Women Experimenting in Theatre

Early Modern to Contemporary

Kate Aughterson, Deborah Philips

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031636882
• eBook ISBN: 9783031636899
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This collection of essays, covering a broad historical range, shows that women working in theatre and drama since the time of Aphra Behn have been engaged in pushing the boundaries of conventional representation and dramaturgical convention. Collectively the authors show that women have used performing spaces as a channel for both political and personal radicalism - one that has demanded and celebrated experimentalism as a kind of survival in a male dominated world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Stage (Im)Properties: Aphra Behn’s Radical Stagecraft
• 3. Dramatic Innovation in Susanna Centlivre’s Plays
• 4. Elizabeth Inchbald’s Such Things Are
• 5. Women Manager–Playwrights and the Independent Theatre Society in Fin-de-Siècle London
• 6. ‘When you want a thing done, get a man to do it!’ Necessary Strategies of Presence and Absence in Suffrage Theatre and Performance
• 7. Modernist Women’s Drama
• 8. ‘If there’s anything worse than an Angry Young Man it’s an Angry Young Woman’ (Daily Mail Review, 28 May 1958): Shelagh Delaney, Joan Littlewood, Theatre Workshop and A Taste of Honey
• 9. Freaks, Prophets, Witches: New Forms, Collaborations and Communions in Women’s Theatre 1969–1992
• 10. Innovations and Influences: Caryl Churchill
• 11. ‘My Sister She Wants - / Don’t Tell Me’: Desire, Negation, Interruption and Agency in Sarah Kane’s Work
• 12. Feminist Re-visions of Greek Tragedy: Katie Mitchell, Anne Carson, and Caryl Churchill
• 13. Decolonizing Experimental Theatre: Experiments in Living in the Work of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti
• 14. Twenty-First-Century Retreats from Realism: Genre Crossings Between Poetry and Drama in born bad, The Lamplighter, and Is God Is
• 15. Feminist Provocations: Experiments with Failure in Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. And We Want You to Watch
• 16. Frying Bacon and Eggs: Scenographic Approaches to Alda Terracciano’s Activist and Experimental Performances
• 17. ‘Pretty’ Political: The Black Joy and Resistance of Caribbean Carnival Costumes
• Back Matter