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174 results in Drama and Theatre: general interest

Page 1 of 9

Ecology and Climate in Theatre and Australian Performance
  • Peta Tait, Denise Varney, Lara Stevens
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Charting a history of theatrical resistance to environmental exploitation, this study places drama and theatrical performance staged in Australia within the context of international scholarship to address major concerns about changing ecological systems. Exploring the staging of calamities ranging from droughts and floods to forest fires and rising seas, it examines a strikingly diverse body of work that reflects the entanglement of socio-economic and natural forces leading to ecological damage and climate change. Weather phenomena become protagonists in plays by Jack Davis, Andrea James, Louis Nowra and Hannie Rayson, while mutant creatures manifest climate threats in Jill Orr's work, and performances by the Australian Indigenous Marrugeku and Bangarra Dance Theatre invite grief for immense losses. Featuring First Nations performance and the profound knowledge of biodiverse multispecies habitats it presents, this study challenges the ways in which socio-ecological disaster is called 'natural' and positioned outside human responsibility.

The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre History
  • Steve Tillis
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • Presenting a panoramic, world-ranging view of history, this Guide identifies theatre's most important moments of widespread change from 50,000 BCE to modernity, across Eurasia, Africa, the Americas, and Australasia. It explains why those moments came about and examines how they found expression in distinctive theatre practices. Its global perspective complements more localized perspectives and foregrounds the importance of sometimes trivialized and overlooked traditions. The Guide provides students, scholars, and all who are interested in theatre with a fresh, lively, and compelling understanding of world theatre history.

American Performance in 1976
  • The Evolution of an Avant-Garde
  • Marc Robinson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
  • 1976 was a febrile, transitional year in cultural history, coming after Watergate and Vietnam and before the AIDS epidemic and the rise of the Conservative movement. Bicentennial triumphalism sounded dissonant against a violent past and uncertain future. Marc Robinson here explores how innovative artists across disciplines – drama, dance, music, film, visual art – responded to this period, before zeroing in on avant-garde theater. Over 1976, five landmark productions could be seen within months of one another: Cecil Taylor's A Rat's Mass / Procession in Shout, Meredith Monk's Quarry, the Robert Wilson / Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach, Joseph Chaikin's production of Adrienne Kennedy's A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, and, finally, the Wooster Group's first open rehearsal of Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte's Rumstick Road. In close readings of these five works, Robinson reveals the poetics of a transformative moment in American culture.

Theatre as Technology
  • Apparatus, Nostalgia, Obsolescence
  • W. B. Worthen
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
  • Theatre does not merely use technology – it is a technology. In this paradigm-shifting study, W. B. Worthen shows how the dynamics of obsolescence and affective nostalgia that shape the passing of technologies into history also shape and reshape theatrical practice. Locating theatre within rather than outside the orbit of media studies, Theatre as Technology traces the theatre's absorption of, and absorption by, digital culture. Treating subjects as wide-ranging as pandemic-era Zoom theatre, on-stage video and sound technologies, and artificial intelligence, Worthen locates a moment of transformational change in the idea of the theatre, change prompted by the theatre's always-changing, and so always obsolescing, material technologies.

The Archives and Afterlives of Nautch Dancers in India
  • Prarthana Purkayastha
  • Published online:
    24 October 2025
    Print publication:
    13 November 2025
  • In a time of colonial subjugation, subaltern, illicit and courtesan dancers in India radically disturbed racist, casteist and patriarchal regimes of thought. The criminalized 'nautch' dancer, vilified by both British colonialism and Indian nationalism, appears in this book across multiple locations, materials and timelines: from colonial human exhibits in London to open-air concerts in Kolkata, from heritage Bengali bazaar art to cheap matchbox labels and frayed scrapbooks, and from the late nineteenth century to our world today. Combining historiography and archival research, close reading of dancing bodies in visual culture, analysis of gestures absent and present, and performative writing, Prarthana Purkayastha brings to light rare materials on nautch women, real and fictional outlawed dancers, courtesans and sex-workers from India. Simultaneously, she decolonises existing ontologies of dance and performance as disappearance and advocates for the restless remains of nautch in animating urgent debates on race, caste, gender and sexuality today.

