During the past century, the interpretation given by the various directors staging Greek drama has varied, and the critical reception accorded the productions has also altered. While the texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides remain constant, the meanings drawn from their plays do not. The director who decides to offer a Greek tragedy in the modern American commercial theater believes in the ability of the text to reach the contemporary audience, and the reviewers assess the success of the venture: their words become a record of both a particular performance and the time in which it played. Hartigan explores how drama and society interact and witnesses the continued vitality of the Greek tragedy.

Outlining different perspectives, this classic and field-defining text introduces 'dramaturgy' as a critical concept and a practical process in an accessible and engaging style. The revised edition includes a new introduction and afterword which provides insight into contemporary developments and future directions of scholarship.

This inspirational guide for advanced acting students brings together multiple ways of creating excellence in performance. David Krasner provides tried and tested exercises, a history of actor training and explores the complex relationships between acting theories and teachers. Drawing on examples from personal experience as an actor, director and teacher, An Actor's Craft begins with the building blocks of mind, body and voice, moving through emotional triggers and improvisation, to a final section bringing these techniques together in approaching a role. Each chapter contains accompanying exercises that the actor should practice daily. Combining theory and practice, this thought-provoking and challenging study of acting techniques and theories is for actors who have grasped the basics and now want to develop their knowledge and training further.

Highlights the bridging character of drama-based foreign and second language teaching for intercultural learning. Drama here is not limited to theater-related work, but means the interplay between body and language in general, to include, for example, sports, dancing, singing, and storytelling. The major techniques and curricular structures of educational drama and its application in the foreign and second language classroom are introduced. What are the techniques, methods, strategies, and curricular structures that engage language learners in continuing dialogue between one's own culture and the one yet to be discovered? What comprises the language we speak in order to understand and be understood? Which body is it we communicate through and to? This volume answers these and other questions of the pedagogy of drama-based teaching across the foreign/second language curriculum and on all levels of the educational pyramid. There are two major issues currently discussed in drama-based foreign and second language methodology. The first is goal-oriented, asking whether the acquisition of accuracy or fluency is more important, and whether a controlled (learning through imitation) or an open (through improvisation) learning environment is more efficient. The second issue concerns using drama in language teaching: either its use is process-oriented, where drama becomes an immediate medium for language learning, or product-oriented, where it becomes primarily the reason for language learning. The book outlines the theoretical frameworks of both issues and introduces personal narrative, comparative observation, and analytical reflection, illuminating opportunities for learning at both ends of the seemingly contradictory poles of both issues.

This book examines the trope of echo in early modern literature and drama, exploring the musical, sonic, and verbal effects generated by forms of repetition on stage and in print. Focusing on examples where Echo herself appears as a character, this study shows how echoic techniques permeated literary, dramatic, and musical performance in the period, and puts forward echo as a model for engaging with sounds and texts from the past. Starting with sixteenth century translations of myths of Echo from Ovid and Longus, the book moves through the uses of echo in Elizabethan progress entertainments, commercial and court drama, Jacobean court masques, and prose romance. It places the work of well-known dramatists, such as Ben Jonson and John Webster, in the context of broader cultures of performance. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of early modern drama, music, and dance.

This book focuses on New York City-based actors and comedians who are self-acknowledged heroin users. Barry Spunt examines a number of hypotheses about the reasons why actors and comedians use heroin as well as the impact of heroin on performance, creativity, and career trajectory. A primary concern of the book is the role that subculture and identity play in helping us to understand the heroin use of these entertainers. Spunt captures the voices of actors and comedians through narrative accounts from a variety of secondary sources. He also examines how New York-based films about heroin relate to the major themes of his research.

The future of theatre history studies requires consideration of theatre as a global phenomenon. The Challenge of World Theatre History offers the first full-scale argument for abandoning an obsolete and parochial Eurocentric approach to theatre history in favor of a more global perspective. This book exposes the fallacies that reinforce the conventional approach and defends the global perspective against possible objections. It moves beyond the conventional nation-based geography of theatre in favor of a regional geography and develops a new way to demarcate the periods of theatre history. Finally, the book outlines a history that recognizes the often-connected developments in theatre across Eurasia and around the world. It makes the case that world theatre history is necessary not only for itself, but for the powerful comparative and contextual insights it offers to all theatre scholars and students, whatever their special areas of interest.

Harold Pinter is universally described as "Britain's leading dramatist." This book evaluates the justification for this appellation. It examines his work in relation to changes taking place in the New British Theatre after the so-called theatrical revolution of 1956, and draws attention to those autobiographical experiences that have been transmuted into his art. Beginning with a look at the nature of British theatre prior to 1956, Peacock then describes Pinter's early life in the East End of London, his career as an actor, and his early writing. The discussion follows Pinter's life and work from The Room in 1957 to his most recent play, Ashes to Ashes in 1996. The author argues that although Pinter has not instigated an aesthetic revolution, he has, more significantly, through his representation of human behavior, provoked a new way of viewing the world.

