Scotland is traditionally regarded as the home of golf. There are over 400 golf courses in Scotland alone. The most important golf club in Scotland is in the seaside town of St. Andrews, near Dundee.
Horse racing
Horseracing, the sport of Kings is a very popular sport with meetings being held every day throughout the year. The Derby originated here, as did The Grand National which is the hardest horse race in the world.
Horse racing and greyhound racing are popular spectator sports. People can place bets on the races at legal off-track betting shops. Some of the best-known horse races are held at Ascot, Newmarket, Goodwood and Epsom.
Ascot, a small town in the south of England, becomes the centre of horse-racing world for one week in June. It's called Royal Ascot because the Queen always goes to Ascot. She has a lot of racehorses and likes to watch racing.
Polo
Another equestrian sport is polo, brought to Britain from India in the 19th Century by army officers. It is the fastest ball sport in the world.
Polo is played with four men on horses to a team. A ball is hit with a stick towards the goal, one at each end of a 300 yard long by 160 yard wide field... Find out more here....
Table Tennis (ping pong)
Table tennis was invented in England in 1880. It began with Cambridge University students using cigar boxes and champagne corks. Although the game originated in England, British players don't have much luck in international championships.
Badminton
Badminton takes its name from the Duke of Beauforts country home, Badminton House, where the sport was first played in the 19th century.
University Boat Race
In the nineteenth century, students at Oxford and Cambridge, Britain's two oldest universities, were huge fans of rowing. In 1829, the two schools agreed to hold a race against each other for the first time on the Thames River. The Oxford boat won and a tradition was born. Today, the University Boat Race is held every spring in either late March or early April.
Fishing (Angling)
Angling is one of the most popular sports in the UK, with an estimated 3.3 million people participating in the sport on a regular basis. Fishermen can be see sitting beside rivers and lakes.
Bowls
The two main forms of bowls are lawn flat green (outdoor and indoor) and crown green.
Boxing
Boxing in its modern form is based on the rules established by the Marquess of Queensberry in 1865. In the UK boxing is both amateur and professional, and strict medical regulations are applied in both.
Swimming
Swimming is also a popular pastime and enjoyed by people of all ages.
Martial arts
Various martial arts, mainly derived from the Far East, are practised in the UK, such as judo and karate.
Darts
Darts is a very popular pub game. The game of darts, as it is today, was invented in the north of England in a town called Grimsby. However, the origins of the game date back to at least the Middle Ages.
Boxing Day Hunts
Traditionally Boxing Day is a day for fox hunting. The huntsmen and huntswomen ride horses. They use dogs too. The dogs (fox hounds) follow the smell of the fox. Then the huntsmen and huntswomen follow the hounds.
Before a Boxing Day hunt, the huntsmen and huntswomen drink hot wine. But the tradition of the December 26th is changing. Now, some people want to stop Boxing Day hunts (and other hunts too) They don't like fox hunting. For them it is not a sport - it is cruel.
XXIII. THEATRE, FILM AND MUSIC.
Elizabethan Theatre
Elizabethan theatre and the name of William Shakespeare are inextricably bound together, yet there were others writing plays at the same time as the bard of Avon. One of the most successful was Christopher Marlowe, who many contemporaries considered Shakespeare's superior. Marlowe's career, however, was cut short at a comparatively young age when he died in a tavern fight in Deptford, the victim of a knife in the eye.
Theatre had an unsavory reputation. London authorities refused to allow plays within the city, so theatres opened across the Thames in Southwark, outside the authority of the city administration.
The first proper theatre as we know it was the Theatre, built at Shoreditch in 1576. Before this time plays were performed in the courtyard of inns, or sometimes, in the houses of noblemen. A noble had to be careful about which play he allowed to be performed within his home, however. Anything that was controversial or political was likely to get him in trouble with the crown!
After the Theatre, further open air playhouses opened in the London area, including the Rose (1587), and the Hope (1613). The most famous playhouse was the Globe (1599) built by the company in which Shakespeare had a stake.
The Globe was only in use until 1613, when a canon fired during a performance of Henry VIII caught the roof on fire and the building burned to the ground. The site of the theatre was rediscovered in the 20th century and a reconstruction built near the spot.
