Four hundred years after Shakespeare's death, it is difficult to imagine a time when he was not considered a genius. But those 400 years have seen his plays banished and bowdlerized, faked and forged, traded and translated, re-mixed and re-cast. Shakespeare's story is not one of a steady rise to fame; it is a tale of set-backs and sea-changes that have made him the cultural icon he is today. This revealing new book accompanies an innovative exhibition at the British Library that will take readers on a journey through more than 400 years of performance. It will focus on ten moments in history that have changed the way we see Shakespeare, from the very first production of Hamlet to a digital-age deconstruction. Each performance holds up a mirror to the era in which it was performed. The first stage appearance by a woman in 1660 and a black actor playing Othello in 1825 were landmarks for society as well as for Shakespeare's reputation. The book will also explore productions as diverse as Peter Brook's legendary A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mark Rylance's 'Original Practices' Twelfth Night, and a Shakespeare forgery staged at Drury Lane in 1796, among many others.Over 100 illustrations include the only surviving playscript in Shakespeare's hand, an authentic Shakespeare signature, and rare printed editions including the First Folio. These - and other treasures from the British Library's manuscript and rare book collections - will feature alongside film stills, costumes, paintings and production photographs.In this book ten leading experts take a fresh look at Shakespeare, reminding us that the playwright's iconic status has been constructed over the centuries in a process that continues across the world today.

This book considers how Samuel Beckett's critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett's writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett's late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett's work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky's theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.

Holiday Cheer from the Antebellum South Columbia, South Carolina. December 24, 1862. It is the week of the "Christmas Raid of Kentucky" and the height of the war among the states. The chill in the air carries hickory-scented plumes of smoke upward from colonial chimneys. Within Antebellum homes, Confederate soldiers cuddle-up with southern belles beneath mistletoe and share mint jelly, ambrosia, and chestnuts from the hearth. Ebenezer Scrooge, wealthy plantation owner, will have none of it. That is, until the miserly curmudgeon is haunted by the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future and forced to review his wasted life of misanthropy. Never straying in message from Charles Dickens' novella, Chris Cook has set the Christmas classic in the American Civil War, a time of strife and struggle not unlike the pain and poverty that belied 1830's Dickensian London. Also included is a delightful companion piece to the play. CONFEDERATE BILL, Memoir of a Civil War Veteran is the real-life autobiography by Cook's great, great grandfather, William E. Trahern. Published for the first time ever, it is an important piece of history, documenting the adventures and vagaries of a young rebel soldier. Both stories are southern-fried treats "Yule " love em

A groundbreaking, cross-cultural reference work exploring the diversity of expression found in rituals, festivals, and performances, uncovering acting techniques and practices from around the world. Acting: An International Encyclopedia explores the amazing diversity of dramatic expression found in rituals, festivals, and live and filmed performances. Its hundreds of alphabetically arranged, fully referenced entries offer insights into famous players, writers, and directors, as well as notable stage and film productions from around the world and throughout the history of theater, cinema, and television. The book also includes a surprising array of additional topics, including important venues (from Greek amphitheaters to Broadway and Hollywood), acting schools (the Actor's Studio) and companies (the Royal Shakespeare), performance genres (from religious pageants to puppetry), technical terms of the actor's art, and much more. It is a unique resource for exploring the techniques performers use to captivate their audiences, and how those techniques have evolved to meet the demands of performing through Greek masks and layers of Kabuki makeup, in vast halls or tiny theaters, or for the unforgiving eye of the camera. A-Z entries span every region of the world and cover diverse topics from Ireland's Abbey Theatre to China's Zhang Mu (rod-puppet theater) Beautiful illustrations include masks used in classical Greek dramas, an advertisement for a performance of Punch and Judy, the humorous puppet characters, and photographs of actors, performances, and ceremonies from Monty Python to young Balinese dancers performing the Legong dance

