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10 results

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945
  • Edited by Jen Harvie, Dan Rebellato
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2024
    Print publication:
    29 February 2024
  • British theatre underwent a vast transformation and expansion in the decades after World War II. This Companion explores the historical, political, and social contexts and conditions that not only allowed it to expand but, crucially, shaped it. Resisting a critical tendency to focus on plays alone, the collection expands understanding of British theatre by illuminating contexts such as funding, unionisation, devolution, immigration, and changes to legislation. Divided into four parts, it guides readers through changing attitudes to theatre-making (acting, directing, writing), theatre sectors (West End, subsidised, Fringe), theatre communities (audiences, Black theatre, queer theatre), and theatre's relationship to the state (government, infrastructure, nationhood). Supplemented by a valuable Chronology and Guide to Further Reading, it presents up-to-date approaches informed by critical race theory, queer studies, audience studies, and archival research to demonstrate important new ways of conceptualising post-war British theatre's history, practices and potential futures.

  • Chapter 6 - International Theatre Festivals in the UK

  • from Part II - International Festivals Around the Globe
  • Edited by Ric Knowles, University of Guelph, Ontario
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to International Theatre Festivals
    Published online:
    22 May 2020
    Print publication:
    11 June 2020, pp 101-117

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on the UK’s biggest and most influential festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (EFF), analyzing its benefits and risks. It considers some of the EFF’s advantages: the opportunities for artists to do a three-week run, to build relationships with other artists, and take part in an international hothouse for seeing work, learning, and developing. The chapter also considers the EFF’s pernicious effects: its unregulated labour conditions; environmental impact; lack of integration into Edinburgh’s year-round performance culture; economic and cultural exclusiveness; competitive individualization of success and failure; and pressures on mental health. It ends by proposing ways the EFF and its emulators could improve their social impact by investing in infrastructure, Edinburgh’s performance culture, and performance makers; actively supporting artists’ mental health; offering structural mentoring support; introducing regulations that protect workers; actively supporting more diverse makers, critics and audiences; and advocating for collaboration over competition. The chapter advocates for a vision of the fringe as, not a neo-liberal capitalist market, but a civic sphere.

  • DV8's Can We Afford This: The Cost of Devising on Site for Global Markets

  • Jen Harvie
  • Journal:
    Theatre Research International / Volume 27 / Issue 1 / March 2002
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    14 February 2002, pp. 68-77
    Print publication:
    March 2002

  • London-based DV8 Physical Theatre makes company-devised hybrid dance/theatre performance which consistently is socially committed, exploring the power dynamics of different forms of social inclusion and exclusion. The company's 2000 show, Can We Afford This, focused particularly on social prejudice about ‘the body beautiful’. Using seventeen dancers of different physical and technical abilities, ages, genders, and sizes, the show both critiqued prejudices about what constitutes the body beautiful and posited other, more inclusive, images of beautiful bodies. This analysis considers how the show's argument was focused and enhanced in its original context of devising and production (Sydney, Australia, in its Olympic and Paralympic year of 2000) and, in contrast, was dissipated and generalized when it moved out of that context to tour to the international markets of London and Hong Kong.