The plays of the late Nobel laureate Harold Pinter have formed part of the canon of world theatre since the 1960s. Frequently revived on the professional stage, and studied on almost every Theatre Studies course, his importance and influence is hard to overestimate. This Critical Companion offers an assessment of Pinter's entire body of work for the stage, appraising his skill as a dramatist and considering his impact and legacy. Through a clear focus on issues of theatricality and the effect of the plays in performance "The Theatre of Harold Pinter "considers Pinter's chief narrative concerns and offers a unifying theme through which over four decades of work may be understood. Plays are considered in themed chapters that follow the chronological sequence of work, illuminating the development of his aesthetic and concerns. The volume features too a series of essays from other leading scholars presenting different critical perspectives on the work, including Harry Burton on Pinter's early drama; Ann Hall on Revisiting Pinter's Women; Chris Megson on Pinter's Memory Plays of the 1970s, and Basil Chiasson on Neoliberalism and Democracy.

Since the mid-1950s, when the works of Samuel Beckett began to attract sustained critical attention, commentators have tended either to dismiss his oeuvre as nihilist or defend it as anti-nihilist. On the one side are figures such as Georg Lukacs; on the other, some of the most influential philosophers and literary theorists of the post-war era, from Theodor Adorno to Alain Badiou. Taking as his point of departure Nietzsche's description of nihilism as the 'uncanniest of all guests', Weller calls this critical tradition into question, arguing that the relationship between Beckett's texts and nihilism is one that will always be missed by those who are simply for or against Beckett. (Legenda 2005)

Where science has often been used to explore the questions raised by art, this book does the reverse, suggesting that art can address a problem raised by science: the deep challenge to ethics posed by Darwin's discovery that we are intentional beings living in an unintentional world. Using "Hamlet," "Othello," and "Macbeth," among others, Angus Fletcher shows how the physical experience of art can transform Darwin's discouraging theory into a practice-based ethics that establishes pluralism, curiosity, and cooperation as the basis of progressive life.

Why do able-bodied characters fake disability in 40 early modern English plays? This book uncovers a previously unexamined theatrical tradition and explores the way counterfeit disability captivated the Renaissance stage. Through detailed case studies of both lesser-known and canonical plays (by Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, and others), Lindsey Row-Heyveld demonstrates why counterfeit disability proved so useful to early modern playwrights. Changing approaches to almsgiving in the English Reformation led to increasing concerns about feigned disability. The theater capitalized on those concerns, using the counterfeit-disability tradition to explore issues of charity, epistemology, and spectatorship. By illuminating this neglected tradition, this book fills an important gap in both disability history and literary studies, and explores how fears of counterfeit disability created a feedback loop of performance and suspicion. The result is the still-pervasive insistence that even genuinely disabled people must perform in order to, paradoxically, prove the authenticity of their impairments.

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British theatre of the 1990s witnessed an explosion of new talent and presented a new sensibility that sent shockwaves through audiences and critics. What produced this change, the context from which the work emerged, the main playwrights and plays, and the influence they had on later work are freshly evaluated in this important new study in Methuen Drama's Decades of Modern British Playwriting series. The 1990s volume provides a detailed study by four scholars of the work of four of the major playwrights who emerged and had a significant impact on British theatre: Sarah Kane (by Catherine Rees), Anthony Neilson (Patricia Reid), Mark Ravenhill (Graham Saunders) and Philip Ridley (Aleks Sierz). Essential for students of Theatre Studies, the series of six decadal volumes provides a critical survey and study of the theatre produced from the 1950s to 2009. Each volume features a critical analysis of the work of four key playwrights besides other theatre work, together with an extensive commentary on the period. Readers will understand the works in their contexts and be presented with fresh research material and a reassessment from the perspective of the twenty-first century. This is an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of British playwriting in the 1990s.

