A study of tragedies, comedies, romances, and histories, this book examines the dynamic interplay of three concepts--gender, text, and habitat--as metaphors for cross-cultural definition. The book focuses on the cross-cultural experience, arguing that Shakespeare reinterprets, refashions, and reinscribes stage aliens such as Jews, Moors, Amazons and gypsies and thus interrogates a Eurocentric perspective and the caricatures that cultures create of one another. Writing in an accessible, compelling style, de Sousa recovers a wealth of information on race and gender relations in early modern Europe.

"Global Changes - Local Stages" investigates the relationships between what happened the last twenty years on the 'world stage' and how theatre life developed on the local level. The subject has been approached from three different angles, each covered by one part of the book: "The Effects of Social Changes on Theatre Fields," "Values in Theatre Politics" and "Localization of Theatrical Values." The group of authors tries to find the links between these three areas. The book profits from the fact that the authors come from two sides of the former 'Wall'. Twenty years after its fall, the transitional processes in countries of the former 'Eastern Bloc' can be compared, not only mutually, but also with the changes in the Western part of Europe. With its 537 pages "Global Changes - Local Stages" is the most extensive research of the possible relationships between cultural change, theatre politics and theatre life in smaller European countries.

Samuel Beckett and Catastrophe is a groundbreaking collection of original essays that explore the relation between Samuel Beckett and catastrophe in terms of war, the Holocaust, nuclear disasters and ecological crisis. Responding to the post-catastrophic situations in the twentieth century, Beckett created characters who often seem to have been through an unknown catastrophe. Although the importance of catastrophe in Beckett has been noted sporadically, there has been no substantial attempt to discuss his aesthetics and work in relation to it. This collection will therefore serve as the first sustained study to explore the theme of catastrophe in Beckett and will be a highly significant contribution to Beckett studies.

Although the myth of Atreus' gruesome vengeance on his brother, Thyestes, was embedded in Greek and Roman culture long before his time, Seneca's play is the only literary or dramatic account to have survived intact. Written probably in late Neronian Rome, Thyestes is now widely regarded as one of the tragedian's finest achievements and represents Seneca's most mature reflections on power and civilization, and on the tragic theatre itself. The play's impact on European literature and drama from antiquity to the present has been considerable; now much studied in universities and colleges, and regularly adapted and performed, it still contains much that speaks pointedly to our times: its focus on appetite, lust, violence, and horror; its preoccupation with rhetoric, morality, and power; its concern with the problematics of kinship, and with political, social, and religious institutions and their fragility and impotence; its dramatization of reason's failure, the triumph and cyclicity of evil, the determinism of history, the mastery of the world through mastery of the word; its theatricalized and godless universe. This new edition of Seneca's Thyestes offers a comprehensive introduction, newly edited Latin text, an English verse translation designed for both performance and high-level academic study, and a detailed exegetic, analytic, and interpretative commentary on the play. The aim throughout has been to elucidate the text dramatically as well as philologically, and to locate the play firmly in its contemporary historical and theatrical context and in the ensuing literary and dramatic tradition. As such, the reception of the play by European dramatists is given especial emphasis in the introduction and throughout the commentary; this and the accessible notes on the text make this edition of particular use not only to scholars and students of classics, but also of literature and drama, and to anyone interested in the cultural dynamics of literary reception and in the interplay between theatre and history.

This comprehensive text is the first survey to explore the theory, history and practice of immersive theatre. Charting the rise of the immersive theatre phenomenon, Josephine Machon shares her wealth of expertise in the field of contemporary performance, inviting the reader to immerse themselves within this abundantly illustrated text. The first section of the book introduces concepts of immersion, situating them within a historical context and establishing a clear critical vocabulary for discussion. The second section then presents contributions from a wealth of immersive artists. Assuming no prior knowledge with its critical commentary, this is a rich resource for lecturers and students at all levels and internationally, including undergraduates and post-graduates, as well as practitioners and researchers of contemporary performance. This would also be an ideal text for general enthusiasts and readers with an interest in immersive theatre.

