Hanna Scolnicov, Tel Aviv University

The momentous artistic revolutions in the 20th century left the theatre behind. Despite early and sustained experimentation, the mainstream of theatrical production remained within the tradition of late 19 th -century Realism. Confronting the gap between avant-garde art and comparatively conservative dramatic forms, playwrights like Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard have sought to bring the theatre up to date.

This course will explore these writers' experimentation with the translation into the dramatic medium of ideas and forms found in the visual arts. Concepts used by art historians will be shown to provide invaluable tools for the analysis of the plays. Minimalism, hyper-realism, abstract painting, Dada and Surrealism are some of the artistic movements that have influenced the two playwrights we will read.

The course will be based on close readings of the texts. I recommend that you read all the plays quickly (some of them are very short) before coming to Venice, so that preparing them for each class will be much easier. Due to their experimental nature, some of these texts may seem at first bizarre or difficult, but that is why we will be interpreting them in class. The following filmed productions of plays by Pinter will be screened and analyzed in class: Landscape, Betrayal, Party Time . Stoppard's Shakespeare in Love will be screened separately (time to be announced).

There are no previous requirements for this course, except an interest in theatre and an open and inquisitive mind! 

Evaluation
50% mid-term exam on Pinter
50% end of term exam on Stoppard

Students are encouraged to get together and offer short performances of passages from the plays in the classroom. You don't have to memorize and can perform text-in-hand. A bonus of up to 10 points (out of 100) will be given to the actors! The same goes for a proposed scenic design. 

Course outline

Texts
PINTER: The full list of plays appears above, in the course timetable. The cheapest way is to buy the paperback volumes two to four of his Complete Works , published by Grove Press in New York, that contain The Collection, The Lover, Landscape, Silence, Night, Betrayal and Old Times . The plays have also been published as separate thin books by Methuen in London. Please note that, for some reason, Party Time is not included in the collected plays, but has been published as a separate volume by Grove Press, as well as by Faber and Faber in London.

STOPPARD: After Magritte is published by Grove Press; Artist Descending a Staircase appears in Stoppard's The Plays for Radio: 1964-1991 , and also in his Plays 2 , both published by Faber; Travesties is published by Grove Atlantic; and Arcadia is published by Faber. 

Suggested bibliography
PINTER
Michael Billington, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (London: Faber and Faber, 1987)
Harold Bloom, ed., Harold Pinter (New York: Chelsea House, 1987)
Elin Diamond, Pinter's Comic Play (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985)
Martin Esslin, Pinter the Playwright (London: Methuen, 1992) [Earlier versions: Pinter (1973) and The Peopled Wound (1970)]
Mel Gussow, Conversations with Pinter (London: Nick Hern Books, 1994)
Bob Mayberry, Theatre of Discord (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989)
Malcolm Page, File on Pinter (London: Methuen, 1993)
Keith Peacock, Harold Pinter and the New British Theatre (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997)
Marc Silverstein, Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993)

STOPPARD
Peter Egri, Modern Games with Renaissance Forms: From Leonardo and Shakespeare to Warhol and Stoppard (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1996; available through: International Specialized Books Services, ISBN 9630573318)
Mel Gussow, Conversations with Stoppard (London: Nick Hern Books, 1995)
Jim Hunter, Tom Stoppard (London: Faber and Faber, 2000)
Anthony Jenkins, The Theatre of Tom Stoppard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Katherine Kelly, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Ira Nadel, Double Act: A Llife of Tom Stoppard (London: Methuen, 2002)

Hanna Scolnicov B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy, M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature (The Hebrew University ). Associate Professor in Theatre Studies and former Head of the School of Graduate Studies of the Faculty of Arts at Tel-Aviv University, and life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is the author of Experiments in Stage Satire (Peter Lang, 1987), on Ben Jonson's Comical Satires, and of a study of the theatrical space from a feminist perspective, Woman's Theatrical Space (Cambridge University Press, 1994). She has edited, with Peter Holland, The Play Out of Context (CUP, 1989) and Reading Plays (CUP, 1991). In Hebrew, she has published a study of, and co-translated Adam de la Halle 's Le Jeu de la feuillée (Jerusalem, Carmel, 1999). She has published over fifty essays on Elizabethan theatre, intertextuality, Shakespeare, Stoppard, Pinter and others, and is currently preparing a book on Harold Pinter. She has taught as Visiting Professor at universities in North Carolina, Rome and Beijing. She has organized several international conferences on theatre and was a fellow at Salzburg Seminar in the session on “Shakespeare Around the Globe”, in the year 2000.