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This study of Bond's later work offers a first critical reading of his post-millennial plays written for Big Brum and Colline: Born (2006), The Under Room (2006), The Balancing Act (2011), and Tune (2011). The study proposes a new understanding of possible relationships between theatre and psychoanalysis; this can be achieved by applying Lacan's Graph of Desire to contemporary British theatre. The Graph's highly nuanced, semiotic take on the dialectic between culture and physicality allows us to pinpoint a structural antagonism between Bond and Brecht in Section One. In Section Two, the Graph is used to defme and theorise Bond's dramaturgical tropes, which appear to dramatise Lacanian 'extimacy'. The 'centre' and 'accident time' entangle an audience oedipally (corporeally) in the drama; the 'site' and the' invisible object' promote forms of active seeing which differentiate between culture and physicality. Our 'aesthetic coordinates of perception' (Ranciere 2004: 83) are disturbed by these processes, which uncover ways of positioning audiences to be creative with, as well as receptive to the linguistic signifier. In this way, Bond's tropes revitalise drama's earliest radical function, an ancient and postmodern capacity to challenge the authority of the 'big other'. Bond achieves this by refusing to turn away from the tragic, or Kristevan abject; he rejects gestic antonyms in favour of careful combinations of indices, icons and symbols - a language of metaphor and metonymy which neither shares a 'postdramatic' disdain for fiction, nor does it 'bar the corporeal' (Irigaray in Lodge 2000: 421). When audiences are co-players in this way, insight may be gained from both the narrative and from their immediate, personal response to its events. In this fresh take on political theatre, staged, visceral events may be read subjectively by audience members; but in facing a situation subjectively, audience members must also face themselves.

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Western plays have been the main material for teaching Modern Theatre in Thailand. However, the literary translation approach, employed in translating most of these plays, seems to create an unnecessary gap between the source text and the target audience. Therefore, this research aims to explore translation methods and the translator's role in helping a play communicate effectively as a performance. This project is practice-based, in which I act as a translator/director translating Joe Orton's Loot into Thai. I domesticate the play by means of recontextualising it to a contemporary Thai context. My translation was staged in Thailand in 2012. With reference to a semiotic viewpoint, I propose that a theatre translator needs to be aware of the connotations of realia and bodies in a play text as theatrical signs. A functional equivalence approach is required to retaining the Ortonesque effect through the translation process, and in producing this effect the theatre translator is taking the position of a creative writer of the target text. Theatre translation is concerned as much with theatre practice as with the translation. The mise-en-scene process is a crucial stage where the contributions of other theatre practitioners can help determine a successful theatre translation. I point out that actors are the co-writers of the performance text, and the director is required to act as the mediator, negotiating the cultural-theatrical differences between the source and the target culture. I argue that foreignisation and domestication are inseparable, especially in theatre translation. It seems rather unhelpful, both in theory and practice, to treat them as separate activities. Finally I recommend various approaches to overcome some of the challenges of the problematic term 'performability', that a theatre translator needs to consider in translating future Western plays for performance.

This written thesis represents one half of my Practice as Research exploration of Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words 11; the other half takes the form of a presentation of the play on the streets of Limerick, a city in the west of Ireland. A DVD of this presentation is available to watch in relation to this document. My overall thesis examines the bodies, costume, props and spaces of performance that are included in the mise en scene of a Beckett play. The argument I make is that although traditionally the body in a Beckett play is thought of and written about as not being tied to a specific time, place, or culture; that in reality there can be no representation of a body onstage, or anywhere else that is not intimately embodied in and tied to a specific time, place and culture. I use three interconnecting methodologies to explore the issues surrounding and integral to the cultural inscriptions on the body and spaces of performance in relation to Beckett's dramas. These methodologies are phenomenology, as expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, intercultural theatre with particular reference to Rustom Bharucha and Philip Zarrilli, and Peggy Phelan's discourse on the 'marked' body. My physical training in New York in the 1980s is traced through the prism of phenomenology and my twenty-five year international practice through the prism of intercultural theatre and the 'marked body' in order to help contextualize and analyse this Practice as Research exploration of Act Without Words 11. The 'incultured' body and spaces of performance are interrogated through the aesthetic prism of the disenfranchised, ie the drug addicted, or homeless oflrish society, as expressed through the placing of the play on the street today. The full text of the play, as in the actions, characters, props, light and space of performance is assessed from within the critical writing available and also from a deconstruction of the text itself. The practical placing of the play on the streets is described and assessed in terms of its efficacy to achieve the interactive insertion of this piece of 'high art' into the architecture and social life of the public spaces of the city.

This thesis considers the stage plays of Stewart Parker in terms of his expressed aim to create 'a working mode wholeness' through theatre. Focusing on issues of performance, it explores how Parker uses the past to conjure visions of alternative futures for his audiences. Part one introduces Parker’s theatre and locates this research within the field of Irish Theatre Studies. It outlines the contribution which this research hopes to make to both Parker scholarship and Irish Theatre Studies and provides an overview of the existing state of Parker criticism. Part two considers Parker's first three stage plays in terms the playfulness of his dramaturgy, his preoccupation with popular culture and the utopian experience which performance of his plays creates. Chapter 2.1 analyses Spoke song’s use of play and how it presents a new civic model of politics. Chapter 2.2 uses Catchpenny Twist to consider Parker's interest in popular culture and issues of artistic responsibility. Chapter 3 analyses how an experience of utopian performativity may be generated by performance of Kingdom Cor. and explores the play's presentation of race and cultural identity. Part three examines Parker's last three plays in terms of the past, performance, ghosts and wholeness Chapter 3.1 examines how the past is Staged in Northern Star and the effects of performing history in the theatre. Chapter 3.2 looks at how performance is staged in Heavenly 80(Res and Parker's use of ghost characters. Chapter 3.3 analyses Pentecosts heightened realist style and the sense of wholeness which the play creates experientially. It also considers how Parker's oeuvre forms a model of wholeness. The conclusion assesses how this 'research has fulfilled its stated aims and objectives, reflecting on it5 permeating themes of wholeness, the past, performance and the future.

This thesis is a study of the contemporary playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker. Its principal source of research has been Wertenbaker's Archive, held by the British Library. This resource has enabled me to compare Wertenbaker's unpublished and unfinished plays with those for which she is better known, thus building a picture of her playwriting career as a developing process. I address ideas of identity formation and resistance to the imposition of identity, as a theme across Wertenbaker's creative works and a feature of her own life. Covering the whole span of Wertenbaker's writing for the stage to date (1976 to 2009), I discuss her plays chronologically, in order to foreground the development of her career. I offer thematic links across these groupings, which are designed to retain a sense of fluidity. I propose that Wertenbaker's diverse writings of the late 1970s developed into a more coherent, feminism-informed body of plays in the early 1980s. Always keen to avoid the labelling of her work, Wertenbaker seems to have sought to expand, or universalise, these concerns, producing her most popular and well-known works of the late 1980s. These plays, which focus on language, make parallels between the oppression of women and the oppression of whole nations or cultural groups, and move her work along a continuum from issues of gender to those of culture and nationhood. These latter concerns become a recurrent trope in her plays of the 1990s and the turn of the millennium, and are intricately linked with concepts of genealogical reproduction on both a global and a personal scale. Whilst my model divides Wertenbaker's work into sections that do not exist in reality, I imbue this structure with the same sense of mutability and fluidity that, I argue, is crucial to the plays.

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