A little over a month after the storming of the Bastille, the royal theatre censor was keen to highlight that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen may have seemingly abolished censorship, but like a phoenix from the ashes, it would rise again at the hands of his fellow citizens. He was proved right. This study explores why that was the case, opening with an examination of contemporaneous definitions of censorship, an overview of the theatrical world at the time in France, and an analysis, using archival material from the regimes from 1788 to 1818, of how theatre could shape the public consciousness. The central argument here is that theatre censorship allowed contemporaries to influence what thousands of people saw (or not), and thus the internalized effects of these plays to shape the world around them.

There is a modern expectation that since Shakespearean theatre is in some respects a popular art form, it should represent ordinary people in a positive or sympathetic light. This hope is frustrated at many points by the hierarchical structure of early modern culture, and its consequent tendency to identify the common people with whatever is ignoble and disorderly – an identification which is deepened, in plays as in society more generally, by the conventional image of the people as a nameless, fickle, and latently rebellious crowd. The pejorative force of these associations is complicated, however, by the fact that something like that very crowd is present in the theatre itself, watching, even co-creating, the show. It is as a formal dimension of the entertainment that ‘the people’ most tellingly take possession of Shakespeare’s stage.

This chapter introduces the discussion of the ineluctable obsolescing of the technological apparatus of theatre. Opening with a discussion of the representation of technological and human obsolescence in Star Trek, this chapter repositions the work of media archaeology, which typically excludes theatre from its purview. And yet, in its attention to the operational dimension of lost, dead, or passing technological instruments, media archaeology locates a network of inquiry profitably directed toward theatre. In a reading of the work of Thomas Elsaesser, Wolfgang Ernst, Jussi Parikka, Rebecca Schneider, and others, this chapter introduces the ways apparatus, nostalgia, and obsolescence provide a lens for thinking contemporary theatre.

Arts-mediated HIV/AIDS education received significant funding from Ghana’s donor partners and global health institutions during the first two decades of the pandemic. Yet these interventions had a mixed impact. On the one hand, there was – and continues to be – near universal awareness of HIV/AIDS, including risk factors and health outcomes. On the other hand, low condom use and persistent stigma suggest that knowledge has not translated into sexual health protective behaviours and psychosocial support. In Chapter 4, I examine how the arts were incorporated into HIV/AIDS interventions, focusing on the use of mass media campaigns to raise awareness and educate, and on ‘folk media’ to educate and empower communities. I discuss a study that applied a narrative approach to examine local knowledge and lived experience, the findings of which illustrate important contrasts between community and indigenous healing system responses to HIV/AIDS and official health service responses. I will conclude with reflections on what these insights yield for developing more robust arts-based HIV interventions in the future.

This chapter maps the prolific appearance of nautch sundaris (beauties) and jans (beloveds) in South Asian popular visual culture in a period of growing anti-colonial nationalism and anti-nautch regulation in India. Visual traces of dancer-actresses are studied alongside established theatre history primary texts to re-presence the overlooked labour of dancing, a fundamental part of innovative and seditious vernacular dramaturgies that inaugurated modern Bengali drama. Part I, ‘The Age of Mechanical Reprodarshan’, narrates the intimacy of the red-light district and the popular printing presses of Kansaripara Art Studio and Chorebagan Art Studio in Calcutta. It argues that actress-dancers proliferated in print in the unique visual participatory space of darshan. Part II, ‘The Sundaris (Beauties)’ traces the many sundaris – real and fictional – appearing in popular visual prints and in Calcutta’s theatres. Part III, ‘The Jans (Beloveds)’ examines nautch on the humble and ubiquitous matchbox label. A reading of the real and fictional beloveds – Khorshed Jan, Pokhraj Jan, Sanichar Jan, Bani Jan and the celebrated Gauhar Jan (1873 –1930) – explores how the circulation of the Jan series on matchboxes brought about a change in modes of patronage and spectatorship for nautch in the subcontinent in the early twentieth century.

