Despite the fact that theatre practitioners have been increasingly involved in the implementation of French integration politics since the late 1990s, the subject has received relatively little attention within the scholarly world. Methodologically rooted in the sociology of the theatre, this thesis seeks to address this oversight by proposing a dedicated study of theatre practice taking place in the context of French integration politics since 1999. This analysis situates the multiform conceptual, socio-historical and symbolic difficulties that underlie in France’s ‘public politics of integration’ within the urban theatrical landscape of Paris Ile-de-France. Focussing on works produced within this context by Hervé Breuil’s Lavoir Moderne Parisien, Cie Graines de Soleil, the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration and Mohamed Rouabhi, this research posits a three-pronged approach to exploring the difficulties bound up with integration in theatrical contexts. First, it proposes a socio-historical analysis of theatre’s emergence within the framework of governmental integration initiatives, throwing into relief the key contextual and ideological factors that shaped its inclusion within this rubric. Second, it unearths the material and symbolic threads linking theatre practice to French integration policy, using France’s Politique de la Ville and the CNHI as key transversal axes. Finally, it unearths the ways in which the social and semiotic landscape engendered by French integration politics has shaped the thematic and stylistic content of works created by practitioners in this context.

Despite the resurgence of interview-based verbatim theatre in the 21st century and scholarly debate surrounding the aesthetics and authenticity of verbatim plays, little examination of the role of the playwright integrating testimonies of war into the making of a verbatim play has been undertaken. The transactional relationships between interviewees and playwrights warrant study as this critical interaction informs the dramaturgy of the playtext. This area of inquiry also has significant resonance in debates regarding the ethics of representation in verbatim theatre, particularly as many contemporary verbatim plays examining conflict tend to incorporate testimony from interviewees whose lives have been affected by war and militarism. What follows is a practice-as-research (PaR)-led investigation into my role as a playwright appropriating testimony from individual subjects affected by conflict. Through the creation of two verbatim plays, namely This Much is True and Yardbird, this investigation examines moments of disjuncture that occur when mediating war-related testimony. In addition to critically reflecting on the creative component of this inquiry, this dissertation also incorporates original interviews conducted with the creative team behind the National Theatre of Scotland’s play Black Watch and examines more broadly the methodologies of playwrights working with trauma-related experiences by focusing on how playwrights’ interactions with individual subjects inform the shaping of a play. This investigation examines the key issues that emerge as playwrights integrate personal testimony in a theatrical translation of subjects’ experiences into the writing of a verbatim play. It also seeks to examine the ethical tensions I encountered within my verbatim playwriting practice. Furthermore, this investigation interrogates my process of locating interview subjects and facilitating testimony; maintaining critical relationships with interviewees; organising the structure of the play; and negotiating interview subjects’ autonomy over the script. Rather than generating codified guidelines for ethical verbatim practice, the findings and deliberations of my investigation are designed to assist other practitioners using personal testimony from interviewees as part of the playwriting process. Encouraging practitioners to critically reflect on the methods that they employ within the interview stages as part of the playwriting process helps to lay bare the ethical and aesthetic responsibilities involved in dramatising war-related testimony. These deliberations are offered for the benefit of other theatre practitioners as well as scholars working within the wider field of theatre studies.

This thesis is an investigation into the influence of documentary methods, both their principles and their practice upon BBC Television Drama between the years 1946-1962 with particular reference to the Dramatised-Documentary and its successor the Documentary-Drama. The first of these, the Dramatised-Documentary was an original form of television writing and production pioneered in the 1940s by Robert Barr and Duncan Ross together with the Documentary Group which worked as a unit until 1955. The second form, the Documentary-Drama was a development of the first, but was by the late 1950s 'fiction based on fact' and the concern of the BBC Television Drama Department. The aims of this thesis - though not necessarily in this order - are to:- 1. Show the historical background of Documentary by tracing the origins of the idea and its development from the early 'realist' films; The British Documentary Movement of of John Grierson (and in particular the 'dramatisations' of Harry Watt); to the BBC Sound 'Features' Department under Laurence Gilliam. 2. By descriptive analysis to consider the pioneer work of the Television Documentary Group, first under the leadership of Robert Barr (1946) and later Paul Rotha (1952) until its dissolution in 1955. To illustrate the methods and output of that tiny group of writer-producers by an examination of a selection of their Dramatised-Documentaries from scripts, production records and BBC files, and to reveal an emerging form of television writing, supported and developed later by Colin Morris, which culminated in the rise of 'Series' to become the mainstay of the medium. 3. As an integral part of this creative side of television, to show throughout, the major technical advances which made so much of the above possible, from the inception of the Service in 1936 to the commencement of Z-Cars in 1962.

