The British `New Wave' of dramatists, actors and directors in the late 1950s and 1960s created a defining moment in post-war theatre. British Realist Theatre is an accessible introduction to the New Wave, providing the historical and cultural background which is essential for a true understanding of this influential and dynamic era. Drawing upon contemporary sources as well as the plays themselves, Stephen Lacey considers the plays' influences, their impact and their critical receptions. The playwrights discussed include: * Edward Bond * John Osborne * Shelagh Delaney * Harold Pinter

The British `New Wave' of dramatists, actors and directors in the late 1950s and 1960s created a defining moment in post-war theatre. British Realist Theatre is an accessible introduction to the New Wave, providing the historical and cultural background which is essential for a true understanding of this influential and dynamic era. Drawing upon contemporary sources as well as the plays themselves, Stephen Lacey considers the plays' influences, their impact and their critical receptions. The playwrights discussed include: * Edward Bond * John Osborne * Shelagh Delaney * Harold Pinter

The new theatre was regarded as a realist theatre, dramatising the social experience of a working-class under threat from the new prosperity. However, despite the currency of the term, 'realism' in the period is imperfectly understood and often crudely applied.

This is the first book of its kind to look across disciplines at this vital aspect of British art, literature and culture. It brings the various intertwined histories of social realism into historical perspective, and argues that this sometimes marginalized genre is still an important reference point for creativity in Britain.

Realism in theatre is traditionally defined as a mere seed of modernism, a crude attempt to reproduce an exact copy of reality on stage. Art, Vision & Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama redefines realism as a complex and under-examined form of visual modernism, one that positioned theatre at the crux of the encounter between consciousness and the visible world. Tracing a historical continuum of "acts of seeing" on the realist stage, Holzapfel demonstrates how theatre participated in modernity’s aggressive interrogation of vision’s residence in the human body. New findings by scientists and philosophers—such as Diderot, Goethe, Müller, Helmholtz, and Galton—exposed how the visible world is experienced and framed by the unstable relativism of the physiological body rather than the fixed idealism of the mind. Realist artists across media paradoxically embraced this paradigm shift by focusing on the embodied observer. Drawing from extensive archival research, Holzapfel conducts close readings of iconic dramas and their productions—including Scribe’s The Glass of Water, Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Ibsen’s A Doll House, Strindberg’s The Father, and Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise—alongside analyses of artwork by major painters and photographers—such as Chardin, Nadar, Millais, Rejlander, and Liebermann. In a radical challenge to existing criticism, Holzapfel argues that realism in theatre was never the attempt to reproduce an exact copy of the seen world but rather the struggle to make visible the act of seeing.

Examines debates central to postwar British culture, showing the pressures of reconstruction and the mutual implication of war and peace.

British Social Realism details and explores the rich tradition of social realism in British cinema from its beginnings in the documentary movement of the 1930s to its more stylistically eclectic and generically hybrid contemporary forms. Samantha Lay examines the movements, moments and cycles of British social realist texts through a detailed consideration of practice, politics, form, style and content, using case studies of key texts including Listen to Britain, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Letter to Brezhnev, and Nil by Mouth. In discussing the work of many prominent realist filmmakers, the book considers the challenges for social realist film practice and production in Britain, now and in the future.

The 'in-yer-face' plays of the mid-1990s announced a new generation shaped by Thatcherism and defined by antipathy to social ideals and political involvement. They have generated thoughtful and lively responses from playwrights. The resulting dialogue has brought politics to the forefront of British drama and reinvigorated British theatre.

The Reader's Guide to British History is the essential source to secondary material on British history. This resource contains over 1,000 A-Z entries on the history of Britain, from ancient and Roman Britain to the present day. Each entry lists 6-12 of the best-known books on the subject, then discusses those works in an essay of 800 to 1,000 words prepared by an expert in the field. The essays provide advice on the range and depth of coverage as well as the emphasis and point of view espoused in each publication.

This book tackles questions about the reception and production of translated and untranslated Russian theatre in post-WW2 Britain: why in British minds is Russia viewed almost as a run-of-the-mill production of a Chekhov play. Is it because Chekhov is so dominant in British theatre culture? What about all those other Russian writers? Many of them are very different from Chekhov. A key question was formulated, thanks to a review by Susannah Clapp of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country: have the British staged a ‘Russia of the theatrical mind’?