A critical study of the work of Polish theatre director Tadeusz Kantor, which includes an analysis of the corpus of Kantor's work plus a collection of the director's essays. These essays comment on work then in progress, describing how Kantor challenged traditional theatrical forms.

Discusses four types of theatrical landscapes; the deadly theatre, the holy theatre, the rough theatre, and the immediate theatre.

Plutarch of Chaeronea is one of the great story-tellers of antiquity, a writer whose ability to create unforgettable scenes matches the grandeur of his subject matter. The heroes of his Lives were the great men of antiquity, often greatly flawed, but with tragic depth and epic stature.

Essays on the York Mystery Plays, uniting voices from the scholarly world with the York community that has assumed responsibility for their production today. The York Play of Corpus Christi, also known as the York Cycle, has been central to the study of early English theatre for over a century and a touchstone for the revival of medieval dramatic practice for over fifty years. But these two endeavours... have often found little common ground. This volume therefore accomplishes something very important. It brings together scholars of medieval English drama and places them in dialogue with experienced practtitioners from the community. Together, they share a common commitment to understanding how performances matter to the communities that produce them, and how plays intersect with other public activities. CAROL SYMES, Professor of History, University of Illinois at Urbana. This volume provides a wealth of new insights into the performance of mystery plays in medieval York and their modern revival. It utilises both academic study, and the practical experience of those who now produce the cycle within York itself on wagons in the street, in an approximation of their original performance. A number of topics are covered. The manuscript is linked to Richard III; the Masons are introduced as non-guildsmen in an enterprise assumed to be guild-specific; families, not just male heads of households, are shown to be important to the dramatic narrative; and cognitive theory elucidates performance past and present.Recent productions are discussed in lively detail by those directly responsible for them, leading to analyses of performances in Israel, Spain, and Australia, not all of them of a predictable kind, which offer further angles on the medieval dramatic tradition. Professor Margaret Rogerson teaches in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. Contributors: Margaret Rogerson, Keith Jones, Richard Beadle, Sheila K. Christie,Mike Tyler, Jill Stevenson, Elenid Davies, Ben Pugh, Peter Brown, Tony Wright, Steve Bielby, Emma Cunningham, Alan Heaven, Linda Ali, Paul Toy, Gweno Williams, John Merrylees, David Richmond, Alexandra F. Johnston, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, Pamela M. King

Signs of Performance provides the beginning student with working examples of theatrical analysis. Its range covers the whole of twentieth century theatre, from Stanislavski to Brecht and Samuel Beckett to Robert Wilson. Colin Counsell takes an historical look at theatre as a cultural practice, clearly tracing connections between: * Key practitioners' ideas about performance * The theatrical practices prompted by those ideas * The resulting signs which emerge in performance * The meanings and political consequences of those signs It provides an understandable theoretical framework for the study of theatre as a an signifying practice, and offers vivid explanations in clear, direct language. It opens up this fascinating field to a broad audience.

'Staging and Stage Décor: Perspectives on European Theater 1500-1950' is a compendium of essays by an international array of theater specialists. The Introduction provides an overview of theater décor and architecture from ancient Greece through the Renaissance and beyond, while the articles that follow explore a variety of topics such as the development of lighting techniques in early modern Italy, the staging of convent theater in Portugal, performance spaces at Versailles, the reconstruction of the Globe theater, and Shrovetide plays in Germany. This volume also offers insight into little-studied subjects such as the early productions of Brecht and the spread of Russian theater to Japan. The focus on performance and performance space across centuries and continents makes this a truly unique volume.