This thesis attempts to develop a pedagogy for devised theatre conceived of as a praxis. Part One explores the status and history of both devised theatre and theatre pedagogy, particularly in the UK but also in other contexts. In doing so, it attempts to demonstrate the multitude of ways in which both devised theatre and the pedagogy of drama, theatre and performance have been conceived. Part Two goes on to look at three frames through which devised theatre might be conceptualised: contemporary theories of language, creativity and social practice. With a particular focus on the theories of Jacques Rancière, I suggest that each of these offers a potential vision of art as a realm which can exist at a remove from everyday life, whilst still functioning within structures that indicate its social basis. The frames each contain a focus on process rather than only focusing on a finished artistic product. They also each suggest simultaneous reflection and action. In the final part of the thesis I map these three notions, particularly that of social practice, onto theories of praxis. I suggest that the notion of praxis offers a vision of what a pedagogy for devised theatre might look like, recognising the importance of process as well as product; reflection as well as action. Finally I use the Chicago based performance company Goat Island, who made work between 1987 and 2009, as a case study of what devised theatre praxis might look like through a discussion of their process, performance and pedagogy.

2017 marked the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong's handover to China after 156 years of British colonial rule. As the ensuing chapters will show, the rapid socio-political changes which have overtaken Hong Kong during those two decades, and the question of how the city is now to view its cultural identity in relation both to its former colonial master and to the People's Republic into which it has officially been subsumed, are nowhere more richly reflected than in the Shakespearean productions staged by local repertory companies since the handover. Adopting a cultural materialist reading in this neocolonial context, my thesis examines post-1997 Hong Kong Shakespeare that comment variously on the identity of the city through staging sinicized, aestheticized and socio-politicised versions of the plays. My introduction contextualizes Hong Kong's position on the current intellectual map of Asian Shakespeare, arguing that Hong Kong Shakespeare should not be subsumed under the heading of Chinese Shakespeare. Chapter One discusses Richard Ho's Hamlet: Sword of Vengeance, which though premièred in the colonial era was later tellingly restaged in Hong Kong and in England after the handover. Chapter Two analyses the configuration of China as an aesthetic metaphor in Tang Shu-wing's Titus Andronicus 2.0 and Macbeth. Chapter Three discusses the emergence of a new Hong Kong identity in Hardy Tsoi's Julius Caesar and Shamshuipo Lear. Chapter Four establishes the necessity of considering Hong Kong's counter discourse to China's centrism in Jimmy Lee's Post-The Taming of the Shrew. Sandwiched between the colonial and the neocolonial, Hong Kong Shakespeare generates an independent narrative of its own through struggle and cultural negotiation.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Peter Brook and designed by Sally Jacobs, is the most influential production of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. Indeed its design licenced audiences, critics, academics, and practitioners to visualize the setting of the play as something more than a staid palace in Athens and a sylvan forest of actual shrubbery. Incorporating a wide range of archival material including the previously unknown full-length recording of that production, I trace how the scenography for the 1970 production has shaped institutional trends of designing Dream at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, both visually and conceptually. In the six main stage RSC productions that followed, those directors and designers all responded to the famous white-box design to varying degrees, highlighting trends within the institution. In 1989, an artistic movement in stage design began, as practitioners at the RSC, instead of avoiding the innovative box set, boldly appropriated the design and production concepts from the 1970 production. This history of designing Dream at the RSC and the critics and academics who write on this topic, have not only shaped the modern impression of Brook and Jacobs’s production, they have noticeably transformed it.

