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Curtain Up!: How to Stage Great Youth Productions
by Charon Williams-RosThis comprehensive, hands-on guide to making theatre – perfect for any school, college, youth group or amateur-theatre company – gives you the knowledge you need to take your productions to the next level. Curtain Up! is packed with invaluable advice and practical tips on every aspect of putting on your show, including: - Direction: from choosing your project to casting, rehearsals and opening night - Vocal Direction: give your singers and actors the confidence to deliver great performances - Choreography: step-by-step advice on bringing your choreography to life - Production Design: use set, costumes and more to realise your vision innovatively (and come in on budget) - Puppets & Props: inject some practical magic into your production – and how to make your own puppets - Scriptwriting: beat the blank page and pen your own original show - Lighting Design: maximise your resources to create a whole world on stage - Publicity: identify your audience, reach them and get those bums on seats Each section is written by an experienced theatre professional, laying out the essentials of every role and offering creative, practical ideas to breathe new life into your own theatre projects. Also included is a section on planning, with tips and worksheets to assist with everything from budgeting to selecting your production team. Wherever and however you make theatre, this inspiring, empowering and highly accessible manual will help make your next production your best yet! 'An extremely useful starting point for anyone wanting to put on a school or amateur theatre production… Lots of really useful ideas for where to begin when putting on a show but also contains a variety of useful tips for use in the classroom' - Drama & Theatre Magazine
An Enemy of the People: A Play In Five Acts (Nhb Classic Plays Ser.)
by Henrik IbsenWhen Dr Stockmann makes a disturbing discovery about the healing waters in his local baths, he holds the future of the whole town in his hands. But doubt spreads faster than disease, and those with everything to lose refuse to accept his word. Soon, a battle is raging – and it goes far beyond contaminated water… Ibsen's provocative play about truth in a society driven by power and money is given a startling contemporary spin in Thomas Ostermeier and Florian Borchmeyer's acclaimed version, which premiered at the Avignon Festival followed by the Schaubühne in Berlin in 2012. It has since toured to more than thirty cities around the world. This edition of An Enemy of the People was published alongside the first English-language production, in a version by Duncan Macmillan. It opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End in 2024, starring Matt Smith and Jessica Brown Findlay. Thomas Ostermeier is a German theatre director, acclaimed for his innovative and often iconoclastic productions of classic and contemporary plays. He is the Artistic Director of the Schaubühne. 'Thrilling… Ibsen's drama scales new heights of excitement and fascination' - Guardian 'Ostermeier is the most important theater director of his generation' - New Republic 'Electrifying… an impassioned examination of society and the powerlessness of democracy to check an abuse of power… Ostermeier is using theatre as a political rallying place, somewhere to ask what we really think' - WhatsOnStage 'Surreal, provocative and very funny… deliciously spikey… fascinating and bracingly direct… Ostermeier blows the themes of the play up in the most thrilling way' - Time Out 'Blistering… full of contemporary resonances' - Financial Times
Shakespeare, memory, and modern Irish literature
by Nicholas Taylor-CollinsThis original and innovative book proposes ‘dismemory’ as a new form of intertextual engagement with Shakespeare by modern and contemporary Irish writers. Through reflection on these canonical writers and ranging across thirteen Shakespeare plays, Taylor-Collins demonstrates how Irish writers who helped to fashion and critique the Irish nation state carry an indelible, if often subdued, mark of Shakespeare’s early modern English influence.The volume overall renews and revitalises the Shakespeare–modern Ireland connection: Taylor-Collins reveals Hamlet’s hauntological legacy in Playboy of the Western World, Ulysses, and Ghosts; how the corporal economies that exert pressure from Coriolanus and Ben Jonson flicker through to the antiheroes in Beckett’s Three Novels; and how the landed legacies of territorial contests in Shakespeare are engaged with in Yeats’s poetry, and similarly how the diseased muddiness in Hamlet is addressed by Heaney.
The aesthetic exception: Essays on art, theatre, and politics
by Tony FisherThe aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art’s politics is limited to a recondite space of ‘autonomous resistance’. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art’s exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to ‘effect’ to offer a nuanced account of art’s political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the ‘new’ through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator.
