Grotesque features have been among the chief characteristics of drama in English since the 1990s. This new book examines the varieties of the grotesque in the work of some of the most original playwrights of the last three decades (including Enda Walsh, Philip Ridley, Tim Crouch and Suzan-Lori Parks), focusing in particular on ethical and political issues that arise from the use of the grotesque.

This Handbook offers a multiform sweep of theoretical, historical, practical and personal glimpses into a landscape roughly characterised as contemporary Irish theatre and performance. Bringing together a spectrum of voices and sensibilities in each of its four sections — Histories, Close-ups, Interfaces, and Reflections — it casts its gaze back across the past sixty years or so to recall, analyse, and assess the recent legacy of theatre and performance on this island. While offering information, overviews and reflections of current thought across its chapters, this book will serve most handily as food for thought and a springboard for curiosity. Offering something different in its mix of themes and perspectives, so that previously unexamined surfaces might come to light individually and in conjunction with other essays, it is a wide-ranging and indispensable resource in Irish theatre studies.

Contemporary Farce on the Global Stage provides audiences and practitioners a detailed survey of how the genre of farce has evolved in the 21st century. Often dismissed as frivolous, farce speaks a universal language, with the power to incisively interrogate our world through laughter. Unlike farces of the past, where a successful resolution was a given and we could laugh uproariously at adulterous behaviour, farce no longer guarantees an audience a happy ending where everything works out. Contemporary farce is no longer ‘diverting us’ with laughter. It is reflecting the fractured world around us. With a foreword by award-winning playwright Ken Ludwig, the book introduces readers to the Mechanics of Farce, and the ‘Four Ps,’ which are key elements for understanding, appreciating, and exploring the form. The Five Doors to Contemporary Farce identify five major categories into which farces fall. Behind each door are a wide selection of plays, modern and contemporary examples from all over the world, written by a diverse group of playwrights who traverse gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Supplementing each section are comments, observations, and reflections from award-winning playwrights, directors, actors, designers, dramaturgs, and scholars. Designed specifically to give theatre-makers a rounded understanding that will underpin their own productions, this book will also be of use to theatre and performance studies students.

Anthony Neilson is one of the most exciting and challenging voices in contemporary British theatre. For more than two decades he has been in the vanguard of new writing and has acquired a formidable reputation for innovation and experimentation. His major stage plays include Penetrator, The Censor, Stitching, Realism, Unreachable and his 2004 masterpiece The Wonderful World of Dissocia, arguably one of the finest Scottish plays of the new millennium. This volume provides the first full-length study of Neilson's plays and his innovative rehearsal methodology. As well as providing a detailed account of each play Trish Reid includes an extensive new interview with Neilson and additional contributions from important scholars and commentators in the field. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to develop a better understanding of one of British theatre's most original artists.

Fifty Key Irish Plays charts the progression of modern Irish drama from Dion Boucicault’s entry on to the global stage of the Irish diaspora to the contemporary dramas created by the experiences of the New Irish. Each chapter provides a brief plot outline along with informed analysis and, alert to the cultural and critical context of each play, an account of the key roles that they played in the developing story of Irish drama. While the core of the collection is based on the critical canon, including work by J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Teresa Deevy, and Brian Friel, plays such as Tom Mac Intyre’s The Great Hunger and ANU Productions’ Laundry, which illuminate routes away from the mainstream, are also included. With a focus on the development of form as well as theme, the collection guides the reader to an informed overview of Irish theatre via succinct and insightful essays by an international team of academics. This invaluable collection will be of particular interest to undergraduate students of theatre and performance studies and to lay readers looking to expand their appreciation of Irish drama.

Based on extensive archival research, this open access book examines the poetics and politics of the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) over the first three decades of its existence, discussing some of its remarkable productions in the comparative contexts of avant-garde theatre, Hollywood cinema, popular culture, and the development of Irish-language theatre, respectively. The overarching objective is to consider the output of the Gate in terms of cultural convergence the dynamics of exchange, interaction, and acculturation that reveal the workings of transnational infrastructures.

