Books in the Exeter Performance Studies series

This is the first full-length study of John McGrath's work, and illuminates the importance of his role in the development of theatre, film and television in the last four decades of the twentieth century.

This volume is an edited collection of critical essays on British Asian theatre. It includes contributions from a number of researchers who have been active in the field for a substantial period of time.This title is complemented by British South Asian Theatres: A Documented History by the same authors, also available from University of Exeter Press.

The Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, first staged in 1913 in St Petersburg, was a key event of the Russian avant-garde, notorious for its libretto, its unconventional score and its pioneering abstract sets and costumes designed by Kazimir Malevich. The iconic importance of Victory over the Sun as a theatrical event is universally acknowledged.This volume brings together the first fully annotated translation of the libretto of this ';anti-opera' and other important primary source materials, including the score, the set and costume designs and contemporary newspaper reviews. The second part of the volume provides a wide-ranging collection of interpretive essays which explore the artistic, literary and musical dimensions of the staging, its theatrical and historical context, its relationship to Italian Futurism, and its position within the Russian modernist movement.You can read more about the Pushkin House event on 22 November 2012 on the Russian Art and Culture website by following this link http:// www.russianartandculture.com/victory-over-sun-book-launch-pushkin-house/ (will open in a new window).And you can see and hear more in Alexander Kan's report on the BBC Russian site by following this link http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/multimedia/2012/11/121127_futuristic_dinner.shtml (will open in a new window).In 1913, the year in which the Romanovs celebrated their tercentenary, the premieres of two revolutionary theatrical events brought Russian artists to the forefront of the European avant-garde. With its nonsensical ';trans-sense' libretto by Aleksei Kruchenykh andVelimirKhlebnikov, experimental score by Mikhail Matiushin and pioneering abstract sets and costumes by Kazimir Malevich, the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun may be compared in terms of its radical assault on artistic convention to Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring.This interdisciplinary volume brings together a distinguished team of international scholars to discuss the artistic significance of this epoch-making ';anti-opera', which is now recognised as a key event of avant-garde cultural production, and a turning point in stage history.The book offers new insight into the theatre practice and history of Russian Futurist performance, which, to date, has received little attention from theatre scholars despite its influence on the development of European drama in the twentieth century.As well as an annotated translation of the libretto, the book includes reproductions of the score and contemporary newspaper reviews.Illustrated throughout, and with a colour plate section containing twenty-seven colour images of costume designs, posters and other work by the abstract artist Kazimir Malevich

Winner of the Society for Theatre Research Book Prize - 2016This is the final volume in a new paperback edition of Steve Nicholson's definitive four-volume survey of British theatre censorship from 1900-1968, based on previously undocumented material, covering the period 1960-1968. This brings to its conclusion the first comprehensive research on the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence Archives for the 20th century. The 1960s was a significant decade in social and political spheres in Britain, especially in the theatre. As certainties shifted and social divisions widened, a new generation of theatre makers arrived, ready to sweep away yesterday's conventions and challenge the establishment. Analysis exposes the political and cultural implications of a powerful elite exerting pressure in an attempt to preserve the veneer of a polite, unquestioning society.

This is the third volume in a new paperback edition of Steve Nicholson's comprehensive four-volume analysis of British theatre censorship from 1900-1968, based on previously undocumented material in the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence Archives in the British Library and the Royal Archives at Windsor. Focusing on plays we know, plays we have forgotten, and plays which were silenced for ever, Censorship of British Drama demonstrates the extent to which censorship shaped the theatre voices of this decade. The book charts the early struggles with Royal Court writers such as John Osborne and with Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop; the stand-offs with Samuel Beckett and with leading American dramatists; the Lord Chamberlain's determination to keep homosexuality off the stage, which turned him into a laughing stock when he was unable to prevent a private theatre club in London's West End from staging a series of American plays he had banned, including Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge and Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and the Lord Chamberlain's attempts to persuade the government to give him new powers and to rewrite the law.This new edition includes a contextualising timeline for those readers who are unfamiliar with the period, and a new preface.

This collection of published and unpublished essays connects antiquity with the present by debating the current prohibiting conceptions of performance theory and the insistence on a limited version of 'the contemporary'.The theatre is attractive for its history and also for its lively present. These essays explore aspects of historical performance in ancient Greece, and link thoughts on its significance to wider reflections on cultural theory from around the world and performance in the contemporary postmodern era, concluding with ideas on the new theatre of the diaspora.Each section of the book includes a short introduction; the essays and shorter interventions take various forms, but all are concerned with theatre, with practical aspects of theatre and theoretical dimensions of its study. The subjects range from ancient Greece to the present day, and include speculations on the origin of ancient tragic acting, the kinds of festival performance in ancient Athens, how performance is reflected in the tragic scripts, the significance of the presence of the chorus, technology and the ancient theatre, comparative thinking on Greek, Indian and Japanese theory, a critique of the rhetoric of performance theory and of postmodernism, reflections on modernism and theatre, and on the importance of adaptation to theatre, studies of the theatre and diaspora in Britain.

