This book explores a range of contemporary performance practices that engage spectators physically and emotionally through active engagement and critical involvement. It considers how risk has been re-configured, re-presented and re-packaged for new audiences with a thirst for performances that promote, encourage and embrace risky encounters in a variety of forms. The collection brings together established voices on performance and risk research and draws them into conversation with next generation academic-practitioners in a dynamic reappraisal of what it means to risk oneself through the act of making and participating in performance practice. It takes into account the work of other performance scholars for whom risk and precarity are central concerns, but seeks to move the debate forwards in response to a rapidly changing world where risk is higher on the political, economic and cultural agenda than ever before.

This book serves as analysis of the aesthetics of materiality in the multifaceted work of Antonin Artaud, one of Twentieth-Century France's most provocative and influential figures, spanning literature, performance, art, cinema, media and critical theory.

Between the trials of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s and the beginnings of legal reforms in the 1960s, the West End stage was dominated by the work of gay playwrights. Many of their plays, such as Private Lives, Blithe Spirit and The Deep Blue Sea are established classics and continue to inform our culture. In this fascinating book, covering both familiar and lesser-known works, Sean O'Connor examines the legacy of Wilde as a playwright and as a gay man, and explores in the works of Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan the resonance of Wilde's agenda for tolerance and his creed of individuality. O'Connor contextualises these plays against the enormous social and historical changes of the twentieth century. He also examines the legal restrictions which regulated the personal lives of these writers and required them to evolve sophisticated strategies in order to express on stage, albeit obliquely, their dilemmas as gay men. From the delicate homoerotic frissons of Rattigan's early comedies to Coward's defiantly pro-sex stance, Straight Acting is a provocative and witty insight into the subtly subversive tactics of gay writers working in that apparently most conservative of forms, the 'well-made play'.

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre is recognised worldwide as both a monument to and significant producer of the dramatic art of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. But it has established a reputation too for commissioning innovative and distinctive new plays that respond to the unique characteristics and identity of the theatre. This is the first book to focus on the new drama commissioned and produced at the Globe, to analyse how the specific qualities of the venue have shaped those works and to assess the influences of both past and present in the work staged. The author argues that far from being simply a monument to the past, the reconstructed theatre fosters creativity in the present, creativity that must respond to the theatre's characteristic architecture, the complex set of cultural references it carries and the heterogeneous audience it attracts. Just like the reconstructed 'wooden O', the Globe's new plays highlight the relevance of the past for the present and give the spectators a prominent position. In examining the score of new plays it has produced since 1995 the author considers how they illuminate issues of staging, space, spectators, identity and history - issues that are key to an understanding of much contemporary theatre. Howard Brenton's In Extremis and Anne Boleyn receive detailed consideration, as examples of richly productive connection between the playwright's creativity and the theatre's potential. For readers interested in new writing for the stage and in the work of one of London's totemic theatre spaces, New Playwriting at Shakespeare's Globe offers a fascinating study of the fruitful influences of both past and present in today's theatre.

Modern theater is a field marked by competing, and often contradictory, impulses and developments. A critique of certain types of theatre is a productive force within modernism and a force that led to the most successful reforms of modern theatre and drama. This exciting collection of essays in Palgrave's "Performance Interventions" series rethinks the historical formations and functions of antitheatricality within modern drama, opera, literature, film, and art.

Using the tools of performance studies, gender theory, and cultural history, Brenda Foley explores the striking similarities between beauty pageantry and striptease. For example, women in both project a 'normal' femininity and adhere to a strict hierarchy (Miss America contestants look down upon Miss Universe contestants, while theatrical 'burlesque artists' saw themselves as far above mere carnival strippers). Undressed for Success collects extensive primary source research - newspapers, journals, trade publications, photography collections, press releases, memoirs, and interviews with both strippers and pageant contestants - and employs a wide array of gender, feminist, and performance theory to analyze them.

Because of its contemporary coverage, this volume is particularly interesting and useful. . . . Reference collections that deal with theater questions could find it a good source even without its two predecessor volumes, but the set as a whole is recommended. "Choice"

An outstanding reference collection is completed with the publication of DurhaM's "American Theatre Companies, 1931-1986," an indispensable guide to an aspect of American theatre not covered elsewhere. The American theatre has undergone a process of decentralization and the focus has shifted from Broadway, once the proving ground for all nationally known theatre talent, to fine regional theatres across the nation. This volume surveys the fifty-year period in which this transformation occurred. The work consists of seventy-eight entries that profile a wide range of types of theatre companies including art theatres, units of the Federal Theatre project, workers' theatre, experimental theatre groups, ethnic theatre groups, children's theatre companies, and regional repertory companies, large and small. The Profiles section contains information-packed narratives from both published and unpublished sources that describe, analyze, and evaluate management policies, facilities, personnel, and repertories of these organizations. Each entry contains an extensive list of key personnel, including managers, designers, actors, and actresses, as well as plays that company produced. A bibliography of sources and a guide to archival resources for further study follows each entry. Two additional appendices are devoted to chronological and state-by-state listings of theatre companies. The volume concludes with an index of personal names and play titles.

