After fifteen years of marriage, Daniel and Sylvia find themselves drifting further apart with each passing day. Until one morning, they find themselves abruptly united by every parent's worst nightmare... The shoes have been polished, the vases are full and the phone is ringing off the hook, but there's one thing they're still missing...answers. Forced into a confrontation, years of resentment and things long left unsaid rise to the surface as they question the circumstances that brought them to this point, and what happens to your relationship when the only thing holding you together, threatens to tear you apart. A timely spotlight on love and loss, Til Death Do Us Part is the debut play of Safaa Benson-Effiom, and was a finalist in the 2020 Theatre503 International Playwriting Award and Soho Theatre's 2019 Tony Craze award. Originally presented as a Theatre503 and Darcy Dobson Productions co-production.

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.

This 11-volume collection contains titles originally published between 1931 and 1992. It examines the genre of comedy, from its roots in ancient Greece, through the centuries, to the relatively modern stand-up variety. The individual titles include the theory of comedy; perspectives on women and comedy; comedy in film; European comedy; Restoration comedy and more. This set will be a valuable resource for those students interested in comedy in both literature and drama.

This analysis of twenty published texts by David Hare employs definitions from contemporary semiotic literary theory as a means of describing typologies of political drama. By tracing the incorporation of stylistic devices from agitational propaganda (caricature, self-referentiality, the frisson between oral and visual signification) throughout the typologies, the study illustrates how each text subverts audience expectation based on established dramatic genres. The collection of texts is seen as inherently self-referential and politically subversive. At the centre of each typology is a protagonist who functions as a martyr to or parodic emblem of contemporary society. Consistently, the hermeticism of public institutions which represent the political status quo makes them immune from any form of individual protest from the Left or Right. In the satirical anatomy, the emblem of political dissent is coopted by involvement within the institution, or the stage is dominated by a conservative who controls the action. In the demythology, private individuals are seen as incapable of altering the public frame of history; but here private suffering subverts the collective mythology of the historical construct. In the martyrology, the emblem of dissent is associated with a moral virtue which is inimical to contemporary society, the audience's expectation of the triumph of the individual being subverted when he/she is expelled from the onstage world on the grounds of political ideology. It is only in the final typology, the conversion, that a conservative emblem is seen as directly influenced by such martyrdom, and the audience is provided with an actual example of political change. Thus, the study describes how each typology builds on the construction of the previous, and all generate from agitational propaganda.

This unique text is both an accessible introduction and specialist review of contemporary dramatherapy practice today. The collected chapters introduce critical and cohesive perspectives on dramatherapy as it is being practiced, developed and advanced in diverse contexts, and also investigate the connections between the discipline of dramatherapy both as an allied health profession, a form of psychotherapy and a traditional form of theatre and healing. In so doing, the volume unpicks the relationship between drama and therapy, exploring some of its key philosophies and practices, and examining its efficacy. Edited by two experienced lecturers and dramatherapists, the book stands as a timely and crucial resource for students and practitioners alike in this growing field. It is essential reading for students on dramatherapy, arts therapy and applied theatre degree programmes, and useful background reading for students of theatre and performance, counselling and psychotherapy.

There is no fourth wall in popular performance. The show is firmly rooted in the here and now, and the performers address the audience directly, while the audience answer back with laughter, applause or heckling. Performer and role are interlaced, so that we are left uncertain about just how the persona we see onstage might relate to the private person who presents it to us. Popular Performance defines and surveys varieties of performance where the main purpose is to entertain, and where there is no shame in being trivial, frivolous or nonsensical as long as people go home happy at the end of the show. Contributions by new and established scholars focus particularly on how it is made, explaining the techniques of performance and production that make it so appealing to audiences. With sections examining how popular performance works in a range of historical and contemporary examples, readers will gain insights into: * performance forms associated with the variety tradition: music hall, vaudeville, cabaret, variety * performance forms associated with circus: wild west shows, clowning * issues relating to the identity of the performer in relation to magic, burlesque, pantomime in contemporary performance * issues relating to venue and audience in relation to contemporary street theatre, stand-up, and live sketch comedy.

Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance is an edited collection designed to address a diverse set of critical responses to and practical interrogations of the notion of being intimate in emergent and hybrid performance practices, aiming to elicit connectivity and provoke debate about the potency, nature and agency of intimacy in contemporary performance.Lauren Berlant suggests that 'intimacy (...) involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared' (2000, p. 1). Sensing intimacy in performance relocates registers of affect from the private experience to the public sphere. Within the current climate of intense global political, social and financial insecurity and unrest, at a time infused with both hope and fear, artists appear to be demonstrating a desire for intimacy and closeness with the Other. Those public figurings of intimacy - staged through contemporary performance, visual culture and digital art practices - become the cultural fuel which, when placed alongside political potentialities, can ignite debates and provocations such as those contained herein.

