Elaine Aston

At last an accessible and intelligent introduction to the energising and challenging relationship between feminism and theatre. In this clear and enlightening book, Aston discusses wide-ranging theoretical topics and provides case studies including: Feminism and theatre history `M/Othering the self': French feminist theory and theatre Black women: shaping feminist theatre Performing gender: a materialist practice * Colonial landscapes Feminist thought is changing the way theatre is taught and practised. An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre is compulsory reading for anyone who requires a precise, insightful and up-to-date guide to this dynamic field of study.

Caryl Churchill's plays are internationally performed, studied and acclaimed by practitioners, theatre scholars, critics and audiences alike. With fierce imagination the plays dramatise the anxieties and terrors of contemporary life. This Companion presents new scholarship on Churchill's extraordinary and ground-breaking work. Chapters explore a cluster of major plays in relation to pressing social topics – ecological crisis, sexual politics, revolution, terror and selfhood – providing close readings of texts in their theatrical, theoretical and historical contexts. These topic-based essays are intercalated with other essays that delve into Churchill's major collaborations, her performance innovations and her influences on a new generation of playwrights. Contributors explore Churchill's career-long experimentation – her risk-taking that has reinvigorated the stage, both formally and politically. Providing a new critical platform for the study of a theatrical career that spans almost fifty years, the Companion pays fresh attention to Churchill's poetic precision, dark wit and inexhaustible creativity.

Royal Court: International is the first full-length study of the Royal Court Theatre's International Department. It charts the engagement of the UK's premiere theatre for new writing with an internationalist agenda and takes readers inside the process developed by the Court for the workshop projects it has undertaken in different parts of the world since the late 1990s. Covering the theatre's unique programming of international plays and seasons, it highlights new writing from different parts of the globe, including France, Spain, Germany, Russia, Eastern Europe, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Columbia, Iran, the Near East, North Africa, Nigeria and India. First-hand accounts of the work appear in contributions from Stephen Daldry, Elyse Dodgson and Vicky Featherstone, and in interviews with Marcos Barbosa (Brazil), Anupama Chandrasekhar (India), Dominic Cooke, Sasha Dugdale, Marius von Mayenburg (Germany), Mark Ravenhill and Indhu Rubasingham.

This Companion, first published in 2000, addresses the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century. The chapters explore the historical and theatrical contexts in which women have written for the theatre and examine the work of individual playwrights. A chronological section on playwriting from the 1920s to the 1970s is followed by chapters which raise issues of nationality and identity. Later sections question accepted notions of the canon and include chapters on non-mainstream writing, including black and lesbian performance. Each section is introduced by the editors, who provide a narrative overview of a century of women's drama and a thorough chronology of playwriting, set in political context. The collection includes essays on the individual writers Caryl Churchill, Sarah Daniels, Pam Gems and Timberlake Wertenbaker as well as extensive documentation of contemporary playwriting in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, including figures such as Liz Lochhead and Anne Devlin.

Bobby Baker is one of most widely acclaimed and popular performance artists working today. Over the course of a thirty-five-year career she has toured the globe with her wildly stimulating explorations of 'Daily Life' and has been extensively written about and studied. This fully-illustrated book brings together for the first time an account of Baker's career as an artist – from her first sculptures at Central St Martins in the early 1970s to her most recent work, 'How to Live' and 'Diary Drawings' – with critical commentary by reviewers and academic practitioners. It includes: - Bobby Baker's own 'Chronicle' of her work as artist and performer - illuminating critical writing about Baker's shows - transcripts of Baker's performances and other original materials reproduced here for the first time - significant new essays by Michele Barrett and Griselda Pollock - a new interview with Bobby Baker by Adrian Heathfield. Under the guiding editorial hand of distinguished cultural theorist Michèle Barrett, this volume is an essential text for students interested in performance, gender, and visual culture, and a hugely absorbing and accessible account of Baker's work.

This is a timely contribution to the debates regarding future possibilities for feminism, theater, and performance. An excellent, cross-generational mix of theater scholars (Sue-Ellen Case, Dee Heddon, Meenakshi Ponnuswami, Janelle Reinelt, Joanne Tompkins) and practitioners (Anna Furse, Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, SuAndi) engage in lively, cutting-edge critical debates on topics that include citizenship, autobiography, cultural heritage and political agency as circulating in contemporary feminism and performance.

"Innovative and engaging, "A Good Night Out for the Girls" looks beyond the confines of the political theatre paradigm that has been the mainstay of feminist theatre interests and theorising. In a departure from the many feminist theorists and philosophers in the last two to three decades who have sought to define and describe the sort of ideal, utopian feminism 'we need', this book looks to the field of theatre and performance to investigate the sort of flawed, sometimes confused and contradictory, but nonetheless lived feminisms that a significant number of women have actually got. Moving across the boundaries of mainstream and experimental circuits, from the affective pleasures of commercially successful shows such as"Calendar Girls" and "Mamma Mia!" to the feminist possibilities of new burlesque and stand-up, the book offers a lucid and accessible account of popular feminisms in contemporary theatre and performance."--