Acts of Dramaturgy is a critical frame for Michael Pinchbeck’s The Shakespeare Trilogy, a recent touring project comprising three performances—The Beginning, The Middle, and The End—that explored the role of the dramaturg. This book sets the playtexts in dialogue with reflexive essays and provocations on contemporary dramaturgy from a range of contributors.
Weaving together different modes of writing, the volume reflects on the politics of dramaturgy, authorship, adaptation, performance, and the use of Shakespeare as a stimulus for making contemporary theater. The resulting work is as much a reflection on the entanglements of processes, lineages, and relations that have shaped the work and its reception as it is an exploration of ways of reflecting and being with practice now. A valuable new contribution to the study of contemporary dramaturgy, the book will be of interest to makers and scholars of theater and performance and anyone interested in practice research and creative critical writing.
Table of Contents
The Prologue: So Here We Are at the Beginning – Nicki Hobday
The Foreword: The Time When Anything Could Happen – Maddy Costa
The Prelude: The (Play)text Is the Set – Catherine Love
Act Two: Picking
On Weaving: Acts of (Auto)dramaturgy – Michael Pinchbeck
The Table Is Set… – Andy Smith
The Playtext of The Beginning (2012) – Michael Pinchbeck
Act Three: Raveling
The Interval – Michael Pinchbeck and Tony Pinchbeck
‘Something In Between’: Liminality, Ageing and The Middle – Mick Mangan
The Playtext of The Middle (2013) – Michael Pinchbeck
Act Four: Battening
Bear Necessity: The Means to The End – James Hudson
And in The End… – Dani Abulhawa
The Playtext of The End (2011) – Michael Pinchbeck
Act Five: Taking up
The Sum of Its Parts: Memories of The Trilogy from an Inside/Outside Eye – Ollie Smith
Endings Are Not Always Completed with a Full Stop – Rhiannon Jones
The Epilogue: It’s Time to Call It a Day – Michael Pinchbeck