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Author: Vicky Angelaki
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474213189
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
In a context of financial crisis that has often produced a feeling of identity crisis for the individual, the theatre has provided a unifying forum, treating spectators as citizens. This book critically deals with representative plays and playwrights who have stood out in the UK and internationally in the post-recession era, delivering theatre that in the process of being truthful to the contemporary experience has also redefined theatrical form and content. Built around a series of case-studies of seminal contemporary plays exploring issues of social and political crisis, the volume is augmented by interviews with UK and international directors, artistic directors and the playwrights whose work is examined. As well as considering UK stage productions, Angelaki analyses European, North American and Australian productions, of post-2000 plays by writers including: Caryl Churchill, Mike Bartlett, Dennis Kelly, Simon Stephens, Martin Crimp, debbie tucker green, Duncan Macmillan, Nick Payne and Lucy Prebble. At the heart of the analysis and of the plays discussed is an appreciation of what interconnects artists and audiences, enabling the kind of mutual recognition that fosters the feeling of collectivity. As the book argues, this is the state whereby the theatre meets its social imperative by eradicating the distance between stage and spectator and creating a genuinely shared space of ideas and dialogue, taking on topics including the economy, materialism, debt culture, the environment, urban protest, social media and mental health. Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain demonstrates that such contemporary playwriting invests in and engenders moments of performative reciprocity and spirituality so as to present the audience with a cohesive collective experience.
Author: Vicky Angelaki
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474213189
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Get Book Here
Book Description
In a context of financial crisis that has often produced a feeling of identity crisis for the individual, the theatre has provided a unifying forum, treating spectators as citizens. This book critically deals with representative plays and playwrights who have stood out in the UK and internationally in the post-recession era, delivering theatre that in the process of being truthful to the contemporary experience has also redefined theatrical form and content. Built around a series of case-studies of seminal contemporary plays exploring issues of social and political crisis, the volume is augmented by interviews with UK and international directors, artistic directors and the playwrights whose work is examined. As well as considering UK stage productions, Angelaki analyses European, North American and Australian productions, of post-2000 plays by writers including: Caryl Churchill, Mike Bartlett, Dennis Kelly, Simon Stephens, Martin Crimp, debbie tucker green, Duncan Macmillan, Nick Payne and Lucy Prebble. At the heart of the analysis and of the plays discussed is an appreciation of what interconnects artists and audiences, enabling the kind of mutual recognition that fosters the feeling of collectivity. As the book argues, this is the state whereby the theatre meets its social imperative by eradicating the distance between stage and spectator and creating a genuinely shared space of ideas and dialogue, taking on topics including the economy, materialism, debt culture, the environment, urban protest, social media and mental health. Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain demonstrates that such contemporary playwriting invests in and engenders moments of performative reciprocity and spirituality so as to present the audience with a cohesive collective experience.
Author: Simon Stephens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474251617
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 66
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Book Description
I'll gather my breath. I'll walk out of my room. I'll know exactly where I'm going to go. The voice in my head tells me exactly where to go. In the opulent grandeur of a European city, a renowned singer abandons the opera house for the truth of the streets. A gorgeous prostitute. A tough-talking taxi driver. A global trader. A teenage dreamer. Everyone's looking for something. Simon Stephens's strange and beautiful play re-imagines Bizet's opera Carmen and the possibility of love in a fractured urban world. Carmen Disruption received its world premiere at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus, Hamburg, in March 2014 and its UK premiere at the Almeida Theatre on 10 April 2015.
Author: Alex Watson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350387290
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
This study offers a historicization of the 2010s in British theatre with a focus on the representation of systemic violence, exploring productions that engage with concerns of protest, climate crisis, neoliberalism, racism and gender-based violence. It offers a range of case studies from established and emergent playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Martin McDonagh, Anders Lustgarten, Lucy Kirkwood, Ella Hickson, Jasmine Lee-Jones, debbie tucker green, Zinnie Harris, and Travis Alabanza. Productions of their work in the 2010s are analysed through a framework of cultural theory, philosophy, and theatre and performance studies that offer insightful conceptions of violence and performativity. Central to this book is the belief that theatre has the ability to depict issues of systemic violence in thoughtful and valuable ways, drawing on the medium's specific relations between creatives, texts, spectatorship and audiences to mindfully engage participants in the most pressing societal and cultural concerns of their time.
