In Chapter One, the dramaturgical analogy, whereby theatre is compared with social life, is described and its relevance to the study of social interaction processes asserted. The analogy may be used simply as an analytic tool or as a possible representation of the phenomenology of social interaction. In this thesis the former approach is defended, but the defence itself requires acknowledgement that people may on occasion view their behaviour in terms which apparently draw on dramaturgical principles and conceptions. The analogy assumes that people behave according to known social forms, embodied in their own and others' expectations ("scripts"), that they modify their behaviour in accordance with what they perceive in the behaviour of others (as "fellow-performers" and "audience"), and that individual differences in performance are expressed within the constraints imposed by the expectations and behaviour of others. Many proponents of the analogy have emphasised the scripted nature of much social action and have ignored the mutually contingent relationships between social performances, while misinterpreting the implications of the analogy for individual performance and "self-expression". Role Theorists' emphasis on social behaviour as "conformity" to "scripts" is rejected; "scripts" for the performance of formal Roles in social life constitute only the frameworks within which social behaviour is improvised.

This thesis explores the complex interplay of factors that have led to the recent significant change in the reception of the plays usually referred to as the great 'classics' of German drama, that is, works by Goethe, Schiller and Kleist. The reception of these plays for most of the pre-war period was unenthusiastic, and they were rarely staged before 1945. Even after this they were only gradually introduced onto the British stage. The long-lasting rejection is usually explained with reference to the rivalries between Britain and Germany since the late nineteenth century and, after 1945, by post-war resentment. In showing that there are more complex mechanisms at work, this thesis demonstrates the highly problematic basis of such explanations. As a case study in intra-European cultural transfer, the history of the reception of the German classics is examined against the backdrop of the British theatrical culture and the implications of the habitus of British theatre: its structures, history and tradition, and how these determine the ways in which foreign plays are perceived and treated by theatre practitioners and, in turn, how this determines how they will be perceived by audiences and critics. The incongruence between the dramatic traditions of Britain and Germany has led to interpretations of the plays that differ widely from those of scholars or German theatre practitioners, but in some cases resulted in notable and influential productions. During the post-war period, political developments have repeatedly made the German classics strikingly relevant, which has worked to the advantage of these plays by effectively outweighing most of the problematic aspects that had formerly led to rejection. The role of individual theatres and directors who spearheaded the reawakening of interest in the German classics is examined alongside the role of translations that were found to be increasingly suitable for performance.

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This practice as research inter-disciplinary PhD’s purpose is to create new knowledge in the area of contemporary and naturalistic drama translation. It straddles the fields of Drama, Acting and Translation Studies but inevitably encompasses the fields of social semiotics and linguistics. The methodology used is of a hybrid nature as it consists of a portfolio of work. The work is divided into two major sections. The first comprises the translation of three Hungarian Contemporary plays into English by the author, followed by the thesis and self- reflection. The thesis will claim that it is by the precise use of the proposed mixed methodology and practical approach to drama translation that new knowledge will be contributed to the field of contemporary European naturalistic drama translation. The use of this methodology is novel in the sense that it claims that the act of translating itself is creating new knowledge. This builds on Nelson’s practice as research model is in which the act of translation is the practice. New knowledge will also be generated by the practice, which is the mise-en-scène of two translated plays as well as the analysis of the Hungarian stage source productions. The use of this hybrid methodology results in the creation of new concepts in the field of foreignising drama translation. The thesis part of the portfolio claims that these new concepts will also serve as tools that will aid the work of scholars and drama translators who chose foreignisation and resistance as their translation strategies. These methodologies will challenge prevailing views in Translation Studies of the primacy of the text in translation. It will challenge Susan Bassnett’s view that it is a superhuman task and not the translator’s role to decode sub-textual meaning in the dialogue. The aim of this methodology is to offer new working concepts for the foreignising contemporary drama translator. This thesis and reflective work will claim and defend the view that in order to achieve a foreignised (Venuti 1998, 2008, 2010) drama translation strategy that adheres to the much debated performability criteria, the drama translator needs to become a cultural anthropologist and perform an excavation of the source culture by using the source production as a tool for translation, especially in translating realia. It will also argue that the drama translator needs to expand and go beyond the traditional translation tools and borrow the naturalistic tools of the actor in order to help with translation challenges. The performance case studies will focus on Hungarian contemporary drama but although this new knowledge contribution is transferable to all contemporary naturalistic drama translation, it will be of a particular benefit to the field of contemporary Eastern European drama translation.

