"Stage Directions" covers half a lifetime and the whole range of Frayn's theatrical writing, right up to a new piece about his latest play, "Afterlife". It is also a reflection on his path into theatre: the 'doubtful beginnings' of his childhood, his subsequent scorn as a young man and, surprisingly late in life, his reluctant conversion. Whatever subjects he tackles, from the exploration of the atomic nucleus to the mechanics of farce, Michael Frayn is never less than fascinating, delightfully funny and charming. This book encapsulates a lifetime's work and is guaranteed to be a firm favourite with his legions of fans around the world.

In this book practitioner and researcher Louise Ann Wilson examines the expanding field of socially engaged scenography and promotes the development of scenography as a distinctive type of applied art and performance practice that seeks tangible, therapeutic, and transformative real-world outcomes. It is what Christopher Baugh calls 'scenography with purpose'. Using case studies drawn from the body of site-specific walking-performances she has created in the UK since 2011, Wilson demonstrates how she uses scenography to emplace challenging, marginalizing or 'missing' life-events into rural landscapes - creating a site of transformation - in which participants can reflect upon, re-image and re-imagine their relationship to their circumstances. Her work has addressed terminal illness and bereavement, infertility and childlessness by circumstance, and (im)mobility and memory. These works have been created on mountains, in caves, along coastlines and over beaches. Each case-study is supported by evidential material demonstrating the effects and outcomes of the performance being discussed. The book reveals Wilson's creative methodology, her application of three distinct strands of transdisciplinary research into the site/landscape, the subject/life-event, and with the people/participants affected by it. She explains the 7 'scenographic' principles she has developed, and which apply theories and aesthetics relating to land/scape art and walking and performance practices from Early Romanticism to the present day. They are underpinned by the concept of the feminine 'material' sublime, and informed by the attentive, autotopographic, therapeutic and highly scenographic use of walking and landscape found in the work of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female contemporaries. Case studies include Fissure (2011), Ghost Bird (2012), The Gathering (2014), Warnscale (2015), Mulliontide (2016), Dorothy's Room (2018) and Women's Walks to Remember: 'With memory I was there' (2018-2019).

Second only to Shakespeare in terms of performances, Ibsen is performed in almost every culture. Since Ibsen wrote his plays about bourgeois family life in Northern Europe, they have become part of local theatre traditions in cultures as different as the Chinese and the Zimbabwean, the Indian and the Iranian. The result is that today there are incredibly many and different 'Ibsens' around the world. A play like Peer Gynt can be staged on the same continent and in the same year as a politically progressive piece of theatre for development in one place, and as a nationalistic and orientalistic piece of elite spectacle in another. This book charts differences across cultures and political boundaries, and attempts to understand them through an in-depth analysis of their relation to political, social, ideological and economic forces within and outside of the performances themselves.Through the discussion of productions of Ibsen plays on three continents, this book explores how Ibsen is created through practice and his work and reputation maintained as a classics central to the theatrical repertoire.

At once both guide book and provocation, this is an indispensable companion for students and practitioners of applied theatre. It addresses all key aspects: principles, origins, politics and aesthetics in a concise and accessible style designed to appeal both to those who have recently discovered this sub-discipline and to experienced practitioners and academics. Part 1 is divided into two chapters. The first introduces the sub-discipline of Theatre for Development, covering its origins, principles and history, and providing an overview of theatre for development in Western contexts as well as in Africa, Asia, the Indian Subcontinent and Latin America. The second focuses upon theoretical and philosophical issues confronting the discipline and its relationship to contemporary politics, as well as considering its future role. Part 2 consists of seven chapters contributed by leading figures and current practitioners from around the world and covering a diverse range of themes, methodologies and aesthetic approaches. One chapter offers a series of case studies concerned with sexual health education and HIV prevention, drawn from practitioners working in Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, Southern Africa, and China. Other chapters include studies of intercultural theatre in the Peruvian Amazon; a programme of applied theatre conducted in schools in Canterbury, New Zealand, following the 2010 earthquake; an attempt to reinvigorate a community theatre group in South Brazil; and an exchange between a Guatemalan arts collective and a Dutch youth theatre company, besides others.

What do we mean when we talk about bodies in theatre? And how does theatre affect the way we think about the human body? Bodies are vital elements of theatre production and spectatorship. But the body is not just physical, it is also conceptual. Drawing on many examples from contemporary performance, Theatre& the Body is a provocative starting point for understanding the surprisingly complex relationship between theatre and the body. Concise and clear, this book explores the revealing tensions between the body, bodies, language, representation and movement in the theatre. Foreword by Marina Abramovic

Script Analysis for Theatre: Tools for Interpretation, Collaboration and Production provides theatre students and emerging theatre artists with the tools, skills and a shared language to analyze play scripts, communicate about them, and collaborate with others on stage productions. Based largely on concepts derived from Stanislavski's system of acting and method acting, the book focuses on action - what characters do to each other in specific circumstances, times, and places - as the engine of every play. From this foundation, readers will learn to distinguish the big picture of a script, dissect and 'score' smaller units and moment-to-moment action, and create individualized blueprints from which to collaborate on shaping the action in production from their perspectives as actors, directors, and designers. Script Analysis for Theatre offers a practical approach to script analysis for theatre production and is grounded in case studies of a range of the most studied plays, including Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Georg Buchner's Woyzeck, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, and Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, among others. Readers will develop the real-life skills professional theatre artists use to design, rehearse, and produce plays.

