Kirjahaku

This complete companion to the study of drama, theatre and performance studies is an essential reference point for students undertaking or preparing to undertake a course either at university or at drama school. Designed as a single reference resource, it introduces the main components of the subject, the key theories and thinkers, as well as vital study skills. Written by a highly regarded academic and practitioner with a wealth of expertise and experience in teaching, Mangan takes students from studio to stage, from lecture theatre to workshop, covering practice as well as theory and history. Reliable and comprehensive, this guide is invaluable throughout a degree or course at various levels. It is essential reading for undergraduate students of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at universities, drama schools and conservatoires, as well as AS and A Level students studying Drama and Theatre who are considering studying the subject at degree level.

One man in his time plays many parts/His acts being seven ages', asserts Shakespeare's Jacques, in a speech which foreshadows what has become a commonplace of contemporary gender theory: that masculinity, far from being a secure, unproblematic gender identity, is a site of crisis and contradictions.Staging Masculinities engages with the complex and paradoxical history of masculinities by exploring the ways in which changing concepts of what it means 'to be a man' have been represented, celebrated, examined and critiqued on mainstream Western - and particularly English - stages. Mapping a history of masculinities onto a history of theatre, Michael Mangan analyses a wide range of plays and performances, from Henry V to Peter Pan, and from medieval liturgical drama to contemporary West-End hits. In the process Mangan offers new and gendered readings of several familiar plays, and traces an intricate relationship between theatrical performance and gender performance.

Edward Bond has been, since his controversial arrival on the theatrical scene in 1965, one of Britain’s most distinctive and important theatre writers. This study examines his work, from The Pope’s Wedding (1962) to Coffee (1995). It gives an overview of the development of his distinctive dramatic language and style, and looks at his experiments with various theatrical forms and genres. It examines, too, the ways in which Bond’s insistence upon the necessity of the drama as an agent of social evolution have determined his development as a dramatist. There are sections which situate Bond’s work within its wider theatrical and political contexts, and which explore his concerns with issues such as violence, technology and social evolution, as they are expressed in plays such as Saved (1965), and Lear (1971). The study also deals with Bond’s continual dialogue with our cultural history – with the ways in which he rewrites classic plays and plunders familiar theatrical genres in order to demythologize the past.

This is an informative and interesting guide to the comedies of love - The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it and Twelfth Night - which were written in the early part of Shakespeare's career. As well as supplying dramatic and critical analysis, this study sets the plays within their wider social and artistic context.Michael Mangan begins by considering the social function of laughter, the use of humour in drama for handling social tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the resulting expectations the audience would have had about comedy in the theatre. In the second section he discusses the individual plays in the light of recent critical and theoretical research. The useful reference section at the end gives the reader a short bibliographic guide to key historical figures relevant to a study of Shakespeare's comedies and a detailed critical bibliography.

This book is a study of four of Shakespeare's major tragedies - "Hamlet", "Othello", "King Lear" and "Macbeth". It looks at these plays in a variety of contexts - both in isolation and in relation to each other and to the cultural, ideological, social and political contexts which produced them.

How can plays and performances, past and present, inform our understanding of ageing? Drawing primarily on the Western dramatic canon, on contemporary British theatre, on popular culture and on paratheatrical practices, Staging Ageing investigates theatrical engagement with ageing from the Greek chorus to Reminiscence Theatre. It also explores the relationship of the plays, performances, and practices to the material, social and ideological conditions that produced them. A seminal work on the cultural past and present of ageing, the book will find grateful audiences not only among scholars but also among theatre and health care professionals.