Elaine Aston – författare

This invaluable student handbook is the first detailed guide to explain in detail the relationship between the drama text and the theory and practice of drama in performance.Beginning at the beginning, with accessible explanations of the meanings and methods of semiotics, Theatre as Sign System addresses key drama texts and offers new and detailed information about the theories of performance.

At last an accessible and intelligent introduction to the energising and challenging relationship between feminism and theatre.In this clear and enlightening book, Aston discusses wide-ranging theoretical topics and provides case studies including:* Feminism and theatre history* `M/Othering the self': French feminist theory and theatre* Black women: shaping feminist theatre* Performing gender: a materialist practice* Colonial landscapesFeminist thought is changing the way theatre is taught and practised. An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre is compulsory reading for anyone who requires a precise, insightful and up-to-date guide to this dynamic field of study.

Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook is a helpful, practical guide to theatre-making which explores the different ways of representing gender. Best-selling author, Elaine Aston, takes the reader through the various stages of making feminist theatre- from warming up, through workshopped exploration, to performance - this volume is organised into three clear and instructive parts:* Women in the Workshop* Dramatic Texts, Feminist Contexts* Gender and Devising Projects.Orientated around the classroom/workshop, Handbook of Feminist Theatre Practice encompasses the main elements of feminist theatre, both practical or theoretical.

Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook is a helpful, practical guide to theatre-making which explores the different ways of representing gender. Best-selling author, Elaine Aston, takes the reader through the various stages of making feminist theatre- from warming up, through workshopped exploration, to performance - this volume is organised into three clear and instructive parts:* Women in the Workshop* Dramatic Texts, Feminist Contexts* Gender and Devising Projects.Orientated around the classroom/workshop, Handbook of Feminist Theatre Practice encompasses the main elements of feminist theatre, both practical or theoretical.

Caryl Churchill's plays are internationally performed, studied and acclaimed by practitioners, theatre scholars, critics and audiences alike. With fierce imagination the plays dramatise the anxieties and terrors of contemporary life. This Companion presents new scholarship on Churchill's extraordinary and ground-breaking work. Chapters explore a cluster of major plays in relation to pressing social topics - ecological crisis, sexual politics, revolution, terror and selfhood - providing close readings of texts in their theatrical, theoretical and historical contexts. These topic-based essays are intercalated with other essays that delve into Churchill's major collaborations, her performance innovations and her influences on a new generation of playwrights. Contributors explore Churchill's career-long experimentation - her risk-taking that has reinvigorated the stage, both formally and politically. Providing a new critical platform for the study of a theatrical career that spans almost fifty years, the Companion pays fresh attention to Churchill's poetic precision, dark wit and inexhaustible creativity.

This Companion, first published in 2000, addresses the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century. The chapters explore the historical and theatrical contexts in which women have written for the theatre and examine the work of individual playwrights. A chronological section on playwriting from the 1920s to the 1970s is followed by chapters which raise issues of nationality and identity. Later sections question accepted notions of the canon and include chapters on non-mainstream writing, including black and lesbian performance. Each section is introduced by the editors, who provide a narrative overview of a century of women's drama and a thorough chronology of playwriting, set in political context. The collection includes essays on the individual writers Caryl Churchill, Sarah Daniels, Pam Gems and Timberlake Wertenbaker as well as extensive documentation of contemporary playwriting in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, including figures such as Liz Lochhead and Anne Devlin.

This Companion, first published in 2000, addresses the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century. The chapters explore the historical and theatrical contexts in which women have written for the theatre and examine the work of individual playwrights. A chronological section on playwriting from the 1920s to the 1970s is followed by chapters which raise issues of nationality and identity. Later sections question accepted notions of the canon and include chapters on non-mainstream writing, including black and lesbian performance. Each section is introduced by the editors, who provide a narrative overview of a century of women's drama and a thorough chronology of playwriting, set in political context. The collection includes essays on the individual writers Caryl Churchill, Sarah Daniels, Pam Gems and Timberlake Wertenbaker as well as extensive documentation of contemporary playwriting in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, including figures such as Liz Lochhead and Anne Devlin.

Caryl Churchill's plays are internationally performed, studied and acclaimed by practitioners, theatre scholars, critics and audiences alike. With fierce imagination the plays dramatise the anxieties and terrors of contemporary life. This Companion presents new scholarship on Churchill's extraordinary and ground-breaking work. Chapters explore a cluster of major plays in relation to pressing social topics - ecological crisis, sexual politics, revolution, terror and selfhood - providing close readings of texts in their theatrical, theoretical and historical contexts. These topic-based essays are intercalated with other essays that delve into Churchill's major collaborations, her performance innovations and her influences on a new generation of playwrights. Contributors explore Churchill's career-long experimentation - her risk-taking that has reinvigorated the stage, both formally and politically. Providing a new critical platform for the study of a theatrical career that spans almost fifty years, the Companion pays fresh attention to Churchill's poetic precision, dark wit and inexhaustible creativity.

