The Routledge Companion to Performance Practitioners collects the outstanding biographical and production overviews of key theatre practitioners first featured in the popular Routledge Performance Practitioners series of guidebooks. Each of the chapters is written by an expert on a particular figure, from Stanislavsky and Brecht to Laban and Decroux, and places their work in its social and historical context. Summaries and analyses of their key productions indicate how each practitioner's theoretical approaches to performance and the performer were manifested in practice. All 22 practitioners from the original series are represented, with this volume covering those born before the end of the First World War. This is the definitive first step for students, scholars and practitioners hoping to acquaint themselves with the leading names in performance, or deepen their knowledge of these seminal figures.

The first comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre from its origins, The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical offers both a historical account of musical theatre from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of key works and productions that illustrate its aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings.

A classic work of theatre history and criticism when first published, Arnold Aronson's formative study surveyed the phenomenon known as environmental theatre. Now updated in this richly illustrated second edition to reflect developments and practice since the 1980s, it offers readers a comprehensive study of the theatre practice which has evolved to become the dominant mode of much contemporary innovative performance. For most audiences, particularly in the Western tradition, theatre means going to a building in which seats face a stage on which actors perform a play. But there has always been a vital alternative that came to be known as environmental theatre. Whether in folk performances, street theatre, avant-garde performance, utopian architecture, Happenings, mass spectacles, or contemporary immersive theatre, the relationship of the spectator to the performance has been one in which the audience is surrounded or immersed in a shared space, in which the multiple events may be happening simultaneously, and in which the experience of theatrical space is visceral and often kinetic. This book examines the history of this phenomenon and looks at a range of contemporary practice. New chapters examine how the 'transformed spaces' of earlier work have become the interactive and immersive productions that characterize the work of companies such as Punchdrunk, dreamthinkspeak, Teatro da Vertigem, En Garde Arts, and The Industry, among others. Updated to take account of the burgeoning scholarship on the subject, The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography remains the authoritative account that illuminates present day theatre practice and its antecedents.

London West End revue constituted a particular response to mounting social, political, and cultural insecurities over Britain’s status and position at the beginning of the twentieth century. Insecurities regarding Britain’s colonial rule as exemplified in Ireland and elsewhere, were compounded by growing demands for social reform across the country — the call for women’s emancipation, the growth of the labour, and the trade union movements all created a climate of mounting disillusion. Revue correlated the immediacy of this uncertain world, through a fragmented vocabulary of performance placing satire, parody, social commentary, and critique at its core and found popularity in reflecting and responding to the variations of the new lived experiences. Multidisciplinary in its creation and realisation, revue incorporated dance, music, design, theatre, and film appropriating pre-modern theatre forms, techniques, and styles such as burlesque, music hall, pantomime, minstrelsy, and pierrot. Experimenting with narrative and expressions of speech, movement, design, and sound, revue displayed ambivalent representations that reflected social and cultural negotiations of previously essentialised identities in the modern world. Part of a wide and diverse cultural space at the beginning of the twentieth century it was acknowledged both by the intellectual avant-garde and the workers theatre movement not only as a reflexive action, but also as an evolving dynamic multidisciplinary performance model, which was highly influential across British culture. Revue displaced the romanticism of musical comedy by combining a satirical listless detachment with a defiant sophistication that articulated a fading British hegemonic sensibility, a cultural expression of a fragile and changing social and political order.