The British Theatre Guide: Academic Works

Academic

Academic Works

Although the British Theatre Guide is aimed at the theatregoer rather than the academic, we do have a number of academics among our regular visitors and even on the staff.

There is a place, we feel, for academic writing on the site, and so opened this new section in August 2003.

Because academic work, by its nature, is longer than general writing, we have decided not to store some work as PDF files. You will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader to open these files. It can be obtained here.

If Acrobat Reader is installed on your computer, clicking on the link to the piece of work should open it. However we suggest that it would be better to download the file by right clicking and choosing "Save target as" (IE Explorer), "Save link target as" (Netscape) or "Quick download" (Opera).

We invite academics who would like to make their theatre research available to a wider public to contact us!

Realism, Feminism and the Northern Irish Women Playwrights of the ‘80s (PDF)
Subsequent to the publication of Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics in 1968 female academics concentrated increasingly on deconstructing patriarchal representations of femininity in literature. In Britain in 1976 Michelene Wandor published Understudies critiquing the representation of female characters in drama, focusing in particular on Look Back in Anger. At the same time actresses started to form women’s companies, usually fringe groups working in a non-naturalistic vein. The eighties became the decade of the women playwrights: Caryl Churchill, Sue Townsend, Sarah Daniels, Pam Gems, to name but a few. The main thrust of the subject-matter was the oppression of women by patriarchal attitudes. And Northern Ireland was no exception: Anne Devlin and Christina Reid put women centre-stage.
Jackie Fletcher (2001)

Tenniel's Punch Cartoons and the Theatre
In Tenniel's political cartoons, the foremost of all performers are the politicians, appearing as theatre managers, actors, fairground, circus and pantomime performers, conjurors, jugglers, magicians and musicians. Gill Stoker looks at some of these theatre-related cartoons.