Award success: Sussex graduate wins prestigious James Menzies-Kitchin Young Directors Award 2013

Alex Brown (centre), winner of the 2013 JMK Trust Award. (Photograph by Rob Logan)

Alex Brown, who graduated in Drama Studies and English from Sussex in 2009, is the 16th winner of the James Menzies-Kitchin (JMK) Young Directors Award.

Alex, who has been assistant director on The River by contemporary playwright Jez Butterworth at the Royal Court Theatre and an adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida Theatre, was selected from a shortlist of seven young directors.

He will receive a bursary of £25,000 to stage a production at the Young Vic in London this autumn.

The award, which was presented to Alex on Thursday (25 April) at the Young Vic, has been increased from £18,000 to £25,000 to assist young directors with the costs of staging their productions and to allow them to pay their creative team agreed minimum rates (Equity rates).

Stephen Fewell, chair of the JMK Trust, said: “Alex really stood out, someone remarkable amid a field of young talent with notable skills and acumen.

“Alex, through the JMK Award and a space at the Young Vic, gets a big opportunity to learn through making theatre, rather than by assisting or studying."

The JMK Trust was set up to commemorate young director James Menzies-Kitchin, whose career was cut short by his sudden death at the age of 28.

The JMK Young Director’s Award has been presented annually since 1998. Applicants must be under 30, must have directed no more than two professional productions and must apply to direct a ‘classic text’.

For more information about the award, visit the JMK Trust website

Funding success: Drama

David Barnett
A History of the Berliner Ensemble

The Berliner Ensemble (BE) is the theatre company set up by one of the most important theatre practitioners of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht, together with his wife, Helene Weigel, in 1949. In the following decade, after landmark productions in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and successful tours to cities such as Paris and London, the BE became perhaps the most important theatre in Europe because of its enlivening and innovative ways of making theatre. The theatre was also, however, the jewel in the GDR’s cultural crown and was thus always in dialogue with a repressive political apparatus which sought to control the plays it wanted to stage and the ways in which they were to be performed.

The story of this company is one that plays out in a variety of arenas, from the stages of the theatre itself to the GDR’s Ministry of Culture and the broader international audience for the BE’s work. This story, however, is yet to be told and there is no single study, in English or German, that charts the complex relationships between the rehearsals, the productions, the repertoires, the showpiece theatre, and the role of the State.

In the summer of 2009, Head of Drama Dr David Barnett was awarded a British Academy Research Development Award (BARDA) worth £120,000 to fund and support extensive work in the archives of Berlin in order to research the first study of the BE. Thirty-five BARDAs were awarded to a field of some four hundred applicants who work in the arts, humanities and social sciences across the United Kingdom. David will spend twenty months viewing production documentation, video recordings and rehearsal notes, set and costume designs, minutes of Ensemble meetings, reviews of productions from Germany and the wider world, government dossiers and Stasi files. And while there are very few members of the original ensemble who are still alive, he will be interviewing the crucial figures who helped to shape the BE in subsequent years. By the end of the sabbatical, he will have all the material required to write the two-volume study.

David started to conduct research into German theatre when reading for his doctorate on the GDR’s ‘postmodern Brecht’, Heiner Müller. He published his doctorate as a book-length study on the relationship between performance text, staging and politics, in 1998. In the academic year 2001-2, he was awarded a Fellowship of the Humboldt Foundation to research the first study of the theatrical work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder is better known as a film-maker but the book, published with Cambridge University Press in 2005, demonstrated Fassbinder’s debt to and achievements in the theatre. The study of the BE will follow these two books by developing their methodologies in which archival theatre research is contextualized by specific social, historical and political contexts.

Funding success: Shakespeare

Brian Cummings
The Confessions of Shakespeare

Religion is the last great mystery of Shakespeare studies. It has long been one of the most controversial topics in relation to the dramatist: to know his religious beliefs, as to know his political views, has seemed like a holy grail. Yet it has proved hard to find evidence. Shakespeare wrote in no devotional genre, in fact hardly wrote in the first person at all – except in the Sonnets, themselves notably opaque and elusive in meaning. Since the romantic period, indeed, the impersonality of Shakespeare’s writing has been one of its most prized features. Shakespeare is ‘like a mirror’, Coleridge wrote, ‘he is in all his personages because all humanity is in him’. But as a consequence we cannot know what Shakespeare himself was, so that investigating the beliefs of Shakespeare – especially the religious beliefs – has come to seem like a category mistake or even a poetic blasphemy. Central to Shakespeare’s claim to universality is the view that his plays display no religion: his work instead is a ‘secular scripture’, Harold Bloom famously stated.

A transformation has recently taken place, motivated by a perception of the significance of religion in contemporary society. The sense of how widespread, controversial – and conflicted – questions of religious affiliation are is greater than a generation ago. Conversely, the religious upheaval of Shakespeare’s own period has come to seem especially relevant. All of these factors make the current moment an exceptionally propitious one for the study of Shakespeare’s religion.

Yet there are obstacles in the way. The primary form of new argument has been biographical. Biography is the serpent in the garden of Shakespeareanism, a constant source of temptation and frustration. The documentary records are few and far between, and notoriously difficult to interpret. Recently attention has been paid to the records of Shakespeare’s family, especially his father, but even if such matters could be proved they would only tell us about the father and not the son. This suggests we are approaching the argument from the wrong direction. Whatever it is that matters about Shakespeare is not to be found in the incidental events of his life but flows outwards from the way in which he wrote. My own project on Shakespeare’s religion, while making use of the insights of the ‘Catholic Shakespeare’ case, is based on different principles. It aims to place the question back within the context of Reformation history. My subject is not the religion of Shakespeare the man so much as the place and meaning of religion within his writing.

With the support generously provided by the Leverhulme Trust for Major Research Fellowship, £131,691 running from October 2009 to October 2012, I seek to redraw the boundaries between biography, history, literature and religion. The response to religion in Shakespeare – in word, gesture and action – can be used to shed new light on confessional identities in a period of profound religious change.

Funding success: American literature

Sue Currell
American Culture in the 1920s

Sue received AHRC funding in the academic year 2008/9 to complete her new book titled American Culture in the 1920s published by Edinburgh University Press in April 2009. The book is an engaging account of the major cultural and intellectual trends that were pivotal to the decade's characterization as “the jazz age.” Avoiding superficial representations of the era as the “roaring twenties” plagued by a “lost generation,” the volume provides a full portrait that includes chapters on literature, music and performance, film and radio, visual art and design, and the unprecedented rise of leisure and consumption. The book contends that certain developments rendered the decade clearly different from others that had come before, all of which were reflected in debates concerning the changing notion of the role of culture: these include the introduction of new mass communications, notably radio programming and sound on film, the unprecedented prominence of racial and nativist ideologies in American public culture, the popularization of psychoanalysis, female suffrage and the prohibition of alcohol. Ideas about these social, technological and scientific changes emerged in the philosophies and ideologies that developed over the period; this book examines the part that those ideas, both old and new, played in the cultural productions of the 1920s.

Sue Currell is a senior lecturer in American Literature at the University of Sussex. She is author of The March of Spare Time: The Problem and Promise of Leisure During the Great Depression (2005) and co-editor of Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture (2006). She recently appeared on the BBC4 documentary, Glamour's Golden Age: The Luxe Experience, discussing streamline design, leisure and eugenics in the 1920s and 30s. Sue is currently working on a number of projects, including the relationship between eugenics and urban planning in the early 20th century, literature of the New Deal era, a cultural history of speed reading and political drama of the 20s and 30s.