Signs of Performance: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theatre

This volume provides the beginning student with working examples of theatrical analysis. Its range covers the whole of the 20th century theatre, from Stanislavski to Brecht and Samuel Beckett to Robert Wilson. Colin Counsell takes an historical look at theatre as a cultural practice, clearly tracing connections between: key practitioners’ ideas about performance; the theatrical practices prompted by those ideas; the resulting signs which emerge in performance; and the meanings and political consequences of those signs. It provides an understandable theoretical framework for the study of theatre as a signifying practice, and offers explanations.