What is the relationship between theatre and therapy? How has this relationship developed over time, with a new contemporary focus on mental wellbeing? How is therapy put on the couch by theatrical performance?Theatre and Therapy explores the evolution of links between theatre and therapy by considering actor training, theatre in therapeutic contexts, and contemporary theatre and performance practice. The book illuminates some of the connections and frictio...

This book examines the surge of queer performance produced across Ireland since the first stirrings of the Celtic Tiger in the mid-1990s, up to the passing of the Marriage Equality referendum in the Republic in 2015.

This Element explores how theatre responded to the death and loss produced by the COVID-19 pandemic, by innovating forms and spaces designed to support us in grief. It considers how theatre grieved for itself, for the dead, for lost ways of living, while also imagining and enacting new modes of being together. Even as it reckoned with its own demise, theatre endeavoured to collectivise grief by performing a range of functions more commonly associated with funerary, health and social care s...

'Tender and rigorous, this book invites readers to linger with difficult pasts and consider how best to grasp their hauntings, demands and manifestations in the present. This is a book about mourning as well as holding, a simultaneous act of exhumation and a laying to rest.'anna six, author of Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness'This is an extraordinary book, in which queer theatre and performance become sites of celebration and resist...

Told against the backdrop of Dublin's burgeoning gay rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s and the contemporary LGBTQ+ community of today, Once Before I Go explores the bonds of Irish queer lives across three decades in Dublin, London and Paris.This Student Edition includes commentary and notes by Fintan Walsh, Birkbeck, University of London, UK, which look at the play's themes of sexuality, emigration, time and relationships, as well as its style as a re...

In the wake of Ireland’s recent economic rise, fall, and associated social crises, theatre and performance have played vital roles in reflecting on the past, engaging the present, and imagining possible futures.That Was Us features a wide, rich range of critical essays and artist reflections that strive to make sense of some of the most significant shifts and trends in contemporary Irish theatre and performance.Focusing on artists connected to the Dublin Theatre Fe...

To what extent is theatre a contagious practice, capable of undoing and enlivening people and cultures? Theatres of Contagion responds to some of the anxieties of our current political and cultural climate by exploring theatre's status as a contagious cultural force, questioning its role in the spread or control of medical, psychological and emotional conditions and phenomena. Observing a diverse range of practices from the early modern to contemporary period, the volume considers...

This anthology documents a decade of some of the UK's most exciting queer performance, through a combination of retrospective scripts, development material and visual documentation.Queer performance is expected to live a brief, bright life without leaving any textual record. Indeed, it rarely begins with a complete script at all, being often developed instead by performance practices designed to fill noisy bars, clinking cabaret venues and fringe theatres, typicall...

This book stages a timely discussion about the centrality of identity politics to theatre and performance studies. It acknowledges the important close relationship between the discourses and practices historically while maintaining that theatre and performance can enlighten ways of being with others that are not limited by conventional identitarian languages. The essays engage contemporary theatre and performance practices that pose challenging questions about identity, as well as subjecti...