Between 1951 and 1987 the Russian director Anatolii Efros created seventy four stage productions, thirteen television films, four feature films and four radio plays. His work made a significant contribution to the development of Russian theatre in the twentieth century, but has received no comprehensive study in Russian or English. This thesis provides an overview of his career but concentrates on a central aspect: his response to the Russian classic canon. It analyses in depth seven productions created in Moscow over some fifteen years. These are discussed in the context of his reaction to their performance history and as a reflection both of changing political circumstances and of his own character and development. His response is shown to have evolved from radical, overtly contemporary, iconoclastic re-interpretation towards a greater indebtedness to tradition and in particular to the legacy of Stanislavsky. His productions of Chekhov's The Seagull (1966) and Three Sisters (1967) were daring assertions of artistic independence. They were condemned and banned both as irreverent attacks on the sacrosanct style of the Moscow Art Theatre and for their overfly political implications. In 1975, Gogol's Marriage and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, though innovative, were less controversial; though they too reflected contemporary concerns, their messages were more muted. Turgenev's A Month in the Country in 1977 marked the beginnings of the change in his approach, and this became increasingly apparent in the 1980s. At the beginning of a period of irrevocable socio-political change, the Soviet theatre was in crisis, and Efros himself had serious problems, prompted in part by criticism of Road (an adaptation of Gogol's Dead Souls) in 1980. His second staging of Three Sisters in 1982 was characterised by a reassessment of his earlier ideas and an increasing concern for historical continuity.

The research described in this thesis is the result of a collaborative project between The University of Nottingham and Roundabout Education at Nottingham Playhouse, funded through an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, which aimed to explore and begin to overcome the barriers to access to theatre for audiences labelled as having profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD). Positioned primarily from the perspective of the unique worlds of five profoundly disabled young people, the thesis begins with an assessment of their access to theatre in the light of disability discrimination legislation particularly Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1991 - and highlights their disenfranchisement from past and current consultation processes, which perpetuates the lack of theatre appropriate to their needs. An initial examination of current audience reception theory - and current theatrical practice for PMLD audiences - suggests that this 'invisibility' is caused by a complex range of historico-cultural factors. The thesis describes the two practical research phases which I undertook as a key part of this collaborative project in order to address this shortfall. In the first phase, Thumbs Up, a team of specialists from a range of art forms worked alongside young people at a Nottingham School to experiment with the engagement potential of three theatre spectra (silence-sound, darkness-light and stillness-action) to foreground emotional narrative moments. This led to the second phase, White Peacock, in which I created a play using the three spectra to construct emotional narrative and utilised the concepts of inner and outer frames to ensure that those narratives could be experienced by PMLD audiences within a safe ethical framework that kept the distinction between reality and performance distinct at all times. The thesis concludes with a number of foundational principles emerging from the research that will assist theatre-makers wishing to create narrative theatre for PMLD audiences in the future.

This thesis critically examines recent trends in authorship for theatre and performance. In the avant-garde performance of the 1960s and 70s, collaborative creation was often employed as a radical rejection of authorship. As such techniques have become more ubiquitous, not just in experimental theatre but in the mainstream, across art forms, and in the performative culture of the ‘network society,’ the social contours of collaborative processes have become more complex, to the point that ‘collaboration’ can no longer describe these practices. Further, socially-engaged practices often defy boundaries between established art forms and disciplines. I theorise an emergent model of ‘social authorship’ to understand how authors stage the social nature of their creative processes, and trace the socio-aesthetic implications of this trend across wide-ranging case studies that exemplify new hybrid approaches: the new pathways between aesthetic theatre and social practice that emerge from The Mill - City of Dreams, a Bradford-based community theatre project; the meeting of social movement and art project in the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt; the open-sourced and dispersed model of mass co-authorship in PARK(ing) Day; the invitation to co-authorship in playwright Charles Mee’s ‘(re)making project’; and even a brand of social authorship that results in a solo performance, from my own practice as playwright and devising performer. What emerges is that as the aesthetic performs the social and the social rewrites the aesthetic, neither can be thought of independently of the other. Further, meaningful social engagement and the potential for social change are not always where they appear to be. This thesis provides a framework for analysing and evaluating the social aesthetics of these socially authored performances.

This thesis attempts to outline the practical relationship between Irish playwrights and the Abbey Theatre, from the early work of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, until the present day. It argues that the Abbey's reputation for being a writer's theatre tends to be contradicted by its distant association with Irish playwrights during the greater part of its history. Only during the early 1980s was there an active attempt to integrate the playwright within the company, creating a vibrant and active community for the development of new writing. Up until the 1980s the Abbey subscribed to the established twentieth-century view that the playwright was a literary writer, outside the creative centre of theatre. The Abbey's changing roles -- from literary theatre, to institutional national theatre and to director's theatre -- distracted the Theatre from acknowledging the valuable contribution individual dramatists could make, ensuring that the playwright remained vulnerable and isolated. The Abbey remained heavily dependent on its own historical inheritance and international reputation, satisfied with a repertoire of predictable classics. The Theatre's approach to playwrights changed in 1978, when Artistic Director Joe Dowling attempted to create what he termed `the home of the living writer'. With assistance from Script Editor Sean McCarthy, Dowling instigated a series of policies which went towards building a coherent writer's theatre within the Abbey, similar to London's Royal Court. Playwrights became members of the company, were assisted with the development of ideas and encouraged to contribute to the rehearsal process. These actions assured experimental playwright development, exemplified by the work of Tom MacIntyre, whose work proved that a playwright could evolve his own artistic identity within an established theatre.