Following an outline history of the monologue as an independent genre in the theater of Latin America, this bibliography incorporates all published and unpublished, staged and unstaged monologue pieces written in Latin America. The bibliographical entries are grouped in three chronological periods reflecting the fundamentally distinct nature of the monolgue during each of its periods of development. Within each grouping, the plays are listed alphabetically by author under an alphabetical roster of country headings. Each playwright's years of birth and death are given, if known, as well as the country of origin if that differs from the geographical category into which the dramatist has been placed. All known editions of the monologues are included. For unpublished works, an abbreviated reference source is given. Each title is followed by the generic description applied to the work by the author or publisher, or by reviewers or historians in the case of unpublished pieces. The secondary bibliography lists works which deal with the monologue as a literary genre.

Based on her award-winning blog, "The Feminist Spectator," Jill Dolan presents a lively feminist perspective in reviews and essays on a variety of theatre productions, films and television series--from The Social Network and Homeland to Split Britches' Lost Lounge.
Demonstrating the importance of critiquing mainstream culture through a feminist lens, Dolan also offers invaluable advice on how to develop feminist critical thinking and writing skills. This is an essential read for budding critics and any avid spectator of the stage and screen.

The crafts of governance and diplomacy are spectacular, theatrical, and performative. Performing Statecraft investigates the performances of states, their leaders, and their citizens on an expanded field of the global arts of statecraft to consider the role of performance in the domestic and international affairs of states, and the interventions into global politics by artists, scholars, and activists. Treating theatre as both an art form and a practice of political actors, this book draws together scholarship on the embodied dimensions of governance, the stagecraft of revolution, arts activism on the world stage, sports performance by heads of state, the performativity of national dress, speechmaking and colonialism, war and medicine, singing diplomats, indigenous sovereignties, and performed nationalisms. It brings the perspective and methods of performance studies to bear on global politics, offering exciting new insights into encounters between states, sovereigns, and people. Whether one is watching a campaign speech, a nightly news broadcast, a sacred dance, or a play about global conflict, these chapters make clear the importance of performance as a tool wielded by amateurs and professionals to articulate the nation in global spaces.

This book investigates the implications of technology on identity in embodied performance; the discussion within it forms a forum of debate exploring the interrelationship of and between identities in performance practices, informed by new technologies. This collection considers how identity is formed, de-formed, constructed, deconstructed, blurred and celebrated within diverse approaches to technological performance practices.Digital practices as experimental artworks and performances both serve as critique and have an indirect affect on the social and political. The discussions included in this collection highlight how a redefinition of the latter term comes about in as much as they question the very nature of our accepted ideas and belief systems regarding new technologies. These essays demonstrate how embodied technological practice, as with all avant-garde art, presents itself and any analysis applied to it as an experimental extension of the socio-political and cultural experience of an epoch.

Since the beginning of theatre history, scandals have taken place and the variety of causes, processes and types of interactions makes them an interesting object of study. Theatre scandals often indicate clashes with a dominant ideology or with the ideology of a particular group in society. Sometimes, following a scandal, the attacked ideology changes and incorporates the possibility of the aesthetics or themes that caused the clash. In this way, scandals can cause dynamic changes within cultural systems. Next to theoretical considerations the contributors, all members of the IFTR Theatrical Event Working Group, present in their various case studies a wide cultural and chronological diversity of theatre scandals, all of which were experienced as very shocking moments in theatre history.

Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy examines compelling ethical issues that concern practitioners and scholars in the fields of translation, adaptation and dramaturgy. Its 11 essays, written by academic theorists as well as scholar-practitioners, represent a rich diversity of philosophies and perspectives, and reflect a broad international frame of reference: Asia, Europe, North America, and Australasia. They also traverse a wide range of theatrical forms: classic and contemporary playwrights from Shakespeare to Ibsen, immersive and interactive theatre, verbatim theatre, devised and community theatre, and postdramatic theatre. In examining the ethics of specific artistic practices, the book highlights the significant continuities between translation, adaptation, and dramaturgy; it considers the ethics of spectatorship; and it identifies the tightly interwoven relationship between ethics and politics.

Born in 1916 in La Jolla, California, Gregory Peck took up acting in college on a lark that would lead to a career. In his early years, he appeared in a series of summer stock engagements and Broadway shows. He became a star within a year after arriving in Hollywood during World War II, and he won an Academy Award nomination for his second film. From the 1940s to the present, he has played some of film's most memorable and admired characters. This volume provides complete information about Gregory Peck's work in film, television, radio, and the stage. Entries are included for all of his performances, with each entry providing cast and credit information, a plot summary, excerpts from reviews, and critical commentary. A biography and chronology highlight significant events in his life, while a listing of his honors and awards summarizes the recognition he has received over the years. For researchers seeking additional information, the book includes descriptions of special collections holding material related to Peck's work, along with an extensive bibliography of books and articles.

