The long-neglected Henry VI plays have been 'rediscovered' by a number of post-war productions which have found new ways of bringing Shakespeare's civil war plays to modern audiences. The Wars of the Roses, directed by Peter Hall and adapted by Hall and John Barton, established the theatrical vitality of the plays and defined them for a generation as 'national' dramas. I argue that many of the most important and mythologised aspects of that production were contingent upon the difficult situation of the RSC in the early 1960s and that, in fact, the 'tradition' of playing the Henry VI plays as national dramas is an invented one, based upon the Tillyardian interpretation of them as 'matter of England' plays. Nevertheless, The Wars of the Roses has cast a massive shadow over subsequent productions of the Henry VI plays. Most notably, two productions in the late 1980s - the RSC's The Plantagenets and the ESC's The Wars of the Roses - were virtual revivals of the 1963 productions whilst even those that, at the time, seemed to be reacting against Hall and Barton - the RSC's trilogy of 1977 and the BBC's tetralogy of 1981/3 - in fact bore their influence in that they staged the plays as 'matter of England' productions. 'England' took on a different meaning however after the election of the Conservative Government in 1979. Mrs. Thatcher introduced market ideologies into the funding of theatres and this forced rapid, radical and often unwelcome changes to the culture of the large theatres: England became a divided and contested site and rubbed against the resolution that Hall and Barton had sought in 1963. In the third chapter, I will examine in detail three 1980s productions which were shaped by this situation, but also responded to, engaged with, and attempted to subvert the Thatcherite appropriation of national identity. Finally, I argue that all of these performances exhibit a deep anxiety about social changes and about the role of Shakespearean theatre within these changes.

In this study, I give some attention to the themes and strategies occurring throughout Pam Gems’s career as a female playwright. However, my main interest lies in five of Gems’s plays that feature historical and mythical female figures: Queen Christina (1977), Piaf (1978), Camille (1984), Marlene (1997) and The Snow Palace (1998). My objective is not to ascertain whether or not the plays I consider capture on accurate image of female myth in history, nor even to determine whether or not there exists an accurate image of the female role in literary history. I am far more interested in the ideological uses of myth and more particularly biography, as a form of myth in relation to gender. Such an interest rests upon the understanding that the reconstruction of a life can never be detached from the source of that reconstruction; in other words, the lenses which filter the telling of a life story become at least as important as the narrative itself. Moreover, as further biographies (lenses) are written on the same subject over time, it is possible to detect a gradual reconstitution of that subject to ultimately generate a pluralist evaluation - where truth and myth are flawlessly fused. It is my aim to analyse the variety of lenses and interpretations which have filtered the lives of Gems’s female protagonists with a view to discovering the contribution Gems makes in her personal and feminist reassessment of their biographical narratives. In the beginning the thesis attempts to unite biographical theory with feminist theory and use this as a framework for investigating Gems’s work. After close examination of the aforementioned plays, the thesis concludes with the assertion that Gems strongly embraces the concept of female plurality as opposed to a restrictive ‘feminist’ label in here revisionary recreation of the female role.

This thesis deals with the cross-cultural relations between Brecht and China through an analysis of how Brecht responded to the traditional Chinese theatre and how his drama was received in turn by modern Chinese theatre. It attempts to examine the respective socio-cultural or political contexts wherein such kind of crosscultural contacts were needed, and the consequent aesthetic-theatrical as well as socio-cultural or political changes brought about by these contacts that have produced two distinctively independent yet related forms of theatre. It is argued that Brecht's search for a theatre style of his own amidst the sociocultural as well as political crises between the two world wars made him look to the East for inspirations, and his direct encounter with Mei Lanfang enabled him to interpret the latter's acting in such a way that he responded to it with his postulation of the alienation effect and modification of a gestic performance style. His repudiation of the well-made dramatic theatre brought his epic theatre closer to the traditional Chinese theatre whose aesthetic principles he shared in constructing a non- Aristotelian episodic form of drama. In his experimentations with new modes of theatrical expressions, he did not simply borrow or copy the forms and content of classical Chinese drama; he appropriated, transformed and renewed them, for example, in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, for the particular purpose of instructing audiences in a scientific age. China! s reception of Brecht has had much to do with the country's changing socio-cultural as well as political situations. Chinese theatre practitioners responded to him because he was a politically, culturally and aesthetically suitable figure. His epic drama provided an alternative style for the Chinese in their attempt to innovate their realist spoken drama imported from the West, and was also introduced into local forms of performing arts in hope that the traditional Chinese theatre could be resurrected. Furthermore, he prompted Huang Zuolin to theoretically re-examine Chinese operas, which the latter integrated with techniques of Brecht and Stanislavsky into spoken drama to establish a new theatre style called Xieyi drama.

