Prominent Scandinavian authors from the end of the 19th century struggled with the classical themes of myth and religion, and the modern concepts of Freud and Darwin. The reconciliation of these counterpoints in the work of Norway's Henrik Ibsen, Sweden's August Stringbberg and Denmark's J P Jacobsen, forms the core of this analysis. Incorporating Diderot's definition of theatricality in painting, this study shows the tension between the image and a concomitant distrust of its reality in three of Ibsen's plays: A Doll's House; Ghosts; and The Wild Duck. Investigating the mythical patterns beneath the text, Osterud suggests that Ibsen's naturalist drama is two-fold: a clash between the sacred (myth, allegory and ritual performance) and avant-garde (utopian visions and transgressive acts). Probing Strindberg's 'The Black Glove', the book demonstrates that this challenging re-telling of the Nativity story creates a modern version of a medieval ritual drama, whereby the logic of place overrides the logic of chronology in the traditional theatre of naturalism. Jacobsen's novella 'Mogens' was said to introduce naturalism into Denmark. Osterud confronts the usual query concerning the balance between Jacobsen as a Darwinist scholar and as a fiction writer. He concludes that, rather than seeing nature as an explanation of the author's narrative, nature is an unsolved riddle to which religion and Dawinism give competing answers, creating a hermeneutic dialogue within the text.

Offstage Space, Narrative, and the Theatre of the Imagination is a study of extrascenic space and how playwrights have used narrative as an alternative to conventional scenic enactment. The book covers the work of writers as diverse as Euripides, Plautus, Shakespeare, Susan Glaspell, Gertrude Stein, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Brian Friel, and Thomas Bernhard. William Gruber offers a wide-ranging overview of the dramaturgical choices dramatists make when they substitute imagined events for perceptual ones.

This book is the first full-length monograph to focus on Punchdrunk, the internationally-renowned theatre company known for its pioneering approach to immersive theatre. With its promises of empowerment, freedom and experiential joy, immersive theatre continues to gain popularity - this study brings necessary critical analysis to this rapidly developing field. What exactly do we mean by audience “immersion”? How might immersion in a Punchdrunk production be described, theorised, situated or politicised? What is valued in immersive experience - and are these values explicit or implied? Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience draws on rehearsals, performances and archival access to Punchdrunk, providing new critical perspectives from cognitive studies, philosophical aesthetics, narrative theory and computer games. Its discussion of immersion is structured around three themes: interactivity and game; story and narrative; environment and space. Providing a rigorous theoretical toolkit to think further about the form’s capabilities, and offering a unique set of approaches, this book will be of significance to scholars, students, artists and spectators.

How real and imagined theatrical spaces and the relationships between them evoke meaning

The Cambridge Companion to Narrative provides a unique and valuable overview of current approaches to narrative study. An international team of experts explores ideas of storytelling and methods of narrative analysis as they have emerged across diverse traditions of inquiry and in connection with a variety of media, from film and television, to storytelling in the 'real-life' contexts of face-to-face interaction, to literary fiction. Each chapter presents a survey of scholarly approaches to topics such as character, dialogue, genre or language, shows how those approaches can be brought to bear on a relatively well-known illustrative example, and indicates directions for further research. Featuring a chapter reviewing definitions of narrative, a glossary of key terms and a comprehensive index, this is an essential resource for both students and scholars in many fields, including language and literature, composition and rhetoric, creative writing, jurisprudence, communication and media studies, and the social sciences.

Theatre's Heterotopias analyses performance space, using the concept of heterotopia: a location that, when apparent in performance, refers to the actual world, thus activating performance in its culture. Case studies cover site-specific and multimedia performance, and selected productions from the National Theatre of Scotland and the Globe Theatre.

space.time.narrative calls for a paradigmatic shift of focus. It puts forward a unique approach, breaking down traditional barriers and offering a wide-ranging theoretical context, redefining and expanding the parameters and the dynamics of the exhibition-format in terms of an open, narrative environment, which at its roots displays deep similarities with performance on stage, or installation in urban and rural space.