Eric Dodson-Robinson's Revenge, Agency, and Identity from European Drama to Asian Film challenges critical readings of drama, film, and literature that downplay agency. From Attic tragedy, through Seneca and Shakespeare, and into Japanese and Korean film, the book pursues the agent of vengeance in her fury to reconstruct an identity shattered by trauma. Tragic revenge is an imaginary theater only partly encompassed by disciplines, institutions, and discourses. In this theater, violence becomes contagious and potentially transformative as performance gives birth to the agent of vengeance: a complex, emergent agent who is more than the sum of the actors, auteur, tradition, and audience, all of whom infiltrate, and strive to control, her will. The agent of vengeance, determined to outdo past exemplars, exacts traumatic excess, not equivalence.

With a companion website that includes short online film episodes, this book proposes expansive ways of deconstructing and re-constituting sexuality and gender and thus more embodied and ethical ways of 'doing' life, and offers an understanding and critique of embodiment through an integration of performance, psychotherapy and feminist philosophy.

In two acts that consider what the theatre is and what it does, a star-studded cast of intellects, wits and wags here take centre stage to enlighten, provoke, and amuse. A collection of close to 1000 distinctive anecdotes, aphorisms, adages and assaults written and spoken by actors, directors, composers, producers, critics and other observers -- everyone from Sophocles to David Mamet, from Buddah to Brando.

Sound experimentation by avant-garde theatre artists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is an important but largely ignored aspect of theatre history. In this book, Curtin shows how attention to this activity enhances our understanding of artistic practice (modernism) and historical circumstance (modernity) and considers how avant-gardists staged sonic modernity by exploring its conceptual and communicative possibilities as well as its experiential realities. He critically examines avant-garde theatre through a composite analysis of dramatic texts, historical productions, sound recordings, philosophical speculations, and social movements.

A complete guide for professional and aspiring literary managers. Written for the professional market of literary managers and dramaturgs, as well as university students of directing and dramaturgy. Stands out from other books in this area with its clear, step-by-step focus on all aspects of the profession.

Patty Duke is one of the few former child actors who has survived the transition from child to adolescent to adult and gone on to greater fame and success in her adult years. Academy Award-winner, television comedy series star, talk-show hostess, author, and aspiring director, this multi-talented actress has become an entertainment industry phenomenon. Researchers as well as film, television, and theater buffs will be interested in Stephen Eberly's research guide, which presents a biography of Patty Duke together with complete and detailed listings of her television, movie, and stage appearances; awards; and recordings.

"Strindberg and the Quest for Sacred Theatre" brings a fresh perspective to the study of Sweden's great playwright. August Strindberg (1849-1912) anticipated most of the major developments in European theatre over the last century. As such he is well-placed to provide perspectives on the current burgeoning interest in sacred theatre. The religious crises of the 19th Century provoked in Strindberg both sharp scepticism about claims to religious authority and a visionary search for truth. Against the backdrop of a major change in European culture this book traces the emergence in some of Strindberg's late plays of a proto-sacred-theatre. It argues that Strindberg faced the alternatives of a contentless transcendent abyss, threatening the extinction of his ego, or a retreat into conservative theism, reducing him to slavish submission to the commandments and rule of an external father-God. Weaving together theatrical, aesthetic, and theological voices, this book investigates the relationship of the sacred to subjectivity and its implications for Strindberg's dramaturgy. In doing so it always keeps in view the sense both of loss and opportunity engendered by a turning point in the western experience of the sacred.

Lillian Russell was the Victorian era's symbol of talent, charm, and beauty. She was introduced by impresario Tony Pastor in 1880, and was considered an emblem of feminine beauty until the turn of the century. Although her voice still set a standard of excellence, by that time America's vision of loveliness had changed, and her middle-aged body could not meet the new challenge on the musical stage. Russell responded with extraordinary resilience. She adapted with the times and became the Igrande dameR of the American theatre in non-musical plays, burlesque, variety, and the lecture circuit. She wrote widely-read newspaper columns in which she pioneered an optimistic philosophy of self-help, and she used her numerous connections to champion the causes that she held dear.

Carefully researched, this reference book is a comprehensive and thoroughly documented guide to Lillian Russell's life and career. A biography places her in the social and cultural context of her time and adds previously ignored information about her parents, birth, coming-of-age in the Midwest, early career, daughter, and death. A chronology then gives a detailed listing of events in her life and career. The chapters that follow are devoted to her many performances. Entries in each section provide cast and credit information, plot synopses, review excerpts, and critical commentary. Several appendices offer additional information about her work, and an extensive annotated bibliography lists sources of additional information.