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This thesis is the first comprehensive study dedicated to music in Caroline plays. The drama of the Caroline period marked the end of the great 'Elizabethan' theatrical tradition. Unfortunately, this has resulted in the Caroline theatre and Caroline plays being virtually subsumed into the Elizabethan and Jacobean. The music in the plays, which has received little critical attention, has never been studied as a body in its own right. Moreover, a relation between Caroline, Elizabethan and Jacobean traditions has nearly always been assumed; to such an extent that the traditions have largely been treated as identical. Those few commentators who have bothered to consider changes in musical practice have been influenced by preconceptions resulting from an erroneous historical perspective; and this has led them to a general undervaluing of Caroline theatre music. The issue of the music in the plays constitutes a notable omission from the recent important studies of Caroline drama and theatre, and a detailed examination and revaluation is long overdue. I set out to do a more thorough survey than has hitherto been attempted. In particular, this is the first study to be based on a survey of all 260 new plays dating from 1625 to 1642 of which texts survive, and on extensive research into musical sources and transcription of a large number of pieces of music. This work has provided a substantial amount of new material. There are some significant findings and conclusions, and I demonstrate that the music in Caroline plays merits neither the neglect nor the cavalier dismissal which it has received in the past. I begin by discussing the composers and performers of theatre music and the location of the latter. Next I look at evidence of the types of music in Caroline plays: song, instrumental music and dance. I then go on to discuss the uses of music in the plays, referring where possible to surviving music (a neglected issue) and discussing it in dramatic context. I give special emphasis to instrumental music and dance, which have previously been given little attention, and I take a more theatrical approach in my analysis of the uses than has been pursued in the past. I deal first with music integral to the plot and emotionally supportive music; then with technically supportive music, music included purely to amuse the audience and music as structural articulation. I identify many musical conventions, and investigate the use of 'conventional types' of music (certain kinds of music which are consistently associated with particular types of dramatic situation). Finally I evaluate the importance of music in the Caroline theatre. I have sought to establish that song, instrumental music and dance had an important role in drama of the time, and that all were important as part of the theatrical experience. The music in Caroline plays is also important historically. There were indeed many similarities with the Elizabethan and Jacobean traditions, but traditions were not static. The view that there was a decline in the use of music compared to earlier practices is refuted. Although the closing of the theatres in 1642 was in many ways a moment of decisive discontinuity, musical practices provide a link between the Caroline and Restoration periods. The extent of Caroline foreshadowing of Restoration practices is striking and to many will be unexpected. The overall pattern is one of basic continuity in musical practices in plays throughout the seventeenth century. One of the main aims of this study has been to identify as much as possible of the music that survives. An important finding is that a substantial body of music is extant, much more than was thought. There are musical sources for settings of or tunes for a total of 113 lyrics from Caroline plays (including settings which are new to musical scholarship); for thirty-one of the instrumental tunes which are called for by name in specific Caroline plays; and for another fourteen instrumental tunes which may be associated with plays. The sources for this music are listed in Appendix 1, which provides a current catalogue of all surviving music associated with specific Caroline plays. Appendix 2 is an edition which makes available thirty-one settings of Caroline dramatic lyrics and symphonies for three further songs, none of which has previously been published in a modern edition; they include newly identified songs. These Appendices are an important adjunct of the thesis, as are Appendices 3 and 4, which are a comprehensive listing of all the specified instances of instrumental music and dance contained in Caroline play-texts, classified by their dramatic context or function.