The theme of this thesis is women and violence explored in eleven plays by British contemporary women playwrights in the 1980s and 1990s. In order to explore these plays, I have made investigations into a basic knowledge of violence against women in the Introduction. Violence against women is also called sexual violence or gender-related violence. The knowledge I have gained includes how sexual violence is defined; why sexual violence occurs; what kinds of sexual violence there are; how people perceive sexual violence. My definition is that any act which limits the autonomy of women constitutes sexual violence. Based on a variety of definitions by feminist scholars, there are many forms of sexual violence in women's history around the world. As a result, I have found out the continuity, diversity, and universality of women's pain. The nature of sexual violence has been mistaken by many people from the perspective of prevailing myths about women's sexuality. Because of them, many women and female children become double victims. Having understood the true nature of sexual violence, I have selected eleven plays which explore women and violence: The Love of the Nightingale (1988) by Timberlake Wertenbaker; Crux (1991) by April de Angelis; The Taking of Liberty (1992) by Cheryl Robson; Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991) by Anna Furse; The Gut Girls (1988) by Sarah Daniels; Ficky Stingers (1986) by Eve Lewis; Beside Herself (1990) by Sarah Daniels; Thatcher's Women (1987) by Kay Adshead; Money to Live (1984) by Jacqueline Rudet; Low Level Panic (1988) by Clare McIntyre; Masterpieces (1984) by Sarah Daniels. The thesis is divided into two parts depending on whether the plays are set in the past or present in order to identify the continuity of sexual violence. They depict the exercise of men's power through sexual violence. In the plays women experience violence committed by men and then they are silenced. However, the women demonstrate their fighting spirit and regain their voice or find ways to express themselves. Women's hope for change is expressed through theatre.

This study of Ibsen in England is divided into three sections. The first section chronicles Ibsen-related events between 1872, when his work was first introduced to a Briton, and 1888, when growing interest in the 'higher drama' culminated in a truly popular edition of three of Ibsen's plays. During these early years, knowledge about and appreciation of Ibsen's work was limited to a fairly small number of intellectuals and critics. A matinee performance in 1880 attracted praise, but successive productions were bowdlerized adaptations. Until 1889, when the British professional premiere of A Doll's House set all of London talking, the lack of interest among actors and producers placed the responsibility for eliciting interest in Ibsen on translators, lecturers, and essayists. The controversy initiated by A Doll's House was intensified in 1891, the so-called Ibsen Year, when six productions, numerous new translations, debates, lectures, published and acted parodies, and countless articles considered the value and desirability of Ibsen's startling modern plays. The central section of this study is concerned solely with the year 1891, and considers in detail the forums for debate; Ibsenite and non-Ibsenite partisans, activity, and opinion; and audience and popular reaction. In addition to prompting discussion about social issues, Ibsen's plays also challenged the censorship system, the actor-mangers' cartel, and the stock-in-trade decorous well-made play. In the 1890s, when Ibsen's themes and style changed, it became apparent that popular and critical taste had absorbed the lessons of plays like Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, and that their comparatively conventional structures and recognizable systems of signification were greatly preferred to the symbolic poeticism of plays like The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken. Most of the later plays were relegated to independent producing societies whose technical and financial resources could not possibly provide suitable scenery or adequate rehearsal, while some of the greatest actors of the day accrued kudos in the earlier polemical plays. By the turn of the century, the Ibsenite impulse had diminished, and his erstwhile champions either promoted a false Ibsen Legend or morosely conceded defeat by a theatre where musical comedy and burlesque flourished. The final section of this study describes the aftermath of the Ibsen Year, and activity in the years leading up to the dramatist's death. General discussion of production style, acting technique, and the modernist movement as a whole are also included in the final chapter. One objective of this research has been to identify and analyze the whole spectrum of response, among as many types of readers, playgoers, and commentators as possible. To this end, a great variety of Victorian periodicals have been consulted, and columns of theatrical gossip, leading articles, interviews, and letters to editors have been sought to supplement the reviews, learned essays, and feuilletons by theatrical journalists and professional critics. Personal accounts in diaries, letters, and autobiographies have also been sought to provide indications of popular interest and opinion, and of Ibsen's place in the avant garde and mainstream theatre.