Performance art and revolution: Stuart Brisley’s cuts in time (Rethinking Art's Histories)
by Sanja PerovicStuart Brisley is a pioneering multi-media and performance artist who developed performance art as a form of social action in the 1960s and 1970s. This book assesses his seminal influence on British art through a focus on his lifelong engagement with the histories and imaginaries of revolution.Linking revolutionary history with material from a critical dialogue established with Brisley over the last decade, the book recognises Brisley's corpus as a fascinating stage for addressing important questions about the relationship of art, politics and history. How do we make sense of politically committed art in a contemporary context where revolution has supposedly died or is deemed impossible? What can the afterlives of performance art tell us about the historical past, including the promises and contradictions of revolutionary time?
Sound effects: Hearing the early modern stage (Revels Plays Companion Library)
by Laura Jayne WrightThis book shows that the sounds of the early modern stage do not only signify but are also significant. Sounds are weighted with meaning, offering a complex system of allusions. Playwrights such as Jonson and Shakespeare developed increasingly experimental soundscapes, from the storms of King Lear (1605) and Pericles (1607) to the explosive laboratory of The Alchemist (1610). Yet, sound is dependent on the subjectivity of listeners; this book is conscious of the complex relationship between sound as made and sound as heard. Sound effects should not resound from scene to scene without examination, any more than a pun can be reshaped in dialogue without acknowledgement of its shifting connotations. This book listens to sound as a rhetorical device, able to penetrate the ears and persuade the mind, to influence and to affect.
Shakespeare, memory, and modern Irish literature
by Nicholas Taylor-CollinsThis original and innovative book proposes ‘dismemory’ as a new form of intertextual engagement with Shakespeare by modern and contemporary Irish writers. Through reflection on these canonical writers and ranging across thirteen Shakespeare plays, Taylor-Collins demonstrates how Irish writers who helped to fashion and critique the Irish nation state carry an indelible, if often subdued, mark of Shakespeare’s early modern English influence.The volume overall renews and revitalises the Shakespeare–modern Ireland connection: Taylor-Collins reveals Hamlet’s hauntological legacy in Playboy of the Western World, Ulysses, and Ghosts; how the corporal economies that exert pressure from Coriolanus and Ben Jonson flicker through to the antiheroes in Beckett’s Three Novels; and how the landed legacies of territorial contests in Shakespeare are engaged with in Yeats’s poetry, and similarly how the diseased muddiness in Hamlet is addressed by Heaney.
The Human Body (Nhb Modern Plays Ser.)
by Lucy Kirkwood1948, Shropshire: the winter is freezing, austerity is biting and Iris Elcock, GP, socialist and Labour Party councillor, is working tirelessly to implement Nye Bevan's National Health Service Act and its revolutionary promise of free healthcare for all. At home she is a mother, and wife to a fellow GP, an ex-Navy man scarred by the war. But a chance meeting with George Blythe, a local boy who has made it to Hollywood, turns her quiet, certain world upside down. A story of political and private passions, Lucy Kirkwood's play The Human Body was first performed at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in 2024, directed by Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee, and starring Keeley Hawes and Jack Davenport. 'Kirkwood is the most rewarding dramatist of her generation' - Independent 'Kirkwood's script crackles with unspoken desires, disappointments, yearning and some fantastic humour… deftly weaves bigger politics with the politics of a marriage and affair' - Guardian 'Delicate and poignant… has its author's characteristic intelligence and wit, the dialogue crammed with texture and vivacity' - The Stage
Ibsen at the Theatrical Crossroads of Europe: A Performance History of Henrik Ibsen's Plays on the Romanian Stages, 1894-1947 (Theater #160)
by Gianina DrutaWhile Ibsen's plays were seldom performed in Romania in the first half of the 20th century, historical sources highlight his strong impact on the national theatre practice. To address this contradiction, Gianina Druta approaches the reception of Ibsen in the Romanian theatre in the period 1894-1947, combining Digital Humanities and theatre historiography. This investigation of the European theatre culture and the way in which the foreign acting and staging traditions influenced the Romanian Ibsenites provides new insights into mechanisms of aesthetic transmission. Thus, this study presents a European theatre landscape whose unpredictability and uniqueness cannot be confined to essentialist interpretations.
Komplexität auf der Bühne: Zur Dramaturgie der Geschichtenverflechtung in zeitgenössischen Theatertexten (Theater #164)
by Ute ScharfenbergWie kann das Theater unsere heutigen opaken Wirklichkeitsverhältnisse vermitteln? Und wie können Bühnenaktionen Vorstellungen von Zusammenhang und Sinn mobilisieren? Ute Scharfenberg analysiert erstmals zeitgenössische Theatertexte, die mit außerordentlich hohen Komplexitätsgraden der Darstellung experimentieren. Die komplizierten »Verflechtungsfabeln« bringen Figuren und Ereignisse in oft überraschende Korrespondenzen und fordern ein kritisch-assoziatives Imaginieren und deutendes Interpretieren heraus. Ihre neuartigen Techniken verleihen der Darstellungs- wie auch der Zuschaukunst eine eminente Produktivität.