This thesis examines and re-evaluates the contemporary performance of Shakespeare in Japan, taking the impact of social and political developments into account. The first part discusses the changing status of Shakespeare in Japan and corresponding representations of the theatrical past onstage. Two different responses to The Merchant of Venice are used to demonstrate this change, one from a British director and one from a Japanese one. The second chapter expands on this changing status to discuss the ways recent productions have responded to social issues and anxieties, particularly to perceived issues amongst the younger generations. The remainder of the thesis analyses the later stages of Ninagawa Yukio’s career and his Shakespeare productions with his two companies, Saitama Next Theatre and Saitama Gold Theatre. This thesis concludes that through the depiction of hybridity, contemporary performances of Shakespeare are part of an ongoing dialogue between Japanese and British theatre, and through the detailed study of never or rarely examined productions defamiliarises the existing narrative of intercultural Shakespeare in Japan.

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This dissertation investigates the nexus between theatre and colonialism in the German empire between 1884 and 1914. It introduces the concept of colonial theatricality, through which it explores to what extent theatre and colonialism have been productive of each other’s orders, knowledge formations, and truth claims. This dissertation thus looks at the empire through its cultural manifestations and its ‘representational machinery’, specifically the theatre. It provides an understanding of the German colonial empire that goes beyond its territorial, administrative and military strategies. In order to do so, the dissertation discusses a broad set of performances that the German empire brought forth at the turn of the century: popular theatre performances that mediated the colonial project to a domestic audience, amateur theatre societies that staged ‘German culture’ in the colonies, colonial ceremonies that included repertoires of the settler as well as of the indigenous population, court-hearings of African individuals residing in Germany claiming their rights, and a petition from the former German colony Kamerun charging the German government with crimes against humanity. Beyond the appearance of the colonial project as a topical issue on stage, this dissertation argues for a deeper-seated interdependence between theatre and colonialism, one that can be detected in the dynamics of ‘seeing’ and ‘showing’. Through the concept of colonial theatricality as a particular mode of perception and representation akin to both the theatre and the colonial enterprise, this dissertation suggests a new framework for looking at the entangled histories of metropole and colony in focusing on the empire’s ordering truth, its formations, effects, and ambivalences.

This thesis explores the notion that the emergent language of theatre, and more generally of modern culture, has links to much earlier forms of storytelling and an ancient worldview, and raises questions as to how theatre practitioners might best understand and utilise early modes of entertainment and ideologies in the creation of performance work today. It examines the emergence and history of theatrical performance in Britain, with particular focus on how medieval ideologies and theatrical forms were absorbed into the practices of the first professional theatres in the early modern age, using Shakespeare’s work as a core example. Further, it uncovers and interrogates, through practice, links between performance approaches today and the ritual roots of native theatrical tradition: links which have been largely lost in Britain and much of the Western world, but which still exist in certain other cultures. The thesis includes analysis of how Shakespeare’s medieval inheritance shaped the drama he created, and demonstrates (through practice-based research) how a practical, psychosomatic understanding of residual as well as emergent modes in the plays can not only benefit practitioners seeking to stage Shakespeare’s work for today’s audiences, but also provide inspiration for the creation of new work. This research has practice as its core: drawing directly on my own theatre work, and exploring an alternative kind of ‘knowing’ through the body. It relates current trends in modern theatre practice (the immersive, the psychosomatic, the multisensory, the site-specific and so on) to the ritual, amalgamative, communal and visceral modes of early performance, interrogating particular elements such as mankind’s position in the universe, time and space, language and the body, universality versus specificity, and ritual behaviour in performance. The work concludes that the ritual, embodied, hierophanic and communal mode of medieval performance is not only what practitioners today are searching for in their experimental practice and in the intercultural engagement with other (ritualised) cultures, but also presents a way of understanding and dealing with the traumas and anxieties of society that is efficacious and malleable to any period in human history, and is especially relevant to times of great change and upheaval, such as both the early modern age of Shakespeare and our own time.

