Search results for ""Author Bridget Escolme""

What is the role of costume in Shakespeare production? Shakespeare and Costume in Practice argues that costume design choices are central not only to the creation of period setting and the actor’s work on character, but to the cultural, political, and psychological meanings that the theatre makes of Shakespeare. The book explores questions about what the first Hamlet looked like in his mourning cloak; how costumes for a Shakespeare comedy can reflect or critique the collective nostalgias a culture has for its past; how costume and casting work together to ask new questions about Shakespeare and race. Using production case studies of Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest, the book demonstrates that costume design can be a site of experimentation, playfulness, and transgression in the theatre – and that it can provoke audiences to think again about what power, race, and gender look like on the Shakespearean stage.

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This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Emotional Excess on the Shakespearean Stage demonstrates the links made between excess of emotion and madness in the early modern period. It argues that the ways in which today's popular and theatrical cultures judge how much is too much can distort our understanding of early modern drama and theatre. It argues that permitting the excesses of the early modern drama onto the contemporary stage might free actors and audiences alike from assumptions that in order to engage with the drama of the past, its characters must be just like us. The book deals with characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries who are sad for too long, or angry to the point of irrationality; people who laugh when they shouldn't or make their audiences do so; people whose selfhood has broken down into an excess of fragmentary extremes and who are labelled mad. It is about moments in the theatre when excessive emotion is rewarded and applauded — and about moments when the expression of emotion is in excess of what is socially acceptable: embarrassing, shameful, unsettling or insane. The book explores the broader cultures of emotion that produce these theatrical moments, and the theatre's role in regulating and extending the acceptable expression of emotion. It is concerned with the acting of excessive emotion and with acting emotion excessively. And it asks how these excesses are produced or erased, give pleasure or pain, in versions of early modern drama in theatre, film and television today. Plays discussed include Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Spanish Tragedy, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, and Coriolanus.

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It's Cabaret, we've got our heads down and we're dancing and drinking as fast as we can. The enemy is on its way, but this time it doesn't have guns and gas it has storms and earthquakes, fire and brimstone.... You were the glimmer. At the end of the tunnel. And you went out. Earthquakes in London is a fast and furious metropolitan crash of people, scenes and decades, as three sisters attempt to navigate their dislocated lives and loves, while their dysfunctional father, a brilliant scientist, predicts global catastrophe. The play deals, through amplified theatricality, with a range of contemporary issues from population growth to climate change. An all-pervasive fear of the future and a guilty pleasure in the excesses of the present drive Mike Bartlett's epic rollercoaster of a play from 1968 to 2525 and back again. Earthquakes in London first published in 2010 and has subsequently become a much-produced and widely studied drama text. It is published here as a Student Edition alongside commentary and notes by Bridget Escolme. The ancillary material is geared at students and includes: - an introduction outlining the play's plot, character, themes context and performance history - the full text of the play - a chronology of the playwright's life and work - extensive textual notes - questions for further study - an interview with the playwright

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