Explore our collection of Theatre and Performance books, offering unparalleled insights into the evolution of global theatre and performance throughout history. Discover a selection of both new releases and bestsellers from a host of esteemed and seasoned authors in the field.
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This book explores how literature, theatre and music revive the dead to explore the dynamics of grief and mourning. Combining expressive and analytical writing, it offers a critical poetics of loss to show how ghosts, scenes of mourning, memories of reading or viewing, and acoustic fragments, all reanimate the dead in different ways.
Theatre, activism, subjectivity
In modern times of political confusion, when Leftist agendas and struggles often collapse or become appropriated by Right, this book stress the necessity of recovering the Leftist ethos of solidarity, social justice, and care for the commons.
Robert Lepage's original stage productions
This book calls upon globalisation, queer, cinema, and affect studies to explore key Robert Lepage productions from 1984 to 2008, analysing the systems through which his work is produced and disseminated.
Adaptation and resilience in the performing arts
Eight teams share their research about live performing arts during the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting on digital innovations and analogue adaptations in dance and theatre, accessibility and community-building, and on how the pandemic impacted on artists and companies.
Performing the testimonial offers a new critical engagement with verbatim and testimonial theatre that draws on an analysis of a number of international contemporary verbatim and testimonial plays. Moving beyond discourses of the real, the book argues that testimonial theatre engages in acts of truth telling, performing new modes of witnessing.
Blending theatre history and sensory studies this book recaptures the sound of early modern drama, acknowledging its intangibility while attempting to both describe those sounds heard on the stage and to try and identify those sound's effects on the playgoers.
The aesthetic exception critically re-evaluates the relation between art and politics by challenging longstanding assumptions surrounding political 'effect' in art and the problem of art's autonomous status. Drawing on examples from visual art and theatre, it offers a new approach based on a conjunctural understanding of how art becomes political.
Politics, performance and popular culture
Working with the concept that politics is performative and performance is political, this book brings together studies of popular performance and politics across the nineteenth century, offering a fresh perspective from an archivally grounded research base.
Performing care explores the relation between socially-engaged performance and care and care ethics. It questions how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring and how care might be viewed as an embodied or aesthetic practice --arguing for more careful art and artful care.
Witness Onstage is a detailed study of the remarkable growth of documentary theatre forms in Russian since the early 2000s. It draws on the author's work as a performer, producer, and researcher of documentary theatre both in Russia and internationally to provide new perspective on the mechanics of theatre as a venue for civic engagement.
Screen plays is a ground-breaking volume thatchronicles the rich and surprising history of stage plays produced for the small screen between 1930 and today. The collection makes a compelling case for the centrality of the theatre to the past and present of British television drama.
Drawing upon previously unseen archival material, this book brings to life the story of the Actresses' Franchise League from 1908-1958, building a picture of this diverse, exciting and innovative organisation that opens up and extends previous scholarship of the suffrage movement, and of political and feminist networks in twentieth century theatre.
This book looks at the genesis of British national identity in the reign of King James I and VI. It does this by studying two things: the political language of the King's project to replace England, Scotland and Wales with a single kingdom of Great Britain and cultural representations of empire on the public and private stages.
Transnational connections in early modern theatre
Pushing the complexities of theatrical connections beyond questions of national boundaries, Transnational connections in early modern theatre studies performance as a connective medium, to engage with the complex encounters, exchanges and interactions among texts, performers and communities, in a time of vastly increasing interchange and mobility.
A study of twenty stage productions, adaptations and screen versions of Shakespeare's final Roman play
This book presents cutting-edge historical and cultural essays in the field of women, theatre and performance. It explore women's networks of professional practice in the performance industries between 1900 and 1950, with a focus on women's sense and experience of professional agency in an industry largely controlled by men.