7 - Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Summary
Readers who have followed my account to this point will surely recall other theatrical scandals that might have been included. Dublin's Abbey Theatre witnessed two of the most tumultuous happenings in Irish stage history: in 1907 the “Playboy Riots” aroused by the week-long stand of J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World; and twenty years later the mobbing of the stage by spectators protesting against Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars (1926). At the 1923 Paris premiere of Tristan Tzara's Dadaist play Le Coeur à gaz (The Gas Heart, 1920), a brief hoax featuring six actors representing the mouth, the eye, the ear, and other parts of the human head, the author's friend Paul Eluard engaged in a fist fight on stage with André Breton, advocate of the new surrealist theater. Following the 1926 premiere of Béla Bartók's musical pantomime Der wunderbare Mandarin (The Miraculous Mandarin) in Rhine-Catholic Cologne, the spectators who had not already stalked out in disapproval greeted the composer and conductor with such a chorus of hisses, whistles, and cries of “Pfui!” that then-mayor Konrad Adenauer summoned the General Manager of the opera company to his office and angrily demanded that the piece, dealing with three tramps and a prostitute, be removed from the schedule. Dmitri Shostakovich's erotically suggestive opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk (1930), based on Nikolai Leskov's novella, enjoyed remarkably successful premieres in Leningrad and Moscow in 1934 followed by two years of popularity.
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- Information
- Scandal on StageEuropean Theater as Moral Trial, pp. 133 - 141Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009