We examined customer and worker discrimination against gay and lesbian business owners using a web-based experiment conducted at a Swedish university campus. Participants (N = 1,406) were presented with a prospective restaurant establishment on the campus. They then stated whether they would be positive to such an establishment, whether they would be interested in working at the restaurant, and what their reservation wage would be if they were interested in the job. Owners sexual orientation was randomized across participants. Results showed that participants were less positive to a restaurant opening if the owners were lesbians, and they were less interested in an available job if the owners were gay. The participants had higher reservation wages if the owners were lesbians. In fact, the participants increased their wage demands when the number of women among the owners increased. Our study underlines that gay and lesbian people face various inequalities in society.

When French Marshal Jean Baptiste Bernadotte was elected heir to the Swedish Throne in 1810, a dramatic dynastic venture commenced. In an age of revolutions, marked by political as well as cultural upheavals, the commoner from Pau was transformed into King Charles XIV John and the head of a new royal dynasty in Sweden and Norway. Although fraught with challenges, the venture proved successful. As restoration set in, and the Napoleonides of Europe fell one after the other, Bernadotte held fast, and today the dynasty is approaching its bicentennial on the throne.

In nine illustrated essays, the formation of a dynasty is explored as it unfolded in media such as ceremonies, spatial arrangements, opera performances, publicity and panegyrics.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, there arose a type of circus performer in England called ‘Shakespearean clowns’. These clowns constituted a transitory figure between the age of Georgian pantomime clowns and the establishment of the typical circus clown in the later part of the century. One of the more neglected representatives of the genre was James Clement Boswell, who enjoyed a brief period of success in England before becoming a sensation in Paris during the 1850s. Although he was universally praised, his clowning also evoked bafflement. This article studies reviews of and periodical articles on Boswell in order to get a picture of his performances and clown persona, and of how critics perceived him and turned him into an example of the melancholy clown trope. The resistance that Boswell’s act and persona offered to the writers, however, illustrates that he was part of a change in the figure of the clown from its early nineteenth century incarnation to the twentieth-century clown and comic. Boswell’s clowning prefigures the irony and deadpan comedy that would become more prevalent in modern comedy. He is also illustrative of the increasing detachment of the clown figure from representations of a social reality, and the creation of the modern circus clown as an essentially unreal character that epitomizes a separate outlook on life.

Peterson, E & Andrén, M. (2010). Från ingen idé till färdig föreställning. Ett fokussamtal om den skapande processen. C-uppsats i dramapedagogik, Akademin för utbildning och ekonomi, Högskolan i Gävle.

Syftet är att utifrån ett ledarperspektiv undersöka och beskriva den skapande processen i ett pedagogiskt föreställningsarbete. Undersökningen har en fenomenologisk utgångspunkt med fokussamtal som metod.  Fem drama-pedagoger som alla har arbetat på kulturskola med föreställningsarbete har gemensamt undersökt den skapande processen. Resultatet redovisas i kategorier utifrån den skapande processens olika faser, gruppens förutsättningar och ledarens pedagogiska överväganden. Vidare är materialet analyserat efter Pirjo Birgerstams indelning av skapande handling utifrån estetisk-intuitiv och rationell-analytisk position. I undersökningen behandlas också den tysta kunskapen och dess betydelse i det dramapedagogiska arbetet. Resultatet visar att den  skapande processen pendlar mellan olika nivåer som kan uttryckas i termer av mythos/logos, formdriften/sinnliga driften, agering/reflexion, estetisk-intuitiv/ rationell-analytisk position och att den pendlar mellan delar och helhet.

In 2022, London’s Royal Court staged Lucy Kirkwood’s Rapture (June) and Martin Crimp’s Not One of These People (November). Kirkwood’s play was advertised as Dave Davidson’s That Is Not Who I Am; it was revealed to be Kirkwood’s Rapture in the first minutes of performance. It had a full run. Crimp’s play, on the other hand, running for four shows only, had a very limited one. The first balancing act, then, had to do with expectations: in the case of the former, putting trust into a play by a newcomer; in the second, cooperating with the strict schedule of the theatre, so as to ensure not to miss what was a contained and, by all accounts, unrepeatable event.