This important resource should be a part of every university's reference collection. It will be consulted by students and scholars of theatre and drama, American history, American popular culture, and American social and cultural history, as will its companion volumes "American Theatre Companies, 1749-1887" (Greenwood Press, 1986) and "American Theatre Companies, 1888-1930" (Greenwood Press, 1987).

David Garrick played over 90 roles on the British stage as well as writing plays, songs, and innumerable letters. As a theatrical manager he watched over the Drury Lane theater for 29 seasons.

In this dynamic collection a team of experts map the development of Live Art culturally, thematically and historically. Supported with examples from around the world, the text engages with a number of key practices, asking what these practices do and how they can be contextualized and understood.

Theatre has often found itself at the centre of recent debates over censorship and the arts, as a result of coverage of events such as the protests against the play "Behzti" and the controversy over "Jerry Springer: The Opera." This book offers the first sustained study of censorship of the British stage from 1968 into the twenty-first century.

This book investigates the shifting relationship between performance and subjectivity over the course of the Modern era. Each chapter details a different set of performance strategies designed to grant the subject a stable sense of self-identity, and each explores the fallout from the ultimate failure of these strategies to offer the subject a fixed and enduring image of itself. The conclusion examines the implications of this failure for new Postmodern conceptions of subjectivity and poses questions about the use of performance in the self-fashioning of future generations.

What do you do if you find yourself weeping in the stalls? How should you react to Jude Law's trousers or David Tennant's hair? Are you prepared to receive toilet paper in the post? What if the show you just damned turns out to be a classic? If you gave it a five-star rave will anyone believe you? Drawing on his long years of experience as a national newspaper critic, Mark Fisher answers such questions with candour, wit and insight. Learning lessons from history's leading critics and taking examples from around the world, he gives practical advice about how to celebrate, analyse and discuss this most ephemeral of art forms - and how to make your writing come alive as you do so. Today, more people than ever are writing about theatre, but whether you're blogging, tweeting or writing an academic essay, your challenges as a critic remain the same: how to capture a performance in words, how to express your opinions and how to keep the reader entertained. This inspirational book shows you the way to do it. Foreword by Chris Jones, Chief theater critic, Chicago Tribune

The Group Theatre, a groundbreaking ensemble collective based in New York that operated from 1931 to 1941, started the careers of many top American theatre artists of the twentieth century and founded what became known as Method Acting. This book is the definitive history of the group, based on more than thirty years of research and interviews by the foremost theatre scholar of the time period, Helen Chinoy. She begins the story of the Group's remarkable ten years at the end of the experiment, then resets the narrative against the Depression years and introduces the cast of youthful characters and their issues with the American theatre of their day. Tracing the careers of Group Theatre actors and directors including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Harry Morgan, Chinoy follows with their collective vision for a new theatre developed around their grand idea for a new approach to an acting process based on an ordered training of the actor's imagination and emotions in exercises and in plays that confront social issues important to the Group.

"Drama and the Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century England" is the first book-length study of the relationship between early modern drama and sacramental ritual and theology. The book examines a range of dramatic forms, including morality plays, Tudor interludes and the Elizabethan professional stage. Offering new insights into the religious practices on which early modern subjectivity is founded, David Coleman both uncovers neglected texts and documents, and offers radical new ways of reading canonical Renaissance plays.

This book examines Field Day's cultural intervention into the Northern Irish 'Troubles' through individual readings of the fourteen plays produced by the enterprise. It argues that at the heart of this project were performances, in a variety of different forms and registers, of an ethics of translation that disrupted notions of Irish identity.

This book examines the surge of queer performance produced across Ireland since the first stirrings of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s, up to the passing of the Marriage Equality referendum in the Republic in 2015.