"Applied Theatre: Research" is the first book to consolidate thinking about applied theatre as research through a thorough investigation of ATAR as a research methodology. It will be an indispensable resource for teachers and researchers in the area.The first section of the book details the history of the relationship between applied theatre and research, especially in the area of evaluation and impact assessment, and offering an examination of the literature surrounding applied theatre and research. The book then explores how applied theatre as research (ATAR) works as a democratic and pro-social adjunct to community based research and explains its complex relationship to arts informed inquiry, Indigenous research methods and other research epistemologies. The book provides a rationale for this approach focusing on its capacity for reciprocity within communities. The second part of the book provides a series of international case studies of effective practice which detail some of the key approaches in the method and based on work conducted in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the South Pacific. The case studies provide a range of cultural contexts for the playing out of various forms of ATAR, and a concluding chapter considers the tensions and the possibilities inherent in ATAR.This is a groundbreaking book for all researchers who are working with communities who require a method that moves beyond current research practice.

An eye for an eye. It's very simple. You choose your homeland like a hyena picking and choosing where he steals his next meal from. Scavenger. Yes you grovel to the feet of Mengistu and when his people spit at you and kick you from the bowl you scuttle across the border. Scavenger. As a violent civil war rages back home in Ethiopia, teenager Alem and his father are in a bed and breakfast in Berkshire. It's his best holiday ever. The next morning his father is gone and has left a note explaining that he and his mother want to protect Alem from the war. This strange grey country of England is now his home. On his own, and in the hands of the social services and the Refugee Council, Alem lives from letter to letter, waiting to hear something from his father. Then he meets car-obsessed Mustapha, the lovely 'out-of-your-league' Ruth and dangerous Sweeney - three unexpected allies who spur him on in his fight to be seen as more than just the Refugee Boy. Lemn Sissay's remarkable stage adaptation of Benjamin Zephaniah's bestselling novel is published here in the Methuen Drama Student Edition series, featuring commentary & notes by Professor Lynette Goddard (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK) that help the student unpack the play's themes, language, structure and production history to date.

For a brief period in the late Elizabethan Era an innovative company of players dominated the London stage. A fellowship of dedicated thespians, Lord Strange's Men established their reputation by concentrating on "modern matter" performed in a spectacular style, exploring new modes of impersonation, and deliberately courting controversy. Supported by their equally controversial patron, theater connoisseur and potential claimant to the English throne Ferdinando Stanley, the company included Edward Alleyn, considered the greatest actor of the age, as well as George Bryan, Thomas Pope, Augustine Phillips, William Kemp, and John Hemings, who later joined William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage in the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Though their theatrical reign was relatively short lived, Lord Strange's Men helped to define the dramaturgy of the period, performing the plays of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and others with their own distinctive flourish.
Lawrence Manley and Sally-Beth MacLean offer the first complete account of the troupe and its enormous influence on Elizabethan theater. Seamlessly blending theater history and literary criticism, the authors paint a lively portrait of a unique community of performing artists, their intellectual ambitions and theatrical innovations, their business practices, and their fearless engagements with the politics and religion of their time.

The shift in temporal modalities of Romantic Theatre was the consequence of internal as well as external developments: internally, the playwright was liberated from the old imperative of "Unity of Time" and the expectation that the events of the play must not exceed the hours of a single day; externally, the new social and cultural conformance to the time-keeping schedules of labour and business that had become more urgent with the industrial revolution. In reviewing the theatre of the Romantic era, this monograph draws attention to the ways in which theatre reflected the pervasive impact of increased temporal urgency in social and cultural behaviour. The contribution this book makes to the study of drama in the early nineteenth century is a renewed emphasis on time as a prominent element in Romantic dramaturgy, and a reappraisal of the extensive experimentation on how time functioned.

British theatre from 1900 to 1950 has been subject to radical re-evaluation with plays from the period setting theatres alight and gaining critical acclaim once again; this book explains why, presenting a comprehensive survey of the theatre and how it shaped the work that followed. Rebecca D'Monte examines how the emphasis upon the working class, 'angry' drama from the 1950s has led to the neglect of much of the century's earlier drama, positioning the book as part of the current debate about the relationship between war and culture, the middlebrow, and historiography. In a comprehensive survey of the period, the book considers: - the Edwardian theatre; - the theatre of the First World War, including propaganda and musicals; -the interwar years, the rise of commercial theatre and influence of Modernism; - the theatre of the Second World War and post-war period. Essays from leading scholars Penny Farfan, Steve Nicholson and Claire Cochrane give further critical perspectives on the period's theatre and demonstrate its relevance to the drama of today. For anyone studying 20th-century British Drama this will prove one of the foundational texts.

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.