Shakespeare's Globe Theatre is recognised worldwide as both a monument to and significant producer of the dramatic art of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. But it has established a reputation too for commissioning innovative and distinctive new plays that respond to the unique characteristics and identity of the theatre. This is the first book to focus on the new drama commissioned and produced at the Globe, to analyse how the specific qualities of the venue have shaped those works and t...

Now in a second edition, Theatre Studies: The Basics is a fully updated guide to the wonderful world of theatre. The practical and theoretical dimensions of theatre – from acting to audience – are woven together throughout to provide an integrated introduction to the study of drama, theatre and performance. Topics covered include:dramatic genres, from tragedy to political documentarytheories of performancethe history ...

Translation is everywhere, and matters to everybody. Translation doesn't only give us foreign news, dubbed films and instructions for using the microwave: without it, there would be no world religions, and our literatures, our cultures, and our languages would be unrecognisable. In this Very Short Introduction, Matthew Reynolds gives an authoritative and thought-provoking account of the field, from ancient Akkadian to World English, from St Jerome to Google Translate. He shows how...

Full of inspiration and practical advice, Playwriting: A Writers' & Artists' Companion is a comprehensive companion to writing for the stage.PART 1 includes reflections on the art and the craft of playwriting, guidance on writing for a full range of genres and spaces and a brief history of playwriting itself.PART 2 contains inspiring advice and reflections from leading playwrights:April De Angelis, Bryony Lavery, David Greig, Christina Reid, Dennis Kelly, Frank McG...

Dialogue between film and theatre studies is frequently hampered by the lack of a shared vocabulary. Stage-Play and Screen-Play sets out to remedy this, mapping out an intermedial space in which both film and theatre might be examined.Each chapter’s evaluation of the processes and products of stage-to-screen and screen-to-stage transfer is grounded in relevant, applied contexts. Michael Ingham draws upon the growing field of adaptation studies to present case studies rangi...

The importance of the library, from ancient times to the digital eraFrom Greek and Roman times to the digital era, the library has remained central to knowledge, scholarship, and the imagination. The Meaning of the Library is a generously illustrated examination of this key institution of Western culture. Tracing what the library has meant since its beginning, examining how its significance has shifted, and pondering its importance in the twenty-first cent...

Improvisation is a tool for many things: performance training, rehearsal practice, playwriting, therapeutic interaction and somatic discovery. This book opens up the significance of improvisation across cultures, histories and ways of performing our life, offering key insights into the what, the how and the why of performance.It traces the origins of improvisation and its influences, both as a social and political phenomenon and its position in performance training. Including histor...

This volume pursues a new line of research in cultural memory studies by understanding memory as a performative act in art and popular culture. The authors take their cue from the observation that art and popular culture enact memory and generate processes of memory. They do memory, and in this doing of memory new questions about the cultural dimensions of memory arise: How do art objects and artistic practices perform the past in the present? What is their relationship to the arc...

Oscar Wilde was a courageous individualist whose path-breaking life and work were shaped in the crucible of his time and place, deeply marked by the controversies of his era. This collection of concise and illuminating articles reveals the complex relationship between Wilde's work and ideas, and contemporary contexts including Victorian feminism, aestheticism and socialism. Chapters investigate how Wilde's writing was both a resistance to and quotation of Victorian master narratives and ge...

'You have discovered a perishable treasure, and it is imperative to share it with other people before it fades... You have only one chance to get it right, while the impression is still fresh...'If critics often disagree among themselves over the merits of a given work, this is nothing compared to the wider argument about what the critic's role should be - Objective judge? Consumer guide? Provocateur? - and whether or not those practising criticism are living up to their d...

From his boyhood Oscar Wilde was haunted by the literature and culture of ancient Greece, but until now no full-length study has considered in detail the texts, institutions and landscapes through which he imagined Greece. The archaeology of Celtic Ireland, explored by the young Wilde on excavations with his father, informed both his encounter with the archaeology of Greece and his conviction that Celt and Greek shared a hereditary aesthetic sensibility, while major works such as The Pictu...

Physical Theatres: A Critical Reader is an invaluable resource for students of physically orientated theatre and performance. This book aims to trace the roots and development of physicality in theatre by combining practical experience of the field with a strong historical and theoretical underpinning.In exploring the histories, cross-overs and intersections of physical theatres, this critical Reader provides:six new, specially commissioned essays, c...