This is the first full-length study of clown training at Gaulier’s school. I take literally Gaulier’s statement, ‘The work of a clown is to make the audience burst out laughing’ (2007: 289). I interpret this to mean that the relationship with the audience plays a defining part in clown practice. Throughout the thesis I consider clowns to have audiences, and argue that the presence of peers in the classroom is a key feature of the learning. I take into account the individual nature of learning, by examining my own experiences learning Clown at the school, and comparing this with the experiences of other writers and a selection of practitioners that have given interviews towards this project. What I call a pedagogy of spectatorship focuses students’ attention towards their classmates, who are audience to everything that takes place in the Clown classroom. Gaulier’s observational skill and charismatic teaching style can enable students to perceive audience laughter and silence as crucial feedback. I demonstrate the audience role in three areas of clown practice: complicit play, the ‘flop’ and the use of the body as ridiculous. I argue that the École Philippe Gaulier provides lessons on the skills necessary to listen to audiences, so that each student can discover the ways in which she can ‘make the audience burst out laughing’.

This thesis explores the relationship between body and site in performance. The research is conducted through the making and examination of a number of the researcher’s own works. Touring and site-based works are examined in relation to specific examples of other contemporary artistic practice. The research is an embodied relationship between theory and practice. Performance works directed by the researcher were created in collaboration with other artists. The process of creating these works is the lived experience of the interaction of the creation of art images and critical theory. These works are then interrogated as part of an ongoing artistic process. This thesis is one element of a tripartite enquiry, comprising practice, theory and documentation, which constitute a ‘body of work’. The ‘body of work’ engages over time with the notion of life as a quality experienced through the body and occasioned by movement. From this perspective it interrogates the static notion of ‘being’ and argues that this notion is limited in examining contemporary performance practice. Through an investigation of theories of ‘becoming’ and an exploration of an embodied practice of ‘becoming’ this research proposes a model of ‘fluid being’ to articulate the nature of the body within ‘the body of work’. The research concludes that the ‘fluid being’ manifest in the lived experience of the ‘body of work’ is an open constellation that militates against any notion of site as that which can contain it. It therefore speculates towards a notion that, in a practice occasioned by ‘fluid being’, the primary relation of practice is with the temporal occasion of life as lived experience rather than spatial notions of site.

This practice-based research investigates movement and gesture in relation to the theatre work of Robert Wilson. A group of performers was established to explore Wilson’s construction of a code of movement during a series of over fifty workshops and films including: a feature film Oedipus; a live performance Two Sides to an Envelope; and a theatre production The Mansion’s Third Unbridled View. The creation of an embodied experience for the spectator, perceived through the senses, is central to Wilson’s theatre. Integral to this are the relationships between drama and image, and time and space. Wilson’s images, in which the body is presented in attitudes of stillness and repetition, are created through these transitional structures. Taking these structures as a starting point for my own performative work, the research led to an abstracted form of natural behaviour, where the movements and arrangements of bodies defined specific movement forms. Subsequently, the relationship between movement and images in Wilson’s theatre was reconsidered through Deleuze’s analysis of the cinematic image. Deleuze identifies subjectivity with the ‘semi-subjective image’, in which traces of the camera’s movements are imprinted in the film. In films made to register these movements, images of moving bodies evincing a sense of time passing were also created. This led to my discovery of film as a direct embodiment of performance, rather than as a form of documentation. Critical to these films, the theatre production, performances, and workshops was the relationship between images and continuous motion predicated upon Wilson’s idea of space, the horizontal: and time, the vertical. This idea enabled me to consider Wilson’s theatre and video works in relation to Bergson’s philosophy concerning duration. The research discovered new ways of interpreting Wilson’s aesthetic through Bergson’s idea that motion is an indivisible process which can also be perceived in relation to the position of bodies in space. Through this understanding, an original performance language was created based on the relationship between stasis and motion, and the interplay between the immersive, semiotic and instrumental modes of gestural communication.

