Clowns’ slapstick is their primary mode of performance and allows them to provoke audiences to laughter wherever they perform. This innovative book, focussing on contemporary practice in the USA and Europe over the last 50 years, investigates the nature and function of clown performance in modern society. Through analysis of clowning in a range of settings - theatre, the circus, hospitals, refugee camps and churches - Peacock establishes a theoretical framework for the evaluation of physical comedy.Peacock explores clowning that takes place outside of conventional venues, and also the therapeutic potential of clowning in clown doctor organisations, refugee camps and war zones. Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance is the first book of its kind to consider clowning performance venues and performance styles in the light of Play Theory, including comparisons of traditional clown comedy with contemporary circuses such as Circus OZ and Cirque du Soleil, and an in-depth look at famous clowns such as Nola Rae and Slava Polunin.

In the post-war period, theatre provided an important critique of the way in which British society engaged with issues of the politics of gender and sexuality. Sex on Stage examines how British playwrights brought gender politics including women’s sexuality and gay and lesbian issues to the cutting edge of drama after World War II. Through a close reading of playwrights such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Terence Rattigan, alongside accounts of their socio-political context and public reception, Andrew Wyllie reveals that this more progressive age was also one in which masculine anxieties and a consequent reaction were discernible.With its full treatment of this important aspect of British theatrical history and the intense relationship between theatre, gender politics and society, Sex on Stage will appeal to academics and students of drama, gender studies and cultural studies.

Between 1979 and 1997, a quarter of Britain’s regional theaters closed their doors forever. Those that survived found themselves constantly on the brink, forced to radically reduce their programs and shut down for extended periods. Bringing Down the House examines how and why this crisis occurred, from the British government’s scant regard for the arts after World War II to the onset of Thatcherism and its long-lasting effects on the theater industry. This timely read for theater and cultural history scholars unearths a catalog of recurring problems that ensured the fragility of the British regional stage. 

David Ian Rabey is one of the most explosive, pioneering, and erotic playwrights ever to emerge from Wales. Lovefuries features three of his performance texts that flaut national and personal pressure to keep silent, committing instead to explore the shocking resurgences of life that break through grief. These plays tackle such issues as the nature of the feminine, surviving sexual abuse, and the boundaries of human language and physicality. This unforgettable collection will introduce American audiences to one of the most gifted contemporary playwrights working in Britain.  

Gabriela Zapolska (1857-1921) was an actor, journalist and playwright. She was born during the 123 year partition of Poland by Austria, Prussia and Russia and wrote over thirty plays. The Morality of Mrs. Dulska (1906), a 'petty-bourgeois tragic-farce', is probably her best known.  Mrs Dulska is a cross between Patricia Routledge¹s Hyacinth Bucket and Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage. She is the tyrannical and hilarious landlady of a fine stone tenement building – proud, shrewd and highly preoccupied with appearances. Dulska keeps her purse strings tightly drawn and exploits her tenants in a most unforgiving fashion. To the unhappy woman from the first floor apartment who tries to poison herself by swallowing some match heads, she shows no mercy. To her serving maid, who she effectively prostitutes to her son in order to keep his philandering under her own roof and within her control, she shows no compassion. Her daughters struggle through the torments of adolescence with the facts of life skillfully concealed from them, and her husband, worn down over the years by his power-hungry wife, has barely a word to say to his family. It is her son that Mrs Dulska loves – loves with an unhealthy possessiveness. Her fear that he will leave prompts her to fund the servicing of his every desire. Why is it, then, that he resents her so much? Why is it that he feels compelled to seek revenge? Zapolska’s uncompromising look at gender construction and class oppression in fin-de-siecle Poland is witty, entertaining and incisive. This is the first published UK translation of this popular Polish classic. It was prepared by Teresa Murjas, a lecturer in Theatre at the University of Reading. In her introduction, Teresa discusses how the translation and first UK production, which she directed, were developed. She introduces Zapolska's work in its historical contexts, provides the reader with relevant biographical information and considers the play's performance history up to the present day. She draws these strands together into a narrative of deportation, exile and emigration.

Through the looking-glass of Russian national cinema, Pride and Panic explores Russia’s anxious adjustment towards the expansion of Western culture. Russian film is shown, in both its creation and perception, to expose the intriguing dynamics of societal psychological conditions. Using specific film examples, the book delves into the subterranean recesses of Russian national consciousness, exposing an internal ambivalence and complex cultural reaction towards the rise of the West. These fears, fantasies and tremulous anxieties are examined through the representation of the West in films by both established and lesser-known Russian directors. Using a highly original and unorthodox approach, the author parallels the shifting dynamics of attitudes and identity in Russia, caused by globalization, to stages of development in an individual human psyche. The book cohesively unveils the psychological turmoil experienced by Russia towards a change in global relations. A text of particular interest to scholars, students and readers involved with contemporary film and, in particular, Russian cinema and culture.

For the last ten to fifteen years, many disciplines of scholarship have been involved in the study of consciousness, often on an interdisciplinary basis. They include philosophy, neurosciences, psychology, physics and biology, and approaches focusing on human experience. The Centre for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson spearheaded this development with its bi-annual conferences since 1994, and a wide range of associations, journals and book publications bear witness to its importance. Over the same number of years, scholarly interest in the relationship of consciousness to theatre has equally grown. The book discusses a range of questions relevant to understanding the phenomenon of theatre against a consciousness studies background. ‘By placing theatre at the centre of human experience, a vital contributor to our mental, emotional and spiritual health rather than mere mindless entertainment, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe does a vital service to the artform.', – Total Theatre Magazine,

Questions of vision and knowledge are central to debates about the world in which we live. Developing new analytical approaches toward ways of seeing is a key challenge facing those working across a wide range of disciplines. How can visuality be understood on its own terms rather than by means of established textual frameworks? Visualizing Anthropology takes up this challenge. Bringing together a range of perspectives anchored in practice, the book maps experiments in the forms and techniques of visual enquiry.



The origins of this collection lie in visual anthropology. Although the field has greatly expanded and diversified, many of the key debates continue to be focused around the textual concerns of the mainstream discipline. In seeking to establish a more genuinely visual anthropology, the editors have sought to forge links with other kinds of image-based projects. Ethnography is the shared space of practice. Understood not as a specialized method but as cultural critique, the book explores new collaborative possibilities linked to image-based work.

For about 40 years, RTE's radio and television channels have played an enormous role in shaping Irish social and cultural life. As the national publicly owned and funded broadcaster, RTE is the biggest cinema, school, sports stadium, market square, performance stage, town crier and concert hall in Ireland. It sets the agenda for the national conversation that drives modern Ireland. This work is a study of the structural transformations now taking place in Irish broadcasting. The book will focus on the broadcasting section generally, but primarily on RTE, as it adjusts to a number of radical changes in the field of forces whose impact began to accelerate in the mid-1990s. The book will take the form of a critical history of the present and an investigation of the future of broadcasting in Ireland. Its analytical framework will be situated within the broader context of contemporary European media policy and trends in the global structure of the cultural industries as they adjust to the deployment of digital compression technology, increasing conglomeration in the media industry worldwide and new regulatory regimes profoundly influenced by the ideology of market liberalism. RTE's work is frequently shrouded in secrecy and mystique, which means that conspiracy theories abound about how it is governed and how it relates to various power centres in Irish life. This book is firmly aimed at increasing the transparency that should characterise public broadcasting and demystifying this national institution that plays such an enormous role in the cultural and political life of Ireland. There is a huge appetite for such a book because of the general high level of curiosity about the institutional life of the national broadcaster and because no seriously analytical book on RTE has appeared on the market for over twenty years.