This thesis explores masochism as a performance trope investigating the relationship between the politics of cultural production and masochistic performance practices. By examining the work of a number of contemporary artists, particularly artists whose work is concerned with broaching or subverting the physical and psychical limits of the body, this thesis asserts that masochistic works present a provocation and resistance to patriarchal discourses of power, in particular those practices and disciplines of power/ knowledge responsible for the constitution of 'desirable' subjectivity. For the purposes of this thesis 'desirable' denotes both a Foucauldian sense of the 'docile' social subject conforming to the disciplinary technologies of society, combined with the idea of high modernity's capitalist driven economic dependence on the perpetuation of consumer 'desire'. In order to undertake this investigation, an understanding of theoretical and cultural masochism has been utilised in relation to certain forms of performance practice. Drawing upon an understanding of Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject and the cultural construction of the 'obscene' and their significance in relation to the constitution of the subject, this thesis analyses the points at which the abject, the obscene and the discourse of masochism intersect and interrogate acculturated ideas concerning the acceptable limits of re/presentation and the social subject. Through a discussion of the diverse range of perspectives on masochism, coupled with it's abject and 'obscene' inflections, this thesis considers the utility of masochistic actions in investigating contemporary subjectivity and its temporary, masochistically induced loss. In so doing this thesis extends its analysis to elaborate the cultural and socio-political significance of presenting/ representing alternative subjectivity through means of masochistic performances that work in opposition to the patriarchally constructed, sado-masochistic cultural economy of 'desire'.

The aim of this thesis has been to document the English careers of the two nineteenth-century Italian International actresses Adelaide Ristori and Eleonora Duse. The English careers of Duse and Ristori are discussed in the light of both the nineteenth-century debate which developed in England on the role and nature of the actress, and the reception of foreign stars on the English stage and the ensuing discussion on the way foreign theatre stars conformed to, or contravened, prevailing images of English womanhood. Chapter 2 looks into the role and status of the actress from the mid-nineteenth-century to the fin de siecle by deploying critical tools offered by feminist theatre criticism. It is an attempt to define the role of the nineteenth-century actress as a professional woman and draw attention to the voyeuristic nature of nineteenth-century theatre where actresses were put on display: on the one hand they were admired and visually possessed by their audiences, but on the other, they were doomed, as women who made a public show of their bodies, to be social outcasts. Chapter 3 attempts a chronology of foreign actresses on the English stage and focuses on their reception which provides a basis for comparison between English and foreign nineteenth-century actresses. Chapter 4 and 5 respectively, reconstruct Ristori's and Duse's English careers. Issues tackled in the previous chapters resurface here to provide a critical angle in trying to evaluate their reception in Victorian England. The conclusion endeavours to pull together the different lines of this study and points to possible lines of research to be pursed in the future in the field of women in theatre.

This thesis is an attempt to identify and reposition the work of a number of women playwrights whose work was produced on the London Stage between 1918-1962. The existing academic assumption about these playwrights is either that they have no significant place in a history of the drama, or that their work was not rooted in feminist ideology. The thesis sets out to analyse their work in the context for which it was created; a time in which both women's lives and the British theatre, were transformed by war, cultural change and a change in their status within the public domain. As such, the plays are examined in relation to social, cultural and ideological developments and change, which particularly affected both women's lives and the perception of what it meant to be a woman. Similarly, the emergent theories of femaleness and femininity, which grew in number during the period under examination and are outlined in the thesis, have a relevance to a reading of the dramatic texts in question. There are, as far as I am aware, no other detailed studies of plays by women playwrights of the period analysed here. As such, it is hoped that this thesis constitutes at least the beginnings of such a study. Some of the plays quoted here, were treated in less detail and within a far less theoretical framework in a Masters thesisWhich was submitted in 1988.

Most studies of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre focus upon the drama and playhouses of London. However, if we are to have a fuller understanding of English Renaissance theatre and its place in early modem English culture, the wider world of regional English drama must also be taken into account. Playing places and vernacular play performances outside early modern London and its liberties are therefore made the subject of this thesis. The dissertation offers the first detailed account of regional playing spaces and their use for play performances in English in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. The thesis opens with an introduction in which provincial playing and staging conventions are discussed in general. Each subsequent chapter concentrates upon playing practices and performances in a representative space, focusing upon buildings (and the grounds of buildings) used for regional dramatic performances (e. g. town halls, schools and colleges, country houses). The chapters are illustrated with transcriptions from primary records and case-studies of known performances in specific spaces. I have supplemented study of published and unpublished dramatic records transcribed for the Records of Early English Drama Project (based at Toronto University) and the Malone Society with extensive primary research amongst those Elizabethan and Jacobean records yet to be transcribed or printed. Visual evidence is also included, furnishing a visual archive for scholars of early modem theatre spaces in England. Research in many archives remains to be done. The survey of early modern English provincial theatre offered in this dissertation is therefore introductory. The aim has been to provide a starting point for those studying this rich and under-researched aspect of English Renaissance dramatic culture in the future.