Author: Jacqueline Bolton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474238653
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Simon Stephens is one of Europe's pre-eminent living playwrights. Since the beginning of his career in 1998, Stephens's award-winning plays have been translated into over twenty languages, been produced on four continents, and continue to feature prominently in the repertoires of European theatre. His original works have garnered numerous awards, with his stage adaptation of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time winning seven Olivier Awards and enjoying acclaim on Broadway. In the first book to provide a critical account of Stephens's work, Jacqueline Bolton draws upon the playwright's unpublished personal archives, as well as original interviews with directors and actors, to advance detailed analyses of his original plays and their productions, examine contemporary approaches to playwriting, and deliver insights into broader debates regarding text, performance and authorship. Caridad Svich addresses Stephens's theatrical output between 2014 and 2019, and essays from Mireia Aragay and James Hudson provide additional perspectives on international productions and the playwright's adaptive practices. Andrew Haydon's edited interviews with six of Stephens's key collaborators – Marianne Elliott, Sarah Frankcom, Sean Holmes, Ramin Gray, Katie Mitchell and Carrie Cracknell – further illuminate the work from a director's viewpoint. The Theatre of Simon Stephens situates the playwright's oeuvre within his embrace of aesthetics and working relations encountered in European theatre cultures, focusing in particular upon shifting attitudes towards the function of the playwright, the relationship between playwrights and directors, and the role of the audience in live performance. The Companion serves as a lively and engaging study of one of the most restlessly creative and important dramatists of our generation.
Author: Simon Stephens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474265863
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 82
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Book Description
I kept telling myself I wanted something more out of my life, something brighter. I had all these ideas in my head. Thing is, I had to go down so low just to try to lift my life up a little bit higher. Simon Stephens's exciting new adaptation of the twentieth-century classic Kasimir and Karoline is a dark, political and hilarious play that sets two young lovers in the throes of a break-up against the hypnotic whirl and bright lights of a funfair. The Funfair takes us on a ride through the loops, dips and highs of one night at a fairground, exploring a crisis of capitalism set to the soundtrack of a rock and roll love song. The play received its world premiere at Manchester's Home Theatre on 14 May 2015 and was the theatre's first-ever production.
Author: Simon Stephens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350235695
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
"Stephens writes dramas set in uncaring, uncompromising worlds, whose characters speak in a language at once naturalistic and yet artificially pared-down and whose uncertain attempts to assert their own identities sometimes lead to gratuitous and brutal acts of violence." - Financial Times A fifth collection of plays by one of Britain's most prolific contemporary playwrights, Simon Stephens, charting his work from 2011-2016, ranging from London's Royal Court Theatre, Manchester's Royal Exchange and Broadway. Wastwater (2011) "Metaphoric, allusive, and thoroughly disturbing in its evocation of suspicion and uncertainty, Wastwater is a thought-provoking play whose quiet intensity stays with you for days - its effect is like that of a ugly stone dropped into a pool, which results in constant ripples of dirty water lapping at your subconscious" (Aleks Sierz) Birdland (2014) "Mega-fame and limitless cash can turn a man into a monster, and Simon Stephens's new play excellently evokes its hero's spiritually shrunken world" (Michael Billington, Guardian) Blindsided (2014) “the dialogue has a rare quality of moment-by-moment intensity" (Telegraph) Song From Far Away (2015) "a meditative monologue – a searching study of impotently self-aware emotional insufficiency" (Independent) Heisenberg (2016) "Mr. Stephens ... is an uncannily subtle dramatist who never wears his depths on the surface ... he probes clichés until they fall apart, before reassembling them into solid but transformed shapes, reminding us why such clichés have become enduring elements of our collective mythology." (Ben Brantley, New York Times)
Author: Simon Stephens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350050881
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 72
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Book Description
I want, one more time, to be absolutely in the moment . . . I am going to try as hard as I can to not be a human being. A series of suggestions on desire, death and time. Nuclear War is the searing result of a groundbreaking and form-defying collaboration between Simon Stephens and the choreographer and movement director Imogen Knight, developed by Actors Touring Company. Introduced by the author, this edition also features a suite of lyrics written by Simon Stephens for a musical collaboration with Dutch singer-songwriter Wende Snijders, performed at Schouwburg Het Park in Westerdijk, The Netherlands, in March 2017. Nuclear War was published to coincide with the world premiere of the play at the Royal Court Theatre, Upstairs, London, in April 2017.
