This work examines the way the clown has been used as a serious character by important playwrights and directors in twentieth-century theater. Experiments with Clown by Jean Cocteau, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Giorgio Strehler, Dario Fo, and Roberto Begnini are examined.

Slapstick comedy has a long and lively history from Greek Theatre to the present day. This book explores the ways in which comic pain and comic violence are performed within slapstick to make the audience laugh. It draws examples from theatre, television and film on both sides of the Atlantic.

The first political biography of Europe's leading radical playwright and winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature.