The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science

Description

Theatre has engaged with science since its beginnings in Ancient Greece. The intersection of the two disciplines has been the focus of increasing interest to scholars and students. The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science gives readers a sense of this dynamic field, using detailed analyses of plays and performances covering a wide range of areas including climate change and the environment, technology, animal studies, disease and contagion, mental health, and performance and cognition. Identifying historical tendencies that have dominated theatre's relationship with science, the volume traces many periods of theatre history across a wide geographical range. It follows a simple and clear structure of pairs and triads of chapters that cluster around a given theme so that readers get a clear sense of the current debates and perspectives.

Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford. Her publications include Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (2006), Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015), Modern Drama: A Very Short Introduction (2016), and Twentieth-Century Approaches to Literature: Late Victorian into Modern (2016), coedited with Laura Marcus and Michele Mendelssohn and shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association book prize.

'This is a mind-expanding book. It not only shows that theatre and science have been interacting for centuries but offers a series of pathfinding essays on subjects ranging from mental health to plague and infection. It establishes beyond doubt that theatre and science are indissolubly linked and challenges, informs and stimulates the reader at every turn.' Michael Billington 'The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science is a masterpiece of interdisciplinarity, bringing together any number of disciplines perhaps formerly thought to have nothing in common. And no one is currently better situated than Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr to undertake such a project. The choice of essay topics is varied and expansive, and the selected contributors are drawn from an international list of the most exciting thinkers currently pursuing ways to see, understand, and enjoy the rich interplay between theatre and science.' William W. Demastes, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge 'This Companion is a powerful contribution to the field. From experiments to the Anthropocene, bestiaries to bodies, pathogens to meteors to back-stage technologies, it demonstrates the enormous range of contemporary thinking on the connections running between theatre and science - and delivers this in a way that manages to be both invigorating and deeply enjoyable.' Tiffany Watt-Smith, Queen Mary University of London