Author: Simon Stephens
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474251439
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
2014 was a spectacular year for playwright Simon Stephens, who has been described by the Independent as 'a brilliant writer of immense imagination' and by the Financial Times as having 'emerged in this millennium as an outstanding playwright'. 2014 was a year for Simon Stephens which featured a high number of world premiere plays including one for the theatre of his birthplace, Manchester's Royal Exchange, a major new play for the Downstairs space at London's Royal Court, and a Chekhov translation for London's Young Vic; a transfer of his West End hit The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to Broadway; and projects in Germany, a country which has seen Stephens lauded, in which he has worked extensively, and which has shaped much of his dramaturgy. In addition to these major projects, Stephens continued his role as a mentor of young writers, actors and directors, and continued to be one of the most frequent, outspoken and fiercely intelligent voices of the playwriting scene. In an exceptionally honest account, Simon Stephens opens up to us, through daily diary entries, his working practices, his inner-most thoughts, his philosophy on theatre, the arts and politics, and his feelings and reactions to specific projects he has worked on. Through this, we are given unprecedented access to the mind of one of the most important playwrights of the twenty-first century.
Author: Lulu Raczka
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350414042
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
This may be the biggest But it is far from the first sacrifice I've made for this house And I'm sure it won't be the last But don't fret. I'm ready. England, 1640. A war is brewing. Rumours are flying. A household is in crisis... and the Devil's having some fun. For Lady Elizabeth, nothing is more important than protecting her family's legacy and their ancestral home. When that comes under threat, she elicits the help of Agnes, a young servant suspected of witchcraft. But Agnes has dark dreams of her own for this house. Women, Beware the Devil is a deadly new play of treachery and trickery by The Sunday Times Playwriting Award-winner Lulu Raczka, author of Antigone and Nothing. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at the Almeida Theatre, London, in February 2023.
Author: Sarah Grochala
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350090743
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
Since the late 1990s, Rupert Goold has garnered a reputation as one of the UK's most exciting and provocative theatre directors. His exhilarating, risk-taking productions of both classic texts and new plays have travelled from regional stages to the National Theatre, the West End, Broadway and beyond. Through his artistic directorship of Northampton's Royal & Derngate, the touring theatre company Headlong and London's Almeida Theatre, he has radically transformed, not only the companies themselves, but the landscape of British theatre. This is the first book to survey and analyse the full range of Goold's work to date and is a vital resource for students, scholars and fans of his work. Based on extensive interviews with Goold and some of the playwrights, designers, actors and other creatives who have collaborated with him, The Theatre of Rupert Goold provides an account of Goold's work from the beginnings of his career to the present day, offering a backstage view of the creative processes behind some of his most successful productions including: Paradise Lost, Faustus (Royal & Derngate); Macbeth (Chichester Festival Theatre); The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet (RSC); Six Characters in Search of an Author, ENRON (Headlong); Time and the Conways (National Theatre); Charles III and Ink (Almeida). The Theatre of Rupert Goold is an accessible and fascinating guide to Goold's approach to making theatre, an approach that asks provocative questions of the modern world in the most theatrical ways imaginable.