This thesis is a collation and discussion of productions of Ben Jonson's plays in England between 1977 and 2000. It focuses on mainstream theatre productions. Therefore, amateur and Fringe productions, adaptations and productions by small-scale theatre companies are not included. It contains previously unreleased material of interviews with theatre practitioners who have been instrumental in staging the productions covered. Whilst scholarship has concentrated on recent productions of Shakespeares, tudies in Jonsonianp erformanceh ave been neglected.W ith the recent resurgence in popularity of Jonson's texts in the English theatre repertoire, it is now pertinent to assessth e methodsu sed to staget he work of this playwright. This thesis focuses only on the staging of texts presented between the two dates; this does not cover all of Jonson's texts. Contained in two volumes, Part One raises issues of performance, whilst in Part Two productions are considered within chapters on each play. An Afterword (in Volume One) considers the future of production and the action needed to be taken for future progression in performance and performance studies. The Appendix (in Volume One) contains detailed venue information. The thesis is intended as a documented record of productions, in order to stimulate future research into Jonsonian performance methods. By examining recent productions the failures and successeso f the contemporaryt heatre's approacht o Jonsonh ave been noted. This will contribute to an understanding of how Jonson's texts continue to work on stage. The title of this thesis comes from Bartholomew Fair, a play that addressesth e need to assimilatet he presentationo f theatre within contemporary concerns.

This study arose out of an awareness that contemporary performance theories and production techniques were not appropriate to the plays of Howard Barker. The first section, a comparison of Barker with Edward Bond, attempts to 'situate' the former with reference to a major dramatist of the seventies and early eighties. This reveals a number of significant differences, including almost diametrically opposed conceptions of the function of drama. In the second section, I consider Barker against a wider background of deconstructive and postmodernist thinking. As opposed to Bond's Brechtian notion of a Rational theatre, I argue that Barker's theatre is irrational and suggest that irrational interaction is Seduction. Barker's plays are considered from the point of view of a theory of seduction - in particular Jean Baudrillard's. There follows a review of a range of discourses on performance by influential practitioners such as Stanislavsky. Although seduction is identifiable in all their practices, it is almost universally denied or shunned - except by Grotowski. Also the focus of acting technique is invariably on the actor/character relation with little consideration of interaction with others. The third section considers in some detail two plays by Barker - JUDITH and THE CASTLE, analysing them from a seductive perspective.

This thesis centres on the twin discourses of hysteria and theatre, and contends that an examination of hysteria, which is above all a performative disease, can illuminate our understanding of performance on the public stage. My analysis of the history of hysteria shows that our modern understanding of the condition developed out of the interactions between the physician/analyst and the live body of the hysteric, with all its symptomatic acts, this thesis, which has as its central concern the live body of staged performance, uses the history of those interactions to re-centre attention on the symptomatic acts of the performing body on stage, and on the process of reading such acts. Drawing its material from a number of stage performances from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - from the texts of melodrama such as The Dumb Man of Manchester(l837) or The Bells (1871) through the work of the American actress Elizabeth Robins in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1891) and her own play Alan's Wife (1893) to modem texts such as Helne Cixous's Portrait of Dora (1976) - this thesis reads those performances, and the relationship of those performances to their audiences, through the lens of hysteria: using an understanding of hysteria to read those texts anew and, in reverse, using the texts to develop, and critique, a model of hysterical performance rhetoric. Such a model, this thesis argues, with its very basis in a condition of rejection of or failure to fit into the dominant discourses of society, is not limited in application to performance texts which take hysteria as their subject. Instead it can be more widely employed as a key part of a radical theatrical politics by those who today find themselves silenced by the dominant discourses and values of our own era.