The figure of Stella Adler towers high among the memorable acting teachers in American theatre. Her methods of training, her principles of acting and character interpretation, her analyses of the seminal plays of the modern theatre comprise a legacy for everyone who followed her. In this book, that legacy gains the special immediacy and authenticity of her own spoken words. Over three years in the 1970s, Joanna Rotte worked with Adler as a student and as an actress under her direction, all the white taking the copious notes that have become the heart of this book. Throughout, Adler speaks about her principles in a tough minded and demanding way, inspired by her overriding conviction that as a person an actor 'becomes bigger through working'. This book provides an opportunity to sit in on the classes of this remarkable woman of whom her student Marlon Brando said, "My debt and gratitude to her are enormous. As a teacher of acting, she has few peers. As a human being, few equals."

This book opens up "Twelfth Night" as a play to see and hear, provides useful contextual and source material, and considers the critical and theatrical reception over four centuries. A detailed performance commentary brings to life the many moods of Shakespeare's subtle but robust humor. Students are encouraged to imagine the theatrical challenges of Shakespeare's Illyria afresh for themselves, as well as the thought, creative responses and wonder it has provoked.

Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media studies the performative nature of evil characters, acts and emotions across intersecting genres, disciplines and historical eras. This collection brings together scholars and artists with different institutional standings, cultural backgrounds and (inter)disciplinary interests with the aim of energizing the ongoing discussion of the generic and thematic issues related to the representation of villainy and evil in literature and media. The volume covers medieval literature to contemporary literature and also examines important aspects of evil in literature such as social and political identity, the gothic and systemic evil practices. In addition to literature, the book considers examples of villainy in film, TV and media, revealing that performance, performative control and maneuverability are the common characteristics of villains across the different literary and filmic genres and eras studied in the volume.

This book analyses the work of applied theatre practitioners using a new framework of 'responsivity' to make visible their unique expertise. In-depth investigation of practice combines with theorisation to provide a fresh view of the work of artists and facilitators. Case studies are drawn from community contexts: with women, mental health service users, refugees, adults with a learning disability, older people in care, and young people in school. Common skills and qualities are given a vocabulary to help define applied theatre work, such as awareness, anticipation, adaptation, attunement, and responsiveness. The Applied Theatre Artist is of scholarly, practical, and educational interest. The book offers detailed analysis of how skilled theatre artists make in-action decisions within socially engaged participatory projects. Rich description of in-session activity reveals what workshop facilitators actually do and how they think, offering a rare focus in applied theatre.

On the 31st of October 1964 a very British institution took its final bow. That was the night of the Windmill's farewell performance and when the curtain fell for the last time on London's world famous little theatre, and the stage door locked shut behind its keeper, the Windmill's heart stopped beating. All that was left was the lingering smell of a good cigar, the ghost of a fan dancer, the last faint echoes of laughter and applause, and then darkness. After 32 years the Windmill had breathed its last breath. Or had it? No one could have predicted that half a century later, in the year 2014, the world would still remember with affection the Windmill Theatre with its famous comedians and its legendary Windmill Girls. Fifty years on, in the public's heart, this particular British institution "Never Closed."This full colour hardback special edition book commemorates the Windmill on the fifty year anniversary of the theatre's closure. With over 600 illustrations (photographs and ephemera), stories and contributions from ex Windmillite Barry Cryer OBE, Windmill girls and boys who danced on through the blitz and many more, this book will remind those who were there of the phenomenon that was the Windmill, and give those who weren't the feeling of having visited the theatre that famously never closed.

The first comprehensive publication on the subject, this book investigates interactions between racial thinking and the stage in the modern and contemporary world, with 25 essays on case studies that will shed light on areas previously neglected by criticism while providing fresh perspectives on already-investigated contexts. Examining performances from Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Africa, China, Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacifi c islands, this collection ultimately frames the history of racial narratives on stage in a global context, resetting understandings of race in public discourse.