These theatres could hold several thousand people, most standing in the open pit before the stage, though rich nobles could watch the play from a chair set on the side of the stage itself.
Theatre performances were held in the afternoon, because, of course, there was no artificial lighting. Women attended plays, though often the prosperous woman would wear a mask to disguise her identity. Further, no women performed in the plays. Female roles were generally performed by young boys.
Twentieth Century British Drama
Background
Twentieth Century British theatre is commonly believed to have started in Dublin, Ireland with the foundation of the Irish Literary Theater by William B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge. (Greenblatt 1843) Their purpose was to provide a specifically Celtic and Irish venue that produced works that stage[d] the deeper emotions of Ireland. (The Abbey's) The playwrights of the Irish Literary Theater (which later became the Abbey Theater, as it is known today) were part of the literary revival and included: Sean OCasey, J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, to name a few. In England the well-made play genre was being rejected and replaced with actors and directors who were committed to bringing both reform and a serious audience to the theatre by appealing to the younger, socially conscious and politically alert crowd. In the plays by George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville Barker, W. Somerset Maugham, and John Galsworthy, characters emulated this new crowd, satirized the well-made play characters, and created new stereotypes and new standards. (Chothia)
The early twentieth century denoted the split between 'frocks and frills' drama and serious works, following in the footsteps of many other European countries. "In Britain the impact of these continental innovations was delayed by a conservative theatre establishment until the late 1950s and 1960s when they converged with the counter-cultural revolution to transform the nature of English language theatre." The West End, England's Broadway, tended to produce the (Greenblatt 1844) musical comedies and well-made plays, while smaller theatres and Irish venues took a new direction. The new direction was political, satirical, and rebellious. Common themes in the new early 20th century drama were political, reflecting the unease or rebellion of the workers against the state, philosophical, delving into the who and why of human life and existence, and. They explored common societal business practices (conditions of factories), new political ideologies (socialism), or the rise of a repressed sector of the population (women).(Chothia) Industrialization also had an impact on Twentieth century drama, resulting in plays lamenting the alienation of humans in an increasingly mechanical world. Not only did Industrialization result in alienation; so did the wars. Between the wars, two types of theatre reined. In the West End, the middle class attended popular, conservative theatre dominated by Noël Coward andG.B. Shaw. "Commercial theatre thrived and at Drury Lane large budget musicals by Ivor Novello and Noel Coward used huge sets, extravagant costumes and large casts to create spectacular productions." (West End) After the wars, taboos were broken and new writers, directors, and actors emerged with different views. Many played with the idea of reality, some were radically political, others shunned naturalism and questioned the legitimacy of previously unassailable beliefs. (Chothia) Towards the end of the century, the term 'theatre of exorcism' came into use due to the amount of plays conjuring the past in order to confront and accept it. Playwrights towards the end of the century count among their numbers: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Brian Friel, Caryl Churchill, and Tom Stoppard. The last act of the century was a turn back towards realism as well as the founding of Europe's first children's cultural center.
Trends
Realism and Myth
Sigmund Freud inspired an interest in myth and dreams as playwrights became familiar with his studies of psychoanalysis. Along with the help of Carl Jung, the two psychiatrists influenced playwrights to incorporate myths into their plays. This integration allowed for new opportunities for playwrights to increase the boundaries of realism within their writing. As playwrights started to use myths in their writing, a "poetic form of realism" was created. This form of realism deals with truths that are widespread amongst all humans, bolstered by Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious.
Poetic Realism
Much of the poetic realism that was written during the beginning of the twentieth century focused on the portrayals of Irish peasant life. John Millington Synge, W.B. Yeats, and Lady Gregory were but a few writers to use poetic realism. Their portrayal of peasant life was often unappealing and many audiences reacted cruelly. Many plays that are poetically realistic often have unpleasant themes running through them, such as lust between a son and his step-mother or the murder of a baby to "prove" love. These plays used myths as a surrogate for real life in order to allow the audience to live the unpleasant plot without completely connecting to it.
