Maggie B. Gale – författare

J. B. Priestley is the first book to provide a detailed and up to date analysis of the enormous contribution made by this playwright, novelist, journalist and critic to twentieth century British theatre. Priestley was often criticised for being either too populist or too experimental and this study unpicks the contradictions of a playwright and theatre theorist popular with audiences but too often dismissed by critics; describing and analysing in detail not only his plays but also their specific historical and contemporary productions.Using a combination of archive, review and critical materials, the book re-locates Priestley as a theatre theorist of substance as well as a playwright who challenged theatre conventions and assumptions about audience expectations, at a time when theatre was considered both conservative and lacking in innovation.

J. B. Priestley is the first book to provide a detailed and up to date analysis of the enormous contribution made by this playwright, novelist, journalist and critic to twentieth century British theatre. Priestley was often criticised for being either too populist or too experimental and this study unpicks the contradictions of a playwright and theatre theorist popular with audiences but too often dismissed by critics; describing and analysing in detail not only his plays but also their specific historical and contemporary productions.Using a combination of archive, review and critical materials, the book re-locates Priestley as a theatre theorist of substance as well as a playwright who challenged theatre conventions and assumptions about audience expectations, at a time when theatre was considered both conservative and lacking in innovation.

The Routledge Drama Anthology is an original compilation of works from key movements in the history of the modern theatre, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. This expanded new edition now features twenty new plays and essays. The anthology spans: Naturalism and Symbolism The Historical Avant-Garde Political Theatres Late Modernism Contemporary Theatre and PerformanceEach of the book’s five sections comprises a selection of plays and performance texts that define the period, reproduced in full and accompanied by key theoretical writings from performers, playwrights and critics that inform and contextualize their reading. Substantial introductions from experts in the field also provide these sections with an overview of the works and their significance.This textbook provides an unprecedented collection of comprehensive resource materials that will facilitate in-depth critical analysis. It enables a dialogue between playwrights and performance practitioners on one hand, and on the other, critics and theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, André Breton, Martin Esslin, Michael Kirby, Hans Thies Lehmann, Jacques Rancière and Theodor Adorno.

The Routledge Drama Anthology is an original compilation of works from key movements in the history of the modern theatre, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. This expanded new edition now features twenty new plays and essays. The anthology spans: Naturalism and Symbolism The Historical Avant-Garde Political Theatres Late Modernism Contemporary Theatre and PerformanceEach of the book’s five sections comprises a selection of plays and performance texts that define the period, reproduced in full and accompanied by key theoretical writings from performers, playwrights and critics that inform and contextualize their reading. Substantial introductions from experts in the field also provide these sections with an overview of the works and their significance.This textbook provides an unprecedented collection of comprehensive resource materials that will facilitate in-depth critical analysis. It enables a dialogue between playwrights and performance practitioners on one hand, and on the other, critics and theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, André Breton, Martin Esslin, Michael Kirby, Hans Thies Lehmann, Jacques Rancière and Theodor Adorno.

Histories of British theatre between 1918 and 1939 have tended to marginalize the commercial and mainstream in favour of the literary or the politically motivated. This volume brings together a collection of essays that reflect both a far more complex theatre world than this strategy has allowed for, and scholarship on mainstream and alternative theatres in the 1920s and 1930s. Combining the popular with the commercial, the book includes accounts of the craze for thriller and detective plays and musical comedy and revue, alongside analyses of historical pageantry and the development of politicized productions of Shakespeare. With assessments of the representation of gender and sexuality in the theatre, this volume not only unveils hitherto neglected theatre practices but also places them in the context of a society undergoing rapid social and cultural change. It will appeal to advanced undergraduates and postgraduates and scholars interested in twentieth-century British theatre.

This Companion brings together sixteen new essays which examine, from various perspectives, the social and cultural role of the actress throughout history and across continents. Each essay focuses on a particular stage in her development, for example professionalism in the seventeenth century; the emergence of the actress/critic during the Romantic period and, later on, of the actress as best selling autobiographer; the coming of the drama schools which led to today's emphasis on the actress as a highly-trained working woman. Chapters consider the image of the actress as a courtesan, as a 'muse', as a representative of the 'ordinary' housewife, and as a political activist. The collection also contains essays on forms, genres and traditions - on cross dressing, solo performance, racial constraints, and recent Shakespeare - as well as on the actress in early photography and on film. Its unique range will fascinate, surprise and instruct theatre-goers and students alike.

Histories of British theatre between 1918 and 1939 have tended to marginalize the commercial and mainstream in favour of the literary or the politically motivated. This volume brings together a collection of essays that reflect both a far more complex theatre world than this strategy has allowed for, and scholarship on mainstream and alternative theatres in the 1920s and 1930s. Combining the popular with the commercial, the book includes accounts of the craze for thriller and detective plays and musical comedy and revue, alongside analyses of historical pageantry and the development of politicized productions of Shakespeare. With assessments of the representation of gender and sexuality in the theatre, this volume not only unveils hitherto neglected theatre practices but also places them in the context of a society undergoing rapid social and cultural change. It will appeal to advanced undergraduates and postgraduates and scholars interested in twentieth-century British theatre.

