's King Ubu, Trump and his cronies run their administration like a mafia family business, with barely fig-leafed personal enrichment schemes layered upon corrupt policies and, in all likelihood, treason. In Ubu Trump, the father, King Ubu, has been replaced with Ubu Trump, while Mama Ubu is reincarnated as Ubu Ivanka. Originally set in Poland and Russia, the new play blends Warsaw with Washington, and Poland with the USA, alluding to Trump's special dealings with Putin and the new right-wing government in Poland. The actors perform behind three simple graphic panels based on Jarry's own sketches of King Ubu, and overlapped with renderings of the ruling Trump family: Donald, Ivanka, Jared, and their Russian guest, Putin. This theatrical performance will be staged at a morgue in Harlem, the neighborhood where Ganahl has been living for more than 20 years.

Drama. Translated and Entirely Updated by Rosanna Hildyard. Though ostensibly Surrealist, Alfred Jarry's 1888 play Ubu Roi bears disconcertingly close resemblance to America in 2017. This new version, which brings Ubu to the USA, is a bombastic, irreverent romp through the misadventures of the titular usurper of the White House, with a sharp eye for materialism and political infighting. Slightly Shakespearean, mostly scatological; the ridiculous UBU TRUMP is more than a spoof. This satirical translation-palimpsest forms a terrifyingly relevant comment on our world turned upside down.

Drawing on the author’s two decades of seeing, writing on, and teaching about puppetry from a critical perspective, this book offers a collection of insights into how we watch, understand, and appreciate puppetry. Reading the Puppet Stage uses examples from a broad range of puppetry genres, from Broadway shows and the Muppets to the rich field of international contemporary performing object experimentation to the wealth of Asian puppet traditions, as it illustrates the ways performing objects can create and structure meaning and the dramaturgical interplay between puppets, performers, and language onstage. An introductory approach for students, critics, and artists, this book underlines where significant artistic concerns lie in puppetry and outlines the supportive networks and resources that shape the community of those who make, watch, and love this ever-developing art.

This book addresses the seismic political events of Donald Trump's presidency and the British vote to leave the EU. It explores why citizens vote against their own best interests, and demonstrates the role and value of universities in a time when evidence, expertise and facts often dissolve into opinion, emotion and fake news.

Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama analyses and discusses the contemporary role of stage and screen drama as a critical forum for progressive thinking in an increasingly polarised geopolitical world. The book addresses the cultural politics of socially engaged 21st century stage plays and films, and makes the case for drama as a sociopolitical forum, in which the complex and contentious issues that confront society can be explored and debated. It conceives of Anglophone political drama as a significant intervention in today’s culture wars, representing the latter as a convenient distraction from the ongoing depredations of neoliberalism. In the main part of the book selected case-study plays and films from each of the first two decades illustrate drama’s capacity to influence critical debate on social justice issues. All of the case-study texts under discussion express a powerful aesthetics of resistance to right-wing ideology, and promote inclusive and enlightened values. This broader orientation underlines drama’s role as a channel for critical agency in today’s putative post-socialist, post-democratic climate.

If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the left? How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions? How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd? How to out-dada President Ubu? And, in any event, why add outrage to a media economy that thrives on the same? What Comes After Farce? comments on shifts in art, criticism, and fiction in the face of the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption. A first section focuses on the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, paranoia, and kitsch. A second reviews the neoliberal makeover of art institutions during the same period. Finally, a third section surveys transformations in media as reflected in recent art, film, and fiction. Among the phenomena explored here are "machine vision" (images produced by machines for other machines without a human interface),"operational images" (images that do not represent the world so much as intervene in it), and the algorithmic scripting of information so pervasive in our everyday lives.

This volume deals with the manifold ways in which histories are debated and indeed historicity and historiography themselves are interrogated via the narrative modes of the truth commissions. It traces the various medial responses (memoirs, fiction, poetry, film, art) which have emerged in the wake of the truth commissions. The 1990s and the 2000s saw a spate of so-called truth commissions across the Global South. From the inaugural truth commissions in post-juntas 1980s Latin America, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the incoming post-apartheid government in South Africa and the twinned gacaca courts and National Unity and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda and that in indigenous Australia, various truth commissions have sought to lay bare human rights abuses. The chapters in this volume explore how truth commissions crystallized a long tradition of dissenting and resisting cultures of memorialization in the public sphere across the Global South and provided a significant template for contemporary attempts to work through episodes of violence and oppression across the region. Drawing on studies from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia, this book illuminates the modes in which societies remember and negotiate with traumatic pasts. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of human rights, popular culture and art, literature, media, politics and history.