This research focuses on assessing the effects of policing operations on tactical deployment operated by non-state actors. The theory advanced by this work, labelled SMORG theory, is first and foremost an attempt to move from fragmented to comprehensive knowledge. At the theoretical level, it provides policy makers and practitioners with a better understanding of policing instruments, and especially highlights the limits of coercion and deterrence when dealing with non-state actors. At the methodological level, it demonstrates how to scrutinise the protest space in its entirety, by providing an innovative set of tools to analyse the temporal and spatial distribution of forms of protests on diverse theaters. At the empirical level, it reveals the evolution of conventional, confrontational and violent forms protest in South Lebanon, Gaza Strip, West Bank, and Israel, during the period 1982 to 2011; it further precisely assesses the effects of policing operations on tactical deployment operated by non-state actors on the same theaters.

Whereas most genealogies of the puppet invariably conclude with robots and androids, this dissertation explores an alternative narrative. Here the inanimate object, first perceived either miraculously or idolatrously to come to life, is then observed as something that the live actor can aspire to, not necessarily the end-result of an ever evolving technological accomplishment. This research project examines a fundamental oscillation between the perception of inanimate images as coming alive, and the converse experience of human actors becoming inanimate images, whilst interrogating how this might articulate, substantiate or defy belief. Chapters 1 and 2 consider the literary documentation of objects miraculously coming to life, informed by the theology of incarnation and resurrection in Early Christianity, Byzantium and the Middle Ages. This includes examinations of icons, relics, incorrupt cadavers, and articulated crucifixes. Their use in ritual gradually leads on to the birth of a Christian theatre, its use of inanimate figures intermingling with live actors, and the practice of tableaux vivants, live human figures emulating the stillness of a statue. The remaining chapters focus on cultural phenomena that internalise the inanimate object's immobility or strange movement quality. Chapter 3 studies secular tableaux vivants from the late eighteenth century onwards. Chapter 4 explores puppets-automata, with particular emphasis on Kempelen's Chess-player and the physical relation between object-manipulator and manipulated-object. The main emphasis is a choreographic one, on the ways in which live movement can translate into inanimate hardness, and how this form of movement can then be appropriated. In chapter 5 I relate puppets and prostheses using texts such as Kleist's "On the Marionette Theatre", Pinocchio, Coppelia, Bergson on mechanical movement, and Jentsch on the Uncanny. In the context of theatrical practise, chapter 6 examines key texts and theories on puppet-like acting, concentrating primarily on Edward Gordon Craig's concept of the Uber-marionette.

The transformations of twentieth-century French theatre have been accompanied by increased interest in Shakespeare. By the late 1940s French academics and directors spoke of a 'need' for his plays. As shown by Jean Chatenet and Jean Jacquot in the early 1960s, the vogue for Shakespeare was closely linked to the modernisation and decentralisation of theatre in France and grew rapidly until 1964, the quatercentenary of his birth. Since then, theatre directors and critics have continued to regard Shakespeare as a leading figure on the French stage. Charting the evolution of Shakespearian production in France from 1960 to 1997, our survey shows that Shakespeare's theatre has continued to thrive, reaching unprecedented heights by the end of the century. Each new wave of theatre directors has influenced the Shakespearian repertoire and generated new appropriations of his theatre, from critical interpretations of his plays in the light of the theories of Bertolt Brecht and Jan Kott in the 1960s and the iconoclastic radicalisations of the 1970s to the self-referential postmodern 'theatre of images' of the 1980s and 1990s and the playful and radical appropriations of the young directors of the 1990s. French directors have frequently referred to the excellence and transcendent nature of Shakespeare's theatre to explain their interest in his plays. However, this explanation is not convincing in the light of the high cultural capital needed to understand Shakespeare's plays. Interpreting the evidence in the light of theories of cultural materialism, we conclude that Shakespearian production has been maintained by belief in the mythical status of Shakespeare. This explains why, far from threatening Shakespearian production, the 1968 rejection of the classics actually encouraged its growth.

