The Cambridge Companion To Victorian And Edwardian Theatre

This Companion is designed for readers interested in the creation, production and interpretation of Victorian and Edwardian theatre in its own time and on the contemporary stage. The volume opens with an introduction surveying the theatre of the time, followed by an essay contextualizing the theatre within the culture as a whole. Succeeding chapters examine performance, production, and theatre, including the music, the actors, stagecraft and the audience; plays and playwriting and issues of class and gender. Chapters also deal with comedy, farce, melodrama, and the economics of the theatre.

A wide-ranging set of essays that explain what theatre history is and why we need to engage with it.

Stimulating and informative new essays on many aspects of nineteenth-century culture.

A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.

This volume discusses traditional and new resources for researching British literature of the Victorian and Edwardian ages and the ways in which those resources can be used in conjunction with one another.

The first ever companion to theatre and science brings together research on key topics, performances, and new areas of interest.

An up-to-date, contextualized assessment of the impact of the 'festivalization' of culture around the world.

British theatre from 1900 to 1950 has been subject to radical re-evaluation with plays from the period setting theatres alight and gaining critical acclaim once again; this book explains why, presenting a comprehensive survey of the theatre and how it shaped the work that followed. Rebecca D'Monte examines how the emphasis upon the working class, 'angry' drama from the 1950s has led to the neglect of much of the century's earlier drama, positioning the book as part of the current debate about the relationship between war and culture, the middlebrow, and historiography. In a comprehensive survey of the period, the book considers: - the Edwardian theatre; - the theatre of the First World War, including propaganda and musicals; -the interwar years, the rise of commercial theatre and influence of Modernism; - the theatre of the Second World War and post-war period. Essays from leading scholars Penny Farfan, Steve Nicholson and Claire Cochrane give further critical perspectives on the period's theatre and demonstrate its relevance to the drama of today. For anyone studying 20th-century British Drama this will prove one of the foundational texts.