This chapter explores the verse drama, a genre favoured by Michael Field and by several other Victorian poets, including Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. This chapter sets Michael Field’s verse dramas in the wider contexts of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century drama and theatre, including debates about the New Drama (epitomised by Henrik Ibsen), ‘Shakespeare-philia’, and the modernist movement, such as T. S. Eliot’s verse plays.

This chapter chronicles the wide range of theatrical styles at the end of the nineteenth century. In addition to the melodrama, farce, and pantomime popular throughout the century, the period saw the development of more experimental forms such as the well-made play and Naturalism. Michael Field as dramatists were both inspired and confounded by this range of theatrical possibility. While their prose drama A Question of Memory was performed by J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre Society, the majority of their dramatic work – written in intricate verse, historically rich, and often requiring elaborate staging – proved unperformable during their lifetimes. The chapter argues that in this Michael Field were representative of late-Victorian women dramatists more broadly: while many of the plays associated with the New Drama told women’s stories, the act of telling remained the prerogative of men.

In this chapter, Sarah Parker interviews Tom Floyd and Sophie Goldrick of Shadow Opera about the process of creating Veritable Michael, an opera and podcast inspired by Michael Field’s life and work. Tom Floyd is the Artistic Director of Shadow Opera and Sophie Goldrick is the Producer and mezzo-soprano, who sings the part of Katharine Bradley in the show. In this interview, they respond to questions about how they originally conceived the piece, why opera is a suitable form for telling Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s story, how the collaborative creative process worked, and how audiences have reacted to the performance and the podcast.

In this chapter, Ben Levitas investigates forms of distance and temporal indeterminacy legible in the latter-day revivalist drama of Marina Carr and Brian Friel. In their works, strategies of distance, of “paratheatricality,” seek not to avoid representation but to link it to more authentic experiences for the audience. Both playwrights create a theatre of hope, a theatre for and of the future that testifies to a continuance of the Revival’s main themes and concerns (particularly with respect to time), despite their rejection of the idealism of so many early revivalist works. Friel and Carr achieve a transposition of dramatic life from the stage to the audience – that is to say, from the stage to actual life – which is, in its turn, captured in the dramatic work. Theatrical words are forms of political action insofar as strategies of performative distance and alienation find their place in dramatic productions that support a “grammar of change.”

The academic concept of ‘intermediality’ presents a challenge to traditional artistic boundaries, offering a refreshed sense of the relationship between different kinds of media. This chapter relates such ideas to modernism, considering the work of a group of writers who showed a fascination with the stage but primarily achieved fame in genres other than performed drama. It begins by examining a tension within Ezra Pound’s work: his desire to engage with the stage and yet to dismiss the significance of theatre. The discussion then references the work of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Rabindranath Tagore, and Kōbō Abe. Ultimately, although ‘intermediality’ is sometimes assumed to apply more specifically to a later historical era of advanced media technology, this chapter shows how intermedial thinking can apply productively to modernist cultural products of the earlier twentieth century.

This chapter covers the multivalent, multidirectional relationship that developed between theatre and philosophy during the modernist era. It begins with the rise of German idealism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its influence on Friedrich Nietzsche’s landmark The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. From Nietzsche’s own sway over a new generation of dramatists worldwide, the chapters expands to consider other thinkers taken as influences by global theatre-makers as well as leading philosophers and theorists around the world who took explicit interest in the stage. The chapter also explores the tensions inherent in these relationships, including open disavowals of philosophic influence by prominent dramatists and outright criticisms of the entire philosophical project by members of the avant-garde. In both its avowals of influence and disavowals of the same, the interaction between theatre and philosophy in the modernist age proved to be enormously generative for both.

This chapter will explore the fundamentals of drama, both as a skill and as a methodology for teaching other curricular requirements. It also offers practical activities and assessment practices, as well as theoretical underpinnings and methods to further develop teaching methodologies beyond this text. You will have the confidence and knowledge to engage learners of all ages and abilities to explore their own ideas through dramatic performance and to evaluate the performance of others. The key to drama is not only the development of skills, but also the ability to apply processes and value these processes as equal to the end product of a drama activity. The application of drama in literacy, numeracy and other areas of learning will be embedded throughout. A great deal of the focus on drama in the classroom in Australia is from a western perspective.