The Skriker

Author: Caryl Churchill
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848424999
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 64

Book Description
In a broken world, two girls meet an extraordinary creature. The Skriker is a shapeshifter and death portent. She can be an old woman, a child, a young man. She is a faerie come from the Underworld to pursue and entrap them, through time and space, through this world and her own. The Skriker was originally produced at the National Theatre, London, in 1994. It was revived at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 2015, as part of the Manchester International Festival, starring Maxine Peake, directed by Sarah Frankcom and featuring specially commissioned music by Nico Muhly and Antony of Antony and the Johnsons. The Skriker is also available in the volume Caryl Churchill Plays: Three.

Women in Dramatic Place and Time

Author: Geraldine Cousin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134917953
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends

Author: Verna A. Foster
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786465123
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
These new essays explore the ways in which contemporary dramatists have retold or otherwise made use of myths, fairy tales and legends from a variety of cultures, including Greek, West African, North American, Japanese, and various parts of Europe. The dramatists discussed range from well-established playwrights such as Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, and Timberlake Wertenbaker to new theatrical stars such as Sarah Ruhl and Tarell Alvin McCraney. The book contributes to the current discussion of adaptation theory by examining the different ways, and for what purposes, plays revise mythic stories and characters. The essays contribute to studies of literary uses of myth by focusing on how recent dramatists have used myths, fairy tales and legends to address contemporary concerns, especially changing representations of women and the politics of gender relations but also topics such as damage to the environment and political violence.

Playing for Time

Author: Geraldine Cousin
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9781847791689
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
Playing for time explores connections between theatre time, the historical moment and fictional time. Geraldine Cousin persuasively argues that a crucial characteristic of contemporary British theatre is its preoccupation with instability and danger, and traces images of catastrophe and loss in a wide range of recent plays and productions. The diversity of the texts that are examined is a major strength of the book. In addition to plays by contemporary dramatists, Cousin analyses staged adaptations of novels, and productions of plays by Euripides, Strindberg and Priestley. A key focus is Stephen Daldry's award-winning revival of Priestley's An Inspector Calls, which is discussed in relation both to other Priestley 'time' plays and to Caryl Churchill's apocalyptic Far Away. Lost children are a recurring motif: Bryony Lavery's Frozen, for example, is explored in the context of the Soham murders (which took place while the play was in production at the National Theatre), whilst three virtually simultaneous productions of Euripides' Hecuba are interpreted with regard to the Beslan massacre of schoolchildren.

Conversations With Food

Author: Dorothy Chansky
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1648891020
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
"Conversations With Food" offers readers an array of essays revealing the power of food (and its absence) to transform relationships between the human and non-human realms; to define national, colonial, and postcolonial cultures; to help instantiate race, gender, and class relations; and to serve as the basis for policymaking. Food functions in these contexts as items in religious or secular law, as objects with which to bargain or over which to fight, as literary trope, and as a way to improve or harm health—individual or collective. The anthology ranges from Ancient Greece to the posthuman fairy underworld; from the codifying of French culinary heritage to the strategic marketing of 100-calorie snacks; from the European famine after the Second World War to the lush and exotic cuisines of culinary tourism today. "Conversations With Food" will engage anyone interested in discovering the disciplinary breadth and depth of food studies. The anthology is ideally suited for introductory and advanced courses in food studies, as it includes essays in a range of humanities and social science disciplines, and each author draws cross-disciplinary linkages between their own work and other essays in the volume. This thematic and conceptual intercalation, when read with the editors’ introduction, makes the collection an exceptionally strong representation of the field of food studies.

Theatre and Ghosts

Author: M. Luckhurst
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137345071
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description
Theatre and Ghosts brings theatre and performance history into dialogue with the flourishing field of spectrality studies. Essays examine the histories and economies of the material operations of theatre, and the spectrality of performance and performer.

Madness in Contemporary British Theatre

Author: Jon Venn
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030797821
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
This book considers the representation of madness in contemporary British theatre, examining the rich relationship between performance and mental health, and questioning how theatre can potentially challenge dominant understandings of mental health. Carefully, it suggests what it means to represent madness in theatre, and the avenues through which such representations can become radical, whereby theatre can act as a site of resistance. Engaging with the heterogeneity of madness, each chapter covers different attributes and logics, including: the constitution and institutional structures of the contemporary asylum; the cultural idioms behind hallucination; the means by which suicide is apprehended and approached; how testimony of the mad person is interpreted and encountered. As a study that interrogates a wide range of British theatre across the past 30 years, and includes a theoretical interrogation of the politics of madness, this is a crucial work for any student or researcher, across disciplines, considering the politics of madness and its relationship to performance.

Process in the Arts Therapies

Author: Ann Cattanach
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN: 1846422116
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
Arts therapists are becoming increasingly interested in process as it is manifested in their work. The multiplicity of levels at which process operates is the theme of this new book. What happens during a therapy session is examined, as are the client's response, which is experienced through the medium of the art form itself, and the evolution of the relationship between therapist and client. Perspectives from across the arts therapy spectrum are included, with contributions from practitioners in dramatherapy, play therapy, art therapy, music therapy and dance movement therapy. Re-evaluating the nature of the practice, Process in the Arts Therapies expands and develops the theory.

Churchill’s Socialism

Author: Siân Adiseshiah
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527554678
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Although now celebrated as a world-leading playwright, Caryl Churchill has received little attention for her socialism, which has been frequently overlooked in favour of emphasising gendered identities and postmodernist themes. Churchill’s Socialism examines eight of Churchill’s plays with reference to socialist theories and political movements. This well-researched and dynamic new book reframes Churchill’s work, positioning her plays within socialist discourses, and producing persuasive political readings of her drama that reflect much more of the political challenge that the plays pose. It additionally explores her uneasy relationship with postmodernism, which presents itself particularly in Churchill’s later plays. The book contains a very helpful chapter on socialist contexts, which outlines some of the key events, debates, and movements during the late 1960s up until the early 2000s. This chapter also offers an incisive critique of the easy acceptance by some socialists of a postmodernist rejection of grand narratives and political agency. An in depth examination of the rarely explored interconnections of utopianism and theatre, forms another chapter, where all eight of Churchill’s plays, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Vinegar Tom, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Mad Forest, The Skriker, and Far Away, are introduced. The plays are then discussed in pairs in a further four chapters with reference to communist historiography, the class/gender intersection, the end-of-history thesis, ecocritical challenges and postmodernism.

The Theatre of Caryl Churchill

Author: R. Darren Gobert
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408154536
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Book Description
The Theatre of Caryl Churchill documents and analyses the major plays and productions of one of Britain's greatest and most innovative playwrights. Drawing on hundreds of never-before-seen archival sources from the US and the UK, it provides an essential guide to Churchill's groundbreaking work for students and theatregoers. Each chapter illuminates connections across plays and explores major scripts alongside unpublished and unfinished projects. Each considers the rehearsal room, the stage, and the printed text. Each demonstrates how Churchill has pushed the boundaries of dramatic aesthetics while posing urgent political and theoretical questions. But since each maps Churchill's work in a different way, each deploys a different reading practice - for many approaches are necessary to characterise such a restlessly imaginative and prolific career. Through its five interlocking parts, The Theatre of Caryl Churchill tells a story about the playwright, her work, and its place in contemporary drama.