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34 results in Drama, Theatre, Performance Studies

Page 1 of 2

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 Performance Reception of Greek Tragedy in Ancient Theatres
  • Sebastiana Nervegna
  • Published online:
    20 March 2025
    Print publication:
    03 April 2025
  • Greek tragedy enjoyed a rich afterlife on ancient stages. This book reconstructs that history across the entire Mediterranean area, from the fourth century BC to the early third century AD. It is based on an extensive collection of primary sources ranging from inscriptions and festival catalogues to literary records, tragedy-related vases from fourth-century Sicily and South Italy, and the Greek models of Roman Republican tragedies, with each one placed in its historical context. Sebastiana Nervegna identifies the Greek tragedies that formed the ancient theatrical repertoire, assesses how actors contributed to their survival and considers how public audiences continued to enjoy the theatrical masterpieces of Classical Athens. This is the first work entirely dedicated to the circulation of Greek tragedies among the larger public throughout antiquity.
English Play Development under Neoliberalism, 2000–2022

English Play Development under Neoliberalism, 2000–2022
  • Lucy Tyler
  • Published online:
    18 March 2025
    Print publication:
    17 April 2025
    • Element
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  • English Play Development under Neoliberalism, 2000–2022 is the first study of the institutionalising of English play development practices in the twenty-first century. It identifies the ways in which support for playwrights and text development increased beneficially during the 1990s and 2000s. It assesses bureaucratic institutional dynamics in key English producing houses as they were surveyed by two reports in 2009, and how these were experienced and transformed in the 2010s. The Element identifies in new play development innovations in the commodification and marketisation of new writing, the bureaucratisation of literary management, the structuring and restructuring of dramaturgy according to Fordist, then post-Fordist, conditions, and the necessity for commissioned artists to operate as neoliberal subjects. It concludes with attention to a liberatory horizon for play development in the English context. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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.
Staging Class Conflict in the UK

Staging Class Conflict in the UK
  • Liz Tomlin
  • Published online:
    06 March 2025
    Print publication:
    03 April 2025
    • Element
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  • This Element focuses on the frequent staging of the most precarious fraction of the working class in the context of a theatre industry, academy and audiences that are dominated by the cultural fraction of the middle class. It interrogates the staging of an abjectified figure as a means of challenging the stigmatisation of the poor in political discourse, defined here as an ideological imaginary of moral and cultural deficit. The Element argues that in seeking to subvert such an imaginary, theatre that stages the abjectified subject may risk consolidating two further imaginaries of working class deficit that have been confected in political discourse from the 1990s to the 2020s. In conclusion, the Element reflects on the political potential of theatre that rather seeks to eradicate class descriptors, conflicts and hierarchies altogether. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Ellen Terry, Shakespeare, and Suffrage in Australia and New Zealand

Ellen Terry, Shakespeare, and Suffrage in Australia and New Zealand
  • Kate Flaherty
  • Published online:
    04 March 2025
    Print publication:
    03 April 2025
  • While the life and career of Ellen Terry (1847–1928) have attracted decades of attention from theatre historians and feminist biographers, one chapter remains hidden: Terry's tour of her solo Shakespeare lectures to Australia and New Zealand in 1914. This bold venture, made at the age of sixty-six, has been interpreted as an indication of Terry's declining physical andmental health following her 1906 Jubilee. Yet Terry claimed that 'while in Australia, although a woman, I am permitted to be a person', testifying affinity with the geopolitical region in which women had already achieved the right to vote in federal elections and to run for parliament. This Element undertakes the first comprehensive examination of the 1914 tour to reveal Terry's professional agency, her creative autonomy, her skilful navigation of ageist sexism, her eager receptivity to new natural environments, and her friendship with international opera star, Nellie Melba.

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?
The Theatre of Louise Lowe

The Theatre of Louise Lowe
  • Miriam Haughton
  • Published online:
    24 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 March 2025
    • Element
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      • Open access
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  • Louise Lowe is a theatre and performance director, writer, choreographer, dramaturge, and, more recently, a television director and short film writer/director, working in Ireland and internationally. She is the Co-Artistic Director of ANU Productions, established with Owen Boss in Dublin in 2009. Lowe is known for facilitating and creating moments of interior reckoning for audiences through immersive performance techniques. These techniques engage spectators in affectively realised moments of understanding that the stories unfolding through performance reflect living histories in need of greater socio-political engagement and intervention. This Element assesses Lowe's creative practice and production history since her days as a drama facilitator in women's prisons and resource centres in Dublin, paying particular attention to the economic struggle of Dublin's north inner-city, the markings of which are potently visible in the work she makes, and how she makes it. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
#WakingTheFeminists and the Data-Driven Revolution in Irish Theatre

#WakingTheFeminists and the Data-Driven Revolution in Irish Theatre
  • Claire Keogh
  • Published online:
    23 January 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
  • #WakingTheFeminists was a year-long grassroots campaign for gender equality in Irish theatre. Prompted by the gender disparity of Ireland's Abbey Theatre's 2016 programme, 'Waking the Nation', Lian Bell posted a Facebook message that sparked a surge of feminist fury that ignited the #WakingTheFeminists movement. This Element considers the movement both as digital feminist activism and as part of the growing trend of data feminism, by analysing how its combined use of connective and collective action, and qualitative and quantitative data, was critical to its success. It contextualises the movement historically in relation to a series of feminist controversies in Irish theatre since 1990, before considering its impact on both policy and cultural changes across the Irish arts sector. #WakingTheFeminists' national and international resonance derived from its research-informed strategy which made it the most effective campaign for gender equality in the history of Irish theatre.
Performance and Postsocialism in Postmillennial China