The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Theatre
  • Edited by Brad Kent, David Kornhaber
  • Published online:
    28 August 2025
    Print publication:
    11 September 2025
  • The first panoramic survey of its kind, The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Theatre is a wide-ranging guide to modernism's myriad theatrical manifestations and permutations. Covering such diverse movements as naturalism, symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, dadaism, futurism, and absurdism and ranging over many genres, including comedy, tragedy, the play of ideas, agitprop, and epic theatre, the book provides a comprehensive examination of how theatre was shaped by modernism – and in turn shaped it – as it was practised around the globe. Arranged into two halves focusing respectively on theatrical forms and major themes, the volume features chapters examining how modernist playwrights, scenographers, actors, and directors engaged with such key social, political, and cultural issues of the day as philosophy, science, religion, sexuality, gender, race, intermediality, and interculturalism. An authoritative resource for students and researchers alike, this Companion attests to the pertinence of theatre and modernism both historically and in the contemporary world.

María Irene Fornés In Context
  • Edited by Brian Eugenio Herrera, Anne García-Romero
  • Published online:
    27 August 2025
    Print publication:
    07 August 2025
  • María Irene Fornés is both one of the most influential and one of the least well-known US theatermakers of the late twentieth century, with former students including leading US playwrights, directors and scholars. This is the first major scholarly collection to elucidate Fornés' rich life, work, and legacy. Providing concise and wide-ranging contributions from notable scholars, practitioners and advocates drawn from the academic and artistic communities most informed and inspired by her work, this engaging volume provides diverse points of entry to specialists and students alike.

The Cambridge Companion to Stand-Up Comedy
  • Edited by Oliver Double
  • Published online:
    21 August 2025
    Print publication:
    04 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 House of Truth and Bloke and His American Bantu
  • Two plays
  • Siphiwo Mahala
  • Foreword by Graham Shane
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    09 August 2025
    Print publication:
    01 March 2025
  • Two plays that follow the writers Can Themba, Bloke Modisane and Langston Hughes based in the DRUM era of 1950s Johannesburg.

    Siphiwo Mahala delves into the lives of iconic figures from South Africa's tumultuous past in this remarkable collection of plays. The collection opens with 'The House of Truth' which explores the complexity of Can Themba, a fearless journalist, playwright and poet living under an oppressive apartheid regime. The one-man play weaves together elements of Themba's life and career, recreating the excitement and pathos of the DRUM era, South Africa's first magazine for a black audience, and his neighbourhood, Sophiatown in Johannesburg, before it was destroyed by apartheid legislation. Themba is brought back to life as an ordinary person with human flaws and attributes both tragic and inspirational.

    In the second play, 'Bloke and His American Bantu', Mahala brings to life the extraordinary lives of Bloke Modisane, a South African writer exiled in London, and Langston Hughes, the renowned American poet. This two-hander play celebrates their remarkable camaraderie and intellectual exchange. Through a reimagined correspondence, the play deftly explores how a simple friendship blossomed into a catalyst for international solidarity and cultural exchange across continents, from Africa to the UK to America.

    The plays explore the intersections of identity, creativity and resistance. With wit, poise, and unflinching honesty, they bring to life the triumphs and struggles of these remarkable men who left an indelible mark on their worlds, and celebrate the human spirit's capacity to persevere, inspire and uplift.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Directors
  • Edited by Maria M. Delgado, Simon Williams
  • Published online:
    19 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 July 2025
  • With a broader range of entries than any other reference book on stage directors, this Encyclopedia showcases the extraordinary diversity of theatre as a national and international artistic medium. Since the mid nineteenth century, stage directors have been simultaneously acclaimed as prime artists of the theatre and vilified as impediments to effective performance. Their role may be contentious but they continue to exert powerful influence over how contemporary theatre is made and engaged with. Each of the entries - numbering over 1,000 - summarises a stage director's career and comments on the distinctive characteristics of their work, alluding to broader traditions where relevant. With an introduction discussing the evolution of the director's role across the globe and bibliographic references guiding further reading, this volume will be an invaluable reference work for stage directors, actors, designers, choreographers, researchers, and students of theatre seeking to better understand how directors work across different cultural traditions.

Finding the Way to 'Long Day's Journey Into Night'
  • Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey O'Neill at Tao House
  • William Davies King
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    10 June 2025
    Print publication:
    03 September 2024
  • Eugene O'Neill wrote his most enduring and important plays after he won international acclaim as the first and only American playwright to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936. In the midst of the Great Depression, with his health failing and spirits sunk, he and his third wife, former actress Carlotta Monterey, moved to California to escape the materialism and commercialism of a declining 'West' and they built a new home called Tao House. A reasonably good translation of tao is 'the way,' and in this house, which was largely the creation of Carlotta, he found the way to his most famous play, 'Long Day's Journey Into Night'.

