The Modern Theatre

This book is the first detailed introduction to the work of the key theatre-makers who shaped the drama of the last century: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud.

Modern Theatres 1950–2020 is an investigation of theatres, concert halls and opera houses in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North and South America. The book explores in detail 30 of the most significant theatres, concert halls, opera houses and dance spaces that opened between 1950 and 2010. Each theatre is reviewed and assessed by experts in theatre buildings, such as architects, acousticians, consultants and theatre practitioners, and illustrated with full-colour photographs and comparative plans and sections. A further 20 theatres that opened from 2009 to 2020 are concisely reviewed and illustrated. An excellent resource for students of theatre planning, theatre architecture and architectural design, Modern Theatres 1950 – 2020 discusses the role of performing arts buildings in cities, explores their public and performances spaces and examines the acoustics and technologies needed in a great building. This beautifully illustrated book is also a must-read for architects, theater designers, theatre historians, and theatre practitioners.

The Birth of Modern Theatre: Rivalry, Riots, and Romance in the Age of Garrick is a vivid description of the eighteenth-century London theatre scene—a time when the theatre took on many of the features of our modern stage. A natural and psychologically based acting style replaced the declamatory style of an earlier age. The theatres were mainly supported by paying audiences, no longer by royal or noble patrons. The press determined the success or failure of a play or a performance. Actors were no longer shunned by polite society, some becoming celebrities in the modern sense. The dominant figure for thirty years was David Garrick, actor, theatre manager and playwright, who, off the stage, charmed London with his energy, playfulness, and social graces. No less important in defining eighteenth-century theatre were its audiences, who considered themselves full-scale participants in theatrical performances; if they did not care for a play, an actor, or ticket prices, they would loudly make their wishes known, sometimes starting a riot. This book recounts the lives—and occasionally the scandals—of the actors and theatre managers and weaves them into the larger story of the theatre in this exuberant age, setting the London stage and its leading personalities against the background of the important social, cultural, and economic changes that shaped eighteenth-century Britain. The Birth of Modern Theatre brings all of this together to describe a moment in history that sowed the seeds of today’s stage.

A collection of plays from various countries. Includes information about each playwright as well as introductory information for each play.

Contains the scripts of nine significant plays of the modern theater, written between 1944 and 1975 by playwrights including Harold Pinter, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Friedrich Durrenmatt, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Slawomir Mrozek, Tom Stoppard, and David Mamet.

Death in modern theatre offers a unique account of modern Western theatre, focusing on the ways in which dramatists and theatre-makers have explored historically informed ideas about death and dying in their work. It investigates the opportunities theatre affords to reflect on the end of life in a compelling and socially meaningful fashion. In a series of interrelated, mostly chronological, micronarratives beginning in the late nineteenth century and ending in the early twenty-first century, this book considers how and why death and dying are represented at certain historical moments using dramaturgy and aesthetics that challenge audiences' conceptions, sensibilities, and sense-making faculties. It includes a mix of well-known and lesser-known plays from an international range of dramatists and theatre-makers, and offers original interpretations through close reading and performance analysis.

Irony and theatre share intimate kinships, not only regarding dramatic conflict, dialectic or wittiness, but also scenic structure and the verbal or situational ironies that typically mark theatrical speech and action. Yet irony today, in aesthetic, literary and philosophical contexts especially, is often regarded with skepticism - as ungraspable, or elusive to the point of confounding. Countering this tendency, William Storm advocates a wide-angle view of this master trope, exploring the ironic in major works by playwrights including Chekhov, Pirandello and Brecht, and in notable relation to well-known representative characters in drama from Ibsen's Halvard Solness to Stoppard's Septimus Hodge and Wasserstein's Heidi Holland. To the degree that irony is existential, its presence in the theatre relates directly to the circumstances and the expressiveness of the characters on stage. This study investigates how these key figures enact, embody, represent and personify the ironic in myriad situations in the modern and contemporary theatre.

Now that directors such as Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, and Francis Ford Coppola are celebrated along-side movie stars, it is hard to imagine that little more than a century ago the director was a nameless, faceless entity-an overseer of workflow in the shuffle of shadows offstage. In surveying the pioneers who transformed theater into the dynamic art form it is today, Directors on Directing presents a timeless collection of writings offering insight into what it means to direct and how to better appreciate theatrical performances.