Performance and Postsocialism in Postmillennial China
  • Rossella Ferrari
  • Published online:
    16 January 2025
    Print publication:
    06 February 2025
    • Element
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  • This Element examines performance in postmillennial China through the lens of postsocialism. The fragmented ontology of Chinese postsocialism captures the structural contradictions of a political system that supports a neoliberal economy while continuing to promote socialist values. This study explores how the ideological ambivalence and cultural paradoxes that characterise the postsocialist condition are embodied and represented in performance. Focusing on independent practitioners and postdramatic practices, it builds on theorisations of postsocialism as a state of temporal disjunction to propose a tripartite taxonomy structured around past, present, and future temporal regimes. The categories of postsocialist hauntologies, postsocialist realisms, and postsocialist futurities are introduced to investigate performance works that respectively revisit the socialist past, document present realities, and envision future imaginations. The intersection of competing temporalities and their performative manifestations reflects the disjunctive constitution of contemporary China, where past socialist legacies and futurological ambitions coexist within a fractured postsocialist present.

The Cambridge Companion to West Side Story
  • Edited by Paul R. Laird, Elizabeth A. Wells
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • Over sixty years after its opening night, West Side Story is perhaps the most famous and beloved of twentieth-century musicals and stands as a colossus of musical and dramatic achievement. It not only helped define a generation of musical theatre lovers but is among the handful of shows that have contributed to our understanding of American musical identity at mid-century. Bringing together contemporary scholars in music, theatre, dance, literature, and performance, this Companion explores this explosive 1950s remake of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and its portrayal of the raw passion, rivalries, jealousy and rage that doom the young lovers to their tragic fate. Organised thematically, chapters range from Broadway's history and precursors to West Side Story; the early careers of its creators; the show's score with emphasis on writing, production, and orchestrations; issues of class, colourism, and racism; New York's gang culture, and how the show's legacy can be found in popular culture throughout the world.

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.

Eastern Drama of the Absurd in the Twilight of the Soviet Bloc
  • Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz
  • Published by:
    Jagiellonian University Press
    Published online:
    18 December 2024
    Print publication:
    18 December 2023
  • Krzysztof Pleśniarowicz draws differences between Western and Eastern European absurdism, points out similarities and adjacencies, and emphasises the function fulfilled by the theatre of the absurd in Eastern Europe: the representation of the drama of a man deprived of freedom. The author of this important book shows absurdity in the dramas of the 1980s 'at the end of the Soviet bloc' as the only possibility of dramatic-theatrical embodiment of realism, as a metaphor for reality.

Belarusian Theatre and the 2020 Pro-Democracy Protests
  • Documenting the Resistance
  • Valleri J. Robinson
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    18 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 April 2024
  • This book highlights the important creative work of Belarusian theatre and filmmakers seeking to raise awareness of the Pro-democracy movement and human rights abuses in Belarus and to build communities of care and mourning following the fraudulent 2020 presidential elections in Belarus. Examining the work of the Belarus Free Theatre, Andrei Kureichik, and the Kupalautsy Theatre, it demonstrates how documentary theatre, adaptation, and digital theatre have enabled displaced, dissident artists to form international communities to support Belarusian dissidents in these fraught times.
Comedy and Controversy

Comedy and Controversy
  • Scripting Public Speech
  • Sarah Balkin, Marc Mierowsky
  • Published online:
    18 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • This is an Element book about stand-up comedy and public speech. It focuses on the controversies generated when the distinction between the two breaks down, when stand-upenters – or is pushed – into the public sphere and is interpreted according to the scripts that govern popular political and media rhetoric rather than the traditional generic conventions of comic performance. These controversies raise a larger set of questions about the comedian's public role. They draw attention to the intention of jokes and their effects in the world. And they force us to consider how the limits of comic performance – what can be said, by whom, and why – respond to, and can reshape, public discourse across changing media contexts.
Theatres of Autofiction

Theatres of Autofiction
  • Lianna Mark
  • Published online:
    06 December 2024
    Print publication:
    30 January 2025
  • This Element is the first monograph to focus on the presence and popularity of autofiction in contemporary theatre, a mode characterised by its mixture of autobiographical and fictional materials and generally associated with the cutting edge of literary fiction. To do so, it brings frameworks from literary and theatre studies to bear on a recent upsurge in plays that explicitly mobilise lived experience and its fictionalisation to political ends. Considering a comparative corpus of state-subsidised productions in Britain and Europe since the mid 2010s – both adaptations of literary works and plays written for the stage – this Element attends to autofiction's aesthetics and politics through its negotiation on stage of three conceptual binaries, each the focus of a section: fact/fiction, self/other, and inclusion/exclusion. By probing the mode's critical potential and pitfalls, it sheds light on the stakes of self-fictionalising practices in today's cultural markets and on the role of theatre therein.

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