In Comes I explores performance and land, biography and locality, memory and place. The book reflects on performances past and present, taking the form of a series of excursions into the agricultural landscape of eastern England, and drawing from archaeology, geomorphology, folklore, and local and family history.Mike Pearson, a leading theatre artist and solo-performer, returns to the landscape of his childhood - off the beaten track in Lincolnshire - and uses it as a mnemonic to reflect widely upon performance theory and practice. Rather than focusing on author, period and genre as is...

In Comes I explores performance and land, biography and locality, memory and place. The book reflects on performances past and present, taking the form of a series of excursions into the agricultural landscape of eastern England, and drawing from archaeology, geomorphology, folklore, and local and family history.Mike Pearson, a leading theatre artist and solo-performer, returns to the landscape of his childhood - off the beaten track in Lincolnshire - and uses it as a mnemonic to reflect widely upon performance theory and practice. Rather than focusing on author, period and genre as is...

This is a book for theatre-lovers, written for anyone who shares the author's curiosity about the art of acting and about theatre past and present. The first section centres on Elizabethan theatre practice, the second highlights themes, episodes and contemporary taste in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England, and the third focuses on twentieth-century performances of Shakespeare at Stratford in the 1970s and in the New Globe as the new century begins. The extensive cast of actors discussed includes Richard Tarlton, Will Kemp, David Garrick, Samuel Foote, Richard and Mary Ann...

British Theatre and the Red Peril examines how communism was portrayed in plays in the British theatre between 1917 and 1945, and how at a time when the capitalist system seemed on the verge of collapse, the theatre played a significant part in communicating and manipulating political propaganda in order to influence audiences. It reveals explicit right-wing propaganda produced within mainstream British theatre and questions the assumption that political theatre is almost always left-wing. The book draws on published and unpublished scripts and archive documents to demonstrate how the theatre...

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians looks at stage satires by John Gay, Henry Fielding, George Farquhar, Charlotte Charke, David Garrick and their contemporaries through the lens of Brecht's theory and practice. Discussing the actor mutiny of 1733, theater censorship, controversial plays and Fielding's forgery of an actor's autobiography, Joel Schechter contends that some subversive Augustan and Georgian artists were in fact early Brechtians. He also reconstructs lost episodes in theater history including Fielding's last days as a stage satirist before his Little Haymarket theater was...