The primary contribution of this thesis is its survey of the history of South Korean Shakespeare performance combined with the specific critical perspective it elaborates. While there have been previous efforts to discuss the subject in the English language, these have not combined such a comprehensive synoptic historical and theoretical approach. This thesis, it is hoped, will therefore serve as an important step in allowing the Anglophone world to understand the varying socio-cultural contexts that have shaped Korea’s reception of Shakespeare. An Introduction explores a method of study (focusing on intraculturalism and ‘gap’) and offers a review of Korean Shakespeare study about performance. Part 1 provides an overview of the history of Korean Shakespeare performance, divided into three periods: the early years (1950-1970), the transitional years (1970-1990) and the contemporary period (1990-present). Part 2 discusses three Shakespeare adaptations, King Uru (The National Theatre of Korea, 2001, directed by Kim Myeong-kon), Romeo and Juliet (Mokwha, 2001, directed by Oh Tae-suk), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Yohangza, 2002, directed by Yang Jung-ung). These three productions have taken elements from Korean traditional performance arts (talchum, traditional dance, and pansori) in order to adapt Shakespeare’s plays. Part 3 discusses productions that focus on reflecting contemporary political and cultural concerns including Ki Koo-Seo’s Hamlet series (1981, 1982, 1985, and 1990, directed by Ki Kook-seo), Seoul Metropolitan Theatre’s Hamlet (2011, directed by Park Geun-hyeong) and Trans Sibiya (Twelfth Night, 2002, directed by Park Jae-wan). In conclusion, I argue that Shakespeare’s plays have provided a tool for examining and establishing selfhood.

This thesis is an investigation into the relationship between ‘queerness’, profundity and the politics of performance. In what ways might moments of performance be both ‘queer’ and ‘profound’? What are the conditions most likely to produce such moments, and what are the political repercussions of such ephemeral performance events? It challenges the notion that live theatrical performance is non-reproductive, arguing that ‘queer moments’ produce resistant and transformative ‘excess of truths’, generated through paradoxes. In analysing ‘queer moments’, this thesis engages in detail with a series of live performances viewed primarily through the recent work of Judith Butler, though it also draws on writings in deconstruction, psychoanalysis, phenomenology and queer studies. The chapters work towards a final performative experiment: an attempt to communicate in writing a sense of a ‘queer moment’ beyond/beside language and representation, which I believe I experienced whilst watching Lia Rodriguez’s production Such Stuff As We Are Made Of in 2002. To prepare the reader for this final chapter, the thesis presents a series of case studies. Analysing a work by transgendered performance artist Lazlo Pearlman, it argues that a deconstructive approach to the body in performance is limited. Although the body is primarily recognised through language and representation, there is a ‘materiality’ (the ‘feeling body’) that exists beside/beyond those modes of recognition. Investigating three of performance artist Franko B’s works, the thesis next demonstrates how performance might produce a ‘ghost of the queer subject’; that is to say, a sense of the feeling body in moments akin to Roland Barthes’s ‘punctum’. This potentially challenges the subject/other hierarchy between performer/spectator through ‘visceral imaging’, which I characterise as imaging a sense of the other through one’s own viscera. La Fura dels Baus’ XXX is analysed to assess how the group’s apparent inability to deconstruct its representations and circuits of desire severely compromised its potential for causing audiences to ‘see feelingly’. Martin Crimp’s playscript Attempts on her Life and its performance in a Welshjlanguage adaptation are analysed to explore how acts of translation can reflexively and ethically mediate performance to reveal common human vulnerabilities as part of an embodied ethicojpolitical practice. Queer moments are identified as utopian instances within such processes: paradoxical truths produced by live performance, which survive the ephemeral event.

This thesis studies the relationship between human bodies and theatrical events through selected European examples of the emergence of transformative ‘inbetween’ experimental performance in the early 21th century. It aims to explore the nature of participatory practices and their attributes. How does the theatrical event interact with the everyday and its theatricality creating ‘embodied’ experiences? What are the attributes and the implications of the relationships that emerge through this bodily engagement? The study questions emergent relational parameters of the theatrical experience in order to explicate its affects and effects in the bodies of participants, whether professional artists, skilled amateur practitioners, theatre/performance researchers, and accidental or intentional audiences and spectators. Its investigation challenges the (im)possibilities of performance knowledge through an experimental method based on a practice-as-research approach. The introductory chapter aims to facilitate understandings of the operational conditions through which the ‘embodied’ is materialized in theatrical performance. The conditions, are named as ‘nomadism’, ‘net-gaming’ and ‘transductions’, and are drawn respectively from the theories and method of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and John McKenzie. In unfolding these operational conditions significant ‘ecological’, social, political, geographical concerns are identified as critical to how the thesis accounts for key elements of current experimental theatrical performance. The rest of its chapters examine three productions of the international touring companies Roger Bernat (Barcelona), Stan’s Cafe (Birmingham) and Rimini Protokoll (Berlin). Each chapter examines different specific yet comparable aspects of their participatory theatre/performance methods – namely: expectations, time, atmosphere, labour, and transformation – a thorough writing that is metaphorical, analytical and performative. Metaphors evoke the ‘common’, they interlace bodily expectations and they trigger the sense of the fleeting experience, establishing a shared sphere between the shows, the audiences and the researcher, immersing the reader in the theatrical events. Thus the thesis aims to present the significance of the ungraspable in participatory experimental performance, paradoxically because only in its evanescent in-betweeness might the ‘embodied’ be envisioned.