In the past century, scholars have observed a veritable full cast of characters from Roman comedy in the poetry of Catullus. Despite this growing recognition of comedy's allusive presence in Catullus' work, there has never been an extended analysis of how he engaged with this foundational Roman genre. This book sketches a more coherent picture of Catullus' use of Roman comedy and shows that individual points of contact with the theatre in his corpus are part of a larger, more sustained poetic program than has been recognized. Roman comedy, it argues, offered Catullus a common cultural vocabulary, drawn from the public stage and shared with his audience, with which to explore and convey private ideas about love, friendship, and social rivalry. It also demonstrates that Roman comedy continued to present writers after the second century BCE with a meaningful source of social, cultural, and artistic value.

This volume offers an examination of Brecht's largely forgotten theatrical fragments of a life of David, written just after the Great War but prior to Brecht winning the Kleist Prize in 1922 and the acclaim that would launch his extraordinary career. David J. Shepherd and Nicholas E. Johnson take as their starting point Brecht's own diaries from the time, which offer a vivid picture of the young Brecht shuttling between Munich and the family home in Augsburg, surrounded by friends, torn between women, desperate for success, and all the while with 'David on the brain'. The analysis of Brecht's David, along with his notebooks and diaries, reveals significant connections between the reception of the Biblical David and one of Germany's most tumultuous cultural periods. Drawing on theatrical experiments conducted with an ensemble from Trinity College Dublin, this volume includes the first ever translation of the David fragments in English, an extensive discussion of the theatrical afterlife of David in the early twentieth century as well as new interdisciplinary insights into the early Brecht: a writer entranced by the biblical David and utterly committed to translating the biblical tradition into his own evolving theatrical idiom.

A new and controversial account of English theatre in the early Twentieth Century, emphasising its previously overlooked avant-garde credentials. Relevant as a foundational text to any courses in English theatre history and Twentieth Century theatre more generally. Goes against the existing literature on this topic by framing English theatre of the period as much more experimental, queer and postmodern than previously believed.

This book addresses the mind-body dichotomy in movement and dance. This book includes a description of the often-forgotten kinesthetic sense, body awareness, somatic practices, body-based way of thinking, mental imagery, nonverbal communication, human empathy, and symbol systems, what occurs in the brain during learning, and why and how movement and dance should be part of school curricula. This exploration arguers that becoming more aware of bodily sensations serves as a basis for knowing, communicating, learning, and teaching through movement and dance. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students interested in teaching methodology and for courses in physical education, dance, and education.

1. This book is a crucial conversation about how racialized bodies and power intersect within actor training spaces. 2. this book specifically examines race from various and diverse points of view. 3. the book looks at acting training and race from a voice and movement perspective.

The only academic study of the role of theatre in towns, focusing on post-industrial, market and seaside towns. Written for theatre academics and students, with a secondary readership in cultural geography and cultural/social policy. Draws on historical and existing experiences of volunteer-led, community, professional theatre in towns, and offers ways in which the relationship between theatre and towns can continue to be assessed in the future.

This volume considers prewar theatre in Hitler's Germany, a previously neglected subject in theatre history. An extended introduction sets the theatre scene of 1933 and charts the major theatre regulations and organizations formed that year. The initial essay examines the unified folk community used to achieve power and served by purged and revived German art. Plays that achieved great success in Nazi Germany--"Die endlose Strasse" by Sigmund Graff and six works by Eberhard Wolfgang Moller--are considered. In essays devoted to specific theatres, the work examines how Reinhardt's Grosses Schauspielhaus fared under the Nazis and how the regional Detmold Stadttheater was obliged to observe the new politicized aesthetics.

The famous and privileged actor Werner Krauss is the subject of an essay on artistic responsibility, while a chapter on three famed directors--Grundgens, Fehling, and Hilpert--shows how artists maneuvered for artistic freedom. The Propaganda Ministry's first national festival in Dresden in 1934 is covered. The final two essays look at minority theatre--Jewish theatre in the anti-Semitic Third Reich and, as a postscript to the volume, theatre in the Nazi concentration camps.

Victorian Shakespeare (Volume 2): Literature and Culture explores some of the responses to Shakespeare by leading nineteenth-century novelists, poets and critics including Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin. Through certain key plays, especially Hamlet and Othello, Shakespeare provided them with ways of thinking about the authority of the past, about the emergence of a new mass culture, about the relations between artistic and industrial production, about the nature of creativity, about racial and sexual difference, about individual and national identity.

