Theatre category: 6638 books

'An invaluable book that we shall all be using for a long time to come' - Michael Billington Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ambitious and unprecedented overview of many of the key directors working in European theatre over the past fifty years. It is a vivid account of the vast...

Examining the development of avant garde theatre from its inception in the 1890s right up to the present day, Christopher Innes exposes a central paradox of modern theatre; that the motivating force of theatrical experimentation is primitivism. What links the work of Strindberg, Artaud, Brook and...

Throughout World War II, audiences in the United Kingdom craved entertainment, even during the country’s darkest days. During this period, actor-manager Donald Wolfit and his theatre troupe toured Great Britain and Europe—often at great risk. After the war, Wolfit broadened his tour, bringing...

For Alain Badiou, theatre—unlike cinema—is the place for the staging of a truly emancipatory collective subject. In this sense theatre is, of all the arts, the one strictly homologous to politics: both theatre and politics depend on a limited set of texts or statements, collectively enacted by...

Many theatre practitioners think of physical theatre as one thing and text-based theatre as another. In this book, Dymphna Callery, author of Through the Body: A practical guide to physical theatre, shows how exercises and rehearsal techniques associated with physical and devised theatre can be applied...

Why should the digital bring about ideas of progress in the theatre arts? This question opens up a rich seam of provocative and original thinking about the uses of new media in theatre, about new forms of cultural practice and artistic innovation, and about the widening purposes of the theatre's...

Putting food and theatre into direct conversation, this volume focuses on how food and theatre have operated for centuries as partners in the performative, symbolic, and literary making of meaning. Through case studies, literary analyses, and performance critiques, contributors examine theatrical...

A 1967 obituary in The Times labelled Stephen Joseph 'the most successful missionary to work in the English theatre since the second world war'. This radical man brought theatre-in-the-round to Britain, provoked Ayckbourn, Pinter and verbatim theatre creator Peter Cheeseman to write and direct, and...

Presenting a rigorous critical investigation of the reinvigoration of the political in contemporary British theatre, Ecologies of Precarity in Twenty-First Century Theatre provides a fresh understanding of how theatre has engaged with precarity, affect, risk, intimacy, care and relationality in recent...

At last an accessible and intelligent introduction to the energising and challenging relationship between feminism and theatre. In this clear and enlightening book, Aston discusses wide-ranging theoretical topics and provides case studies including: * Feminism and theatre history * `M/Othering the...

Theatre in the Expanded Field is a fiercely original, bold and daring exploration of the fields of theatre and performance studies and the received narratives and histories that underpin them. Rich with interdisciplinary reference, international, eclectic and broad-ranging in its examples, it offers...

This collection of published and unpublished essays connects antiquity with the present by debating the current prohibiting conceptions of performance theory and the insistence on a limited version of ‘the contemporary’. The theatre is attractive for its history and also for its lively...

How has theatre represented the rural? And how does a re-viewing of theatre of and in the rural help to build and complicate our sense of place? Theatre & the Rural explores the different ways in which theatre has performed the rural from the medieval to the contemporary, and examines the...

In 1974, a group of determined, young high school actors started doing plays under the name of Steppenwolf Theatre Company, eventually taking residence in the basement of a church in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago. Thus began their unlikely journey to become one of the most prominent theatre companies...