Blending a flair for textual nuance with theoretical engagement, Theaters of Desire not only contributes to our understanding of the most influential form of early Chinese song-drama in local and international cultural contexts, but adds a Chinese perspective to the scholarship on print culture, authorship, and the regulatory discourses of desire. The book argues that, particularly between 1550 and 1680, Chinese elite editors rewrote and printed early plays and songs, so-called Yuan-dynasty zaju and sanqu, to imagine and embody new concepts of authorship, readership and desire, an interpretation that contrasts starkly with the national and racially-oriented reception of song-drama developed by European critics after 1735 and subsequently modified by Japanese and Chinese critics after 1897. By analyzing the critical and material facets of the early song and play tradition across different historical periods and cultural settings, Theaters of Desire presents a compelling case study of literary canon formation.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

Doctor Faustus, is Christopher Marlowe's most popular play andis often seen as one of the overwhelming triumphs of the English Renaissance. It has had a rich and varied critical history often arousing violent critical controversy

While the past decade proved to be some of the most tumultuous times in modern US history, the Black community has been resilient, opening up dialogues and sustaining advocacy. Nowhere has this been more apparent than at the Obie Award-winning The Fire This Time Festival in New York City. Since being founded in 2009, this theater festival has become the destination for emerging and early career playwrights from the African diaspora. Inequality in education and healthcare, skewed and negative images of Black people in mainstream media, racism in policing, widespread gentrification and its effects on multi-generational Black neighbourhoods, and the growth of Black love; these conversations have been happening in the US, and The Fire This Time Festival has borne witness. 25 Plays from The Fire This Time Festival: A Decade of Recognition, Resistance, Resilience, Rebirth, and Black Theater reflects this fantastic legacy, containing 25 ten-minute plays originally produced by the eponymous festival. Together, these pieces bookend the Black experience in the US from 2009 to the present day: from the hope for further progress and equity under the Obama administration, to the existential threat faced by Black people under the Trump presidency. Edited and curated by Kelley Nicole Girod, the anthology divides the plays into seven thematic sections concerning multi-faceted aspects of the Black experience, featuring work by seminal writers such as Katori Hall, Antoinette Nwandu, Dominique Morisseau, C.A. Johnson, and Marcus Gardley. Both timely and timeless, 25 Plays from The Fire This Time Festival presents an exciting, eclectic mix of 21st century theater that is perfect for study, performance, and reflection.

American documentary theatre records the social issues that continue to shape the United States at the close of the twentieth century. This book provides an historical and critical survey of documentary theatre in the United States since John Reed's The Pageant of the Paterson Strike (1913). It defines documentary theatre as a dramatic representation of societal forces using a close reexamination of events, individuals, or situations. While documentary theatre reinvents itself from time to time, this study demonstrates that its constituent parts remain roughly the same. Because documentary theatre is rooted in oral traditions, it offers an alternative to conventional journalistic treatments of social history. Through a close look at the history of documentary theatre, the volume concludes that a new period of expression is presently underway in the United States. Numerous social issues have marked the growth of the United States, and many of these continue to shape contemporary American culture. While many of these issues have been treated in novels, they have also captured the attention of playwrights. Documentary theatre explores the issues and events at the very heart of society. But in spite of its significance, this dramatic form continues to escape, for the most part, the awareness of the theatre community and its public. This book is an historical and critical survey of documentary theatre in the United States since John Reed's The Pageant of the Paterson Strike (1913). It defines documentary theatre as a dramatic representation of societal forces using a close reexamination of events, individuals, or situations. By listing current and more distant examples of American documentary theatre, the book shows that the genre is richly steeped in the oral history tradition. Therefore, American documentary theatre is an alternative to conventional journalism. For the theatre practitioner, the volume provides valuable insight about the process of making a documentary play. For the investigative researcher, the book shows that documentary theatre possesses a non-Aristotelian dramatic structure, in contrast to the strictly narrative form generally found in conventional drama. Through an overview of numerous plays, the book observes that even though documentary theatre reinvents itself from time to time, its constituent parts remain roughly the same. It concludes that a new period of expression is presently underway in the United States, one that affirms that the theatre is a vital part of society and is as important as religion, education, and government.

Using nine recent theatrical and cinematic productions as case studies, it considers the productive contradictions and tensions that occur when contemporary actors perform the gender norms of previous cultures. It will be of interest to theatre practitioners as well as to students of early modern drama, of performance, and of gender studies.

This book examines the socio-political and theatrical conditions that heralded the shift from the margins to the mainstream for black British Writers, through analysis of the social issues portrayed in plays by Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams, and Bola Agbaje.

