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133 results in British Theatre

Page 1 of 7

The Cambridge Companion to Stand-Up Comedy
  • Edited by Oliver Double
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Stand-up comedy is one of the simplest theatre forms in existence. The comedian stands on a (usually) bare stage, talking straight to the audience in the hope of getting laughs. Yet it has never been more popular, with national scenes developing across every continent except Antarctica. In this insightful and accessibly written volume, diverse chapters explore the subject from many angles, ranging from national scenes, live venues, and recordings to politics, race, sexuality, and the question of offensiveness. Chapters also consider the performance dynamics of stand-up in detail, examining audience, persona, and trauma. Interspersed throughout the chapters are a series of originally commissioned interviews with comedians from nine different countries, including Maria Bamford, Jo Brand, Aditi Mittal, and Rod Quantock, providing rare insights into their craft.

The Business of English Restoration Theatre, 1660–1700
  • Deborah C. Payne
  • Published online:
    18 October 2024
    Print publication:
    13 June 2024
  • Deborah C. Payne's ground-breaking study traces the historical origins of a dilemma still bedevilling theatre companies: how to reconcile audience demand for novelty with profitability. As a solution, English acting companies in 1660 adopted an unprecedented theatrical duopoly. Implicit to its economic logic were scarcity, prestige, and innovation: attributes that, it was hoped, would generate wealth and exclusivity. Changes to playhouse architecture, stagecraft, dramatic repertory, and company practices were undertaken to create this new, upmarket theatre of “great expences.” So powerful was the promise of the duopoly and so enthralling the wholesale transformation of the theatrical marketplace that management—despite dwindling box office—resisted change for 35 years. Drawing upon network and behavioural economic theory, Professor Payne shows why the acting companies clung to an economic model inimical to their self-interest. Original archival research further bolsters this radically new perspective on an exciting and crucial period in English theatre. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The World as It Goes
  • A Comedy
  • Hannah Cowley
  • Edited by William D. Brewer
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    15 March 2024
    Print publication:
    16 November 2021
  • During the Romantic period, Hannah Cowley (1743-1809) achieved fame both as a playwright and a poet, composing popular comedies and, as Anna Matilda, amorous Della Cruscan verse. But despite a recent surge of scholarly interest in her works, her controversial comedy The World as It Goes; or A Party at Montpelier (performed 1781) has never been published. During its premiere, audience members loudly objected to the play’s bawdy content, and it closed after a single performance. The comedy’s catastrophic failure provides insights into the theatrical tastes, anxieties and mores of late eighteenth-century audiences and influenced the manner in which Cowley handled controversial issues in her subsequent plays. This edition of The World as It Goes is based on the Larpent licensing holograph manuscript held by the Huntington Library (LA 548). The transcription of the play is supplemented with an introduction providing cultural, theatrical, historical and biographical contexts; contemporaneous reviews; and a note on the text.

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945
  • Edited by Jen Harvie, Dan Rebellato
  • Published online:
    14 March 2024
    Print publication:
    21 March 2024
  • British theatre underwent a vast transformation and expansion in the decades after World War II. This Companion explores the historical, political, and social contexts and conditions that not only allowed it to expand but, crucially, shaped it. Resisting a critical tendency to focus on plays alone, the collection expands understanding of British theatre by illuminating contexts such as funding, unionisation, devolution, immigration, and changes to legislation. Divided into four parts, it guides readers through changing attitudes to theatre-making (acting, directing, writing), theatre sectors (West End, subsidised, Fringe), theatre communities (audiences, Black theatre, queer theatre), and theatre's relationship to the state (government, infrastructure, nationhood). Supplemented by a valuable Chronology and Guide to Further Reading, it presents up-to-date approaches informed by critical race theory, queer studies, audience studies, and archival research to demonstrate important new ways of conceptualising post-war British theatre's history, practices and potential futures.

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre of the First World War
  • Edited by Helen E. M. Brooks, Michael Hammond
  • Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    19 October 2023
  • This is the first comprehensive guide to British theatre's engagement with the First World War over the last century, from 1900 to the Armistice Day centenary in 2018. Considering theatre as both an industry and literary-cultural artform, it provides a contextual grounding in the prelude to the conflict and coverage of post-war plays as well as wartime performances. Lively chapters from leading scholars explore diverse genres and practices, from Shakespeare to melodrama, while focusing on topics including regionality, national identity, propaganda, commemoration, gender, censorship and international influences. Presenting original scholarship in an accessible and engaging manner, this Companion establishes theatre as a vital means of understanding wartime experiences, and a central feature in commemoration and remembrance.

