This book explores Kneehigh Theatre Company’s notions of “Brand Kneehigh”, discussing how their theatrical style enjoyed local and global appeal, in relation to theories of globalisation, localisation and cultural exchange. It defines Kneehigh’s theatrical brand, indicating Cornish cultural identity as a core component in conjunction with international influences. By looking at the history of this company, the book’s analysis of key productions reflects on qualities attributed to “Brand Kneehigh” and considers the ‘local’ and ‘global’ nature of their work. The selection and review of productions examined here reveals the changes and reinventions Kneehigh have undergone to incorporate shifting interests and socioeconomic engagements. This book explores Kneehigh’s ambitions to establish themselves as a company delivering material that is ‘popular’ in appeal, meeting the needs of a Cornish (local) community and an international (global) audience. However, tensions working between local and global interests are also exposed, with an investigation into Kneehigh’s own cited solution: their self-created performance space, the Asylum.

This book explores Kneehigh Theatre Company's notions of "Brand Kneehigh", discussing how their theatrical style enjoyed local and global appeal, in relation to theories of globalisation, localisation and cultural exchange. It defines Kneehigh's theatrical brand, indicating Cornish cultural identity as a core component in conjunction with international influences. By looking at the history of this company, the book's analysis of key productions reflects on qualities attributed to "Brand Kneehigh" and considers the 'local' and 'global' nature of their work. The selection and review of productions examined here reveals the changes and reinventions Kneehigh have undergone to incorporate shifting interests and socioeconomic engagements. This book explores Kneehigh's ambitions to establish themselves as a company delivering material that is 'popular' in appeal, meeting the needs of a Cornish (local) community and an international (global) audience. However, tensions working between local and global interests are also exposed, with an investigation into Kneehigh's own cited solution: their self-created performance space, the Asylum.

This is a love story but not as you know it. Should an academic study be framed in this way? Love seems an unlikely bedfellow for critical thinking. Watching an Emma Rice production and being in her rehearsal room you feel the love: a warm and generous welcoming in; a joyful celebration of the theatrical exchange. What produces this pleasurable affect and how might we consider its political potential? This Element positions Emma's theatre-making, a body of work spanning three decades, as feminist acts of love. Drawing on fieldwork research her practice is viewed through the critical lenses of feminisms and affect to consider its contextual tensions, its ethics of affirmation, staging of femininities and contribution to queer worldmaking. Mapping her work from this perspective brings to light her important contribution to UK feminist theatre; its love activism offering an emergent strategy for change.

This book examines the socio-political and theatrical conditions that heralded the shift from the margins to the mainstream for black British Writers, through analysis of the social issues portrayed in plays by Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams, and Bola Agbaje.

Panoramically divided by the Danube, Budapest is one of Europe's most beautiful capitals. A grand metropolis of appealingly peeling facades, ornate bathhouses and classic coffeehouses, Hungary's idiosyncratic capital holds plenty to amuse the jaded Eurotraveller. As well as covering the city's art, sights and museums, this guide unearths the best places to eat, drink, sleep and shop.

Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns – his life, loves, celebrity and astonishing search for the truth about his parents. When he is four years old, Jack travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, to several North Sea ports in search of his father, William Burns. From Copenhagen to Amsterdam, William, a brilliant church organist and profligate womanizer, is always a step ahead – has always just departed in a wave of scandal, with a new tattoo somewhere on his body from a local master or “scratcher.” Alice and Jack abandon their quest, and Jack is educated at schools in Canada and New England – including, tellingly, a girls’ school in Toronto. His real education consists of his relationships with older women – from Emma Oastler, who initiates him into erotic life, to the girls of St. Hilda’s, with whom he first appears on stage, to the abusive Mrs. Machado, whom he first meets when sent to learn wrestling at a local gym. Too much happens in this expansive, eventful novel to possibly summarize it all. Emma and Jack move to Los Angeles, where Emma becomes a successful novelist and Jack a promising actor. A host of eccentric minor characters memorably come and go, including Jack’s hilariously confused teacher the Wurtz; Michelle Maher, the girlfriend he will never forget; and a precocious child Jack finds in the back of an Audi in a restaurant parking lot. We learn about tattoo addiction and movie cross-dressing, “sleeping in the needles” and the cure for cauliflower ears. And John Irving renders his protagonist’s unusual rise through Hollywood with the same vivid detail and range of emotions he gives to the organ music Jack hears as a child in European churches. This is an absorbing and moving book about obsession and loss, truth and storytelling, the signs we carry on us and inside us, the traces we can’t get rid of. Jack has always lived in the shadow of his absent father. But as he grows older – and when his mother dies – he starts to doubt the portrait of his father’s character she painted for him when he was a child. This is the cue for a second journey around Europe in search of his father, from Edinburgh to Switzerland, towards a conclusion of great emotional force. A melancholy tale of deception, Until I Find You is also a swaggering comic novel, a giant tapestry of life’s hopes. It is a masterpiece to compare with John Irving’s great novels, and restates the author’ s claim to be considered the most glorious, comic, moving novelist at work today.

An exploration of the fast food industry in the United States, from its roots to its long-term consequences.