More balancing acts were required of spectators upon contact with the performance events, which involved negotiating different stimuli at the same time, as the plays made use of the Royal Court stage in novel and even groundbreaking ways, integrating technology that advocated for new interactions between the digital and the physical. Considering such factors, I will discuss how both productions developed new strategies for balancing two major crises: the climate crisis and the pandemic. I will propose that the sustainability of life and performance emerged as a key topic in different ways, both through the depiction of mental, emotional and physical health challenges, and through the development of new modes of creating and staging theatre at a time of programming uncertainty and a shifting artistic field, not least financially, and while dialogues concerning the footprint of performance making are emerging strongly.

The paper proceeds from research conducted for the project “Performing Interspaces: Social Fluidities in Contemporary Theatre”, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2022). It forms part of the monograph Environment and Fluidity in Contemporary Theatre: Staging Interspaces, completed and contracted with Palgrave Macmillan/Springer for open access publication. 

In the recent period, Ella Hickson and Lucy Kirkwood have emerged as two of the most original and impactful voices of contemporary British theatre. In this essay, I shall be discussing their two plays ANNA (2019, directed by Natalie Abrahami) and Mosquitoes (2017, directed by Rufus Norris) respectively, drawing on theoretical frameworks informed by Michel Foucault and Tracy C. Davis. These will allow me to trace the processes of contingency, experiment, rehearsal and execution that both utilize and shape the human body towards the completion of tasks that extend beyond private imperative, into public mission. Such enquiries will also allow me to probe how the body's own intricacies and errancies might interject different layers of agency in high-risk procedures. All the while, my emphasis will remain on the ways in which both Hickson and Kirk-wood construct a profoundly gendered playscape, where networks between female-identifying actors are pivotal towards the conceptualization and execution of certain tasks. The electric body that the title of this piece refers to, then, is equally charged, as I go on to discuss, through a sense of duty; the feeling of being compelled to perform; and internal urges and priorities. Such factors, as will be shown, can both co-exist and antagonize one another.

This book covers playwright Martin Crimp’s recent work showing how it captures the nuances in our interpersonal contemporary experience.

Examining the bold and exciting body of writing by Crimp, the book delves into his depiction of intersections between narratives, as well as between private and public, through an honest look at power structures and shifts, marriages and relationships, sexuality, and desire.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in Drama, Theatre and Performance, English Literature, and Opera Studies.

The article concentrates on Marina Carr’s seminal play Portia Coughlan (1996), examined through an ecocritical and ecofeminist lens. As the essay argues, the play’s recent revival at London’s Almeida Theatre (2023), directed by Carrie Cracknell, designed by Alex Eales and featuring Alison Oliver in the lead role, made a considerable contribution towards highlighting the roots of discomfort as well as the embodied experience of Carr’s eponymous heroine, towards emphasising concerns of grief and inconsolability, but also towards asking how consolation and agency may be conceivable for spectators within an environmentally focused staging and reading of the play. As the article proposes through an interdisciplinary reading engaging with dialogues focused on environmental discourses, the pastoral, and theatre studies (especially related to Carr), the resonance of Portia Coughlan not only endures as it approaches its thirty-year anniversary, but is also recharged vis-à-vis ecologically orientated imperatives in current theatre scholarship and the broader socio-political realm.

 In the last two decades, as the climate crisis has accelerated, and as our collective vocabularies for addressing the issue have evolved from the early days of “global warming” to the more direct “climate change” and the even more literal “climate crisis” and “climate emergency”, theatre, as both text and performance, has been making considerable strides in addressing the issue. It has done so by incorporating the environment, nature and climate – and cross-combinations of these concerns – as a primary theme, as we have been noticing in the work of numerous contemporary playwrights, companies and directors. It has also developed more ways of incorporating sustainability and responsibility not only to the plot of the play, but, also, to the very staging methodologies that are increasingly often curated with the guiding principle of reducing footprint and emissions, and generally offsetting the environmental impact of performance through the tools available – as well as formulating novel ways of staging, seeing and engaging. I propose that an incentive towards such developments is not only the capturing of the emergency, but, also, the imperative to provide, for audiences who are of course also citizens experiencing shifting ecologies, arguably with a degree of complicity, a site for reflection, community and, indeed, recognition and consolation in the face of crisis.

            The paper will concentrate on a selection of Anglophone plays and performances from the past five years which have prioritised the environment, and the non-human world broadly conceived in such ways, promoting active agency amongst spectatorial communities and highlighting the interventionist role of performance. I will discuss the function of theatre in creating interspaces, which may be defined as sites of possibility that operate within the dramaturgy of the play, but, also, within the site of encounter of the audience. I will especially concentrate on plays by female-identifying authors, who have reconceptualised the eco-feminist creative framework in the twenty-first century.