This thesis analyses the development of amateur theatre in Britain in the long nineteenth century and has five main emphases. Firstly, it considers the multiple functions of private theatricals in the regions and the varied reactions to their increasing popularity. It argues that they were used as a form of soft power; that they disrupted the Victorian ideology of the separate spheres; and that they developed amateur and professional theatre in the regions. Secondly, the thesis will offer new perspectives on the West End by exposing its lost histories of amateur theatre. It will break down the binary of ‘London theatre’ as ‘West End theatre’ by uncovering amateur theatrical venues and communities beyond this district. The thesis then examines the birth of amateur dramatic clubs and societies and exposes a complex network of amateur theatrical activities taking place across Britain. It reveals the symbiosis of amateur dramatic enthusiasts with members of the theatre profession and foregrounds the existence of ‘professional amateurs’ – performers who were celebrated nationally for their theatrical abilities, but chose not to adopt a stage career. The focus of this thesis then turns to the repertoire of amateur theatre and argues that existing studies of the nineteenth century theatrical repertoire have been constructed based on data from professional performances alone. It makes the case for a distinct amateur repertoire and a reimaging of the theatrical canon through use of data from amateur theatrical events in the period. Finally, the thesis considers the ‘value’ of amateur theatricals. It highlights the significance of the amateur sector to the financial success of the theatre industry. It then considers the economic, social and cultural value of the relationship between amateur theatricals and local, national and dramatic charitable causes. It concludes by emphasising the role that amateur theatre had in building strong communities and constructing identities.

This thesis forms the complementary writing for my practice-as-research project “Affective Intentionalities: Practising Performance with Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida”. Working with Barthes’s 1980 book about photography, the project goes beyond an application of Barthes’s ideas to creatively respond to Camera Lucida through performance. The project approaches this through the following research questions: What strategies might be useful for responding to Camera Lucida through performance? What new insights does this contribute to theatre and performance studies? What methodological contributions does this project make to the ways that writing and performance can be thought together in a practice-as-research context? This thesis, provides a critical context for the project by reviewing writing on Barthes from media theory, comparative literature, art history and theatre studies; it critically reflects on three performances made over the course of the PhD project: Involuntary Memory (2015), Kairos (2016), and After Camera Lucida (2017); and it re-presents photographic documentation and audience comments in a way that self-reflexively stages them in relation to the practical work. This complementary writing gestures towards the ways that the performances explored different inflections of performance time, the ways that the live body captured a tension between semiotic meaning and materiality and the relationships between the form of the performances and their ability to produce affect. These findings contribute to the overarching argument that a process of iterative creative response to Camera Lucida has allowed an exploration of dramaturgies of the body, time, affect and theatricality that open up the possibility of critically affective and radically compassionate relations between performance works and their audiences. As such, this project will be of interest to theatre and performance researchers, scholars of Barthes, and performance practitioners who are interested in the relationships between affect and meaning, temporality, performance and photography, practice and theory.

Taking Meyerhold’s Biomechanics, I will analyze four key principles: otkaz (the preparation for action), pocil (the action with meaning), stoika (the end of the action) and tormos (the brakes or control of an action). Using a practice as research approach as outlined by Nelson (2013, p.10) I will explore these principles at three stages of theatre production: 1. The training of the actor, 2. Rehearsals and 3. Performance. The findings of the research are presented in three formats: the theatre production, the thesis and edited footage of the whole process from training to performance. The research brings an understanding of how these principles, developed by Meyerhold throughout his career until his death in 1940, can be applied to contemporary British theatre practice. First taking otkaz, pocil and stoika - how can they can be used to train an actor from the very basics of the construction of a physical score to the development of character and ensemble? I will then include tormos, to bring a depth of understanding to how this and the tripartite can be applied to performance. They provide the tools for an actor and director to approach a production, giving a clear method with which to communicate to an audience. Through this process it is possible to see the principles of Meyerhold’s Biomechanics within a contemporary British theatre context. To understand how the fundamental parts of Biomechanics can be used today to find meaning within an actor’s movements, to find purpose within a production and be used to create theatre which ‘grabs us by the lapels’ (Leach, 1989, p.174).