Theaterproben und Interaktion: Sprech- und theaterwissenschaftliche Perspektiven (Theater #159)
by Anna WesselWie werden künstlerische Ideen von Regie und Schauspieler*innen in Theaterproben interaktiv entwickelt, vermittelt und ausgehandelt? Anna Wessel betrachtet Probeninteraktionen aus sprechwissenschaftlicher Perspektive und kombiniert diese mit theaterwissenschaftlichen und linguistischen Aspekten. Dabei stellt sie die Besprechungsphasen von Theaterproben in den Fokus und zeigt auf, welche interaktiven Probenpraktiken zum Einsatz kommen, wie mit ihnen Instruktionen der Regie gestaltet werden und wie die Schauspieler*innen darauf sprachlich und spielend reagieren. Die Erkenntnisse liefern eine neue Perspektive auf interaktive Prozesse theatraler Probenarbeit - in Theorie und Praxis.
The Third Space: Body, Voice, and Imagination
by Robert LewisThe Third Space serves a crucial need for contemporary performers by providing an interdisciplinary and physiovocal approach to training. It is a new take on body and voice integration designed to develop the holistic performer. It takes performers through a series of step-by-step practical physiovocal exercises that connects the actor’s centre to the outside world, which increases awareness of self and space. It also develops a deeper connection between spaces within the body and the environment by connecting sound, imagination, and movement.Robert Lewis’s approach is a way of working that unlocks the imagination as well as connecting performers to self, space, and imagination, through voice and body. It conditions, controls, and engages performers by integrating various voice and movement practices.The theories and practice are balanced throughout by: introducing the practical works theoretical underpinnings through research, related work, and case studies of performances; demonstrating a full program of exercises that helps performers get in touch with their centre, their space, and shape both within and outside the body; and exploring the performers physiovocal instrument and its connection with imagination, energies, and dynamics. This book is the result of nearly 20 years of research and practice working with voice and movement practitioners across the globe to develop training that produces performers that are physiovocally ready to work in theatre, screen, and emergent technologies.
The Third Space: Body, Voice, and Imagination
by Robert LewisThe Third Space serves a crucial need for contemporary performers by providing an interdisciplinary and physiovocal approach to training. It is a new take on body and voice integration designed to develop the holistic performer. It takes performers through a series of step-by-step practical physiovocal exercises that connects the actor’s centre to the outside world, which increases awareness of self and space. It also develops a deeper connection between spaces within the body and the environment by connecting sound, imagination, and movement.Robert Lewis’s approach is a way of working that unlocks the imagination as well as connecting performers to self, space, and imagination, through voice and body. It conditions, controls, and engages performers by integrating various voice and movement practices.The theories and practice are balanced throughout by: introducing the practical works theoretical underpinnings through research, related work, and case studies of performances; demonstrating a full program of exercises that helps performers get in touch with their centre, their space, and shape both within and outside the body; and exploring the performers physiovocal instrument and its connection with imagination, energies, and dynamics. This book is the result of nearly 20 years of research and practice working with voice and movement practitioners across the globe to develop training that produces performers that are physiovocally ready to work in theatre, screen, and emergent technologies.
The History of British Film (Volume 6): The History of the British Film 1929 - 1939: Films of Comment and Persuasion of the 1930's
This set is one of the cornerstones of film scholarship, and one of the most important works on twentieth century British culture. Published between 1948 and 1985, the volumes document all aspects of film making in Britain from its origins in 1896 to 1939.Rachael Low pioneered the interpretation of films in their context, arguing that to understand films it was necessary to establish their context. Her seven volumes are an object lesson in meticulous research, lucid analysis and accessible style, and have become the benchmark in film history.
The History of British Film (Volume 6): The History of the British Film 1929 - 1939: Films of Comment and Persuasion of the 1930's
by Rachael LowThis set is one of the cornerstones of film scholarship, and one of the most important works on twentieth century British culture. Published between 1948 and 1985, the volumes document all aspects of film making in Britain from its origins in 1896 to 1939.Rachael Low pioneered the interpretation of films in their context, arguing that to understand films it was necessary to establish their context. Her seven volumes are an object lesson in meticulous research, lucid analysis and accessible style, and have become the benchmark in film history.
