What does it mean to "fail" in performance? How might staging failure reveal theatre’s potential to expand our understanding of social, political and everyday reality? What can we learn from performances that expose and then celebrate their ability to fail? In Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure, Sara Jane Bailes begins with Samuel Beckett and considers failure in performance as a hopeful strategy. She examines the work of internationally acclaimed UK and US experimental theatre companies Forced Entertainment, Goat Island and Elevator Repair Service, addressing accepted narratives about artistic and cultural value in contemporary theatre-making. Her discussion draws on examples where misfire, the accidental and the intentionally amateur challenge our perception of skill and virtuosity in such diverse modes of performance as slapstick and punk. Detailed rehearsal and performance analysis are used to engage theory and contextualise practice, extending the dialogue between theatre arts, live art and postmodern dance. The result is a critical account of performance theatre that offers essential reading for practitioners, scholars and students of Performance, Theatre and Dance Studies.

The impact of naturalism, a literary approach invented by Zola and especially significant in the field of the novel through his American «disciples» Crane, Norris, and Dreiser, is well acknowledged and recognized. Not so well recognized, but equally important, is naturalistic theatre; this was a style that also originated with Zola, but its progeny was more international and its significance more radical and insurrectionary than in the less «spectacular» genre of fiction. The Theatre of Naturalism: Disappearing Act establishes the incipiently revolutionary context (between the Paris Communist Commune, crushed in 1871, and the successful Bolshevik insurrection of October 1917) - more or less foregrounded or in the background of works by Zola, Strindberg, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Synge, Shaw, and Tolstoy, focused especially on issues of class struggle and class war, as well as the prospects and possibilities of challenging the hegemony of the ruling orders. Especially in regard to later theatre, for instance the «hypernaturalism» of The Brig (Living Theatre) of Kenneth Brown, and of plays by Arnold Wesker and David Storey - Philip Beitchman frequently invokes themes culled from recent French theory, particularly Derrida's deconstruction and Baudrillard's ideas about simulation. The Theatre of Naturalism will open up new perspectives for anyone interested in theory or theatre, whether scholars or the wider theatre-loving or performing public.

Drawing on his experience in the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, a leading mediator and his co-author provide the first jargon-free guide to consensual strategies for resolving public disputes—indispensable to citizen activists and to business and government leaders.

A study of post–World War II plays set in “total institutions” such as hospitals, psychiatric wards, prisons, and military bases Plays of Impasse probes the structure and significance of the numerous and highly visible plays set in contemporary society’s dead ends—the hospitals, psychiatric wards, prisons, and military training camps so aptly described by Irving Goffman as “total institutions.” Carol Rosen shows how the setting in these plays tends to engulf and then to exclude the audience, turning an encompassing stage structure—a closed, controlling, absolute system—into a protagonist that overwhelms the characters. In discussions ranging from Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse to Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, she further maintains that the impasse of characters in reductive environments supplies a unifying image for post–World War II drama in general. This state of impasse pervades contemporary drama. Everyday activities and attempts to endure life in a parenthesis are vacated of traditional social or moral meaning onstage. The pain of this kind of survival, spatially fixed, is at the heart of Endgame, for example, an extreme instance of this mode of drama at the edge of existence. In plays such as Peter Nichols’s The National Health, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists, David Storey’s Home, Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow, Jean Genet’s Deathwatch, and David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, the splintered self, like the divided society, strives to endure against enormous, codified odds. Even in plays not depicting the rigidity of institutions, the contemporary dramatic mode is finally characterized by sparse, introspective action in a closed system—an onstage model of a world gone awry, a world at an impasse. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"We are not short of good playwrights in Britain, but I know of none with Nichols' power to put modern Britain on the stage and send the spectators away feeling more like members of the human race" (Irving Wardle, The Times). Among Nichols' most important plays are A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, The National Health and Forget-me-Not Lane. Writers-Files is an important series documenting the work of major dramatists of the last hundred years. Each volume contains a comprehensive checklist of all the writer's plays, with a detailed performance history, excerpted reviews and a selection of the writers' own comments on their work. "Methuen are to be congratulated on launching this series...extremely useful to theatre professionals as well as to students and teachers of drama" (David Bradby, Speech and Drama)

This study traces key developments in theatre’s engagement with mental health since the 1970s. It introduces and applies the concept of the ‘mental health play’ as accurate and timely in addressing the way mental distress and mental illness have been brought to the stage. The study argues that the theatre is a central calibrator for reflecting developments and tensions in, as well as attitudes towards, mental health care, and thus opens up a domain that still has stereotypes and myths attached to it. Theatre’s representations of mental distress inform and shape cultural production and vice versa. Mental health plays are central in encouraging and fostering conversations about mental health, and they thus intervene in ongoing debates. Due to its interdisciplinary approach, this study contributes to and extends existing research in multiple fields, including theatre and science, performance studies, and the medical humanities.