This innovative account of the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership provides a unique insight into the experience of both attending and performing in the original productions of the most influential and enduring pieces of English-language musical theatre. In the 1870s, Savoy impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte astutely realized that a conscious move to respectability in a West End which, until then, had favored the racy delights of burlesque and French operetta, would attract a new, lucrative morally 'decent' audience. This book examines the commercial, material and human factors underlying the Victorian productions of the Savoy operas. Unusually for a book on 'G&S', it focuses on people and things rather than author biography or literary criticism. Examining theatre architecture, interior design, marketing, and typical audiences, as well as the working conditions and personal lives of the members of a Victorian theatre-company, 'Respectable Capers' explains how the Gilbert and Sullivan operas helped to transform the West End into the family-friendly 'theatre land' which still exists today.

In 1664, Moliere's Tartuffe was banned from public performance. This book provides a detailed, in-depth account of the five-year struggle (1664-69) to have the ban lifted and, so doing, sheds important new light on 1660s France and the ancien regime more broadly. By drawing on theatrical and non-theatrical writings (including contemporary sermons, treatises, and memoirs), it changes the terms of the debate by challenging received notions regarding the opposition between the sincere believer (vrai devot) and the hypocrite (faux devot). "Tartuffe" was a key locus for the struggle for influence among competing political and religious factions during the early reign of Louis XIV, and the lifting of the ban in 1669 is understood as an act of political assertion on the part of an increasingly confident king.

After exhaustive research into the D'Oyly Carte collection of documents, Ainger offers the most detailed account to date of Gilbert and Sullivan's starkly different backgrounds and long working partnership. "A Gilbert is of no use without a Sullivan," W.S. Gilbert once summed his reasons for persisting in his collaboration with Arthur Sullivan despite the combative nature of their relationship. Indeed, Michael Ainger suggests, it is the clash between these two strong personalities that accounts for the success of their work together, as each partner challenged the other to produce his best work.

While often some of the most beautiful, opulent buildings in a town or city, a theatre is so much more than a space for the performance of a play. It is a cultural hub, a meeting place for people from all walks of life and, through the stories told there, brings people together in numerous ways. Indeed, theatres have been doing so for over two millennia. The theatre comes in many forms. From the more rigid and repeated (but no less attractive) designs of Greek and Roman theatres, the buildings that now house our shared cultural output boast some of the finest, most creative structures in the world. Huge and cathedral-like or modest, concrete and futuristic or neo-Renaissance, we are lucky that the physical constructions themselves recapture the ambition of the arts performed within. With chapters organised by continent and featuring theatres and opera houses - and any space for the performing arts - from the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and Australasia, Amazing Theatres of the World includes modern masterpieces and ancient remains, art deco delights and Baroque classics, taking in centuries of theatre building. Both the exterior and the interior of buildings are examined, as well as behind-the-scenes shots of dressing rooms and the mechanics of putting on a show. In so doing, we catch a glimpse of how the performing arts and their home has evolved over time. Illustrated with more than 190 photographs, Amazing Theatres of the World includes more than 150 of the most stunning theatres and opera houses.

In this book, Arvid F. Sponberg provides a view of what some of the most important people in the commercial theater think about the state of their business. With one exception, none of those interviewed has ever before had an extended opportunity to discuss, for the record, the nature of their work. The volume treats the reader to a comprehensive view of American commercial theater and how it operates. It documents the thoughts of twenty people who are currently making their living in the commercial theater, exploring aspects of their work usually ignored by the media. Those interviewed made comments on four broad topics: their personal background and key experiences in the theater; their views on the present state of financing, production, writing, casting, directing and designing; their insights into day-to-day theatrical management; and their opinions on proposed changes in theatrical practices. Their words show that it has taken enormous amounts of talent and work to preserve commercial theater from destruction by internal and external economic forces and political neglect. This book will surely receive wide acclaim from all scholars of drama and theater, all members of the theatrical professions, and especially playgoers and lovers of theater.

A comprehensive survey of Roman theatrical production, this book examines all aspects of Roman performance practice, and provides fresh insights on the comedies of Plautus and Terence. Following an introductory chapter on the experience of Roman comedy from the perspective of Roman actors and the Roman audience, addressing among other things the economic concerns of putting on a play in the Roman republic, subsequent chapters provide detailed studies of troupe size and the implications for role assignment, masks, stage action, music, and improvisation in the plays of Plautus and Terence. Marshall argues that Roman comedy was raw comedy, much more rough-and-ready than its Hellenistic precursors, but still fully conscious of its literary past. The consequences of this lead to fresh conclusions concerning the dramatic structure of Roman comedy, and a clearer understanding of the relationship between the plays-as-text and the role of improvisation during performance.

This international collection of essays forms a vibrant picture of the scope and diversity of contemporary queer performance. Ranging across cabaret, performance art, the performativity of film, drag and script-based theatre it unravels the dynamic relationship performance has with queerness as it is presented in local and transnational contexts.

Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourie explores the varied aesthetic impulses and ever-evolving personal motivations of Russian composer Arthur Lourie. A St. Petersburg native allied with the Futurist movement and profoundly sympathetic to Silver Age decadence, Lourie was swept away by the Revolution; he surfaced as a Communist commissar of music before landing in Europe and America, where his career foundered. Making his way by serving others, he became Stravinsky's right-hand man, Serge Koussevitsky's ghostwriter, and philosopher Jacques Maritain's muse. Lourie left his mark on the poems of Anna Akhmatova, on the neoclassical aesthetics of Stravinsky, on Eurasianism, and on Maritain's NeoThomist musings about music. Lourie serves as a flawless lens through which aspects of Silver Age Russia, early Bolshevik rule, and the cultural space of exile come into sharper focus. But this interdisciplinary collection of essays, edited by musicologists Klara Moricz and Simon Morrison, also looks at Lourie himself as an artist and intellectual in his own right. Much of the aesthetic and technical discussion concerns his grandly eulogistic opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, understood as both a belated Symbolist work and as a NeoThomist exercise. Despite the importance Lourie attached to the opera as his masterwork, Blackamoor has never been performed, its fate thus serving as an emblem of Lourie's own. Yet even if Lourie seems to have been destined to be but a footnote in the pages of music history, he looms large in studies of emigration and cultural memory. Here Lourie's life, like his last opera, is presented as a meditation on the circumstances and psychology of exile. Ultimately, these essays recover a lost realm of musical and aesthetic possibilities-a Russia that Lourie, and the world, saw disappear.

The first edited volume to examine philosopher Slavoj Zizek's influence on, and his relevance for, theatre and performance studies. Featuring a brand new essay from Zizek himself, this is an indispensable contribution to the emerging field of Performance Philosophy.

In a career that spanned more then four decades and four countries, Michel Saint-Denis-actor, director, teacher, and theorist-was a major force in twentieth-century theatre. Baldwin chronicles his life and career, which was characterized by frequent beginnings, triumphs, and disasters. Although the times, the artistic currents, and the places changed, Saint-Denis's ambition remained consistent: to create a permanent company dedicated to theatrical experiment coupled with school. While this aspiration was never fully realized, the result of his "failure" was to have a more lasting effect on the theatre. Always on the move, he implanted his theatre practice internationally through the creation of innovative drama schools and his own teaching. In this long-overdue assessment, Saint-Denis's contribution to the stage is brought to light in vivid detail. Making the case that the Saint-Denis's innovations, ideas, and vision are present in current theatrical practice, Baldwin resurrects this important figure and examines a life and career that had almost been forgotten. Thirty-five years after his death, the author contends his influence can still be seen in the drama schools he created-the London Theatre Studio, the Old Vic School, the Ecole Superieure d'Art Dramatique, the National Theatre School of Canada, the Juilliard Drama Division-and in the spirit behind much that was accomplished at England's National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, and Royal Court. This consideration casts new light on this important figure and reveals the extent of his role in the shaping of modern theatre and dramatic arts.

Directors have long been the main figures on Eastern European stages. During the last three decades some of the most outstanding among them have risen to international stardom thanks to their ground-breaking productions that speak to audiences far beyond local borders. Not by chance, a considerable number of these directors have won the second-biggest theatre award on the continent - the European Prize for (New) Theatrical Realities. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the top directors of the region have been pushing contemporary theatre as a whole ahead into new territories. This book offers informative and in-depth portraits of twenty of these directors, written by leading critics, scholars, and researchers, who shed light on the directors' signature styles with examples of their emblematic productions and outline the reasons for their impact. In addition, in two chapters the selected directors themselves discuss their artistic family trees as well as the main stakes theatre faces today. The book will be of interest to theatre scholars, students, and anybody engaged with theatre on a global scale.

Many theatres and theatre companies host post-show discussions, or talkbacks, as part of their season. Often these are done for established plays with the goal of audience cultivation; others are done as part of the new development process. While post-show discussions are fairly ubiquitous, without a clear definition of what they are, who they are for, how they are led, and how they are structured, they are floundering. Playwrights consider them a joke, theatres use them for audience cultivation on top of helping the playwright, thus muddying the focus of the discussions, and audiences are unsure as to their role in the post-show discussion because they aren't properly prepared for them. This book is a critical examination of what has and has not worked with post-show discussions utilized in new play development.

Sut mae ysgrifennu drama ‘genedlaethol’ mewn cenedl ddwyieithog a diwladwriaeth? A yw ymdrech dramodwyr yr 1990au i ddychmygu cenedl amgen ac annibynnol ar lwyfan wedi pylu ers datganoli? Sut y mae lleiafrifoedd eraill wedi dygymod â heriau’r oes honedig ôl-fodern ac  ôl-genedlaethol hon, ac a oes gan eu profiadau wersi i Gymru? Dyma rai o’r cwestiynau y mae nifer o arloeswyr y ddrama Gymraeg gyfoes yn ymhél â nhw yn y gyfrol ddiweddaraf hon yng nghyfres Safbwyntiau. Mae Llwyfannu’r Genedl Anghyflawn yn gasgliad heriol o ysgrifau, wedi ei guradu a’i olygu gan un o’n dramodwyr mwyaf blaengar.