A Masterclass in Dramatic Writing: Theater, Film, and Television
by Janet NeiprisA Masterclass in Dramatic Writing addresses all three genres of dramatic writing - for theatre, film and TV - in a comprehensive, one-semester, 14-week masterclass for the dramatic writer.This book is tightly focused on the practical outcome of completing a first draft and first rewrite of a dramatic work, drawing on Professor Janet Neipris’ many years of experience as the head of Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch. The fourteen chapters, organized like a semester, take the reader week-by-week and step-by-step through writing a first draft of an original play, screenplay, or TV pilot, while also teaching the core principles of dramatic writing. Chapters include Beginnings, Creating Complex Characters, Dialogue, Escalating Conflicts, Endings, Checkpoints, Comedy, and Adaptation, and there are Weekly Exercises and progressive Assignments.This book is perfect for professional writers, teachers, and students of dramatic writing, as well as anyone who wants to complete their first dramatic work.An award-winning playwright and Professor of Dramatic Writing at NYU, Janet Neipris has written for Screen and Television. She has also taught dramatic writers at UCLA and in China, Australia, Indonesia, South Africa, Italy, and in the UK at Oxford, CSSD, University of Birmingham, and the University of East Anglia. Previous publications include To Be A Playwright (Routledge 2006). Janet Neipris’s plays and letters are in the Theatre Collection of Harvard University’s Houghton Library. For more, see www.janetneipris.com.
Trauma and Embodied Healing in Dramatherapy, Theatre and Performance
by J. F. JacquesThis edited volume explores the singularity of embodiment and somatic approaches in the healing of trauma from a dramatherapy, theatre and performance perspective.Collating voices from across the fields of dramatherapy, theatre and performance, this book examines how different interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches offer unique and unexplored perspectives on the body as a medium for the exploration, expression and resolution of chronic, acute and complex trauma as well as collective and intergenerational trauma. The diverse chapters highlight how the intersection between dramatherapy and body-based approaches in theatre and performance offers additional opportunities to explore and understand the creative, expressive and imaginative capacity of the body, and its application to the healing of trauma.The book will be of particular interest to dramatherapists and other creative and expressive arts therapists. It will also appeal to counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists and theatre scholars.
Trauma and Embodied Healing in Dramatherapy, Theatre and Performance
This edited volume explores the singularity of embodiment and somatic approaches in the healing of trauma from a dramatherapy, theatre and performance perspective.Collating voices from across the fields of dramatherapy, theatre and performance, this book examines how different interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches offer unique and unexplored perspectives on the body as a medium for the exploration, expression and resolution of chronic, acute and complex trauma as well as collective and intergenerational trauma. The diverse chapters highlight how the intersection between dramatherapy and body-based approaches in theatre and performance offers additional opportunities to explore and understand the creative, expressive and imaginative capacity of the body, and its application to the healing of trauma.The book will be of particular interest to dramatherapists and other creative and expressive arts therapists. It will also appeal to counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists and theatre scholars.
Red Pitch (Nhb Modern Plays Ser.)
by Tyrell WilliamsRed Pitch. South London. Three lifelong friends Omz, Bilal and Joey are playing football. Like they always have. Living out dreams of football stardom. Beyond their football pitch, local shops are closing, old flats are being demolished as new flats shoot up, some residents struggle to stay while others rush to leave. A coming-of-age story about what it means to belong somewhere, Tyrell Williams' fast-paced and sharp-edged play tells a powerful story about gentrification, regeneration and the impact of this relentless change on London's communities. Red Pitch received an ecstatic critical and audience response when it was first performed at the Bush Theatre, London, in February 2022, directed by Associate Artistic Director Daniel Bailey. The production was revived at the Bush in September 2023, with this definitive version of the text. For Red Pitch?, Tyrell Williams won the Evening Standard Theatre Award and the Critics' Circle Theatre Award both for Most Promising Playwright, The Stage Debut Award for Best Writer, the George Devine Award, as well as the Off West End Award for Best New Play. An earlier version of the play was presented in June 2019, as part of the Untold Season at Ovalhouse, London. 'Fierce, affectionate and effortlessly funny' - Guardian '90 minutes of end-to-end stuff… the plot is pacy and exciting. The language is rich and vivid. It's also very funny… It's still rare to see a play about young, black, working-class youths on our stages: rarer still to see one in which they are celebrated like this' - Evening Standard 'Intelligent, nuanced – an unbelievable debut… phenomenal… true mastery of craft. It's a next-level coming-of-age story' - The Stage
Nine Lessons and Carols: Stories for a Long Winter (Nhb Modern Plays Ser.)
