National Drama

Anne Cattaneo was among the first Americans to fill the role of dramaturg, one of theatre’s best kept secrets. A combination of theatre artist, scholar, researcher, play advocate, editor, and writer’s friend, it is the job of a dramaturg to ‘reflect light back on the elements that are already in play,’ while bringing a work of theatre to life. Cattaneo traces the field from its beginnings in the eighteenth century to the present and chronicles the multitude and variety of tasks a dramaturg undertakes before, during, and after a production is brought to the stage.

This article examines ethical tensions and entanglements that arise when working as a volunteer and professional director outside of the academy with multiple stakeholders including teachers, university students, young carers, a playwright, youth arts organisation and social services.

In Ramón Griffero’s seminal work, The Dramaturgy of Space, the playwright and director describes his aesthetic philosophy and theoretical approach to theatrical creation, illustrating his theory through practical application in a series of exercises. His book also reinforces the practicality of Griffero’s concepts through a series of online videos, breaking down each exercise and allowing readers to engage with the effects of his celebrated approach.

This book revisits Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of the postdramatic and participates in the ongoing debate on the theatre paradigm by placing contemporary Indian performance within it. None of the Indian theatre-makers under study built their works directly on the Euro-American model of postdramatic theatre, but many have used its vocabulary and apparatus in innovative, transnational ways. Their principal aim was to invigorate the language of Indian urban theatre, which had turned stale under the stronghold of realism inherited from colonial stage practice after independence.

This article expounds on an experimentation of an educational drama model to aid teachers working in an unfavourable physical environment for play-based learning and do not have any substantial training in the use of drama pedagogy.

What is home? The answer seems obvious. But Telling Our Stories of Home, an international collection of eleven plays by and about women from Lebanon, Haiti, Venezuela, Uganda, Palestine, Brazil, India, UK, and the US, complicates the answer.
These are voices seldom represented to a larger audience. The plays and performance pieces include a mix of monologue, duologue, and ensemble plays, allowing fantastic performance opportunities particularly in an age of social-distancing with flexible casts that together invite the theme of home to be performed and studied on the page.

This article describes and reflects on the process of adapting and translating a classic theatre text, Don Juan by Molière, into a twenty minute performance in Maltese to be performed by a class of eleven-year-old students.

Featuring conversations with theatre makers in the US and UK during the first 8 months of the Covid-19 lockdown, this collection reveals the innovations in digital theatre as artists, companies and theatres had to adjust to the restrictions and formulate new ways of working and reaching audiences. Besides documenting in their own words the work that was generated, this book captures the artists’ dreams for a new post-Covid reality in which theatre is reimagined and issues of racial and economic injustice are addressed.

Applied Theatre: Ethics explores what it means for applied theatre practice to be conducted in an ethical way and examines how this affects the work done with communities and participants. It considers how practitioners can balance aesthetics and ethics when creating performance, particularly with relatively inexperienced and often vulnerable groups of people who are being asked to both tell and stage their stories. The two sections bring together theoretical and practical ways for theatre-makers to examine the ethics of their applied theatre projects.