London's West End has a rich and unique collection of theatres, ranging in date from early the early 19th century to the end of the 20th;more than fifty are located within an area of two square miles. This book celebrates the working buildings at the heart of the British theatrical industry. Focusing on the theatres in the West End, it looks at their architecture and history as well as examining what it is that constitutes a West End Theatre. The exquisite photographs in the book lead the reader on a tour - taking in the front -of -house areas, the auditoria and the backstage spaces - of some of London's most famous theatres. From the Palladium to the Lyceum, it offers glimpses of those areas not normally seen by the public, Such as rehearsal spaces, dressing rooms, backstage areas and even a Royal reception room. In doing so, it enters the private realms of the theatre technicians and actors, and brings to light the theatre's hidden world.

This study by Monica Prendergast offers a curriculum theory for audience in performance presented in a series of essays and poems on this key yet neglected educational topic. In a contemporary world that has been described as the "society of the spectacle" and the "performative society," it becomes a significant task for educators to find ways to assist students in becoming more active and critical spectators. This unique book is presented in seven chapters that survey how audience has been taken up (or ignored) across many disciplines, including aesthetic philosophy, performance theory, cultural studies, and arts education. Drawing on key findings discovered in this extensive literature review, the author goes on to present a number of chapters that theorize how spectatorship may become a central concern of curriculum through committed and teacher-facilitated attendance of live performance. These performance experiences-which may be community-based or professional-then serve as catalysts for creative postperformance interactions with artists and further classroom explorations. Throughout the text, the author makes use of an emergent arts-based methodology called poetic inquiry. The poems she creates offer readers other perspectives on the investigation and act as a reminder that cultural performance, like poetry, is an aesthetic event that calls us to attention, to wide-awakeness in the world. Teaching Spectatorship is a groundbreaking study that makes a critical contribution to the fields of performance studies, curriculum theory, and drama/theatre education.

David Greig has been described as 'one of the most interesting and adventurous British dramatists of his generation' ("Daily Telegraph") and 'one of the most intellectually stimulating dramatists around' ("Guardian"). Since he began writing for theatre in the early nineties, his work has been both copious and remarkably varied, defying neat generalisations or attempts to pigeon-hole his work. Besides his original plays, he has adapated classics, is co-founder of the Suspect Culture Theatre Group and is currently Dramaturge for the National Theatre of Scotland. This Critical Companion provides an analytical survey of his work, from his early plays such as "Europe" and "The Architect "through to more recent works "Damascus," "Dunsinane "and "Ramallah"; it also considers the plays produced with Suspect Culture and his work for young audiences. As such it is the first book to provide a critical account of the full variety of his work and will appeal to students and fans of contemporary British theatre.Clare Wallace provides a detailed analysis of a broad selection of plays and their productions, reviews current discourses about his work and offers a framework for enquiry. The Companion features an interview with David Greig and a further three essays by leading academics offering a variety of critical perspectives.

This ground-breaking new book uncovers the way Shakespeare draws upon the available literature and visual representations of the hand to inform his drama. Providing an analysis of gesture, touch, skill and dismemberment in a range of Shakespeare's works, it shows how the hand was perceived in Shakespeare's time as an indicator of human agency, emotion, social and personal identity. It demonstrates how the hand and its activities are described and embedded in Shakespeare's texts and about its role on the Shakespearean stage: as part of the actor's body, in the language as metaphor, and as a morbid stage-prop. Understanding the cultural signifiers that lie behind the early modern understanding of the hand and gesture, opens up new and sometimes disturbing ways of reading and seeing Shakespeare's plays.

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, advancements in communication and travel encouraged widespread international cultural exchange, and Americans increasingly came into contact with Russian culture and theatrical performance. A number of factors, including emigration from Russia, world war, revolutionary activities in both Russia and the United States, and developments in modernism in the American theatre influenced the way those performances were received by American artists and audiences. Examining the work of impresarios, financiers, and the press as well as the artists themselves, Hohman demonstrates how a variety of Russian theatrical styles were introduced and incorporated into American theatre and dance.

This book examines sexuality, gender and race in Australia's vibrant independent theatre and performance culture. It analyses selected feminist and queer performances that interrogate the cultural construction of sexuality and gender, challenge the normative trends of mainstream Australian society and culture and open up spaces for alternative representations of gender identity and sexual expression. Offering the first full-length study on sexuality and gender in Australian theatre since 2005, this book reveals a resurgence of feminist themes in independent performance and explores the intersection of feminist and queer politics. Ranging across drag, burlesque, cabaret, theatre and performance art, the book provides an accessible and engaging account of some of the most innovative, entertaining and politically subversive Australian theatrical works from the past decade.