    As an unusually explicit autobiographical drama, this play returns to 1912, the outset of O'Neill's writing career, when he confronted tragedy in his family story and found a way to dramatize his mother, father, brother, and himself in a way that has resonated with audiences since its publication and production in 1956. But this book argues that the play originates as much in the moment of its creation, 1939-1941 - in the family relationships, the historical circumstances, and the fact that this work would represent a moment of closure of his great career.

    This book is the most granular and at the same time the most far-reaching inquiry into how this quintessential play was written (and almost not written) and how it came into the world.

A New Material Interpretation of Twelfth-Century Architecture
  • Reconstructing the Abbey of Saint-Denis
  • Jason R. Crow
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    01 May 2025
    Print publication:
    17 June 2024
  • Today, we perceive Gothic cathedrals as light-filled forms representing the sacred. The colored light projected from brightly-colored stained glass windows onto the walls and floors of these buildings suggests the presence of divinity. Suger (1081-1151CE), the abbot of the monastery of Saint-Denis, is credited with originating Gothic architecture. However, focus on form and structure has elided attention to the material out of which medieval churches were made. When Suger describes the early church he was replacing, he says that the gold and gems it contained beamed outwardly with a gleaming light that filled the eye. When he restored his church and filled it with the shining souls of his ecclesia, he repeated God's divine act of creation. His restored church imitated the precious stones that could be shaped and polished to reveal divine light. By crafting stone, Suger fulfilled the divine plan to make heaven on earth.

Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater
  • A Play
  • Neil Coppen, Mpume Mthombeni
  • Foreword by Kira Erwin
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    17 April 2025
    Print publication:
    01 April 2024
  • Isidlamlilo/ The Fire Eater is an electrifying one-woman play inspired by the true story of a woman who served as a political assassin in the build-up to South Africa's first democratic elections. Zenzile Maseko, the protagonist, is a 60-year-old Zulu grandmother living in a women's hostel in Durban. Falsely declared dead by the Department of Home Affairs, she finds herself cast into a Kafkaesque nightmare that forces her to confront her past.

    Flown in on the wings of the Impundulu (the lightning bird), Zenzile's story weaves a magical and terrifying tapestry. She draws on myth, religious symbolism and traditional beliefs as she shares the realities - at times brutal, at times forgiving - of survival in South Africa. Her story touches on what it means to live through political violence, the transition to democracy, the brutality of inequality, health epidemics like HIV/AIDS, patriarchy, and the apathetic bureaucracy of government departments.

    Ultimately, Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater offers a critical and unflinching look at the eddying cycles of violence and revenge that play out across generations. Yet it is most of all a story about regeneration and redemption that speaks to both the country's haunted past and its present-day complexities.

    Isidlamlilo / The Fire Eater will appeal to teachers, high school learners, and tertiary students in theatre, drama and English studies.

Twentieth-Century Models of the Theatrical Work
  • Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz
  • Translated by William Brand
  • Published by:
    Jagiellonian University Press
    Published online:
    08 April 2025
    Print publication:
    09 September 2024
  • This book offers readers a clear model for reflecting upon works of theater, a summary of twentieth-century knowledge on the subject, and a holistic view of the consequences and achievements of modern theatrical autonomy. Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz draws an antinomy confined exclusively to works of theater: that of illusion/anti-illusion - in contrast to the largely obsolete opposition between a work of literature (drama) and a non-literary work of theater (play).

The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre
  • Edited by Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson, Naomi Paxton, Claire Warden
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    14 March 2025
    Print publication:
    01 June 2023
  • Instead of treating modernism principally as a thing of the past, this volume highlights modernism as an impulse that can be carried forward to the present, re-embodied and re-encountered in theatrical performance. It demonstrates how modernist impulses spark contemporary theatre in electric and dynamic ways, continuing the modernist imperative to 'make it new' and to engage meaningfully with the complicated situation of living in the contemporary world. Through a diverse set of contributions from scholars and theatre practitioners, this book examines the legacy of modernism on the world stage in acts of remembrance, restaging, transmission and slippage. It investigates both well-known and less familiar aspects of modernist theatre history, engaging topics such as the revival of the first Black American musical, feminist and disability-led reinterpretations of canonical modernist plays, the use of modernist-inspired performance practice in contemporary university arts education and the continually contested meaning and importance of the avant-garde.

Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert
  • Edited by Iggy Cortez, Ian Fleishman
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    19 May 2023
  • Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert argues that the career of this singular French actor - constituting a corpus of well over a hundred films - offers a unique testing ground for current approaches in film studies and affect studies.

    Attention to Huppert's performances can reframe recent discussions on the social and cultural dimensions of emotion and normativity through a compelling paradox: her roles tend to express grandiose and overwhelming conditions central to debates in the humanities - negativity, dispossession, trauma - but through elusive and at times resistant or diminutive forms of expression: what J. Hoberman once called her 'genius to distinguish 47 varieties of blankness'. Including diverse contributions from an international line-up of established scholars, this volume examines Huppert's flat affect and other registers with an eye to their significance for cinema and media studies, queer and gender studies, star studies and world cinema.

Ricardo Darín and the Construction of Latin American Film Stardom
  • Clara Garavelli
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    28 February 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2023
  • This monograph examines the figure of Ricardo Darín, the leading actor that drives Argentine cinema's box office success. It aims to fill a lacuna both in Hispanic and Anglophone academia regarding the study of how Ricardo Darín's rise to stardom took place, and what that stardom means for the Latin American film industry. Accordingly, it examines whether or not Ricardo Darín embodies the epitome of the contemporary Latin American or Hispanic star, and, importantly, whether or not the characteristics of the Hollywood star system are actually applicable in the case of Argentine cinema - where the dividing lines between so-called 'industrial' and 'independent' cinemas are very difficult to discern. Thus, whilst taking the study of this key figure from contemporary Argentine cinema as its focal point, this study will also facilitate an opening up towards broader but equally vital questions that continue to require full examination: How are Argentine, Latin American and Hispanic stars constructed? Does the leading actor of contemporary Argentine cinema embody a wider social group and historical moment in the region? Is his performative approach redefining a particular cinematic style?

Staging Asia
  • The Dutch East India Company and the Amsterdam Theatre
  • Manjusha Kuruppath
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    04 January 2025
    Print publication:
    01 October 2017
  • In the early modern Dutch Republic, three playwrights wrote dramas based on political revolutions that were occurring at that same time in Asia. Reflecting on this remarkable phenomenon, Staging Asia traces the transmission of the stories surrounding the seventeenth-century Asian events and their ultimate appearance in Europe as Dutch dramas. Manjusha Kuruppath explores the nature of the representation of the Orient in these works and evaluates how this characterization was influenced by the channels, including some connected to the Dutch East India Company, that the dramatists relied on to gather information for their plays.

Contemporary Performance Translation
  • Challenges and Opportunities for the Global Stage
  • Jean Graham-Jones
  • Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    12 December 2024
  • Radically rethinking translation for the contemporary international stage, Jean Graham-Jones interrogates standard linguistic and cultural categories and proposes an overhaul of the translation process itself, incorporating dramaturgical logic and staging, actor training and performance styles, gesture and embodiment, and performance aesthetics and reception. She demonstrates how a theory of translationality – in which translations do not erase the original but rather stand in relation to it and to other texts and performances – encapsulates the collaborative process between contemporary translators and theatre artists. Presenting multiple experiential cases and drawing on Graham-Jones's own career as a translator, actor, director and scholar working in Argentina, the US, and the UK, this richly interdisciplinary work extends a traditional understanding of contemporary performance translation and its potential in theatrical practice.

Encounters in Theatre and Liberature
  • B. S. Johnson and Zenkasi
  • Katarzyna Biela
  • Published by:
    Jagiellonian University Press
    Published online:
    18 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023
  • In his essay-manifesto of 1999, Zenon Fajfer defined liberature - a literary genre encompassing works whose authors intentionally design the shape of the book, so that it matches their textual message. Extending beyond the growing literary research on liberature, this book presents the theatrical contexts of the genre. Grounded in original archival research, it discusses the theatre practice of Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik (Zenkasi), as well as the post-war British avant-garde author, B. S. Johnson, whom they see as a liberatic author avant la lettre. Tracking the connections between their work in different media, the monograph considers how their theatrical experience may be related to the invention of unconventional aesthetic solutions in literature.

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