From the late 1960s to the present, women have utilised performance art as a 'form' with which to resist, transgress, contest or reveal the position of women within wider society. However, as both the nature of feminist politics and the contexts within which the work has been produced have changed, the enactment of such oppositional strategies has also shifted. This thesis aims to locate and account for such shifts by mapping multiple subjects, including performance art, feminism(s), contemporary theory, performers and women's performance art. In the late 1960s throughout the 1970s, the strategies most often utilised by women performance artists either offered alternative, supposedly more 'truthful' representations which drew on the real, material lives of women, or completely reimagined woman, locating her in a place before or outside of the patriarchal structure. From the 1980s onwards, however, the practice of women's performance art looks somewhat different. While performers continue to contest the material conditions and results of being positioned as female in Western society, such contestations are now often enacted from within what might be considered a 'deconstructive' or 'poststructuralist' frame. Acknowledging the impossibility of ever representing the 'real' woman, since 'woman' is always already a representation (and is always multiple), I suggest that the aim of this work is therefore not so much to reveal the 'real' woman behind the fiction, but to take apart the fiction itself, revealing the way in which the signifier 'woman' has been differentially constructed, for what purpose, and with what real effects. I have nominated this shift as a movement from a performance and politics of identity to a performance and politics of subjectivity.

This thesis is a reflection and an argument. It is a reflection on the history of the intermedial embrace between film and theatre and the implications this has for contemporary educators and learners in higher education performing arts programmes. It is also a critical argument for how and why cine-theatrical intermediality is distinct in creating particularly poignant and insightful modes of experience and learning that reveal new ways of perceiving our being-in-the-world. A disposition of vulnerability is central to the thinking and ethos within the study as I propose that the phenomenological, embodied experience of cine-theatrical practice potentially exposes educators and learners to their own fragility as the significance of our human body in contiguous time and space is brought into question. The work resides within two main sections: Mapping Constellations and Case Studies: Cine-Theatrical Pedagogy in Practice. In Mapping Constellations I pursue the parallel aims of mapping the key territories of intermediality, intermodality and hypermediality in practitioner and pedagogical terms whilst also reappraising intermediality and principally cine theatricality's significance as central modes of 20th and 21st century practice through which all of theatre and theatre pedagogy may be informed. In this context, Case Studies: Cine-Theatrical Pedagogy in Practice follows on to consider how professional methodologies of intermedial practice may act as pedagogical lenses to inform teaching and learning. Each is framed philosophically as representing a particular and revelatory pedagogy that discloses and challenges our sense of self in time and space, self as 'other' and self as a mediated, social being.

This thesis develops an ecological performance practice using a practice-as-research methodology. It explores how performance can engage the ecological, where performance (in process and product) is understood as an ecology of diverse humans and nonhumans, which participates within the wider ecology of Earth. Whilst recent publications have given sustained attention to the ways performance can respond to ecological imperatives (Allen and Preece, 2015; Heddon and Mackey, 2012; Bottoms, Franks and Kramer, 2012; Arons and May, 2011; Kershaw, 2007; Bottoms and Goulish, 2007), there has been scarce attention paid to how performance practices and creative process can be and do ecology. In attending to that gap, this research develops a critically-engaged practice of performance (in) ecology, exploring how performance – in its very methods, modes and live moments of practice – can enact the ecological. The project developed an ecological practice through intergenerational and professional-nonprofessional collaboration. It was led by two performance works – Age-Old (2013) and Wild Life (2014). Age-Old involved collaborating with a seven-year-old girl to co-devise a new performance and it formed a developmental period of the research inquiry from which key methods were taken into the more ambitious work, Wild Life. This performance explored ‘wildness’ and was a collaboration with eight professional and nonprofessional performers, aged between nine and 60 years old. It presents the main body of the research. The written component of the thesis frames and elucidates the practice-based research findings. The thesis proposes that involving collaborators of diverse ages and skills presents a dynamic performance ecology through which an inclusive ecological practice can be developed. Its claim is that collaborative practice offers a potentially radical enactment of ecological qualities and dynamics, where this enactment is the ‘wilding’ of performance. Conducted through a Collaborative Doctoral Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project was supported by Catherine Wheels Theatre Company. It offers new approaches for practice and scholarship in the fields of performance and ecology, devised performance, movement and ecology, and intergenerational practice. It also contributes to wider meanings of ‘ecology’ as advanced by scientific views, including posthumanist and rewilding perspectives.

