When Flick and Joey spot a poster asking for help to find a 'mysterious lost box', their ordinary day takes a dangerous turn, plunging them into a magical world beneath their school: Shinglepits High.As they soon discover, below their home city of Edinburgh lies a powerful river of magic, known as a 'Ley Line', which is set to wreak havoc when it transforms a pile of forgotten books into a tiny yeti, a miniature alien... and a full-sized evil witch with a thirst for misery....

This new textbook edition of Audience Participation in Theatre: Evolutions of the Invitation situates the text in evolving theory, emerging practice, and changing contexts, re-establishing itself as the key reference point in its field. An updated review of the literature and a new chapter develops its original argument with respect to historical change in how audiences and their expectations are constituted, and changes to how participation is invited, mediated and valued.

Being an audience participant can be a confusing and contradictory experience. When a performance requires us to do things, we are put in the situation of being both actor and spectator, of being part of the work of art while also being the audience who receives it, and of being both perceiving subject and aesthetic object. This book examines these contradictions – and many others – as they appear by accident and by design in increasingly popular forms of interactive, immersive, and partic...

Applied Theatre: Aesthetics re-examines how the idea of 'the aesthetic' is relevant to performance in social settings. The disinterestedness that traditional aesthetics claims as a key characteristic of art makes little sense when making performances with ordinary people, rooted in their lives and communities, and with personal and social change as its aim. Yet practitioners of applied arts know that their work is not reducible to social work, therapy or education. Reconciling the...

"So engrossing, clearheaded, and lucid that its arrival is not just welcome but cause for celebration." —Dan Cryer, NewsdayStephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life; full of drama and pageantry, and a...

In The Age of Shakespeare, Frank Kermode uses the history and culture of the Elizabethan era to enlighten us about William Shakespeare and his poetry and plays. Opening with the big picture of the religious and dynastic events that defined England in the age of the Tudors, Kermode takes the reader on a tour of Shakespeare’s England, vividly portraying London’s society, its early capitalism, its court, its bursting population, and its epidemics, as well as its arts—includin...

"An impressively complete survey of the play in its cultural, theatrical, historical and political contexts." - David Bradby, co-editor of Contemporary Theatre ReviewSamuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is not only an indisputably important and influential dramatic text -it is also one of the most significant western cultural landmarks of the twentieth century. Originally written in French, the play first amazed and appalled Parisian theatre-goers and critics before ...

Most philosophy has rejected the theater, denouncing it as a place of illusion or moral decay; the theater in turn has rejected philosophy, insisting that drama deals in actions, not ideas. Challenging both views, The Drama of Ideas shows that theater and philosophy have been crucially intertwined from the start. Plato is the presiding genius of this alternative history. The Drama of Ideas presents Plato not only as a theorist of drama, but also as a dramatist himself, on...

The stories we tell in our attempt to make sense of the world—our myths and religion, literature and philosophy, science and art—are the comforting vehicles we use to transmit ideas of order. But beneath the quest for order lies the uneasy dread of fundamental disorder. True chaos is hard to imagine and even harder to represent. In this book, Martin Meisel considers the long effort to conjure, depict, and rationalize extreme disorder, with all the passion, excitement, and compromises the a...

British theatre is booming. But where do these beautiful buildings and exciting plays come from? And when did the story start? To find out we time travel back to the age of the first Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century, four hundred years ago when there was not a single theatre in the land. In the company of a series of well-characterised fictional guides, the eight chapters of the book explore how British theatre began, grew up and developed from the 1550s to the 1950s.The Ti...

Written specifically for GCSE students by academics in the field, the Methuen Drama GCSE Student Editions provide in-depth explanatory material alongside the play texts frequently studied at Key Stage 4.Whether for use in the classroom or independent study, these editions offer a fully comprehensive and lightly glossed play text with accompanying notes specifically directed towards readers of this age, which unravel essential topics and challenge all students to delve further into ...

In Bodies in Dissent Daphne A. Brooks argues that from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, black transatlantic activists, actors, singers, and other entertainers frequently transformed the alienating conditions of social and political marginalization into modes of self-actualization through performance. Brooks considers the work of African American, Anglo, and racially ambiguous performers in a range of popular entertainment, including racial melodrama, spectacular ...