This first book-length exploration of geographical engagement with puppets examines constructions of puppets in contemporary popular British culture and considers the various ways in which puppets and humans (not just puppeteers) are unified in diverse cultural media. Organised around themes of metaphorical, performative and transformational puppets, the work draws out how puppets are used in diverse cultural media (fiction, music, television, film and theatre), how they are constructed through those uses, and to what effect. Both puppets as generalised forms (bodily, relational or ideational) and specific puppet characters (Mr Punch, Pinocchio) are explored. Building upon existing associations between puppets and the grotesque, the volume extends understandings of the puppet by elaborating borderscaping strategies through which puppets are constructed and an alternative perspective on the uncanniness of puppets. Geographically, it unearths distinct puppet spatialities, identifies the socially critical potential of puppets, rescales geo/bio-politics at the interpersonal level, and highlights the potential of puppets within posthuman debates about the status of the human. This work will be of interest to anyone fascinated by puppets, as well as those in fields such as geography, anthropology, cultural and media studies, and those interested in the grotesque, posthumanism and/or non-representational scholarship.

"Fractured Fifties: The Cinematic Periodization and Evolution of a Decade presents a two-pronged argument that (1) cinema has helped define the 1950s by contributing in considerable and meaningful ways to the process of periodization and thus a general conception of the decade, and (2) cinema has fractured our sense of the 1950s. It challenges a reductive and fairly cohesive set of tropes with a complex amalgam of representations that also intervene in debates about historiography, historicity, cultural memory, mediation, nostalgia, and periodization. In other words, cinema has fractured our sense of the 1950s, yielding in the process a series of 1950s types or kinds, (e.g., The Leave it to Beaver Fifties, The Jukebox Fifties, and The Cold War Fifties, The Retromediated Fifties, etc.) as well as a wealth of critical insights into myriad pasts, presents, and the evolving relationships between them"--

The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 offers readers a large and fully annotated collection of primary source texts addressing the grotesque in the English Renaissance. The sources are arranged chronologically in 120 numbered items with accompanying explanatory Notes. Each Note provides clarification of difficult terms in the source text, locating it in the context of early modern English and Continental discourses on the grotesque. The Notes also direct readers to further English sources and relevant modern scholarship. This volume includes a detailed introduction surveying the vocabulary, form and meaning of the grotesque from its arrival as a word, concept and aesthetic in 16th century England to its early maturity in the 18th century. The Introduction, Items and Notes, complemented by illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography, provide an unprecedented view of the evolving complexity and diversity of the early modern English grotesque. While giving due credit to Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin as masters of grotesque theory, this ground-breaking book aims to provoke new, evidence-based approaches to understanding the specifically English grotesque. The textual archive from 1500-1700 is a rich and intriguing record that offers much to interested readers and researchers in the fields of literary studies, theatre studies and art history.

The collaborative monograph will commemorate the centenary of the Prague English Studies, officially inaugurated in 1912 by the appointment of Vilém Mathesius, the founder of Prague Linguistic Circle and the first Professor of English Language and Literature at Charles University. Apart from reassessing the work of major representatives (Mathesius, Vančura and others) and reviewing important developments in literature-oriented Prague English Studies with respect to the Prague Structuralism, it will focus on the methodological problems of the discipline related to the transformation of humanistic as well as modern philologies, searching for the links between two historically distinct interdisciplinary projects: humanist philology and structuralist semiology. Following Paul de Man, this link can be identified as the problem of rhetoric – its liminal position between grammar and logic, structure and meaning, and its concern with performativity and value of language. Reassessment of this problem appears crucial for understanding the dynamics of present transformation of philologies and structuralist methodologies which will be discussed in the concluding section. The other crucial methodological problem is that of the methodology of literary history. Although the representatives of the Prague English studies managed to overcome the rigidity of synchronic approaches their treatment of dynamic structures is still considerably indebted to traditional notions of function and value. The book is divided into two sections: the first attempts to reassess the significance of the legacy of Mathesius (in literary theory, history and theory of translation) and his followers (especially Zdeněk Vančura and Jaroslav Hornát), the second explores diverse contexts and implications of the Prague Structuralism, from political aspects of Russian formalist theories, via the aesthetics of the grotesque to structuralist psychoanalysis and recent textual genetics.