This thesis explores the impact of Mercadante’s operas in France during the 1820s and 1830s. The study covers a period from the French premiere of Elisa e Claudio in Paris (1823) up to the period immediately preceding the worldpremiere of Il giuramento (Milan, La Scala, 11 March 1837), which is traditionally regarded as the first of Mercadante’s ‘reform’ operas and the watershed of his mature style. Modern music historians and early biographers have suggested that Mercadante’s encounter with French operatic conventions was the trigger for his ‘reform’ impulse, which the composer himself acknowledged in one of his most famous letters. As a contribution to discussion of Mercadante’s stylistic developments, I examine a number of case studies which probe the French reception of his early output. Chapter 1 provides a historical survey of French critical assessments of Mercadante in the nineteenth century, revealed in the ongoing discourse of the time regarding Italian opera in France. Chapter 2 explores the critical reception of Elisa e Claudio, staged at the Théâtre Italien in 1823. Chapter 3 studies the process of transfer that brought about the transformation of Elisa e Claudio into the pasticcio Les Noces de Gamache, produced for the Théâtre de l’Odéon by the composer Luc Guénée in 1825. Chapter 4 reconstructs Mercadante’s sojourn in Paris and the genesis of I briganti during the 1835-36 season at the Théâtre Italien. Chapter 5 frames the Italian performances of I briganti and the related revision process in the context of Mercadante’s French experience. In focusing on the intertwined responses of Franco-Italian music criticism, this study of Mercadante’s early operas shows the value of the study of pan-European criticism and of cultural transfer as a larger framework within which to locate studies of Mercadante’s developments in style and aesthetics.

The Malvern Festival was established by Sir Barry Jackson in association with the lessee of the Malvern Theatre, Roy Limbert, in 1929. The Festival continued for ten seasons as an annual event until the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and then returned for one final season in 1949. The Festival was initially dedicated to the works of George Bernard Shaw with the repertoire of the first season wholly composed of the plays of this playwright. While during its twelve seasons the Festival fluctuated in the extent of its association with Shaw, in total the Festival presented two world premieres of Shaw’s plays and four British premieres. Furthermore, in addition to its dramatic productions, the Festival also featured other activities such as talks and exhibitions and attracted an impressive list of visitors and speakers including Allardyce Nicoll and Gabriel Pascal as well as performers such as Cedric Hardwicke and Stephen Murray. This thesis explores the development of the Malvern Festival, an event which has thus far given rise to scant academic scholarship. I argue that rediscovering the Malvern Festival has the potential to reorientate common critical understanding of early twentieth-century English theatre and its key locations. While much of the British theatre scholarship of this period has been concerned with drama in the capital, this study of Malvern demonstrates that regional theatres at this time had the capability of offering experimental drama which often failed to attract the attention of theatre managers in London. As the high prices of rent in the metropolis limited the financial risk accepted by many theatre managers in the early twentieth century, individuals such as Shaw and Jackson amongst others turned their attention away from London to the regions for new opportunities in staging a more experimental repertoire. This study of the Malvern Festival demonstrates that while Jackson and Shaw initially considered the Festival as the solution to their troubles with playhouses in London’s West End, the Festival soon became entangled with those familiar debates of venue and repertoire, and ultimately failed after twelve seasons. In the organisation of the Festival, there were a number of damaging contradictions, some of which were also evident in the ventures preceding the Festival such as the movement for building a National Theatre in England and the Vedrenne-Barker seasons at the Court Theatre. The Festival had simultaneous links with both the non-metropolitan, as a result of its location in Malvern, and the urban, through its target audience of the metropolitan elite. Thus while the Festival was held in Malvern, as a result of Jackson’s guiding philosophy much of the local population in Malvern were excluded from the activities included in the Festival. Additionally, the identity of the Festival was intertwined with both a sense of nostalgia for the past and an outlook towards the future. While Jackson emphasised less well-known classics in the repertoire of the Festival, he also flew critics into Malvern, and Limbert extended the activities of the Festival by presenting modern talkies. Other contradictions included Jackson’s pursuit of critical praise for the Festival’s productions and his desire to experiment away from theatrical norms, in addition to the lack of certainty surrounding the focus of the Festival which fluctuated between an emphasis on a star playwright, Shaw, and Jackson’s aim to celebrate the literary canon. Moreover, some of these clashes were then exacerbated by the Shavian drama performed as part of the Festival. It was the difficulties in reconciling such contradictions which resulted in the Festival’s failure to remain as an annual event. However, in this thesis I argue that regardless of the Festival’s lack of financial and popular success, the Malvern Festival allowed Shaw the creative space to write some of his most experimental work, which was then explored in production as part of the Festival on the stage of the Malvern Theatre.