Dan Rebellato

Jen Harvie

The definitive guide to post-war British theatre's huge variety and expansion, exploring the diverse contexts that shaped it.

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945

Graham Eatough

Suspect Culture was Scotland’s leading experimental theatre company between 1993 and 2009. Based in Glasgow, it was formed of a core group of associate artists who collaborated in making groundbreaking, high quality new work which gained an international reputation. Over the course of its 16-year history the company worked with some of the most respected artists and organizations in the UK and internationally, and made a significant contribution to the British theatre scene of the 1990s and early 2000s. Described by the Scotsman on Sunday as ‘Scottish theatre’s major creative powerhouse’ and by The Times as ‘the most adventurous, most in-tune-with-the-times theatre company in Britain’, Suspect Culture have had a quietly decisive impact on British theatre. This book surveys the company’s history and ideas and includes an overview of the Company by David Greig; co-founder, writer, dramaturg and sometime actor with Suspect Culture and the perspective of the Company from Brazilian director and writer Mauricio Paroni de Castro, one of Suspect Culture’s many international artistic associates. Also included here are the previously unpublished playtexts of three of its most celebrated shows, Timeless, Mainstream and Lament (all created by the company with text by David Greig).

The Suspect Culture Book

Maria M. Delgado

This expanded second edition of Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ambitious and unprecedented overview of many of the key directors working in European theatre over the past 30 years. This book is a vivid account of the vast range of work undertaken in European theatre during the last three decades, situated lucidly in its artistic, cultural, and political context. Each chapter discusses a particular director, showing the influences on their work, how it has developed over time, its reception, and the complex relation it has with its social and cultural context. The volume includes directors living and working in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Russia, Romania, the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, offering a broad and international picture of the directing landscape. Now revised and updated, Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ideal text for both undergraduate and postgraduate directing students, as well as those researching contemporary theatre practices, providing a detailed guide to the generation of directors whose careers were forged and tempered in the changing Europe following the end of the Cold War.

Contemporary European Theatre Directors

What is globalization? What role is there for the theatre in a globalizing world? This original and provocative book explores the contribution that theatre has made to our slowly evolving consciousness of our world as a whole. Drawing on sources from Aeschylus to The Lion King, Chekhov to Complicite, tragedy to advertising, the book argues for theatre's importance as a site of resistance to the ruthless spread of the global market. Foreword by Mark Ravenhill

Theatre and Globalization

I don't know who he is but he's old, he's got to know stuff... he's got to be like wise and stuff yeah? Anton Chekhov, masterful playwright and mirror to Russian society, awakening from one hundred years of sleep, is thrust rudely into twenty first century Britain. Reality shows, fashionistas, Z-list celebrities, illegal immigrants, chuggers and wags. Pole dancing, YouTube, Twitter and 5-a-day. Chekhov in Hell takes you on a whirlwind tour of modern day Britain.

Chekhov in Hell

It is said that British Drama was shockingly lifted out of the doldrums by the 'revolutionary' appearance of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court in May 1956. But had the theatre been as ephemeral and effeminate as the Angry Young Men claimed? Was the era of Terence Rattigan and 'Binkie' Beaumont as repressed and closeted as it seems? In this bold and fascinating challenge to the received wisdom of the last forty years of theatrical history, Dan Rebellato uncovers a different story altogether. It is one where Britain's declining Empire and increasing panic over the 'problem' of homosexuality played a crucial role in the construction of an enduring myth of the theatre. By going back to primary sources and rigorously questioning all assumptions, Rebellato has rewritten the history of the Making of Modern British Drama.

The Making of Modern British Drama

1956 and All That

'An invaluable book that we shall all be using for a long time to come' - Michael Billington Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ambitious and unprecedented overview of many of the key directors working in European theatre over the past fifty years. It is a vivid account of the vast range of work undertaken in European theatre during this period, situated lucidly in its artistic, cultural and political context. The resulting study is a detailed guide to the generation of directors whose careers were forged and tempered in the changing Europe of the 1980s and 1990s. The featured directors are: Calixto Bieito, Piotr Borowski, Romeo Castellucci, Frank Castorf, Patrice Chéreau, Lev Dodin, Declan Donnellan, Kristian Frédric, Rodrigo García, Jan Lauwers, Christoph Marthaler, Simon McBurney, Daniel Mesguich, Katie Mitchell, Ariane Mnouchkine, Thomas Ostermeier, Patrice Pavis, Silviu Purcărete and Peter Sellars. Travelling from London and Craiova to St. Petersburg and Madrid, the book examines directors working with classics, new writing, and new collaborative theatre forms. Each chapter is written by a specialist in European theatre and provides a detail critique of production styles. The directors themselves provide contributions and interviews to this multi-authored work, which unites the many and varied voices of European theatre in one coherent volume.

Bryce Lease

Contemporary European Playwrights presents and discusses a range of key writers that have radically reshaped European theatre by finding new ways to express the changing nature of the continent’s society and culture, and whose work is still in dialogue with Europe today. Traversing borders and languages, this volume offers a fresh approach to analyzing plays in production by some of the most widely-performed European playwrights, assessing how their work has revealed new meanings and theatrical possibilities as they move across the continent, building an unprecedented picture of the contemporary European repertoire. With chapters by leading scholars and contributions by the writers themselves, the chapters bring playwrights together to examine their work as part of a network and genealogy of writing, examining how these plays embody and interrogate the nature of contemporary Europe. Written for students and scholars of European theatre and playwriting, this book will leave the reader with an understanding of the shifting relationships between the subsidized and commercial, the alternative and the mainstream stage, and political stakes of playmaking in European theatre since 1989.

Dan Rebellato

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