A popular crowd-pleaser in the late 16th and mid-17th century, the dramatic jig was a short, comic, bawdy musical-drama which included elements of dance, slapstick and disguise. With a cast of ageing cuckolds and young head-strong wives, knavish clowns, roaring soldiers and country bumpkins, jigs often followed as afterpieces at London's playhouses, and were performed at fairs, in villages and in private houses. Troublesome to the authorities, they drew the crowds by offering a lively antidote to more sober theatrical fare.This performance edition presents for the first time nine examples of English dramatic jigs from the late sixteenth century through to the Restoration; the scripts are re-united as far as possible with their original tunes. It gives a comprehensive history, discusses sources, plots, instrumentation and dancing, and offers practical information on staging jigs today.Includes:Transcriptions of the original textsContextual notes: plot synopses and discussion of sources, themes and audience receptionMusical notation for each tune, with suggestions for underlay and chords, and notes on instrumention and styleAppendix of dance instructions and reconstructions

The first book to document grass roots popular theatres which developed from within the working class Republican and Loyalist communities of Belfast and Derry during the latest phase of the four hundred year conflict between Ireland and Britain.

Marking Time: Performance, archaeology and the city charts a genealogy of alternative practices of theatre-making since the 1960s in one particular city Cardiff. In a series of five itineraries, it visits fifty sites where significant events occurred, setting performances within local topographical and social contexts, and in relation to a specific architecture and polity. These sites from disused factories to scenes of crime, from auditoria to film sets it regards as landmarks in the conception of a history of performance.Marking Time uses performance and places as a means to reflect on the character of the city itself its history, its fabric and make-up, its cultural ecology and its changing nature. Weaving together personal recollections, dramatic scripts, archival records and documentary photographs, it suggests a new model for studying and for making performancefor other artistic practicesfor other cities.Marking Time is an urban companion to the rural themes and fieldwork approaches considered in ';In Comes I': Performance, Memory and Landscape (University of Exeter Press, 2006).

Drawing on archive material and a series of personal interviews, this exciting new book reverses the neglect of this vital element in the history of contemporary theatre - the vibrant presence of South Asians in theatre in Britain.

Drawing on archive material and a series of personal interviews, this exciting new book reverses the neglect of this vital element in the history of contemporary theatre - the vibrant presence of South Asians in theatre in Britain.

Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre is the first in-depth study of perhaps Britain's most influential twentieth-century theatre company. The book sets the company's aims and achievements in their social, political and theatrical contexts, and explores the elements which made its success so important.

A companion to UEP's Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (now in its third reprint). London's Grand Guignol was established in the early 1920s at the Little Theatre in the West End. It was a high-profile venture that enjoyed popular success as much as critical controversy.

This book examines the relationships between theatre and the turbulent political and social context of Northern Ireland since 1969. It explores key theatrical performances which deal directly with this context. The book is aimed at a student readership: it is largely play-text-based, and it contains useful contextualising material.

From Mimesis to Interculturalism offers a series of critical readings of key texts in the history of European and American theatrical and performance theory. It answers the need for a detailed critique of theatrical theory from its origins in Greek antiquity to the present day.

This is the first full-length study of John McGrath's work, and illuminates the importance of his role in the development of theatre, film and television in the last four decades of the twentieth century.

This is a book for theatre-lovers, written for anyone who shares the author's curiosity about the art of acting and about theatre past and present. Three sections cover from the Elizabethan period to the 20th century.

This is a full-length study of the representation of contemporary warfare on the British stage and investigates the strategies deployed by theatre practitioners in Britain as they meet the representational challenges posed by the `new wars' of the global era.

';In Comes I' explores performance and land, biography and locality, memory and place. The book reflects on performances past and present, taking the form of a series of excursions into the agricultural landscape of eastern England, and drawing from archaeology, geomorphology, folklore, and local and family history.Mike Pearson, a leading theatre artist and solo-performer, returns to the landscape of his childhood off the beaten track in Lincolnshire and uses it as a mnemonic to reflect widely upon performance theory and practice. Rather than focusing on author, period and genre as is conventional in the study of drama, the book takes region as its optic, acknowledging the affective ties between people and place.Offering new approaches to the study of performance, he integrates intensely personal narrative with analytical reflection, juxtaposing anecdote with theoretical insight, dramatic text with interdisciplinary perception. The performances, ranging from folk drama to contemporary site-specific work, are seen in the light of their relationship to their cultural and physical environment.

This is the second part of a four-volume analysis of British theatre censorship from 1900 - 1968, based on previously undocumented material in the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence Archives. It covers the period from 1933 to 1952, and focuses on theatre censorship during the period before, during and after the Second World War.

This is the first of a four volume analysis of British theatre censorship from 1900 - 1968, based on previously undocumented material in the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence archives. It covers the period before 1932, when theatre was seen as a crucial medium with the power to shape society, determining what people believed and how they behaved.

From the authors of the successful Grand-Guignol and London's Grand Guignol - also published by UEP - this book includes translations of a further eleven plays, adding significantly to the repertoire of Grand-Guignol plays available in the English language.

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians is a collection of essays by a well-known author on comic and radical political theatre. It looks at stage satires by John Gay, Henry Fielding, George Farquhar, Charlotte Charke, David Garrick and their contemporaries through the lens of Brecht's theory and practice. 15 b&w illustrations.