Reading the Past, Understanding the Present
  • Edited by Agnieszka Orszulak, Agnieszka Romanowska
  • Published by:
    Jagiellonian University Press
    Published online:
    13 October 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2021
  • Reading the Past, Understanding the Present is a collection of essays written by students from nine European universities, who took part in the Strategic Partnership, 'Facing Europe in Crisis: Shakespeare's World and Present Challenges', aiming to promote historical understanding of the crises plaguing the contemporary Europe and the world. In each chapter, the authors examine early modern theatre, the works by William Shakespeare in particular, and how it interacts with various local and global issues, reflecting on their cultural and socio-political origins and consequences. This book offers an innovative insight into the relationship between the past represented in such plays as 'The Merchant of Venice', 'King Lear', 'The Tempest', or the history plays and the complex contemporary European context - migrant crisis, racial diversity, democracy, or the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Censorship of Eighteenth-Century Theatre
  • Playhouses and Prohibition, 1737–1843
  • Edited by David O'Shaughnessy
  • Published online:
    03 August 2023
    Print publication:
    17 August 2023
  • This collection reveals the wide-ranging impact of the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 on literary and theatrical culture in Georgian Britain. Demonstrating the differing motivations of the state in censoring public performances of plays after the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 and until the Theatres Act 1843, chapters cover a wide variety of theatrical genres across a century and show how the mechanisms of formal censorship operated under the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays. They also explore the effects of informal censorship, whereby playwrights, audiences and managers internalized the censorship regime. As such, the volume moves beyond a narrow focus on erasures and emendations visible on manuscripts to elucidate censorship's wide-ranging significance across the long eighteenth century. Demonstrating theatre archives' potency as a resource for historical research, this volume is of exceptional value for researchers interested in the evolving complexities of Georgian society, its politics and mores.

Theatre in the Chocolate Factory
  • Performance at Cadbury's Bournville, 1900–1935
  • Catherine Hindson
  • Published online:
    23 June 2023
    Print publication:
    13 July 2023
  • Providing a new way of thinking about industrialism and its history through the lens of one of Britain's most recognisable heritage brands, Catherine Hindson explores the creativity that was at the heart of Cadbury's operation in the early twentieth century. Guided by Quaker Capitalism, employees at Bournville took part in recreational and educational activities, enabling imagination to flourish. Amidst this pattern of work and play arose the vibrant phenomenon that was factory theatre, with performances and productions involving tens of thousands of employees as performers and spectators. Home-grown Bournville casts and audiences were supplemented by performers, civic leaders, playwrights, academics, town planners, and celebrities, interweaving industrialists with the city's theatrical and visual arts as well as national entertainment cultures. This interdisciplinary study uncovers the stories of Bournville's theatre and the employees who made it, considering ground-breaking approaches to mental and physical health and education.

Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires
  • Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform
  • Tracy C. Davis
  • Published online:
    19 May 2023
    Print publication:
    01 June 2023
  • This ambitious study traces the strategies of human rights activists to show how world-changing reform movements were shaped by women and men from modest backgrounds who were deeply attuned to the power of performance. Tracy C. Davis explores nineteenth-century reform campaigns through the pioneering work of a family of activists – prominent anti-slavery lecturer George Thompson, his daughter Amelia (the first female theatre and music critic for a British daily newspaper) and her husband, the political organizer Frederick Chesson. Engaging in some of the most important social struggles of the late Georgian and Victorian periods – including abolition, enfranchisement, and anti-genocide - this book reveals how two generations' insights into performance consolidated into activist tactics that persist today. Characterised by a skilful deployment of performance theory alongside deep and wide-ranging historical knowledge, this ground-breaking work demonstrates what 'dramaturgy' can teach us about 'history'.

Strolling Players of Empire
  • Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833
  • Kathleen Wilson
  • Published online:
    11 November 2022
    Print publication:
    01 December 2022
  • Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe.