by Chris Bush Maimuna MemonA play about connection and isolation, forged during the Covid pandemic, exploring what we hold on to in troubled times. Chris Bush's play Nine Lessons and Carols: Stories for a Long Winter, with songs by Maimuna Memon, was first staged at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 2020, directed by Rebecca Frecknall. 'A reminder of the power of theatre and our need for it' - Telegraph 'Tender and embracing, Nine Lessons and Carols leaves you with the glow that only comes from a true sense of shared experience' - The Stage
Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages (Routledge Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance)
Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages is the first edited collection in the field of ecosomatics.With a combination of essays and practice pages that provide a variety of scholarly, creative, and experience-based approaches for readers, the book brings together both established and emergent scholars and artists from many diverse backgrounds and covers work rooted in a dozen countries. The essays engage an array of crucial methodologies and critical/theoretical perspectives, including practice-based research in the arts, especially in performance and dance studies, critical theory, ecocriticism, Indigenous knowledges, material feminist critique, quantum field theory, and new phenomenologies. Practice pages are shorter chapters that provide readers a chance to engage creatively with the ideas presented across the collection. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective that brings together work in performance as research, phenomenology, and dance/movement; this is one of its significant contributions to the area of ecosomatics.The book will be of interest to anyone curious about matters of embodiment, ecology, and the environment, especially artists and students of dance, performance, and somatic movement education who want to learn about ecosomatics and environmental activists who want to learn more about integrating creativity, the arts, and movement into their work.
Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages (Routledge Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance)
by Sondra Fraleigh Shannon Rose RileyGeographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages is the first edited collection in the field of ecosomatics.With a combination of essays and practice pages that provide a variety of scholarly, creative, and experience-based approaches for readers, the book brings together both established and emergent scholars and artists from many diverse backgrounds and covers work rooted in a dozen countries. The essays engage an array of crucial methodologies and critical/theoretical perspectives, including practice-based research in the arts, especially in performance and dance studies, critical theory, ecocriticism, Indigenous knowledges, material feminist critique, quantum field theory, and new phenomenologies. Practice pages are shorter chapters that provide readers a chance to engage creatively with the ideas presented across the collection. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective that brings together work in performance as research, phenomenology, and dance/movement; this is one of its significant contributions to the area of ecosomatics.The book will be of interest to anyone curious about matters of embodiment, ecology, and the environment, especially artists and students of dance, performance, and somatic movement education who want to learn about ecosomatics and environmental activists who want to learn more about integrating creativity, the arts, and movement into their work.
Shakespeare’s Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind The First Folio
by Chris Laoutaris‘A lively picture of multiple operators scrambling to steal a march on the competition . . . Lavishly detailed’FINANCIAL TIMES
Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play
by Alexandra PoulainThis book discusses Irish Passion plays (plays that rewrite or parody the story of the Passion of Christ) in modern Irish drama from the Irish Literary Revival to the present day. It offers innovative readings of such canonical plays as J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, W. B. Yeats’s Calvary, Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer and Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire, as well as of less well-known plays by Padraic Pearse, Lady Gregory, G. B. Shaw, Seán O’Casey, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett and David Lloyd. Challenging revisionist readings of the rhetoric of “blood sacrifice” and martyrdom in the Irish Republican tradition, it argues that the Passion play is a powerful political genre which centres on the staged death of the (usually male) protagonist, and makes visible the usually invisible violence perpetrated both by colonial power and by the postcolonial state in the name ofmodernity.
**Missing** (Nhb Modern Plays Ser.)
by Chris BushA daringly theatrical investigation of the climate crisis through the perspectives of class, patriarchy and colonialism. Chris Bush's play (Not) the End of the World was first staged at the Schaubühne in Berlin in 2021, directed by Katie Mitchell. 'Staggering… Bush's remarkable text melds a ruthless structural concept with exquisite lyricism' - Guardian 'A play of endless permutations, interrogating the idea of choice and individual agency in the face of planetary crisis… Bush's fractal text, like a shattered sheet of ice, combines vivid passages about embracing the paths unchosen with a stark account of the consequences of vanishing marine life and rising temperatures. It is intentionally contradictory, at once putting the onus on the individual, while highlighting the need for change at a governmental level. It deftly captures these tensions, while articulating the mental tug of war underlining many of our decisions' - The Stage