Maggie Gale's West End Women uncovers groundbreaking material about women playwrights and the staging of their performances between the years 1918 and 1962.
It documents a dynamic era of social and theatrical history, analysing the transformations that occurred in the theatre and the lives of British women in relation to specific plays of the period. Focusing on the work of playwrights such as Dodie Smith, Clemence Dane, Gordon Daviot and Bridget Boland, Maggie Gale examines the cultural and political context within which they enjoyed commercial success and great notoriety.

Maggie Gale's West End Women uncovers groundbreaking material about women playwrights and the staging of their performances between the years 1918 and 1962.
It documents a dynamic era of social and theatrical history, analysing the transformations that occurred in the theatre and the lives of British women in relation to specific plays of the period. Focusing on the work of playwrights such as Dodie Smith, Clemence Dane, Gordon Daviot and Bridget Boland, Maggie Gale examines the cultural and political context within which they enjoyed commercial success and great notoriety.

This volume reveals a theater culture more complex and contradictory than previous histories have allowed for. 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. It initiates a long overdue reassessment of mid-twentieth century British theater cultures. The book will appeal to advanced undergraduates and postgraduates as well as scholars interested in twentieth-century British theater.

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...

This volume reveals a theater culture more complex and contradictory than previous histories have allowed for. 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. It initiates a long overdue reassessment of mid-twentieth century British theater cultures. The book will appeal to advanced undergraduates and postgraduates as well as scholars interested in twentieth-century British theater.

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...

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...

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'. In eleven essays 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, from Emma Robinson to Tilly Wedekind, and from Lena Ashwell to Tracy Emin, testing the boundaries between gender, theatre and...

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 Performance

Each of the book's five sections...