This is an extended study of the touring practices and performances of Elizabethan and Jacobean travelling players. It examines the lively, competitive world of professional touring theatre through to its decline in the 1620s.
Great Shakespeare Actors provides a series of well-informed, well-written, illuminating, and entertaining accounts of many of the most famous stage performers of Shakespeare in both England and America, offering a concise, actor-centred history of Shakespeare on the stage.
Stanislavski's 'system' or interpretations of it - has become the central force determining almost every performance we see on stage or screen. His classic texts An Actor Prepares, Building a Character and Creating a Role have stood the test of time as inspirational guides for actors all over the world.
This engaging text explores the role of the writer and the text in collaborative practice through the work of contemporary writers and companies working in Britain, offering students and aspiring writers and directors effective practical strategies for collaborative work.
A provocative overview of the questions raised by theatrical encounters between performers and audiences, drawing on examples that have sought to generate active audience involvement from Brecht's epic theatre to The Blue Man Group. It argues for more audience-responsive approaches to what theatre does for those who witness, watch or participate.
This is a lively, readable and accurate verse translation of the six best plays by one of the most influential of all classical Latin writers. The volume includes Phaedra, Oedipus, Medea, Trojan Women, Hercules Furens, and Thyestes, together with an invaluable introduction and notes.
In this work the author proposes that one should consider Greek tragedy of the 5th-century BC as performance-based, with a visual emphasis. He does not consider language as the most important feature of Greek drama.
This title is an accessible and authoritative A-Z offering strong coverage of actors, playwrights, directors, and designers, as well as the styles, organizations, and movements within the world of live performance. Containing 2,400 up-to-date entries, it is an essential companion for anyone involved with the theatre.
A guide to finding just the right piece for various auditions. It is suitable for acting teachers who want their students to understand each monologue in context. It describes the characters, action, and mood for more than 1,000 scenes in over 300 plays.
This quide for artists in a variety of media covers aspects of starting up a company, funding, multimedia tools, documentation marketing, a Yellow Pages section with contact information (funding, venues, publications, festivals, equipment hire, software support) and interviews from artists.
Best known as an acclaimed novelist, Beryl Bainbridge is also a former actor. This is a collection of Beryl Bainbridge's writing about the theatre. It contains insights into the work of such contemporaries as Alan Bennett, Alan Rickman and Ronald Harwood, alongside sketches of the actors Bainbridge worked with in her early years.
The way in which degree subjects are taught is far removed from A level courses in schools. "Questions & Answers Degree Subject Guides" is a series that prepares students for the rigours and discipline required to study effectively at university.
The theatre has always been a place where conceptions of race and racism have been staged, shared and perpetuated. Harvey Young introduces key ideas about race, before tracing its relationship with theatre and performance - from Ancient Athens to the present day.
The Sunday Times BestsellerThis is the inside story of twelve years at the helm of Britain's greatest theatre. of opening the doors of the National Theatre to a broader audience than ever before, and changing the public's perception of what theatre is for.
What happens to politics when it takes the form of theatre? How has theatre both exploited and undermined politics both in society and on the stage?
Theatre& Politics explores the complex relationship between theatre and politics, questioning some of the assumptions that often arise when they are brought together.
In a world of spectacular suffering and power plays - large and small - what is theatre's role in protecting human dignity?
With its impassioned plays, inspired activism and outspoken artists, the theatre has long provided a venue for promoting and practising human rights;
What is ethics and what has it got to do with theatre? Drawing on both theoretical material and practical examples, Ridout makes a clear and compelling critical intervention, raising fundamental questions about what theatre is for and how audiences interact with it.
Drawing on sources from Aeschylus to The Lion King, Chekhov to Complicite, tragedy to advertising, the book argues for theatre's importance as a site of resistance to the ruthless spread of the global market.
Foreword by Mark Ravenhill
It provides an intellectual framework for the range of emotional experience engendered by the theatre, establishing a base-line for further thinking and practice in this rich and emergent area of inquiry. Moving across western dramatic theory and theatre history, the book demonstrates the centrality of feeling to the theatre.
Theatre& Education provides an insight into the energy, passion and values that have inspired the most inventive theatre-makers who work with young people in educational settings. It argues that the aesthetic principles and educational ideals that inform theatre& education drive at the heart of why theatre matters.
Theatre and architecture are seeming opposites: one a time-based art-form experienced in space, the other a spatial art experienced over time. The book unpicks these assumptions, demonstrating ways in which theatre and architecture are essential to each other and contextualizing their dynamic relationship historically and culturally.
Moving from the history and theory of performance analysis to its practical application and paying particular attention to cross-cultural applications, he examines not what a particular piece of theatre means, but how meaning is produced in the process of creating, viewing and analysing theatre.
This provocative book meets the supposedly 'live' practices of performance and the 'no-longer-live' historical past at their own dangerous crossroads. Focussing on the 'and' of the title, it addresses the tangled relations between the terms, practices, ideas, and aims embedded in these compatriot - but often oppositional - arts and acts of time.