This book strives to unmask the racial inequity at the root of the emergence of modern physical culture systems in the US Progressive Era (1890s-1920s). This book focuses on physical culture - systematic, non-competitive exercise performed under the direction of an expert - because tracing how people practiced physical culture in the Progressive Era, especially middle- and upper-class white women, reveals how modes of popular performance, institutional regulation, and ideologies of individualism and motherhood combined to sublimate whiteness beneath the veneer of liberal progressivism and reform. The sites in this book give the fullest picture of the different strata of physical culture for white women during that time and demonstrate the unracialization of whiteness through physical culture practices. By illuminating the ways in which whiteness in the US became a default identity category absorbed into the "universal" ideals of culture, arts, and sciences, the author shows how physical culture circulated as a popular performance form with its own conventions, audience, and promised profitability. Finally, the chapters reveal troubling connections between the daily habits physical culturists promoted and the eugenics movement's drive towards more reproductively efficient white bodies. By examining these written, visual, and embodied texts, the author insists on a closer scrutiny of the implicit whiteness of physical culture and forwards it as a crucial site of analysis for performance scholars interested in how corporeality is marshaled by and able to contest local and global systems of power.

Hamlet is considered the greatest of Shakespeare's works, unsurpassed in richness and levels of meaning; it probes into the deepest human emotions. Haunted by his father's ghost, Hamlet sets out to avenge his death. But, has he heard his father or the voice of madness welling up from his mourning heart? The father's ghost accuses his brother Claudius, who has assumed the throne and married his wife Queen Gertrude, of murder. Unable to trust anyone anymore, Hamlet is consumed by his mission, shunning those who love him, even killing the eavesdropping Polonius, thinking him to be Claudius. This sets into motion events that threaten the stability of the whole kingdom. A story of truth, betrayal, family, loyalty and fate it has been unfailingly popular since it was first performed. Hamlet speaks to each generation of its own yearnings and problems.

Written to provide information on all price ranges of equipment to everyone from the beginner to the experienced home theater owner, Build Your Own Home Theater has been completely updated for today's audience. This new edition contains valuable consumer information on the latest digital home theater components and technology, including digital surround sound receivers, DVD players, digital television & HDTV, digital satellites (DBS), digital camcorders, and digital hard-drive video recorders. It also features easy-to-understand explanations of surround sound technology and set ups including Dolbya Digital, THX Surround EXTM, and DTS-ESTM.
If you are interested in audio, video, and home theater technologies, this book will give you the information you need to choose the right components, hook the pieces together, and create a fabulous theater experience right in your own living room. When the first edition of Build Your Own Home Theater was published, decent home theater systems were primarily only affordable for wealthier consumers. Now, several years later, the technology is accessible to millions of homes as products such as wide-screen televisions, digital surround sound audio, DVD Video and Audio Players, and digital satellite systems have become commonplace. Though most people don't have actual home theater set-ups in their living rooms, more and more consumers are trying to combine components they already own with new high-tech components to create an affordable home theater experience. Complete with important home theater Web site addresses and resources, Build Your Own Home Theater, Second Edition is a comprehensive, current, and well-researched text. Beginners to advanced home theater consumers, Videophiles, technicians, engineers, and electronics hobbyists from all walks of life will especially find it invaluable.

*"Dolby" and the double-D symbol are registered trademarks and "Surround Sound EX" is a trademark of Dolby Laboratories.
THX and Lucasfilm are (c) Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All rights are reserved. Used under authorization. DTS and DTS-ES are trademarks of Digital Theater Systems, Inc.
Covers all of the hot digital technologies and how to tie them together into one amazing home theater experience for budgets from $1,500 to $15,000.
New edition includes cutting edge technology from Digital Surround Sound to High Definition and Digital Television, DVD, Video Hard-Drives, Digital Satellites, and much more."

The creator of Story Theater, the original director of Second City, and one of the greatest popularizers of improvisational theater, Paul Sills has assembled some of his favorite adaptations from world literature. Includes: The Blue Light and Other Stories, A Christmas Carol (Dickens), Stories of God, Rumi.

