Theatre History

Playing Sick reconstructs how actors embodied three of the Victorian era’s most provocative illnesses: tuberculosis, drug addiction, and mental illness. In placing performances of illness within wider medicocultural contexts, Meredith Conti analyzes how such depictions confirmed or resisted salient ..

Since the Second World War, we have witnessed exciting, often confusing developments in the British theatre. This book, first published in 1976, presents an enlightening, objective history of the many facets of post-war British theatre and a fresh interpretation of theatre itself...

First published in 1990, this book presents a discussion with Arthur Miller. He discusses both the technique of his writing and the moral and political questions which his plays address, and argues passionately for the importance of maintaining respect for human values in a world where they are so f..

First published in 1985, C.W.E Bigsby examines the career and work of playwright David Mamet. Bigsby shows that Mamet is a fierce social critic, indicting an America corrupted at its core by myths of frontier individualism and competitive capitalism...

From Komisarjevsky in the 1920s, to Cheek by Jowl’s Russian ‘sister company’ almost a century later, Russian actor training has had a unique influence on modern British theatre. Russians in Britain, edited by Jonathan Pitches, is the first work of its type to identify a relationship between both cou..

This book explores the influence of commedia dell’arte improvisation, sight gags and wordplay on Shakespeare’s comedies and how these techniques can be applied when producing the Bard’s comedies today. When commedia troupes and players were invited to England in the mid 1500s, and their performances..

The playhouse at Newington Butts has long remained on the fringes of histories of Shakespeare’s career and of the golden age of the theatre with which his name is associated. Yet for eleven days in June, 1594, it was home to the two companies that would come to dominate the London theatres...

Beginning with a reassessment of the 1920s and 30s, this text looks beyond a consideration of just the most successful Spanish playwrights of the time, and discusses also the work of directors, theorists, actors and designers...

This fascinating study differentiates stage presence from charisma and stardom, to explore the co-presence of and relationship between performer and audience...

US Theatre and Performance from 1898 to 1949 is a compelling and wonderfully varied account of the relationship between theatre in the United States and the social, cultural and political forces that shaped it during one of the most formative periods in the nation’s history. Joshua Polster applies k..

US Theatre and Performance from 1898 to 1949 is a compelling and wonderfully varied account of the relationship between theatre in the United States and the social, cultural and political forces that shaped it during one of the most formative periods in the nation’s history. Joshua Polster applies k..

Stanislavsky in America explores the extraordinary legacy that Constantin Stanislavsky’s system of actor-training has left on acting in the US._x000D_ Mel Gordon outlines the journey of Stanislavsky’s theories through twentieth century American history, from the early US tours of the Moscow Art Thea..