Women
The female characters progressed from the downtrodden, useless woman to an empowered, emancipated woman. They were used to to pose subversive questions about the social order. Many female characters portray the author's masculine attitudes about women and their place in society. As time passed, though, females began gain empowerment. G.B. Shaw became one of the first English playwrights to follow Ibsen's influence and create roles of real women. Mrs. Warren, Major Barbara, and Pygmalion all have strong female leads. Women first started voting in 1918. Later in the century, females (and males) were both subjected to the alienation of society and routinely were not given names to suggest to the audience the character's worth within the play.
Political Theatre and War
Political theatre uses the theatre to represent "how a social or political order uses its power to 'represent' others coercively." It uses live performances and often shows the power of politics through "demeaning and limiting" prejudices. Political theatre often represents many different types of groups that are often stereotyped - "women, gay men, lesbians, ethnic and racial groups, [and] the poor." Political theatre is used to express one's political ideas. Agitprop, a popular form of political theatre, even had its roots in the 1930s women's rights movement. Propaganda played a big role in political theater, whether it be in support of a war or in opposition of political schemes, theater played a big role in influencing the public. The wars also affected the early theatre of the twentieth century. The consternation before WWI produced the Dada movement, the predecessor to Surrealism and Expressionism. Dada rejected the values of society and turned everything on its head, preferring to disgust and offend.
Types of Modern Drama
Realism
Realism, in theater, was meant to be a direct observation of human behavior. It began as a way to make theater more useful to society, a way to hold a mirror up to society. Because of this thrust towards the "real" playwrights started using more contemporary settings, backgrounds and characters. Where plays in the past had, for the most part, used mythological or stereotypical characters, now they involved the lower class, the poor, the rich; they involved all genders, classes and races. One of the main contributors to this style was Henrik Ibsen.
Social Realism
Social Realism began showing up in plays during the 1930s. This realism had a political conscience behind it because the world was in a depression. These plays painted a harsh picture of rural poverty. The drama began to aim at showing governments the penalties of unrestrained capitalism and the depressions that lax economies created. One of the main contributors to this style was G.B. Shaw.
Absurdist Drama
Absurdist Drama was existentialist theatre which put a direct perception of a mode of being above all abstract considerations. It was also essentially a poetic, lyrical theatre for the expression of intuitions of being through movement, situations and concrete imagery. Language was generally downplayed. (Barnet) Symbolism, Dadaism and their offspring, Surrealism, Theatre of Cruelty, and Expressionism all fall into this category.
Dadaism
Dadaism, or Dada, was a reaction against WWI. Like many of the movements, Dada included writing, painting and poetry as well as theatre. Many Dadaists wrote manifestos detailing their beliefs, which normally outlined their disgust in colonialism and nationalism and tried to be the opposite of the the current aesthetics and values. The more Dada offended, the better. It was considered (by Dadaists), the 'anti-art'.
Symbolism/Aestheticism
In England, Symbolism was also known as Aestheticism. A very stylized format of drama, wherein dreams and fantasies were common plot devices, Aestheticism was used by numerous playwrights from Yeats to Pinter. The staging was highly stylized, usually using minimal set pieces and vague blocking. While the playwrights who could be considered Aestheticists lived and worked at the beginning of the century, it influenced all of the following styles.
Surrealism
Like Aestheticism, Surrealism has its base in the mystical. It developed the physicality of theatre and downplayed words, hoping to influence its audiences through action. Other common characteristics of surreal plays are unexpected comparisons and surprise. The most famous British playwright in the 20s surrealist style is Samuel Beckett. Theatre of Cruelty is a subset of surrealism and was motivated by an idea of Antonin Artaud. It argues the idea that theatre is a "representational medium" and tried to bring current ideas and experiences to the audience through participation and "ritualistic theater experiments." Artaud thought that theatre should present and represent equally. This type of theatre relies deeply on metaphors and rarely included a description of how it could be performed.
Expressionism
The term 'Expressionism' was first coined in Germany in 1911. (Michaelides) Expressionism also had its hey-day during the 20s although it had two distinct branches. The branches had characters speaking in short, direct sentences or in long, lyrical expanses. This type of theatre usually did not name the characters and spend much time lamenting the present and warning against the future. Spiritual awakenings and episodic structures were also fairly common.
Golf
Horse racing
Polo
Table Tennis (ping pong)
Badminton
University Boat Race
Fishing (Angling)
Bowls
Darts