An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber, Comedian and Late Patentee of the Theatre Royal
  • A Modernized Text
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by David Roberts
  • Published online:
    30 June 2022
    Print publication:
    21 July 2022
  • Colley Cibber was one of the most derided men in eighteenth-century London. Mocked for his work in the theatre and as Poet Laureate, he was nevertheless a prolific actor and playwright, and co-managed the Theatre Royal Drury Lane for 24 years. His response to his critics, An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber, is often described as the first theatrical autobiography, and even as the first secular autobiography in English. But what kind of text is it – intimate confession or cunning pose? History of the stage or political polemic? Rambling or purposeful? Or perhaps, even, the first celebrity memoir? Including comprehensive notes and a detailed scholarly introduction, this modernised text makes Cibber's enigmatic literary landmark accessible to a wide readership for the first time and allows both specialists and general readers to explore Cibber's extraordinary career against the rich, turbulent background of London theatre in the eighteenth century.

International Theatre Festivals and Twenty-First-Century Interculturalism
  • Ric Knowles
  • Published online:
    11 January 2022
    Print publication:
    16 December 2021
  • Ric Knowles' study is a politically urgent, erudite intervention into the ecology of theatre and performance festivals in an international context. Since the 1990s there has been an exponential increase in the number and type of festivals taking place around the world. Events that used merely to be events are now 'festivalized': structured, marketed, and promoted in ways that stress urban centres as tourist destinations and “creative cities” as targets of corporate enterprise. Ric Knowles examines the structure, content, and impact of international festivals that draw upon and represent multiple cultures and the roles they play in one of the most urgent processes of our times: intercultural negotiation and exchange. Covering a vast geographical sweep and exploring festival models both new and ancient, the work sets compelling new standards of practice for post-pandemic festivals.

Tom Stoppard in Context
  • Edited by David Kornhaber, James N. Loehlin
  • Published online:
    09 June 2021
    Print publication:
    17 June 2021
  • Tom Stoppard's work as a playwright and screenwriter has always been notable for mixing ideas with entertainment. From the early success of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to masterpieces like Arcadia, from radio plays about modern art to the Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, Stoppard has challenged and delighted audiences with the intellectual and cultural richness of his writing. Tom Stoppard in Context provides multiple perspectives on both the life and works of one of the most important modern playwrights. This collection covers biographical and historical topics, as well as the broad array of intellectual, aesthetic, and political concerns with which Stoppard has engaged. More than thirty essays on subjects ranging from science to screenwriting help illuminate Stoppard's rich body of work.

Criticism, Performance, and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century
  • The Art of Transition
  • James Harriman-Smith
  • Published online:
    02 March 2021
    Print publication:
    18 March 2021
  • Great art is about emotion. In the eighteenth century, and especially for the English stage, critics developed a sensitivity to both the passions of a performance and what they called the transitions between those passions. It was these pivotal transitions, scripted by authors and executed by actors, that could make King Lear beautiful, Hamlet terrifying, Archer hilarious and Zara electrifying. James Harriman-Smith recovers a lost way of appreciating theatre as a set of transitions that produce simultaneously iconic and dynamic spectacles; fascinating moments when anything seems possible. Offering fresh readings and interpretations of Shakespearean and eighteenth-century tragedy, historical acting theory and early character criticism, this volume demonstrates how a concern with transition binds drama to everything, from lyric poetry and Newtonian science, to fine art and sceptical enquiry into the nature of the self.

The Fifteenth Century XVI
  • Examining Identity
  • Volume 16
  • Edited by Linda Clark
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 August 2020
    Print publication:
    21 December 2018
  • This series (pushes) the boundaries of knowledge and (develops) new trends in approach and understanding. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW

Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools
  • Amanda Eubanks Winkler
  • Published online:
    14 May 2020
    Print publication:
    04 June 2020
  • Music, Dance, and Drama in Early Modern English Schools is the first book to systematically analyze the role that the performing arts played in English schools after the Reformation. Although the material record is riddled with gaps, Amanda Eubanks Winkler sheds light on the subject through an innovative methodology that combines rigorous archival research with phenomenological and performance studies approaches. She organizes her study around a series of performance-based questions that demonstrate how the schoolroom intersected with the church, the court, the domicile, the concert room, and the professional theater, which allows her to provide fresh perspectives on well-known canonical operas performed by children, as well as lesser-known works. Eubanks Winkler also interrogates the notion that performance is ephemeral, as she considers how scores and playtexts serve as a conduit between past and present, and demonstrates the ways in which pedagogical performance is passed down through embodied praxis.