Adopting a qualitative mode of researc~ this study aims to present the Theatre Designer, Abd' Elkader Farrah, as a phenomenon in British theatrical design. More specifically, the study aims to illustrate the role played by Farrah at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre; to present the way in which Farrah's role and contribution affected the production of Shakespearean plays by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), including the contribution made by Farrah's significant ideas and concepts in scenographic design to the RSC. The evaluation compares three theatre designers; Farrah, John Bury and Christopher Morley, all of whom differ in their approaches to theatrical design, through an analytical comparative study of their designs for five Shakespearean plays. In accordance with the research framework adopted for this study, the aim has been to qualify the research phenomenon, not in terms of number crunching, but rather, with the aim of ascertaining how the informants view the research phenomenon under investigation. The planning and implementation of the study has been made in three stages. The first stage aimed to discover information related to the context of the present study in the form of background literature, covering the period from 1939 to 1976. The second stage involved identifying the research design of the study on the basis of the relevant literature. It also involved the research sample and the fieldwork and data collection process including the contextual factors which affected this process. Stage three included analysis of the interviews and presenting the findings of this analysis. These indicate that Farrah's theatrical designs have been a phenomenon in the British theatre scene in terms of his innovativeness, which is significantly represented in Shakespearean plays. Farrah's colleagues saw him, and also his work, as having an individual approach to scenography. His introduction of symbols and hieroglyphic script into his designs was unique, especially as they represent the influence of and also his reflection-upon his Middle Eastern cultural background. Findings also made clear that Farrah's view of things, especially as regards ways to present Shakespeare, is unique, for example in his rejection of conventional symbols in costume. In this sense, the findings have highlighted the influence of the social and cultural contexts in which the designer was brought up and the culture which he absorbed on the approach adopted in the production. The study illustrates how the designer has distinguished artistic characteristics as well as his relevance beyond the theatre. Farrah's many works were more orientated toward dependence on the arts through using and exploiting movements in the fine arts, such as surrealism and the avant-garde, to their ultimate scenographic designation. Christopher Morley's designs are more scientifically based, and reflect an artistic doctrine based upon philosophical movements and their impact on the arts. In contrast, John Bury's designs are more floor level stage-based, i.e., launched from the stage floor itself, proceeding from design to execution to materialisation

This dissertation examines the relation between ‘risk’ and ‘performance’ through analysis of examples of contemporary theatre and performance practice commissioned, developed and produced under the New Labour government. The project is multidisciplinary and materialist. It problematises constructions of risk in theatre and performance studies as either inhering in the identity of the artist, as a dynamic specific to genre or indeed a discipline-specific value. In view of the explosion of social scientific interest in ‘risk’ which gathered momentum in the early 1990s, it follows work by theorists of neoliberal governmentality, geography and cultural studies to suggest that a more productive and historically specific treatment of the concept is one informed by political economy. Neoliberal policy rejects the welfare state’s collectivisation of risk and characteristically redistributes risk to individual, entrepreneurialised subjects. New Labour, seeking to produce ‘inclusion’, has deployed a managerial cultural policy in the service of this aim, the chief concerns of which are the ‘ethical training’ of social subjects and the economic regeneration of post- industrial sites. I analyse closely the mediation of four figures of contemporary political economic concern in theatre and performance: the asylum seeker, the young person ‘at risk’, the sex worker and the entrepreneur. On the basis of these analyses, I make two key claims. Firstly, that culture’s supplementary role to the state manifests in these works in a preoccupation with ‘value’. Secondly, that their strategies of, or concerns with aesthetic realism and immersion correlate to the delegation of risk to individuals imagined to operate in a ‘community’ space. The necessary implication of social subjects not in unproblematically communal relations but in systems of production and exchange will burst through in performance in the form of theatricality – a cognizance not of an immersive ‘community’ space, but of agonistic, dialectical relations.

This doctoral project is concerned with gender and the way that transgender masculinities are manifested, articulated and debated through drama, theatre and performance. The central question of the research is how `performance' contributes to the process of constituting individual identities and communities, specifically transgender masculinities. The research engages with the multiple ways that the concepts or categories of the individual, of community and of performance are defined, and how they function and are experienced when transgender identities or transgender masculinities are central to a `performance event'. The particular individuals and groups of transgender-identified people, or people who might be described in relation to a trans framework of identity, are those for whom gender is not a fixed state rooted in a binary system, but a state that can be bent, moved or made malleable in order to fit according to individual need. The individuals and groups on whom I focus tend to have had their sex assigned female at birth and at some point in their lives have identified themselves as male rather than female. There are also individuals who do not self-identify as male but refute gender categorisation, thereby not identifying as female either. Moreover, there are people who still self-identify as female but have developed or produced markers of masculinity on their body that have a significant impact on their day-to-day living and in their performance work. In this thesis I will be referring to this range of varied identities as transgender masculinities. This research will be of relevance to contemporary theatre scholars, particularly those with an interest in the creation of avant-garde and community-generated practices. The research will also be of use to those interested in queer and non-normative identities as manifested through drama, theatre and performance, whether this is by solo artists or within project work with groups of people who identify as transgender, genderqueer or have an otherwise complex relationship to gender.