Theatre & the Visual argues that theatre studies' preoccupation with problems arising from textual analysis has compromised a fuller, political consideration of the visual.
Using examples from popular culture, dramatic texts and applied theatre it analyses how theatre and performance reveals economies of punishment, affects penal reform and both challenges and participates in narratives of reformation.
All performance depends upon our abilities to create, perceive, remember, imagine and empathize. This book provides an introduction to the evolutionary and cognitive foundations of theatrical performing and spectating and argues that this scientific perspective challenges some of the major assumptions about what takes place in the theatre.
In this cutting-edge text, Trish Reid offers a concise overview of the shifting roles of theatre and theatricality in Scottish culture. She asks important questions about the relationship between Scottish theatre, history and identity, and celebrates the recent emergence of a generation of internationally successful Scottish playwrights.
Walsh argues that there are many links between theatre and therapy when considering actor training, theatre in therapeutic contexts, and contemporary theatre and performance. He draws on a range of examples that include the drama of Sarah Kane, the method acting of Daniel Day Lewis and performances by Ruby Wax and David Hoyle.
Lourdes Orozco considers different representations of animals in performance; suggesting that all animals have the ability to make us question the human, and its relationship to the other. She examines ways in which animals challenge theatre's ability to make meaning, and considers the surrounding ethical, political and social issues.
A concise history of popular theatre in the 20th and 21st centuries. This book questions how we define the distinguishing principles of popular theatre, considers the use of popular forms in experimental and avant-garde theatre, and introduces a range of international artists and theatre makers.
What is the significance of theatre and performance within Irish culture and history? Expanding the field of Irish theatre to include mumming, wake games, prison protests and theatre riots, the book argues that Ireland's longstanding association with performance illuminates key aspects of its cultural history and politics.
A vibrant introduction to theatre that engages with stories, conditions and experiences of migration. Arguing that migration is crucially about encounters with foreignness, Emma Cox traces international histories of migration and considers key issues in contemporary performance - from Cape Town and Melbourne, to London and Toronto.
Focussing on costume in performance, this reader brings together key texts, case studies and interviews. Exploring costume's role and function in a variety of theoretical, historical, conceptual and practical contexts, this exciting volume also reflects on the broader relationship between costume and visual culture throughout.
While the body appears in almost all cultural discourses, it is nowhere as visible as in dance. This book captures the resurgence of the dancing body in the second half of the twentieth century by introducing students to the key phenomenological, kinaesthetic and psychological concepts relevant to both theatre and dance studies.
Bringing critical theory and musical theatre together, Millie Taylor and Dominic Symonds explore the musical stage from a broad range of theoretical perspectives. Part 1 focuses on the way we understand musicals as texts and Part 2 then looks at how musical theatre negotiates its position in the wider world.
If violence is a terrible thing, why do we watch it? Nevitt explores the use of violence in theatre and its effect on spectators. Critically engaging with examples of stage combat, rape, terrorism, wrestling and historical re-enactments, she argues that studying violence through theatre can be part of a desire to create a more peaceful world.
In this stimulating book, Jim Davis examines the relationship between theatre and entertainment by assessing audience reception, political theatre and melodrama. Davis concludes with a review of contemporary perspectives on the topic and questions the limits of entertainment in theatrical performance.
This fascinating account of the relationship between theatre and time explores how different concepts of time - including linear clock time, the cyclical time of the planets and seasons, the rhythms of the body and individual memories - have impacted on and been reinforced by theatre throughout history, from medieval times to the present day.
Through detailed case-studies on the work of key international theatre companies such as the Elevator Repair Service and The Mission Business, Bill Blake explores how the digital is providing new scope for how we think about the theatre, as well as how the theatre in turn is challenging how we might relate to the digital.
This stimulating introduction to laughter in theatre and performance examines laughter among actors, among audience, and the interaction between the two.
This succinct and engaging text rethinks the common wisdom that festivals, sites of collective celebration and play, provide a temporary reprieve from the grind of everyday, 'real' life.
This fresh and insightful text examines the intersections and tensions between theatre and protest. Exploring the cross-fertilization of international theatre and protest across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Lara Shalson illuminates how and why these two are mutually influencing and enriching forms.
Theatre & Law offers the first comprehensive account of the complex relations between legal process and performances. Through ten major principles of performance within law, it establishes how law itself is a performative mode of practice and reflects upon the co-dependence of law, performance and politics in celebrated works of theatre.
This exploration of theatre and the rural argues that the reality of the lived rural is overlaid with external representations, often coloured by nostalgia, which are reflected and potentially created by theatre and its practices. It suggests that we need to re-engage with the actuality of the rural in order to fully understand our own nations.
How can we rethink the importance of voice in performance? How can we understand voice simultaneously as music and text, as sound and body, or as both personal and political?
This book explores voice across genres, media and cultures, inviting the reader to reassess established ways of analysing, enjoying and listening to voice.