This book is a brief history of the end of the world as seen through the eyes of theatre. Since its inception, theatre has staged the fall of empires, floods, doomsdays, shipwrecks, earthquakes, plagues, environmental degradations, warfare, nuclear annihilation, and the catastrophic effects of climate change. Using a wide range of plays alongside contemporary thinkers, this study helps guide and galvanize the reader in grappling with the climate crisis. Kulick divides this litany of theatrical cataclysms into four distinct historical phases: the Ancients, including Euripides and Bhasa, the legendary Sanskrit dramatist; the Age of Belief, with the anonymous authors of the medieval mystery cycles, Shakespeare, and Pushkin; the Moderns, with Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, and Bond; and, finally, the way the world might end now, encompassing Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, and Anne Washburn. In tandem with the insights gleaned from these playwrights, the book draws upon the work of contemporary scientists, ecologists, and ethicists to further tease out the philosophical implications of such plays and their relevance to our own troubled times. In the end, Kulick shows how each of these ages and their respective authors have something essential to say, not only about humanity's potential end, but, more importantly, about the possibility for our collective continuance.

Romeril's homage to the 18th century Japanese playwright, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, is a daring blend of cultures, involving the destiny of two lovers -- one from Osaka, the other from Perth. The result is an epic story for our times: audacious in its conception, breathtaking in its vision, passionate in its realisation. Love Suicides is an important new play from a highly original and provocative playwright (3 acts, 3 men, 2 women).

"Listen to the dialogue: no other American dramatist has this feel for the ordinary talk of ordinary people, or the knowledge of what they do. This is more than a writer's craft, it is a psychological and moral openness to humanity, an act not of imitating, but of sharing". Sunday Times This fourth anthology features Arthur Miller's two early plays, The Golden Years, a historical tragedy about Montezuma's destruction at the hands of Cortez, and The Man Who Had All the Luck, a fable about human freedom and individual responsibility, are brought together in this volume. It also features two of his contemporary shorter plays, I Can't Remember Anything and Clara, first presented on a double bill as Danger! Memory. The latter focus on the importance and dangers of remembering the past, while the early plays, written at the time of the Second World War, mark the emergence of a drama in which public issues are rooted in private anxieties and chart the beginning of Miller's career that was one of the most distinguished in dramatic history. First produced in 1944 and revived in London in 2008, The Man Who Had All the Luck is a mesmerising drama in which the author's brilliance and characteristic qualities are already evident: The fourth volume of Miller's plays has been reissued with a new cover and features an introduction by the author and a chronology of his work.

The final volume in Methuen Drama's acclaimed series of work by Arthur Miller who, during his lifetime, was acknowledged as "the greatest American dramatist of our age" (Evening Standard). Featuring two plays from the 1990s and his final two plays (2002 and 2004), it offers the first ever publication of Miller's final play, Finishing the Picture. Inspired by his experience during the filming of The Misfits with his then wife Marilyn Monroe, the play was completed and produced at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, just months before the playwright's death in February 2005. Broken Glass (1994) is set in Brooklyn in 1938 and intertwines a woman's obsession with the news from Germany that government thugs are smashing Jewish stores, with her strange relationship with her husband. "It balances private lives with public morality. . . it is also an amazingly full-blooded piece, bursting with pain and passion." (Daily Telegraph). Mr Peters' Connections (1998) is an unforgettable journey through one man's mind at a time of suspended consciousness, where the living and dead intermingle in his memory. Resurrection Blues (2002) is Miller's astonishing black comedy set in a South American banana republic, that satirises global politics and the predatory nature of a media saturated culture. The volume also features a chronology of the writer's work and an introduction by Enoch Brater, professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre provides the single most comprehensive survey of the field to be found in a single volume. Drawing on more than forty contributors from around the world, the book addresses a full range of topics relating to modern Irish theatre from the late nineteenth-century theatre to the most recent works of postdramatic devised theatre. Ireland has long had an importance in the world of theatre out of all proportion to the size of the country, and has been home to four Nobel Laureates (Yeats, Shaw, and Beckett; Seamus Heaney, while primarily a poet, also wrote for the stage). This collection begins with the influence of melodrama, looks at arguably the first modern Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, before moving into a series of considerations of the Abbey Theatre, and Irish modernism. Arranged chronologically, it explores areas such as women in theatre, Irish-language theatre, and alternative theatres, before reaching the major writers of more recent Irish theatre, including Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, and their successors. There are also individual chapters focusing on Beckett and Shaw, as well as a series of chapters looking at design, acting and theatre architecture. The book concludes with an extended survey of the critical literature on the field. In each chapter, the author does not simply rehearse accepted wisdom; all of the authors push the boundaries of their respective fields, so that each chapter is a significant contribution to scholarship in its own right.

