What sort of thing is a theatre image? How is it produced and consumed? Who is responsible for the images? Why do the images stay with us when the performance is over? How do we learn to speak of what we see and imagine? And how do we relate what we experience in the theatre to what we share with each other of the world? The Illuminated Theatre is a book about theatricality and spectatorship in the early twenty-first century. In a wide-ranging analysis that draws upon theatrical, visual and philosophical approaches, it asks how spectators and audiences negotiate the complexities and challenges of contemporary experimental performance arts. It is also a book about how European practitioners working across a range of forms, from theatre and performance to dance, opera, film and visual arts, use images to address the complexities of the times in which their work takes place. Through detailed and impassioned accounts of works by artists such as Dickie Beau, Wendy Houstoun, Alvis Hermanis and Romeo Castellucci, along with close readings of experimental theoretical and art writing from Gillian Rose to T.J. Clark and Marie-José Mondzain, the book outlines the historical, aesthetic and political dimensions of a contemporary ‘suffering of images.’

The Art of Light on Stage is the first history of theatre lighting design to bring the story right up to date. In this extraordinary volume, award-winning designer Yaron Abulafia explores the poetics of light, charting the evolution of lighting design against the background of contemporary performance. The book looks at the material and the conceptual; the technological and the transcendental. Never before has theatre design been so vividly and excitingly illuminated. The book examines the evolution of lighting design in contemporary theatre through an exploration of two fundamental issues: 1. What gave rise to the new directions in lighting design in contemporary theatre? 2. How can these new directions be viewed within the context of lighting design history? The study then focuses on the phenomenological and semiotic aspects of the medium for light – the role of light as a performer, as the medium of visual perception and as a stimulus for imaginative representations – in selected contemporary theatre productions by Robert Wilson, Romeo Castellucci, Heiner Goebbels, Jossi Wieler and David Zinder. This ground-breaking book will be required reading for anyone concerned with the future of performance.

What sort of thing is a theatre image? How is it produced and consumed? Who is responsible for the images? Why do the images stay with us when the performance is over? How do we learn to speak of what we see and imagine? And how do we relate what we experience in the theatre to what we share with each other of the world? The Illuminated Theatre is a book about theatricality and spectatorship in the early twenty-first century. In a wide-ranging analysis that draws upon theatrical, visual and philosophical approaches, it asks how spectators and audiences negotiate the complexities and challenges of contemporary experimental performance arts. It is also a book about how European practitioners working across a range of forms, from theatre and performance to dance, opera, film and visual arts, use images to address the complexities of the times in which their work takes place. Through detailed and impassioned accounts of works by artists such as Dickie Beau, Wendy Houstoun, Alvis Hermanis and Romeo Castellucci, along with close readings of experimental theoretical and art writing from Gillian Rose to T.J. Clark and Marie-José Mondzain, the book outlines the historical, aesthetic and political dimensions of a contemporary ‘suffering of images.’

'One of the best books for 2023' Cosmopolitan Against a rising tide of fundamentalism in India, a mother and daughter lose the most important man in their lives. Shashi, fifty-something and suddenly widowed, tries to contact her only daughter, Tara, to break the news, but cannot reach her. As Shashi confronts her loss, she finds, amidst grief, unexpected new freedoms. Meanwhile, Tara, a spoiled but brilliant university student, has retreated to Dharamsala to deal with the fall out from an ill-advised relationship. Her self-imposed solitude makes contact near impossible, so by the time she learns of her loss, the funeral is already over. Without the man that bound them, Shashi and Tara struggle to reconcile. But his absence also makes them a target for an emerging religious group determined to put women in their place, and Shashi and Tara individually prepare to defend their independence. If mother and daughter are to come together, they must find a way to understand both their new world, and each other. But can you ever emerge from an eclipse unscathed? 'Lyrical throughout yet so deceptively easygoing... an extraordinary novel' André Aciman 'Powerful, evocative and accomplished – it's hard to believe The Illuminated is a debut' Alice Ryan 'Gives voice to a new generation' BBC Radio 4