This book is a detailed description of the intensive work process involved in the making of Toy Symphony, a new play by Michael Gow, directed by Neil Armfield and brought to the stage for the first time in December 2007 by Company B at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney. Drawing on many years of pioneering research into the nature of contemporary rehearsal practice, Gay McAuley rejects simplistic notions of playwright or director as 'auteur'. Her account makes possible a more nuanced understanding of the real artistry involved in what it is that the director does and what the playwright...

After '89 takes as its subject the dynamic new range of performance practices that have been developed since the demise of communism in the flourishing theatrical landscape of Poland. After 1989, the theatre has retained its historical role as the crucial space for debating and interrogating cultural and political identities. Providing access to scholarship and criticism not readily accessible to an English-speaking readership, this study surveys the rebirth of the theatre as a site of public intervention and social criticism since the establishment of democracy and the proliferation of...

Extremity might suggest violence, pornography, criminality, misanthropy, danger, recklessness, eccentricity or obscurantism. How has art exceeded its own example through performance art? How have artists used performance to question and overextend the limits of form in the 1970s? And with what effects? -- .