Based on extensive archival research, this open access book examines the poetics and politics of the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) over the first three decades of its existence, discussing some of its remarkable productions in the comparative contexts of avant-garde theatre, Hollywood cinema, popular culture, and the development of Irish-language theatre, respectively. The overarching objective is to consider the output of the Gate in terms of cultural convergence - the dynamics of exchange, interaction, and acculturation that reveal the workings of transnational infrastructures.

A revised and updated edition of Declan Donnellan's bestselling book, a fresh and radical approach to acting by a world-famous director. 'Cuts open every generalisation about acting and draws out gleamingly fresh specifics' Peter Brook 'Explains Donnellan's highly practical system and sheds unique light on one of the greatest directors of acting in our time' Le Monde 'Hugely practical and never gets lost in theory' El Pais 'A gripping read, as acute about the psychology of lying as it is about the art of acting' Guardian 'Rooted in modern theatre, modern psychology and, above all, modern reality' Izvestia 'Unpretentious, straightforward, and pierced with acute insight' Kommersant

Outlaws, irreverent humorists, political underdogs, authoritarians - and the silhouette, throughout, of a contemporary Australian woman: these are some of the figures who emerge from Philippa Kelly's extraordinary personal tale, The King and I. Kelly uses Shakespeare's King Lear as it has never been used before - to tell the story of Australia and Australians through the intimate journey she makes with Shakespeare's old king, whose struggles and torments are touchstones for the variety, poignancy and humour of Australian life. We hear the shrieking of birds and feel the heat of dusty towns, and we also come to know about important moments in Australia's social and political landscape: about the evolution of women's rights; about the erosion and reclamation of Aboriginal identity and the hardships experienced by transported settlers; and about attitudes toward age and endurance. At the heart of this book is one woman's personal story, and through this story we come to understand many profound and often hilarious features of the land Down Under.

Building on Robert J. Landy's seminal text, Handbook of Educational Drama and Theatre, Landy and Montgomery revisit this richly diverse and ever-changing field, identifying some of the best international practices in Applied Drama and Theatre. Through interviews with leading practitioners and educators such as Dorothy Heathcote, Jan Cohen Cruz, James Thompson, and Johnny Saldana, the authors lucidly present the key concepts, theories and reflective praxis of Applied Drama and Theatre. As they discuss the changes brought about by practitioners in venues such as schools, community centres, village squares and prisons, Landy and Montgomery explore the field's ability to make meaning of a vast range of personal and social issues through the application of drama and theatre.

Now in its 25th year, the Commercial Theater Institute sponsors an annual intensive program in New York for individuals interested in producing or investing in the theatre that attracts people from all over the world. The top working theatre professionals offer hard, factual information to those interested in producing for Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, anywhere in North America, as well as in the United Kingdom. The Commercial Theater Institute Guide to Producing Plays and Musicals now collects for the first time the cream of the crop of that advice, from the noted theatre professionals who participate in the program, in their own words. Interviews, contributions, and a resource directory are included from 30 theatre professionals who have won a total of 45 Tony Awards. Agents, directors, production designers, general managers, fundraisers, marketing directors, producers, and theatrical attorneys all offer invaluable advice in a book that will be the definitive resource in its field.

For more than 15 years Jonathan Kalb has been a singularly perceptive commentator on American and European theatre. These essays and reviews, by the 1991 winner of the George Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, set a new standard for theatre writing today. This collection begins with a brave and piercing appraisal of the state of current theatre criticism, in a section Kalb characteristically calls 'Critical Mess'. He goes on to revisit the work of Samuel Beckett, as performed in well-meaning efforts to bring it to a new, wider (TV) audience; to consider today's political theatre, particularly in the flourishing form of one-person shows; to explore the theatrical landscape of a reunited Germany, where the Berliner Ensemble is no longer a showcase for the East, and finally to cover what's going on back home in New York -- everything from 'The Lion King' and 'Dame Edna' to plays of David Mamet and Arthur Miller (new and old) and to the latest trends in the Broadway musical.