General

World Theories of Theatre expands the horizons of theatrical theory beyond the West, providing the tools essential for a truly global approach to theatre. Identifying major debates in theatrical theory from around the world, combining discussions of...

'Actors always talk about what the audience does. I don't understand, we are just sitting here.' Audience as Performer proposes that in the theatre, there are two troupes of performers: the actors and the audience. Although academics have...

The twenty-eight essays of this collection, first published in 1962, are the work of distinguished British, Canadian, and American scholars. The essays range widely over the field of Elizabethan drama, concentrating attention on Shakespeare and Marlowe...

Focusing on Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Webster and John Milton, Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England argues that the English tragedians reflected an unease within the culture to acts of religious violence. David Anderson...

Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in the period. ...

Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern...

In the field of seventeenth-century English drama, women participated not only as spectators or readers, but more and more as patronesses, as playwrights, and later on as actresses and even as managers. This study examines English women writers'...

Although not much is known about the three Stuart plays in this edition, which was first published in 1987, we can ascribe them to one of the English universities, and each is indicative of a distinctly different influence on the Renaissance academic...

The domination of the state over the lives of individuals is, arguably, a problem of the present-day world. In this book, first published in 1971, the author finds essentially the same problem in Jacobean tragedy in the shape it assumed during the rise...

In this scholarly and entertaining book, first published in 1987, the author tells the story of Jacobean private theatre. Most of the best plays written after 1610, including Shakespeare's late plays such as The Tempest, were written for the new breed of...

While most critical writing on Jonson concentrates on the plays, poems or masques seen in isolation, this title, first published in 1981, ranges across the genres to explore Jonson's vision as a whole. The author points to the inner connections that make...

What does Immersive Theatre 'do'?By contrasting two specific performances on the same theme - one an 'immersive' experience and the other a more conventional theatrical production - Nandita Dinesh explores the ways in which theatrical form impacts upon...

The extraordinary character of Ben Jonson has only recently been brought into the light. Critics traditionally exalted Shakespeare, at Jonson's expense. In this biography, first published in 1986, the author presents a full and accurate account of...

Adapting Western Classics for the Chinese Stage presents a comprehensive study of transnational, transcultural, and translingual adaptations of Western classics from the turn of the twentieth century to present-day China in the age of globalization...

Affordable 3D printers are rapidly becoming everyday additions to the desktops and worktables of entertainment design practitioners - whether working in theatre, theme parks, television and film, museum design, window displays, animatronics, or... you...

Actors and Audiences explores the exchanges between those on and off the stage that fill the atmosphere with energy and vitality. Caroline Heim utilises the concept of "electric air" to describe this phenomenon and discuss the charge of...

Stage Manager: The Professional Experience-Refreshed takes the reader on a journey through all aspects of the craft of stage management in theatre, including the technological advancements that have come to theatre and the stage manger's job. Chapters...

Praise for the First Edition: 'A major contribution to performance studies. If cynicism and political quietism have quelled your impulse to rage against this sorry state of affairs, Bogad demonstrates, with wit and verve, that it is possible to expose...

The Costume Supervisor's Toolkit explores the responsibilities of a Costume Supervisor within a theatrical, opera or dance production company. Rebecca Pride provides an insight into all manner of processes, beginning with a definition of the role, and...

Throughout the twentieth century, live theatre has been challenged by a range of new media based on increasingly sophisticated technologies. In Stages for Tomorrow, Francis Reid, one of the world's best known and best loved lighting designers, gives a...

This guide to the fundamentals of stage lighting includes a series of projects to allow experimentation, discussion and analysis. The necessary equipment is described in relation to its purpose, along with checklists and hints for practical use. The...

Precariousness and the Performances of Welfare brings together an international group of artists, activists and scholars to explore precarity in the contexts of applied and socially engaged theatre. The policy of austerity pursued by governments across...

Theatre designers using 3D software for computer visualisation in the theatre will find this book both a guide to the creative design process as well as an introduction to the use of computers in live performance. Covering the main software packages in...

This popular book describes in detail a stage manager's job. It provides those just starting out in the profession with a solid grounding in theatre stage management practices and procedures. The disciplines of lighting, set design and sound are...

Dialect work is one of the actor's most challenging tasks. Need to know a Russian accent? Playing a German countess or a Midwestern farmhand? These and more accents - from Yiddish to French Canadian - are clearly explained in Evangeline Machlin's classic...

Anyone working with lighting in the entertainment industries will find this an immensely readable source of information. The authors, themselves experienced lighting practitioners, have collected a wealth of essential lighting technology and data into...

In the world of theatre, the technical director is responsible for overseeing the safe and efficient realization and implementation of scenery for the stage. The Technical Director's Toolkit is the first book to address every nut and bolt of this...

If theatre is a way of seeing, an event onstage but also a fleeting series of moments; not a copy or double but more vitally metamorphosis, transformation, and change, how might we speak to - and of - it? How do we envision and frame a fluid reality that...

In this second volume of Stays and Corsets, Mandy Barrington continues to create historical patterns for a modern body shape. This book contains all new corset patterns with a range of silhouettes that span over 300 years, from the late 16th century to...

Foam Patterning and Construction Techniques: Turning 2D Designs into 3D Shapes explains how to create your theatrical prop, puppet, or costume design using the unique and tricky medium of foam. Step-by-step instructions, photographs, and explanations...

This core textbook provides a clear and accessible introduction to the key concepts of phenomenology in relation to theatre, showing how they shed light on the works of influential theatre-makers such as Brecht, Artaud, and Stanislavski. By placing these...

This edited collection gathers together leading voices in theatre and performance studies to debate the politics of participation and find points of connection across a range of performative forms - including community theatre, live art, applied theatre,...

'This work goes where other books fear to tread. It reaches the parts other scholars might imagine in their dreams but would neither have the international reach nor the critical acumen and forensic flourish to deliver.' Alan Read, King's College London...

Performing Commedia dell'Arte, 1570-1630 explores the performance techniques employed in commedia dell'arte and the ways in which they served to rapidly spread the ideas that were to form the basis of modern theatre throughout Europe.Chapters include one...

The five essays in this book reflect many years of the author's sustained academic engagement with dramatic forms and traditions. The opening essay traces the historical trajectory of modern drama in Europe from its bourgeois period through the period of...

In this engaging and disarmingly frank book, comic Jay Sankey spills the beans, explaining not only how to write and perform stand-up comedy, but how to improve and perfect your work. Much more than a how-to manual Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy is...

This anthology of six contemporary plays from Turkey captures such global themes as questions of identity, poverty, class conflict, oppression, and displacement while shedding light on current cultural and political matters in Turkey, a country literally...

Time and Performer Training addresses the importance and centrality of time and temporality to the practices, processes and conceptual thinking of performer training. Notions of time are embedded in almost every aspect of performer training, and so...

In setting foot on stage, every performer risks the possiblity of failure. Indeed, the very performance of any human action is inextricable from its potential not to succeed. This inherent potential has become a key critical trope in contemporary...

Playwrights on Television features interviews with writers of award-winning stage plays and celebrated television shows reflecting on the successes and challenges of being a playwright in the post-network television era. In these conversations,...