Feminist Views on the English Stage, first published in 2003, is an exciting and insightful study on drama from a feminist perspective, one that challenges an idea of the 1990s as a 'post-feminist' decade and pays attention to women's playwriting marginalized by a 'renaissance' of angry young men. Working through a generational mix of writers, from Sarah Kane, the iconoclastic 'bad girl' of the stage, to the 'canonical' Caryl Churchill, Elaine Aston charts the significant political and aesthetic changes in women's playwriting at the century's end. Aston also explores writing for the 1990s in theatre by Sarah Daniels, Bryony Lavery, Phyllis Nagy, Winsome Pinnock, Rebecca Prichard, Judy Upton and Timberlake Wertenbaker.

Feminist Views on the English Stage, first published in 2003, is an exciting and insightful study on drama from a feminist perspective, one that challenges an idea of the 1990s as a 'post-feminist' decade and pays attention to women's playwriting marginalized by a 'renaissance' of angry young men. Working through a generational mix of writers, from Sarah Kane, the iconoclastic 'bad girl' of the stage, to the 'canonical' Caryl Churchill, Elaine Aston charts the significant political and aesthetic changes in women's playwriting at the century's end. Aston also explores writing for the 1990s in theatre by Sarah Daniels, Bryony Lavery, Phyllis Nagy, Winsome Pinnock, Rebecca Prichard, Judy Upton and Timberlake Wertenbaker.

The volume traces the scope and development of Caryl Churchill’s theatre from her early writing for radio and television, through her stage career of the 1970s and 1980s to her recent major success Far Away (2000). Making use of contemporary critical and feminist theory, the study offers close dramatic and theatrical readings of the plays highlighting Churchill’s concerns with feminism, socialism and theatrical style. A key chapter on ‘The Woman Writer’ examines those plays, including Cloud Nine and Top Girls, which brought Churchill to the attention of the international feminist theatre academy, and links Churchill’s emergent feminism to her personal struggle to combine a career in the theatre with motherhood. Detailing the international success of play such as Serious Money and Mad Forest, alongside some of the lesser known and lesser studied earlier work, this accessible account illustrates how Churchill has come to be recognised as one of the leading playwrights of our contemporary theatre.

Pivotal to Caryl Churchill's What If If Only (2021) is the ghost of a democratic future that never happened. Framed by What If If Only, if-only yearnings for a democratic future are seminal to this Element with its primary attentions to the feminist, socialist and ecological values of Churchill's theatre. Arguing for the triangulation of the latter, the study elicits insights into: the feeling structures of Churchill's plays; reparative strategies for the renewal of an eco-feminist-socialist politics; the conceptualisation of the 'political is personal' to understand the negative emotional impact that an anti-egalitarian regime has on people's lives; and relations between dystopian criticality and utopian desire. Hannah Proctor's notion of 'anti-adaptive healing' is invoked to propose a summative understanding of Churchill's theatre as engaging audiences in anti-adaptive, resistant feelings towards a capitalist order and healing through a utopic sensing that an alternative future is desirable and still possible.

Pivotal to Caryl Churchill's What If If Only (2021) is the ghost of a democratic future that never happened. Framed by What If If Only, if-only yearnings for a democratic future are seminal to this Element with its primary attentions to the feminist, socialist and ecological values of Churchill's theatre. Arguing for the triangulation of the latter, the study elicits insights into: the feeling structures of Churchill's plays; reparative strategies for the renewal of an eco-feminist-socialist politics; the conceptualisation of the 'political is personal' to understand the negative emotional impact that an anti-egalitarian regime has on people's lives; and relations between dystopian criticality and utopian desire. Hannah Proctor's notion of 'anti-adaptive healing' is invoked to propose a summative understanding of Churchill's theatre as engaging audiences in anti-adaptive, resistant feelings towards a capitalist order and healing through a utopic sensing that an alternative future is desirable and still possible.

This invaluable student handbook is the first detailed guide to explain in detail the relationship between the drama text and the theory and practice of drama in performance.Beginning at the beginning, with accessible explanations of the meanings and methods of semiotics, Theatre as Sign System addresses key drama texts and offers new and detailed information about the theories of performance.

'Miss Delaney brings real people on to her stage...she is busy recording the wonder of life as she lives it' Kenneth Tynan, Observer A Taste of Honey became a sensational theatrical success when first produced in London by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in 1958. Now established as a modern classic, this comic and poignant play, by a then nineteen-year-old working-class Lancashire girl, was praised at its London premiere by Graham Greene as having 'all the freshness of Mr Osborne's Look Back in Anger and a greater maturity.' It was made into a highly acclaimed film in 1962. The play is about the adolescent Jo and her relationship with her irresponsible mum, Helen, the Nigerian sailor who leaves Jo pregnant and Geoffrey, the homosexual art student who moves in to help Jo with the baby. It is also about Jo's unshakeable optimism throughout her trials. This story of a mother and daughter relationship (imitated in many other modern British plays since), set in working-class Manchester, continues to engage new generations of audiences.

Restaging Feminisms offers a re-encounter with the tripartite modelling of liberal, radical, and socialist feminisms foundational to establishing feminist approaches to theatre.

Restaging Feminisms offers a re-encounter with the tripartite modelling of liberal, radical, and socialist feminisms foundational to establishing feminist approaches to theatre.