This dissertation is concerned with the idea of play. It argues for seeing play in Foucaultian terms, not as a privileged 'object' existing concretely in the world, but as discursively constructed in a range of intersecting and sometimes competing fields. Two orders of discourse that produce play, one explicitly and one implicitly, are investigated here for the ways in which they contribute to constructions of power. In the first, scholarly discourse systematically constructs play as a problem that can only be understood through the academic practices of reading, writing, and 'objective' analysis, privileging reason as the hegemonic way of knowing and the scholar as authority. An archaeological analysis demonstrates how this discourse constructs the academic as an external observer rather than as a player, systematically 'writing out' not only the playing subject, but also the imaginative, performative, and sensuous knowledges of play. In the second order of discourse studied here, the re-enactment of legendary sea voyages, these knowledges are privileged. A genealogical analysis demonstrates how these disparate seafaring events systematically construct a discourse of play through voyagers' imaginative performance of discourses of, for example, exploration, adventure, masculinity, and legend. Attention to the construction of power in these voyaging performances also functions to provide a critique of the academic discourse of play. Alternating chapters on scholarly and voyaging discourses thus productively illuminates the struggle over knowledges of play and of the past - but also for the authority of different ways of knowing.

In the period of the French Revolution, the armed or martial woman comes to stand in Britain as the representative of extreme political and social disruption. She embodies, in striking form, the revolutionary chaos witnessed across the channel, which threatens to infect British culture. This thesis traces shifting representations of the female warrior, and examines the complex processes by which the threat that she personifies is handled in British tragedies and sentimental comedies, written and performed in London and Dublin between 1789 and 1804. The study presents the British theatre as an arena in which the significance of the arms-bearing woman is constantly re-modelled and re-appropriated to fulfil diverse ideological functions. Used to challenge as well as to enforce established notions of sex and gender difference, she is fashioned also as an allegorical tool, serving both to condemn and to champion political rebellion in England, France and Ireland. Combining close readings of dramatic texts with detailed discussions of production and performance histories, this thesis tells a story of the martial woman’s evolution in British dramas, which emphasises her multifaceted and protean identity, and shows her development not to have followed a stable or linear pattern, but to have been constantly redirected by an expansive range of contextual factors: historical, social, and theatrical.

This thesis is a study of thematic clusters in the performance reception of the Hippolytus and Phaedra tradition – the body of reception material based on Euripides’ Hippolytus, Seneca’s Phaedra, and/or Racine’s Phèdre. This is the first comprehensive study of these three major source texts as a collective whole, challenging not only the idea of a single original ‘source text’, but also the idea of a directly linear reception pattern. I visualise the reception of the Hippolytus and Phaedra tradition as a porous membrane, containing a number of different items, from texts to performances, interacting in a multi-dimensional, fluid way, manifesting itself in different forms depending on the political, social, historical or literary context in which this story has emerged since Racine himself reworked Euripides and Seneca in the late seventeenth century. Each chapter has a particular thematic focus, within which I provide more detailed case study analyses from particular works across multiple genres. The Introduction provides close readings of the source texts and outlines my cross-genre theoretical framework. The second chapter focusses on the question of consanguinity and the impact of the incest motif on early adaptations. In the third chapter, I explore two 20th-century adaptations, both of which emerged during a decade dominated by Freud’s discoveries. In the fourth chapter, I focus on adaptations that explore and problematise Hippolytus’ sexuality. My fifth chapter focuses exclusively on the operatic and dance traditions, arguing that these genres lead to a prioritisation of the Phaedra character. The thesis concludes with a final chapter which traces the role of the divine within the reception tradition of Hippolytus and Phaedra examining in particular how recent adaptations move away from an earlier focus on psychology and human emotion to a new emphasis on the supernatural forces in the wider world.