This reference book has entries for some 300 women in American theater, ranging from actors, directors, choreographers, playwrights, and designers, to critics, agents, and managers, and should provide focus for future scholars of women's studies and theater. . . . . The volume will prove valuable to scholars and the curious. "Library Journal"

The current and thoughtful treatment of this book will be valuable for academic and large public libraries, especially those that support research in women's studies, theater, American studies, and biography. "Booklist"

From Mrs. Lewis Hallam, the first known professional actress in America to outstanding women of the present era, this biographical dictionary alphabetically examines some 300 notable women who had distinguished careers in the American theatre. Not simply a list of names and activities, the volume--to the extent possible--narrates and evaluates the women's lives and accomplishments providing not only relevant biographical information and bibliographical materials but also describing the women's professional contributions. In representing the careers of theatre artists from actors, directors, and designers, to choreographers, managers, playwrights, educators, critics, variety performers, and agents, this first reference of its kind devoted exclusively to women also serves as a unique survey of the history of American theatre. "Notable Women in the American Theatre" documents the widespread activities of women in the American theatre. As many of them functioned in more than one capacity, one of the two appendixes lists names in the various professional categories.

Each entry describes the pertinent facts of biography and contains a descriptive narrative relating to the individual's career with a special notation of her distinguished role in the American theatre. A bibliography of the featured woman, including sources to be found in books, magazines, and newspapers, is also part of the alphabetical entry. To aid readers and researchers, 2 separate appendixes contain listings by place of birth and by profession and collate the interrelatedness of the careers of many of the women. Compiled primarily as a reference for college and university libraries, the volume would be a useful supplement to courses in women's studies, American studies, drama courses taught in English and theatre departments, courses in the history of the theatre, American history, and biography.

In distracted times like the present, Shakespeare too has been driven to distraction. Shakespeare | Cut considers contemporary practices of cutting up Shakespeare in stage productions, videogames, book sculptures, and YouTube postings, but it also takes the long view of how Shakespeare's texts have been cut apart in creative ways beginning in Shakespeare's own time. The book's five chapters consider cuts, cutting, and cutwork from a variety of angles: (1) as bodily experiences, (2) as essential parts of the process whereby Shakespeare and his contemporaries crafted scripts, (3) as units in perception, (4) as technologies situated at the interface between 'figure' and 'life,' and (5) as a fetish in western culture since 1900. Printed here for the first time are examples of the cut-ups that William S. Burroughs and Brion Guysin carried out with Shakespeare texts in the 1950s. Bruce R. Smith's original analysis is accompanied by twenty-four illustrations, which suggest the multiple media in which cutwork with Shakespeare has been carried out.

This is the first book length study of performance activism. While Performance Studies recognizes the universality of human performance in daily life, what is specifically under investigation here is performance as an activity intentionally entered into as a means of engaging social issues and conflicts, that is, as an ensemble activity by which we re-construct/transform social reality. Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers provides a global overview of the growing interface of performance with education, therapy, conflict resolution, civic engagement, community development and social justice activism. It combines an historical study of the processes by which, over the course of the 20th Century, performance has been loosened from the institutional constraints of the theatre with a mosaic-like overview of the diverse work/play of contemporary performance activists around the world. Performance Activism will be of interest to theatre and cultural historians, performance practitioners and researchers, psychologists and sociologists, educators and youth workers, community organizers and political activists.

"Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain" focuses on the staging of Self and Other as phantom characters inside the brain (in the "mind's eye," as Hamlet says). It explores the brain's anatomical evolution from animal drives to human consciousness to divine aspirations, through distinctive cultural expressions in stage and screen technologies. Even-numbered chapters look at specific dramas with ghost characters from the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans to Shakespeare, Japanese Noh, modern drama, and recent films. Odd-numbered chapters examine various intersections of psychoanalytic and neuroscientific theories to explore the brain's inner theatre, regarding ghosts and gods performed onstage and onscreen, as extensions of and connections between different brains in particular cultures.

The career of Norton and Margot, a ballroom dance team whose work was thwarted by the racial tenets of the era, serves as the barometer of the times and acts as the tour guide on this excursion through the worlds of African American vaudeville, black and white America during the swing era, the European touring circuit, and pre-Civil Rights era racial etiquette.