This Companion brings together sixteen new essays which examine, from various perspectives, the social and cultural role of the actress throughout history and across continents. Each essay focuses on a particular stage in her development, for example professionalism in the seventeenth century; the emergence of the actress/critic during the Romantic period and, later on, of the actress as best selling autobiographer; the coming of the drama schools which led to today's emphasis on the actress as a highly-trained working woman. Chapters consider the image of the actress as a courtesan, as a 'muse', as a representative of the 'ordinary' housewife, and as a political activist. The collection also contains essays on forms, genres and traditions - on cross dressing, solo performance, racial constraints, and recent Shakespeare - as well as on the actress in early photography and on film. Its unique range will fascinate, surprise and instruct theatre-goers and students alike.

The first in a new annual series, Women, Theatre and Performance that will consist of themed volumes on diverse aspects of women's engagement with theatre and performance. Ranging across three hundred years the essays in this volume address key questions in women's theatre history and retrieve a number of hitherto 'hidden' histories of women performers. Resituates women's, largely neglected, creative contribution within theatre and cultural history and seeks to challenge orthodox readings of both history and text. Topics include: Susanna Centlivre and the notion of intertheatricality; gender and theatrical space; the repositioning of women performers such as Wagner's Muse, Willhelmina Schröder-Devrient, the Comédie Français' 'Mademoiselle Mars', Mme Arnould-Plessey, and the actresses of the Russian serf theatre.

This groundbreaking book shows how female performers - one of the first groups of professional women - used and still use autobiography and performance as both a means of expression and control of their private and public selves, the 'face and the mask'. It looks at how a range of women in the theatre - actors, managers, writers and live artists - have done this on the page and on the stage from the late eighteenth-century to the present day, testing the boundaries between gender, theatre and autobiographical form. This paperback edition facilitates connections - between texts and performances, past and present practitioners, professional and private selves, individuals and communities, all of which have in some way renegotiated identity through autobiography and the creative act.'Auto/biography and identity' is a landmark in theatre history and performance analysis, in gender and cultural theory, and autobiographical studies.

This groundbreaking anthology, part of the Women, Theatre and Performance series, brings together an extraordinary mix of one-act and full length plays and solo performance texts written by women. Included in the volume are texts by Beatrice Herford, Ruth Draper, Zora Neale Hurston and G. B. Stern, originally performed across commercial and amateur theatres in Britain and America. Some of the plays have remained unpublished since their original performance - Georgina Weldon's Not Alone, Clothilde Graves' Mother of Three, Rachel Crother's Ourselves and Marie Stope's Our Ostriches. Others are anthologized here alongside plays with which they connect aesthetically and historically, for example, Edith Lyttelton's Warp and Woof, Elizabeth Robins' Votes for Women, Elizabeth Baker's Edith, Sophie Treadwell's Machinal and Aimée Stuarts' Nine Till Six. The volume, for students and scholars, provides an accessible collection of texts exemplifying the range and breadth of women's theatre writing from the 1880s to the early decades of the twentieth century.

This book provides a new social history of British performance cultures in the early decades of the twentieth century, where performance across stage and screen was generated by dynamic and transformational industries.Exploring an era book-ended by wars and troubled by social unrest and political uncertainty, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 makes use of the popular material cultures produced by and for the industries – autobiographies, fan magazines and trade journals, as well as archival holdings, popular sketches, plays and performances. Maggie B. Gale looks at how the performance industries operated, circulated their products and self-regulated their professional activities, in a period where enfranchisement, democratization, technological development and legislation shaped the experience of citizenship. Through close examination of material evidence and a theoretical underpinning, this book shows how performance industries reflected and challenged this experience, and explored the ways in which we construct our ‘performance’ as participants in the public realm.Suited not only to scholars and students of British theatre and theatre history, but to general readers as well, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 offers an original intervention into the construction of British theatre and performance histories, offering new readings of the relationship between the material cultures of performance, the social, professional and civic contexts from which they arise, and on which they reflect.

This book provides a new social history of British performance cultures in the early decades of the twentieth century, where performance across stage and screen was generated by dynamic and transformational industries.Exploring an era book-ended by wars and troubled by social unrest and political uncertainty, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 makes use of the popular material cultures produced by and for the industries – autobiographies, fan magazines and trade journals, as well as archival holdings, popular sketches, plays and performances. Maggie B. Gale looks at how the performance industries operated, circulated their products and self-regulated their professional activities, in a period where enfranchisement, democratization, technological development and legislation shaped the experience of citizenship. Through close examination of material evidence and a theoretical underpinning, this book shows how performance industries reflected and challenged this experience, and explored the ways in which we construct our ‘performance’ as participants in the public realm.Suited not only to scholars and students of British theatre and theatre history, but to general readers as well, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939 offers an original intervention into the construction of British theatre and performance histories, offering new readings of the relationship between the material cultures of performance, the social, professional and civic contexts from which they arise, and on which they reflect.

This book presents a collection of cutting-edge historical and cultural essays in the field of women, theatre and performance. The chapters explore women’s networks of professional practice in the theatre and performance industries between 1900 and 1950, with a focus on women’s sense and experience of professional agency in an industry largely controlled by men. The book is divided into two sections: ‘Female theatre workers in the social and theatrical realm’ looks at the relationship between women’s work – on and off stage – and autobiography, activism, technique, touring, education and the law. ‘Women and popular performance’ focuses on the careers of individual artists, once household names, including Lily Brayton, Ellen Terry, radio star Mabel Constanduros and Oscar-winning film star Margaret Rutherford.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.