Profile
After an undergraduate degree in English at Cambridge, I trained as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and later as a director with Erica Whyman at the Gate Theatre, Katie Mitchell at the National Theatre Studio, and at Shakespeare’s Globe. During my time as a freelance director I also taught acting and directing for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and the Theaterpädagogische Zentrum in Lingen, Germany.
The financial crisis of 2007-8 forced a turning-point in my career, and I took up the opportunity of a PhD at the University of Warwick on the theatre studios developed in England in the mid-twentieth century by Michel Saint-Denis, George Devine and Michael Chekhov. The politics of austerity post-2008, and the resurgent nationalism and authoritarian populism that have since emerged have substantially shaped both my teaching and research since I began a lectureship at the University of York in 2012, and moved to Central at the start of 2016.
In sum, my work asks what it would take for cultural production to become a space of liberation, and I critique the reproduction of oppressive ideologies in the sphere of performance-making, with a particular focus on questions of political economy, labour and race. I won the 2017 David Bradby Award for Early Career Research in European Theatre for my work on the director Katie Mitchell, and in 2018 I was given the Society for Theatre Research’s Stephen Joseph Award for my research into ensemble theatre-making.
I am a member of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) and the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA), and an editor of the international, peer-reviewed journal Studies in Theatre and Performance.
Areas of Expertise
- Performance and contemporary politics
- 20th century theatre history
- Acting, directing and dramaturgy
- Political economies of cultural production
- Race and racism
- Activism and performance
PhD Supervision
To date, I have supervised three PhD theses to completion as first supervisor and one as second, and externally examined four more in areas including contemporary performance-making, the politics of actor training, and performance, gender and race. I am currently lead-supervising doctoral projects on institutional racism and sexual violence in the theatre, ensemble rehearsal and theatre-making practices, feminist performance-making, and Black British theatre.
Key Publications
NB: Publications before 2023 are under the name ‘Tom Cornford’.
Books
2020. Theatre Studios: A Political History of Ensemble Theatre-Making (Abingdon: Routledge).
Co-edited volumes
2020. Michael Chekhov in the Twenty-First Century: New Pathways, co-edited with Cass Fleming (London: Bloomsbury).
2020. Contemporary Theatre Review, special issue: Katie Mitchell, co-edited with Caridad Svich (30.2).
Articles
2020. ‘Introduction: Katie Mitchell’s Theatre’, with Caridad Svich, Contemporary Theatre Review, 30.2, 137-150, DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2020.1732952
2020. ‘Katie Mitchell and the Technologies of the Realist Theatre’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 30.2, 168-192, DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2020.1732953
2018. ‘The Racist Case for Diversity?’, Contemporary Theatre Review 28.4, 553-556, DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2018.1533070
2018. ‘Experiencing Nationlessness: Staging the Migrant Condition in Some Recent British Theatre’, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 6.1, 101-112, DOI: 10.1515/jcde-2018-0014
2017. ‘The Editing of Emma Rice’, Contemporary Theatre Review 27.1, 134-148, DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2017.1274147
Book chapters
2019. ‘Michael Chekhov: Directing an Actors’ Theatre’ in Russian Theatre in Practice: The Director’s Guide, ed. Amy Skinner (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 95-107.
2018. ‘Willful Distraction: Katie Mitchell, Auteurism and the Canon’ in The Theatre of Katie Mitchell. ed. Benjamin Fowler. (Abingdon: Routledge), pp. 72-92.
2018. ‘Tyrone Guthrie’, with Roberta Barker, in The Great European Stage Directors, Vol. 3: Copeau, Komisarjevsky, Guthrie. ed. Jonathan Pitches. (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 115-162.
2016. ‘Jacques Lecoq and the Studio Tradition’, in The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq. Ed. by Mark Evans and Rick Kemp. (Abingdon: Routledge), pp. 43-50.
Register of Interest
Nothing to declare.