This article reflects on the sociopolitical, cultural, and health landscape(s) of our current moment in time, addressing how intersecting crises have delivered us to an unprecedented moment for drama, theatre, and performance. As communities across the world have had to dispense with staples of everydaylife – attending live theatre performances being one of these –, so art, in all its forms, has never been more significant in its capacity to bring us together, even if modes of togetherness have shifted in their referentiality and locationality. As the article proposes, we need to take an intuitive approach to the appreciation of how our ecologies – in their broadest iteration – have been impacted and realigned by the COVID-19 pandemic in such ways that we can expect that our future scholarship(s) on plays, place, and landscape will and, indeed, ought to reflect this experience. Dialogues on theatre and environment, which are already intersectional, are now receiving yet another focusing lens through the pandemic. The article also suggests that our understandings of how our ecologies have been adapted invite a consideration of new modes of engaging with the environment in our discourses – and of the very term itself and what it might encompass –and new economies in calibrating our discourses to reflect our radically redistributed individual and collective experiences. The text offers examples of categories that emerge particularly strongly where spatial liminality is key; in so doing, it asserts that inbetweenness is a central element towards understanding our contemporary role and responsibilities: from collapsing binaries (environment/economy) to the unmoored experience of our times.

This article responds to recent calls for more creative expressions of climate and sustainability transformations. In particular, research literature argues that the formulation of new narratives of sustainable societies may function as a prominent intervention for system changes. Yet, few empirical studies exist on how creative climate and sustainability storytelling elicit varying levels of awareness and engagement. With the intention to advance scholarship in the role of narratives to create engagement with sustainability transformations, this study investigates children’s theater for the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as one research site. By analyzing the interactive children’s theater play “Esmeralda and the Dragon—The Global Sustainability Goals,” we show that creative storytelling can offer a meaningful space for engagement with Agenda 2030 and the UN SDGs. In particular, we find that (1) children’s cognitive and emotional associations and experiences shape the meaning of and responses to the SDGs and (2) the play’s fictional elements resonate with children’s emotional frameworks. Based on the results, we argue that new stories are needed for sustainability transformations and that there is transformative power in the creative and performance arts in this respect, and we call for further exploration of various publics engagements with sustainability storytelling.

This thesis is to present identified modifications in the model opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and to put these in perspective of its trajectory from its origins in the novel Tracks in the Snowy Forest, to its final form as the studied model opera from 1970. A semantical analysis was employed in the study of the book and the script, whereas semiotics served as a tool in identifying the existence and use of traditional elements from the theatrical form of jingju in the model opera. The contextualized analysis of the encountered alterations and their employment in relation to their history and contemporary circumstances shed a light over the importance of the identified elements’ role in using the model opera as a tool for clarifying differences between good and evil as established by the contemporary political elite. Going beyond its entertaining purpose and in accordance with the established policies regarding the arts set by the Communist Party, director Jiang Qing created a medley of Chinese and Western instruments, reformed jingju elements and rephrased lines. A medley conveying the indirect message of the right way to follow, in the disguise of a communist hero besieging Tiger Mountain in the name of revolution.

This essay explores drag as an artform, guided by the lens of queer theory, offering insights into the nuanced expressions of drag. Exploring three theatrical productions across genres like modern dance, opera and musical theatre, the study focuses on character portrayal and design, seeking to understand the essence of drag and why certain cross- dressings are more closely associated with drag than others. By combining performance analyses with existing research on drag, this paper reveals the complex and dynamic nature of drag culture. With a particular emphasis on the exploration and subversion of gender norms, the study sheds light on how drag is portrayed and understood within the Swedish theatrical context through Matilda the Musical, Askungen and Everlasting Event. Through this investigation, the essay offers valuable insights into the evolving role of drag as a form of artistic expression and social commentary.

This essay explores the genre of In-Yer-Face theatre and its representation of women. In-Yer-Face theatre emerged in the 1990s in the UK, characterised by its confrontational style and provocative themes. While the genre is often associated with the portrayal of violence and aggression towards women, this essay explores how In-Yer-Face theatre may also offer a platform for women's stories and experiences. Through an analysis of The Censor, Blasted and the performances of Shopping and fucking and Look back in anger, the essay researches how In-Yer-Face theatre explores traditional gender roles and the ways in which women are often subjected to violence, exploitation, and objectification. The essay will use both a drama analysis and performance analysis of two plays and two performances from the genre to explore different views from the most prominent writers of the genre.Ultimately, this essay argues that In-Yer-Face theatre has an opportunity to offer a powerful and complex representation of women that demands critical engagement and interpretation but in many ways reproduces the societal norms. 

