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The year is 1616. William Shakespeare has just died and the world of the London theatres is mourning his loss. 1616 also saw the death of the famous Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu. Four hundred years on and Shakespeare is now an important meeting place for Anglo-Chinese cultural dialogue in the field of drama studies. In June 2014 (the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth), SOAS, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the National Chung Cheng University of Taiwan gathered 20 scholars together to reflect on the theatrical practice of four hundred years ago and to ask: what does such an exploration mean culturally for us today? This ground-breaking study offers fresh insights into the respective theatrical worlds of Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu and asks how the brave new theatres of 1616 may have a vital role to play in the intercultural dialogue of our own time.

Product Description: Essential for students of theatre studies, this series of 6 decadal volumes provides a critical survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1950s to the present. Each volume features a critical analysis of the work of four key playwrights from that decade together with an extensive commentary on the period...read more

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This volume explains why Beckett's work is so significant and eduring. Professor John Fletcher first met Beckett in 1961 and his book is filled not only with insights into the work but also interviews with Becket and first-hand stories and observations by those who helped to put his work on the stage, including Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Roger Blin.

Presents a collection of interviews, which provides a guide to Pinter, his work for stage and screen, and his political outlook. The author has compiled a range of material which gives equal emphasis to the study and context of Pinter's writing and the experiences of the theatre practitioners who bring his plays to the stage.

A story of a political activist who 'fell' to his death from the window of a police station. It presents incisive satire on police corruption, media manipulation and political shenanigans.

Product Description: Series of essays celebrating the work of Irish playwright, Thomas Kilroy.

This second edition contains traditional drama sketches, raps, narrated mimes, response stories and entertaining monologues. Written for performance by or to children in family services, school assemblies or as street theatre, this text is fully photocopiable.

Product Description: Acting concentrated both the aspirations and anxieties of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, where theater was a defining element of urban sociability. In Acting Up: Staging the Subject in Enlightenment France, Jeffrey M...read more

Product Description: Exploring how readers received and responded to literary works in the long eighteenth century, M-C. Newbould focuses on the role played by Laurence Sterne's fiction and its adaptations. Literary adaptation flourished throughout the eighteenth century, encouraging an interactive relationship between writers, readers, and artists when well-known works were transformed into new forms across a variety of media...read more

This book considers the hundred years of re-writes of Anton Chekhov’s work, presenting a wide geographical landscape of Chekhovian influences in drama. The volume examines the elusive quality of Chekhov’s dramatic universe as an intricate mechanism, an engine in which his enigmatic characters exist as the dramatic and psychological ciphers we have been de-coding for a century, and continue to do so. Examining the practice and the theory of dramatic adaptation both as intermedial transformation (from page to stage) and as intramedial mutation, from page to page, the book presents adaptation as the emerging genre of drama, theatre, and film. This trend marks the performative and social practices of the new millennium, highlighting our epoch’s need to engage with the history of dramatic forms and their evolution. The collection demonstrates that adaptation as the practice of transformation and as a re-thinking of habitual dramatic norms and genre definitions leads to the rejuvenation of existing dramatic and performative standards, pioneering the creation of new traditions and expectations. As the major mode of the storytelling imagination, adaptation can build upon and drive the audience’s horizons of expectations in theatre aesthetics. Hence, this volume investigates the original and transformative knowledge that the story of Chekhov’s drama in mutations offers to scholars of drama and performance, to students of modern literatures and cultures, and to theatre practitioners worldwide.  

Product Description: Using Martin Esslin's "invention" - the Theatre of the Absurd - to examine Pinter's works, Wong brings the complexities and intricacies of the plays to the forefront, provoking readers and audiences to reconsider and problematize more conventional studies of his plays.

Product Description: The pain of America's racial legacy has been richly addressed in the nation's literature, often by women who have gone largely unrecognized. This critical and gender-focused text scrutinizes the role of lynching dramas produced by African-American women dramatists...read more

Product Description: After the Irish Renaissance was first published in 1967.This account of contemporary Irish drama provides critical introductions to some thirty or forty playwrights who have worked in Ireland since 1926, the year Sean O’Casey left Ireland following a riotous protest against his play The Plough and the Stars...read more

This version of Alan Bennett's popular stage play, starring Sir John Gielgud, Alan Bennett and Paul Eddington, is paired with one of his famous monologues starring Patricia Routledge as Margaret.

Product Description: Described by Coleridge as having one of the three mostperfectly constructed plots in literary history, The Alchemist is aplay that is strikingly modern in its cynicism.This guide, with new essays by leadingscholars, provides a comprehensive survey of major issues in the contemporarystudy of the play and points to new avenues for critical exploration...read more