Dan Rebellato |
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Professor of Contemporary Theatre BA (Bristol) PhD (London) |
My research has so far mainly focused on post-war British theatre. 1956 and All That (Routledge, 1999) is a rereading of the revolutionary revival of seriousness and social engagement that is thought to have taken place at the Royal Court in 1956 with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and all that followed. I have recently completed the short monograph, Theatre & Globalization, for a new series I am editing with Jen Harvie: Theatre& is a long series of short books offering a guide to the latest innovations in theatre and performance research. My next book project is British Theatre since the Seventies: Playwriting, Art and Politics, which argues that British playwriting of the last three decades is best understood as responding to - and offering a form of resistance to - the global expansion of capitalism. Theoretically, my work is informed by poststructural thinkers like Derrida and Foucault, but more recently by a German critical tradition, stretching from Kant, through Marx, to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Together with colleagues from across the faculty, I have recently worked to introduce Philosophy as an undergraduate minor degree programme. Our first philosophy undergraduates joined in 2007 and we are now expanding the programme to a joint degree. I am also a playwright, and my work has been performed in Berlin, New York and Barcelona, and across the UK, on the fringe, in the West End, at the National Theatre Studio, the Young Vic, and on BBC Radio. I designed, with colleagues in English, two new joint degrees in Creative Writing (with Drama or English), whose first students graduated in July 2007. I've chaired several platforms for the National Theatre, Lyric Hammersmith, and Manchester Royal Exchange, I am on the advisory board of New York’s Synapse Productions, and I’m a contributing editor for New Theatre Quarterly and Associate Editor of Contemporary Theatre Review |
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Sarah Kane
In autumn 1998, I invited Sarah Kane to come to Royal Holloway and talk to my students and she agreed giving a long platform interview and answering questions from the floor. It appears to be the last interview she gave. Excerpts from it have been published in several books and articles, including Aleks Sierz's In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (2001) and Graham Saunders' 'Love Me or Kill Me': Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (2002). A short audio clip of the event was included in my BBC Radio 4 documentary Blasted: The Life and Death of Sarah Kane. Since then I've had a series of enquiries about that recording and it seemed easier to make it available online. Here you can download an MP3 of the interview and also an edited transcript of the interview kindly prepared by Aleks Sierz.
This interview is made available under a Creative Commons 'Attribution Non-commercial' license, allowing non-commercial use, adaptation and distribution, as long as the interview is fully attributed:
- Dan Rebellato. Interview with Sarah Kane: 3 November 1998. Department of Drama and Theatre: Royal Holloway University of London, 2009. MP3 file / PDF file
Interview with Sarah Kane by Dan Rebellato is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Supervision
I welcome applications from research students, especially in these areas:
- British Theatre since the late-nineteenth century.
- Naturalist and Modernist theatre in Europe
- Theatrical politics, philosophy, theory
- Writing for performance
Current courses
- DT1000 Contemporary Theatremaking: Rimini Protokoll
- PY1001 Fundamental Questions in Philosophy
- DT2280 British Theatre since 1979: New Writing
- DT2310 Playwriting
- CW3010 Playwriting 2
Recent Publications
| Theatre & Globalization. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. |  |
| '"No Theatre Guild Attraction Are We": Kiss Me, Kate and the Politics of the Integrated Musical', Contemporary Theatre Review, xix, 1 (February 2009), pp. 61-73. |
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| '"Because It Feels Fucking Amazing": Recent British Drama and Bodily Mutilation' in: Cool Britannia? British Political Drama in the 1990s, eds. Rebecca D'Monté and Graham Saunders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 192-207. |  |
| (with Chris Megson) '"Theatre and Anti-Theatre": David Hare and Public Speaking' in: The Cambridge Companion to David Hare, ed. Richard Boon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 236-249. |  |
| 'From the State of the Nation to Globalization: Shifting Political Agendas in Contemporary British Playwriting.' in: A Concise Companion to British and Irish Drama, eds. Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, pp. 245-262. |  |
| Interview. in: British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics, eds. Mireia Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte, Pilar Zozaya. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007, pp. 159-171. |  |
| ‘Globalization and Playwriting: Towards a Site-Unspecific Theatre’ Contemporary Theatre Review, xvi, 1 (February 2006), pp. 97-113. | |