Through historical and bibliographical research, and through analysis of Shakespeare's work, the author places Shakespeare among the supreme artists of the world. In the first two chapters he examines the facts about Shakespeare's career as a dramatist and summarizes the unfavorable judgments created by his early biographers. In subsequent chapters Professor Alexander establishes an order among the plays that reveals a gradual development of Shakespeare's art.

Closely reading a range of performance work from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, "Naming Theatre" is a ground-breaking study of theater's growing obsession with technologies and effects of naming. How do theater-makers such as Ping Chong, Anne Bogart, Suzan-Lori Parks, Forced Entertainment, Lightwork, Ridiculusmus, Theodora Skipitares, Paula Vogel, and Riot Group intervene in naming practices across domains such as medicine, political activism, philosophy, horror films, television and print journalism, anthropology, advertising and brand development, semiotics, military training, and genetics?

Adorno and Modern Theatre explores the drama of Edward Bond, David Rudkin, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane in the context of the work of leading philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). The book engages with key principles of Adorno's aesthetic theory and cultural critique and examines their influence on a generation of seminal post-war dramatists.

In Staging Politics and Gender , Cecilia Beach examines the political and feminist plays of French playwrights who have largely been overlooked until now. Beach highlights the importance of theatrical endeavors which women perceived as a powerful way to promote political opinions. The author analyzes the work of Louise Michel, Nelly Roussel, Marie Leneru, Vera Starkoff, and Madeline Pelletier and discusses anarchist theatre and forms of social protest theatre at the turn of the century.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity Weller argues through an analysis of the interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender that to read Beckett in this way is to miss the strangely 'anethical' nature of his work, as opposed to the notion that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity.

Shakespeare's Surrogates contends that the adaptation of Renaissance drama played a key role in the development of modern drama's major aesthetic movements. This book reveals the way that modern drama built itself in response to its Elizabethan past, ransacking the literary work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries for 'new' innovations in dramatic technique and content. Indeed, playwrights central to the evolution of modern and postmodern drama often returned at key moments in their writing careers to the remains of the Renaissance. Sonya Freeman Loftis argues that for playwrights such as Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, and Heiner Muller, Shakespearean appropriation was central both to the creation of their public personas and to the development of their own dramatic canons.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) are major plays by Tennessee Williams, one of America's most significant dramatists. They both received landmark productions and are widely-studied and performed around the world. The plays have also inspired popular screen adaptations and have generated a body of important and lasting scholarship.
In this indispensable Reader's Guide, Thomas P. Adler:
- charts the development of the criticism surrounding both works, from the mid-twentieth century through to the present day
- provides a readable assessment of the key debates and issues
- examines a range of theoretical approaches from biographical and New Criticism to feminist and queer theory.
In so doing, Adler helps us to appreciate why these plays continue to fascinate readers, theatregoers and directors alike.

This book provides a needed new interpretation of the complex cultural meanings of the late medieval, guild-produced, biblical plays of York and Chester, England, commonly known as mystery plays. It argues that the plays are themselves a "drama of masculinity," that is, dramatic activity specifically and self-consciously concerned with the fantasies and anxieties of being male in the urban, mercantile worlds of their performance. It further contends that the plays in their historical performance contexts produced and reinforced masculine communities defined by occupation, thus visibly naturalizing the world of work as masculine. The book offers welcome insight into a significant, canonical genre of dramatic literature that has been studied previously in devotional and civic contexts, but not yet in its role in the cultural history of masculinity.

A major study of the work of one of Britain's best-known dramatists Peter Barnes was one of the UK's most significant, prolific and enduring playwrights. This book offers a major critical appraisal of the canon of Barnes' work, including a detailed study of his best-known plays, The Ruling Class, Bewitched, Laughter!, Red Noses, and Dreaming, as well as a selection of his television and radio plays which illuminate his thematic concerns, and offer key insights into his dramatic methods. Through this examination, Brian Woolland shows that many of Barnes' plays have remarkable contemporary relevance, and are formally far more innovative than has hitherto been recognised. Woolland analyses the ways in which Barnes uses and subverts theatrical traditions, and relates his work to relevant critical contexts: theatrical, critical and socio-political. Deservedly, Barnes' use of comedy is given special attention. It is a sad truth that Barnes' great talents have not always been acknowledged by the theatrical establishment. In this exciting study, Barnes finally gets the recognition he deserves, as one of the most original, daring and exuberant dramatists of his generation.