The Players' Advice to Hamlet
  • The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
  • David Wiles
  • Published online:
    16 January 2020
    Print publication:
    06 February 2020
  • Hamlet is a characteristic intellectual more inclined to lecture actors about their craft than listen to them, and is a precursor of Enlightenment figures like Diderot and Lessing. This book is a quest for the voice of early professional actors, drawing on English, French and other European sources to distinguish the methods of professionals from the theories of intellectual amateurs. David Wiles challenges the orthodoxy that all serious discussion of acting began with Stanislavski, and outlines the comprehensive but fluid classical system of acting which was for some three hundred years its predecessor. He reveals premodern acting as a branch of rhetoric, which took from antiquity a vocabulary for conversations about the relationship of mind and body, inside and outside, voice and movement. Wiles demonstrates that Roman rhetoric provided the bones of both a resilient theatrical system and a physical art that retains its relevance for the post-Stanislavskian performer.

British Enlightenment Theatre
  • Dramatizing Difference
  • Bridget Orr
  • Published online:
    21 December 2019
    Print publication:
    02 January 2020
  • In this ground-breaking work, Bridget Orr shows that popular eighteenth-century theatre was about much more than fashion, manners and party politics. Using the theatre as a means of circulating and publicizing radical Enlightenment ideas, many plays made passionate arguments for religious and cultural toleration, and voiced protests against imperial invasion and forced conversion of indigenous peoples by colonial Europeans. Irish and labouring-class dramatists wrote plays, often set in the countryside, attacking social and political hierarchy in Britain itself. Another crucial but as yet unexplored aspect of early eighteenth-century theatre is its connection to freemasonry. Freemasons were pervasive as actors, managers, prompters, scene-painters, dancers and musicians, with their own lodges, benefit performances and particular audiences. In addition to promoting the Enlightened agenda of toleration and cosmopolitanism, freemason dramatists invented the new genre of domestic tragedy, a genre that criticized the effects of commercial and colonial capitalism.

The Globalization of Theatre 1870–1930
  • The Theatrical Networks of Maurice E. Bandmann
  • Christopher B. Balme
  • Published online:
    12 October 2019
    Print publication:
    24 October 2019
  • Between 1895 and 1922 the Anglo-American actor and manager, Maurice E. Bandmann (1872–1922) created a theatrical circuit that extended from Gibraltar to Tokyo and included regular tours to the West Indies and South America. With headquarters in Calcutta and Cairo and companies listed on the Indian stock exchange, his operations represent a significant shift towards the globalization of theatre. This study focuses on seven key areas: family networks; the business of theatrical touring; the politics of locality; repertoire and publics; an ethnography of itinerant acting; legal disputes and the provision of theatrical infrastructure. It draws on global and transnational history, network theory and analysis as well as in-depth archival research to provide a new approach to studying theatre in the age of empire.

The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare
  • Edited by Bruce R. Smith
  • Edited in association with Katherine Rowe
  • With Ton Hoenselaars, Akiko Kusunoki, Andrew Murphy, Aimara da Cunha Resende
  • Published online:
    17 August 2019
    Print publication:
    21 January 2016
  • The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare aims to replicate the expansive reach of Shakespeare's global reputation. In pursuit of that vision, this work is transhistorical, international and interdisciplinary. Volume 1, Shakespeare's World, 1500–1660, includes a comprehensive survey of the world in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries lived, while Volume 2, The World's Shakespeare, 1660–Present, examines what the world has made of Shakespeare as a cultural icon over the past four centuries. For each of the work's twenty-eight broad subject areas, ranging from translation to popular culture to performing arts, an overview is followed by a series of shorter essays taking up particular aspects of the subject at hand. Richly illustrated with more than three hundred images between the two volumes, this work brings the world, life and afterlife of Shakespeare to readers, from non-academic Shakespeare fans and students to theater professionals and Shakespeare scholars.

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