This thesis examines the strategy of re-visioning myth within contemporary European feminist theatre, a strategy which has proved popular over time and across cultures but which has received insufficient critical attention. This study seeks to fill that gap by offering a framework through which this practice can be considered, exploring the diverse motivations of individual playwrights, and evaluating the achievements of particular plays in context. Twelve case studies are included, grouped together to demonstrate a variety of approaches to re-visioning ranging from utilisation of myth as pretext for examination of social issues, to an apparent abandonment of contemporary reality for a utopian otherworld. However, it is argued first that mythical, social and psychological strands remain intertwined, and second that the diversity of approaches reflects the importance for feminist theatre of selecting strategies to meet specific needs, and that these strategies can thus be viewed as complementary rather than in conflict. Chapter One introduces selected critical perspectives on myth, re-visioning and feminist theatre, framing these within Rita Felski's model of the feminist counter-public sphere. Chapter Two discusses plays by Hella Haasse, Franca Rame and Sarah Daniels, which examine myth as ideological narrative. Plays by Maureen Duffy, Caryl Churchill and David Lan, and Timberlake Wertenbaker, considered in Chapter Three, investigate myths of female violence. Chapter Four looks at plays by Andree Chedid and Angela Carter which use myth to confront women's complicity in maintaining the status quo. Plays by Serena Sartori, Renata Coluccini and Helene Cixous, discussed in Chapter Five, offer psychological investigations into women's relationships with myth, language and power. The thesis concludes with a summary of the research findings, and assesses their significance.

This thesis examines how mental illness has been represented in British theatre from c. 1960 to the present day. It is particularly concerned with the roles played by space and embodiment in these representations, and what emerges as bodies interact in space. It adopts a mixed methodology, drawing on theoretical models from both continental philosophy and contemporary cognitive and neuroscientific research, in order to address these questions from the broadest possible range of perspectives. The first part of the thesis draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre to explore the role of institutional space, and in particular its gendered implications, in staging madness. The second part introduces approaches to the body drawn from the cognitive turn in theatre and performance studies. These are connected to the approaches of the first section through phenomenology’s concern with lived experience. Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher’s work on ‘the phenomenological mind’ provides important context here. In addition, Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of ontology offers a solid basis from which to think about how to act ethically as both a producer of, and an audience member for, representations of mental illness. Through these explorations, this thesis suggests a model of madness, not as something to be bracketed as ‘other’ and belonging to a deviant individual, but as emerging between bodies in space – there is no madness outside of social, spatial and embodied contexts. This in turn suggests a new approach to understanding the role theatre can play in addressing the lived experience of mental illness. While many productions currently attempt, unilaterally, to reduce the ‘stigma’ of mental illness, this thesis suggests that that, in fact, discrimination against people experiencing mental illness is more likely to be reduced through the interaction between an ethically minded production and an ethical spectator. Such a model does not claim to be able to reduce the experience of madness to a totalising concept which can be communicated through theatre, but rather insists that it is only through an embodied, empathic interaction that a true concern for the (‘mad’ or ‘sane’) Other can emerge.

This thesis places the notion of risk and the diversity of treatment that the management of risk involves, at the centre of the discourse about Early English drama. It locates the spectator’s experience on the edge of reality and fiction. Offering an alternative to current theories of metatheatricality and cognitive theory, this research attempts to contribute to knowledge by arguing that the most important element of the dramatic experience exists between the two poles of an awareness of artifice and absorption, and that the dramatic experience is managed by playwright, actor and spectator with respect to these two poles. This thesis focuses on the spectator, not just on the absorbed spectator who ‘lives’ in the drama, such as one finds in cognitive studies, or on the reflective spectator who is conscious of the artifice of drama, such as in metatheatrical studies, but rather on participatory spectators, and on spectators moving between the two positions of absorption and reflection. The case studies in this thesis are reflective of the contexts of early English dramatic performance: they show how similar issues were controlled differently in different contexts; that there might be no clear boundary between Catholic and Protestant drama in terms of spectator management; that some playwrights had political reasons to believe it best if they did not manage their spectators’ experience, while other playwrights displayed a deep commitment to controlling not only spectators’ experiences and responses during the performance but also afterwards, suggesting that risk management is not an act but rather a process; that dramatic performance could cause disaster if not sufficiently managed, or if the performance context in which the drama was performed, was misjudged, but that the use of the dramatic medium could also be recuperated by later events of a similar nature. Examining drama in its specific literary and historical context, this thesis reconstructs the play-experience not only through the plays, but also through a study of how plays were described in Star Chamber records, ambassadorial records, eye-witness accounts, and other records. It clarifies early drama’s most fundamental characteristic to be an intervention in society, and as such always relating to non-dramatic issues, and inevitably carrying risk with it.