The maid who fell silent. Epic structures and gender in Swedish drama 1725-1900

Epic structures such as soliloquies and asides are frequently used in drama. The narrative function served by these dramatic conventions enables characters to provide a running commentary to the plot, and this in turn makes the characters using them a driving force in the drama.

In this paper I discuss gender and social class of the dramatic figures using epic structures in Swedish drama from 1725 to 1900. The material studied consists of 25 plays.

The main characters af interest are the servant figures. The driving force of 18th-century comedy is the cunning maid and, to a lesser extent, her male counterpart. Around 1850 these servants are replaced by other figures, such as the scheming villain, a characteristic male figure in melodrama.

With the emergence of realism and naturalism, the use of epic structures is reduced. Female servant figures in naturalist plays have few lines, and use virtually no soliloquies or asides. They are a necessary part of the bourgeois family, but are no longer the driving force of the drama.

The aim of this thesis is to show that the opera singer's art is to transmit word and music into vocal action. It is assumed that opera, like all the arts, communicates myth. Of the stage arts opera is unique in that it expresses mythic metaphors through a combination of words and music.

The point of departure is the opera singer's: confronted with the text, comprising libretto and music, how can this be used to achieve a dramatic effect? Stanislavsky's theory of acting is often applied in practice, but whatever its merits for the stage, it has shortcomings for opera. More promising, it is argued, is a form of hermeneutic approach that Ricoeur calls "backward relatedness": the composer's score is relied on to contain all essential information, but further understanding may be gained by studying any human science that gives insight into how the poet expresses his life experience.

In this spirit, the first part of the thesis surveys the history of opera from Monteverdi to Verdi with a focus on how composers have handled the relation between words and music to give expression to human conflicts that are the stuff of myth. The second part comprises two chapters in which arias from each of the main periods studied are analysed with attention paid both to the libretto and the music and how these combine in vocal action that communicates myth. It is here that the fruitfulness of Ricoeur's insights are demonstrated. In a final part, the conditions for the present-day opera singer are discussed.

King Gustav III founded the Swedish National Theater and Opera, participated in the court theater as playwright, director and actor and he was rightly called the Theater King. The King’s passion for acting was perceived in the past as a psychological weakness, which won him the appellation of wimp (fjant). However, Gustav III presents a special interest as a performer of the role of an enlightened monarch according to the philosophy of the epoch of Enlightenment, particularly that of Voltaire. This research project aims at challenging the stereotyped perception of Gustav III, and presents him as a performing king who purposely used his acting ability to achieve political gain.

The theoretical foundation of this study of the King’s use of theater is described in Chapter I. The theory of playing by Johan Huizinga and the theory of theatricality of Nikolai Evreinov, from the point of view of culture and anthropology, respectively, explain how playing is the basis of human living. Yuri Lotman’s semiotic approach is applied to formulate the concept of theatrical playing meant to influence the spectators, which is at the core of the Pageants in court and in public, used by Gustav III to display his power. Finally, but most importantly, the theories of Josette Féral, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Willmar Sauter present theatrical playing as an interactive performative communication between the performer and the beholders that became the core of Royal Encounters, which were the most effective political tools of Gustav III.

The ensuing chapters are devoted to the different activities of the King related to theater, understood as the sum of interactions between the performer and the spectators that can occur within the walls of a theater or outside them. Theatricalized actions transported into life and directed to the beholders (Pageants) and the interaction between the performing King and his beholding subjects (Royal Encounters) are presented and examined. Examples of Pageants are chosen from court life, such as entertaining divertissements and amateur theater; Public Pageants were held at occasions such as the birth of a royal prince and King Gustav’s departure to the war with Russia. Among the Royal Encounters the coup d’etat in 1772 and the struggle against the nobility at the Riksdag of 1789 can be mentioned.

The conclusion establishes the concordance between the performing King and his beholding subjects leading to real achievements in politics. This investigation sheds light on the different theatrical means the King employed in crafting political tasks and choosing appropriate political masks. Gustav III was a master of acting; thus, the decisive factor in each of his theatricalized actions was not so much his art at playwriting and directing, as his ability as a performer. In addition, the King could assert his royal power by performing his own idealized social role of an enlightened monarch.