Profile
It’s my privilege to be the first, and so far only, drama and theatre academic who is a Fellow of the British Academy, an organisation of the leading academics in the humanities and social sciences.
I got there by an extraordinarily conventional academic route. After studying for degrees at Oxford, I became the first lecturer in drama at Nottingham University, with a brief to direct shows for students as well as teach almost anything from English drama and literature. When I left there was a clear drama pathway to the final degree, an established tradition of practical work, and an expanded drama staffing.
Imagining that it would be more fun to work in Drama than English I became Head of Drama at Goldsmiths. It turned out that my brief here was to sort out internecine conflict between staff and get the department ready for quality audit. With that sorted I helped pioneer an inter-department staff seminar, which was joyous both intellectually and socially. After a year’s study leave part- funded by the AHRC, I returned to find a somewhat changed department and, more or less by accident, moved to The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
This was to a new post, Director of Programmes, invented by the incoming Principal who realised there needed to be an academic in the senior management of a college. Here my project was to transform a whole institution, this time from training school to university college. I decided to invent, for perhaps the first time anywhere, an institution that was both conservatoire and college, without compromising either part. An early step in the process was Central’s admission to the University of London. When I left Central it had just gained a high score in the Research Excellence Framework, a mark of how far it had come on its journey to a specialist university college.
My retirement project is to become better at my subject.
Areas of Expertise
The work of Granville Barker
Drama and Theatre 1900-1925
PhD Supervision
I have supervised to completion theses on subjects such as clowning, bhānds, Tino Sehgal and deconstructed scenography.
I no longer offer PhD supervision.
Key Publications
2021. (forthcoming) The Unknown Granville Barker: Letters to Helen and Other Texts, 1915-1918. (London: Society for Theatre Research)
2021. (forthcoming) Forms of Drama, multi-volume series. Series editor. (London: Bloomsbury)
2018. The Great European Stage Directors, eight volumes. Series editor. (London: Bloomsbury)
2018. Studying Plays: 4th edition (with new material on testimony, monodrama and the post-dramatic), with Mick Wallis (London: Bloomsbury)
2017. ‘9 August 1967/The Pyjamas’, Studies in Theatre and Performance 37: 2 (Orton-Halliwell anniversary issue), pp. 173-183
2016. The Cambridge Introduction to Performance Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
2012. Direction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan)
2009. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
2009. On Training, edited with Richard Gough (Performance Research 14.2)
2006. Theatre, Body and Pleasure (London: Routledge)
2004. Drama/Theatre/Performance, with Mick Wallis (London: Routledge) (published in Korean 2015)
2004. ‘Drama and Politics 1970-2002’, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, edited by Laura Marcus and Peter Nichols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 635-652
2003. ‘Lolo’s Breasts, Cyborgism, and a Wooden Christ’, in Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and History, edited by Helen Thomas and Jamilah Ahmed (Oxford: Blackwell)
2002. ‘A Coloured Girl Reading Proust’, in Joe Orton: A Casebook, edited by Francesca Coppa (London: Routledge), pp. 141-154
2002. ‘Revels End, and the Gentle Body Starts’, Shakespeare Survey 55, pp. 237-256
1999. ‘Blood, Thunder and Theory: The Arrival of English Melodrama’, Theatre Research International 24: 2, pp. 145-151
1996. English Drama: A Cultural History, with Peter Womack (Oxford: Blackwell)
1996. ‘Melodrama as Avant-Garde: Enacting a New Subjectivity’, Textual Practice 10: 3, pp. 507-522
1994. ‘Pauses of Mutual Agitation’, in Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, edited by Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute)
1990. A Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers 1580-1720, with Maureen Bell and George Parfitt (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press)
1989. Coming on Strong: Gay Culture and Politics, edited with Mick Wallis (London: Unwin Hyman)
1988. Because We’re Queers: The Life and Crimes of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton (reprinted 1989) (London: Gay Men’s Press)
1986. Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (reprinted 1993) (Brighton: Harvester Press)
1985. The Women’s Sharp Revenge: Five Women’s Pamphlets from the Renaissance (London: Fourth Estate)
1981. Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth Century Drama (Brighton: Harvester Press)
Register of Interest
Nothing to declare.