Women, Theatre and Performance – serie

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.

Drawing on feminist cultural materialist theories and historiographies, ‘Treading the bawds’ analyses the collaboration between actresses Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle and women playwrights such as Aphra Behn and Mary Pix, and traces a line of influence from the time of the first theatres royal to the rebellion that resulted in the creation of a player’s co-operative. Bush-Bailey offers a fresh approach to the history of women, seeing their neglected plays in the context of performance. By combining detailed analysis of selected plays within the broader context of a playhouse managed by its leading actresses, Bush-Bailey challenges the received historical and literary canons, including a radical solution to the mysterious identity of the anonymous playwright ‘Ariadne’. It is a story of female collaboration and influence with the spotlight focused on the very public world of women in the commercial business of theatre.

This study focuses on seven women who used the fin-de-siècle’s popular stage as a space to develop their experimental performance practices: acts that won them international fame and critical acclaim. The diverse entertainment careers of Maud Allan (1873-1956), Jane Avril (1868-1943), Loïe Fuller (1868-1926), Sylvia Grey (1866-1958), Yvette Guilbert (1867-1944), Letty Lind (1862-1923) and Cissie (Cecilia) Loftus (1876-1943) encompassed song, dance, impersonation and acting. In accounts, reviews, autobiographical writings, interviews and other cultural products associated with them it is clear that individual female celebrities understood their work as creative, professional and original performance practice. The absence of their creative work from studies of performance history reveals much about hierarchical approaches to cultural environments, gender and physical, non-scripted performances that demands to be interrogated.

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 study focuses on seven women who used the fin-de-siècle’s popular stage as a space to develop their experimental performance practices: acts that won them international fame and critical acclaim. The diverse entertainment careers of Maud Allan (1873–1956), Jane Avril (1868–1943), Loïe Fuller (1868–1926), Sylvia Grey (1866–1958), Yvette Guilbert (1867–1944), Letty Lind (1862–1923) and Cissie (Cecilia) Loftus (1876–1943) encompassed song, dance, impersonation and acting. In accounts, reviews, autobiographical writings, interviews and other cultural products associated with them it is clear that individual female celebrities understood their work as creative, professional and original performance practice. The absence of their creative work from studies of performance history reveals much about hierarchical approaches to cultural environments, gender and physical, non-scripted performances that demands to be interrogated.

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.

Stage rights! explores the work and legacy of the first feminist political theatre group of the twentieth century, the Actresses' Franchise League. Formed in 1908 to support the suffrage movement through theatre, the League and its membership opened up new roles for women on stage and off, challenged stereotypes of suffragists and actresses, created new work inspired by the movement and was an integral part of the performative propaganda of the campaign. Introducing new archival material to both suffrage and theatre histories, this book is the first to focus in detail on the Actresses' Franchise League, its membership and its work. The volume is formulated as a historiographically innovative critical biography of the organisation over the fifty years of its activities, and invites a total reassessment of the League within the accepted narratives of the development of political theatre in the UK.

Victorian touring actresses brings new attention to women’s experience of working in nineteenth-century theatre by focusing on a diverse group of largely forgotten ‘mid-tier’ performers, rather than the usual celebrity figures. It examines how actresses responded to changing political, economic and social circumstances and how the women were themselves agents of change. Their histories reveal dynamic patterns of activity within the theatrical industry and expose its relationship to wider Victorian culture. With an innovative organisation mimicking the stages of an actress’s life and career, the volume draws on new archival research and plentiful illustrations to examine the challenges and opportunities facing the women as they toured both within the UK and further afield in North America and Australasia. It will appeal to students and researchers in theatre and performance history, Victorian studies, gender studies and transatlantic studies.

This book provides a vital new history of feminist performance through an ecological lens. It argues that from the 1960s to the present, artists have used performance to challenge the linked oppression of women and nature. Proposing ‘composting’ as a new method for writing feminist history, the study moves beyond linear narratives to trace regenerative connections between generations of practitioners. It provides sustained analysis of genres from land art to postdramatic theatre, re-evaluating the work of canonical figures while examining how contemporary artists continue to address these urgent themes. By placing ecofeminism in dialogue with feminist new materialism, queer ecology, and transecological thought, this study demonstrates how performance has been a crucial site for imagining more just and sustainable futures in an age of environmental crisis.