The Americanization of the Soviet living newspaper
This article examines the migration of a Soviet agitational theatrical form from Russia to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The Soviet living newspaper, or zhivaia gazeta, began during the Russian Civil War as a method to act out a pro-Soviet version of the news for mainly illiterate Red Army soldiers. During the 1920s, it evolved into an experimental form of agitprop theater that attracted the interest of foreigners, who hoped to develop new methods of political theater in their own countries. In the United States, the living newspaper format was first adopted by American communist circles. Eventually, the depression-era arts program, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), incorporated an expanded and altered version as part of its many offerings. Living newspapers eventually became one of the FTP’s most celebrated and criticized performance genres. The political content of American living newspapers was a major factor in the government’s elimination of the FTP in 1939.
At the Theatre
Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving began with a simple statement of the event which was to prove the most momentous of his life: ‘The first time I ever saw Henry Irving was at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, on the evening of Wednesday, August 28, 1867’ (PR I: 1). Stoker was then aged 20. After that first encounter, when Stoker realised that there were no regular theatre reviews appearing in the Dublin press, he offered his own services for free, and was thereafter associated with the theatre for the rest of his life. Nine years after first seeing Irving on stage, he was finally introduced to the great man, and the two bonded for life over an odd episode in which Stoker was apparently reduced to hysterics by Irving’s recital of ‘The Ballad of Eugene Aram’, a long narrative poem which focuses on the guilty conscience of a murderer: as Stoker himself put it, ‘In those moments of our mutual emotion he too had found a friend and knew it. Soul had looked into soul!’ (PR I: 33). Jeffrey Richards suggests that ‘It is perhaps significant that Stoker’s father died aged 77 in 1876, the year he had his momentous encounter with Irving’,1 and that Stoker was thus perhaps subconsciously seeking a replacement father-figure. Whether this was so or not, he had found in Irving a man who from now on would be at the emotional centre of his life.
Aristocratic Century: The sinews of power: political
In his excellent book on the Secretaries of State, Mark Thomson offered ‘the paradox of continuing domination of the aristocracy and the simultaneous insignificance of the House of Lords, per se ’. It is true that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the supremacy of the House of Commons in financial matters was a wellestablished convention. The claims of the Commons to an undisputed control over money matters, which had been urged before the Civil War, were resumed immediately after the Restoration and a protracted dispute with the House of Lords began. In 1661 the Lords resolved that there were no precedents in history for this new claim by the House of Commons. In 1671, the Commons retorted that taxation ought not to be questioned by the Lords and in 1678 they reiterated that supply was ‘the undoubted and sole right of the Commons’ and ‘ought not to be changed or altered by the House of Lords’. The Lords' attempt in 1692 to assess their own taxes was also abandoned, though they retired under cover of a rather insubstantial smoke-screen that they maintained their power of amendment to be a ‘fundamental, inherent and undoubted right from which their lordships can never depart’. That established, they departed. Geoffrey Holmes quotes a nice example from 1702 when the bishop of Carlisle found himself the only peer answering to a money bill, ‘no other lord in the House regarded what was doing, this being only (pro forma) to preserve a seeming right to dissent from, or amend, any part of a money bill’.