Examining the ways in which national theatres have formed and evolved over time, this new collection highlights the difficulties these institutions encounter today, in an environment where nationalism and national identity are increasingly contested by global, transnational and local agendas, and where economic forces create conflicting demands.

In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class’s time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century political theater censorship at a time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the European population was becoming increasingly politically active.

Theatre Institutions in Crisis examines how theatre in Europe is beset by a crisis on an institutional level and the pressing need for robust research into the complex configuration of factors at work that are leading to significant shifts in the way theatre is understood, organised, delivered, and received. Balme and Fisher bring together scholars from different disciplines and countries across Europe to examine what factors can be said to be most common to the institutional crisis of European theatre today. The methods employed are drawn from systems theory, social-scientific approaches, economics and statistics, theatre and performance, and other interpretative approaches (hermeneutics), and labour studies. This book will be of great interest to researchers, students, and practitioners working in the fields of performance and theatre studies. It will be particularly relevant to researchers with a particular interest in European theatre and its networks. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This expanded second edition of Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ambitious and unprecedented overview of many of the key directors working in European theatre over the past 30 years. This book is a vivid account of the vast range of work undertaken in European theatre during the last three decades, situated lucidly in its artistic, cultural, and political context. Each chapter discusses a particular director, showing the influences on their work, how it has developed over time, its reception, and the complex relation it has with its social and cultural context. The volume includes directors living and working in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Russia, Romania, the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, offering a broad and international picture of the directing landscape. Now revised and updated, Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ideal text for both undergraduate and postgraduate directing students, as well as those researching contemporary theatre practices, providing a detailed guide to the generation of directors whose careers were forged and tempered in the changing Europe following the end of the Cold War.

Over the past 20 years European theatre underwent fundamental changes in terms of aesthetic focus, institutional structure and in its position in society. The impetus for these changes was provided by a new generation in the independent theatre scene. This book brings together studies on the state of independent theatre in different European countries, focusing on the fields of dance and performance, children and youth theatre, theatre and migration and post-migrant theatre. Additionally, it includes essays on experimental musical theatre and different cultural policies for independent theatre scenes in a range of European countries.

Most studies of the performance of Shakespeare's work concentrate on how the text has been played and what meanings have been conveyed through acting and interpretive directing. Dennis Kennedy demonstrates that much of audience response is determined by the visual representation, which is normally more immediate and direct than the aural conveyance of a text. Ranging widely over productions in Britain, Europe, Japan and North America, Kennedy gives a thorough account of the main scenographic movements of the century, investigating how the visual relates to Shakespeare on the stage. The second edition of this acclaimed history includes a new chapter on Shakespeare performance in the 1990s, bringing the story up to date by drawing on examples from a wide international field. There are more than twenty new illustrations, some of them in colour (bringing the total number of illustrations to almost 200), and previous references have been updated.

How has theatre engaged with the nation-state and helped to formulate national identities? What impact have migration and globalisation had on the relationship between theatre and nation? Theatre & Nation explores how theatre institutions, playwrights, theatre-makers and performance artists engage with the nation, nationalism and national identity in their work. The book argues that theatrical representations of the nation are constantly in flux and that the way theatre engages with the nation changes according to different geographical, political, economic, social and cultural circumstances. Foreword by Nicholas Hytner.

Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic explores the origins and lasting influences of two contesting but intertwined discourses that persist today when we use the words landscape, country, scenery, nature, national. In the first sense, the land is a physical and bounded body of terrain upon which the nation state is constructed (e.g., the purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea). In the second, the country is constituted through its people and established through time and precedence (e.g., land where our fathers died, land of the Pilgrims pride). Kenneth Robert Olwig s extended exploration of these discourses is a masterful work of scholarship both broad and deep, which opens up new avenues of thinking in the areas of geography, literature, theater, history, political science, law, and environmental studies. Olwig tracks these ideas though Anglo-American history, starting with seventeenth-century conflicts between the Stuart kings and the English Parliament, and the Stuart dream of uniting Scotland with England and Wales into one nation on the island of Britain. He uses a royal production of a Ben Jonson masque, with stage sets by architect Inigo Jones, as a touchstone for exploring how the notion of "landscape" expands from artful stage scenery to a geopolitical ideal. Olwig pursues these contested concepts of the body politic from Europe to America and to global politics, illuminating a host of topics, from national parks and environmental planning to theories of polity and virulent nationalistic movements. "

This unique text uses material never previously published on theatre life during the Communist years. Chapters begin with introductions by well-known theatre professionals or lively interviews with a major directors or playwrights.