| Introduction and editorial material for Mark Ravenhill. Shopping and Fucking: Student Edition. London: Methuen, 2005. |  |
| ‘“And I Will Reach Out My Hand With A Kind Of Infinite Slowness And Say The Perfect Thing”: The Utopian Theatre of Suspect Culture’ Contemporary Theatre Review, xiii, 1 (February 2003). pp. 61-80. | |
| ‘Gestes d’utopie: le théâtre de David Greig.’ in: Dramaturgies Britanniques (1980-2000). Edited by Jean-Marc Lanteri. Écritures Contemporaines, 5. Paris-Caen: Lettres Modernes Minard, 2002. pp. 125-48. | |
| ‘Lu Santo Jullàre Dario Fo.’ in: Research Papers on Dario Fo and Franca Rame. Edited by Ed Emery. London: Red Notes, 2002. pp. 161-74. | |
| ‘Look Back at empire: British theatre and imperial decline.’ in: British Culture and the End of Empire. Edited by Stuart Ward. Manchester University Press, 2001. pp. 73-90. | |
| Introduction to David Greig. Plays: One. London: Methuen, 2001. | |
| ‘Noel Coward’s Bad Manners.’ in: Look Back in Pleasure: Noel Coward Reconsidered. Edited by Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell. London: Methuen, 2000. | |
| Introduction to Mark Ravenhill. Plays: One. London: Methuen, 2000. | |
| ‘Sarah Kane: An Appreciation,’ New Theatre Quarterly. xv, 3 (NTQ 59) (August 1999). pp. 280-81. | |
| 1956 and All That: the Making of Modern British Drama. London: Routledge, 1999. |  |
| 'Is There a Comic Sublime?' Laughter and Violence Symposium, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, October 2007. |
| 'Poetic Licence' Between Fact and Fiction, University of Birmingham, September 2007. |
| 'When We Talk of Horses' Performing Literatures, University of Leeds, July 2007. |
| 'The Cut and the Critics: Mark Ravenhill's Ethical Politics' Ravenhill 10, Goldsmiths, University of London , November 2006. |
| ‘The Theatre Is Not Local: Borges’s Birds and the Otherwhere of Theatre’ IFTR/FIRT, University of Helsinki, August 2006 (an abbreviated version of this paper was given at TaPRA, University of London, September 2006). |
| ‘“No Theatre Guild Attraction Are We”: Kiss Me, Kate and the Politics of the Integrated Musical’ Song, Stage and Screen, University of Portsmouth, April 2006. |
| ‘The Economy's Gay, Stupid!’ Gagging: Gender, Performance and the Politics of Intervention, University of Hull, March 2006. |
| ‘Is Theatre Historical All The Way Down?' TaPRA Inaugural Conference, Manchester University, September 2005. |
| ‘Walking with Dinosaurs: The Rise and Fall of the State of the Nation Play’ Political Futures? Alternative Theatre in Britain Today, University of Reading, April 2004. |
| ‘Resisting Globalization from Above: Ethics, Aesthetics, and British Drama’SCUDD Conference, University of Leeds, April 2003. |
| ‘The Postmodern Condition Did Not Take Place’ Postgraduate Research Seminar, Exeter University - School of Performance Arts, January 2003. |
| ‘“Because it feels fucking amazing”: Recent British Theatre and Bodily Mutilation’ In Yer Face? British Drama in the 1990s, University of the West of England, September 2002. |
| ‘The Importance of Being Martha’ Keynote Address. The Importance of Being Arthur: British Masculinities in the 1950s, University of Surrey, Roehampton, June 2002. |
| ‘In Praise of Luvvies’ Theatre and Theologies, Suspect Culture/RSAMD, Glasgow, December 2000. |
| ‘I Love a Good Story: British Drama against Postmodernism’ Keynote Address. Birmingham Playwriting Conference, Birmingham University, April 1999. |
| Theatremorphosis [performance installation] (part of the exhibition Stage Fright at the CCA, Glasgow, 2009) | |
| Fear and Misery in the Third Term [co-written with Mike Bartlett, Duncan Macmillan, Chloe Moss, and Ben Musgrave] (‘Later’ Paines Plough: Trafalgar Studios, 2008) | |
| Static [writer] (Suspect Culture & Graeae, tour 2008) | |
| Cavalry [writer] (BBC Radio 4, 2008) | |
| Girlfriend in a Coma adaptation of novel by Douglas Coupland (BBC Radio 3, 2008) | |
| Longship [writer] (writer on attachment: National Theatre Studio, 2007) | |
| Mile End [writer in devised process] (Analogue TC, Edinburgh 2007) | |
| Futurology [co-writer, co-deviser] (Suspect Culture & National Theatre of Scotland: tour, 2007) | |
| Your Hand in Mine [dramaturg] (Wishbone: Lyric Hammersmith, April 2007) | |
| Dead Souls adaptation of novel by Nikolay Gogol ('Classic Serial, 2 episodes, BBC Radio 4, April 2006; rpt BBC World Service, 2007) | |
| Outright Terror Bold and Brilliant [writer] (NYT: Soho Theatre, 2005) | |
| A Modest Adjustment [writer] ('G8 Plays' National Theatre: Olivier, 2005; Synapse: Ohio Theatre, New York, 2006)) | |
| Chekhov in Hell [writer] (Studio Theatre, Royal Holloway, 2005) | |
| Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day [writer] (Pleasance Theatre, London 2004; National Tour, January - March 2006) | |
| The Midwich Cuckoos adaptation of novel by John Wyndham (‘Classic Serial’, 2 episodes, BBC Radio 4, December 2003; nominated for Sony Drama Award 2004; BBC Audiobook 2007) |
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| Fucking Romeo [writer] (Young Vic, London, October 2003) | |
| We All Fall Down! translation of Zitti! Stiamo Precipitando by Dario Fo (Boilerhouse, 2002) | |
| The Rival Queens adaptation of play by Nathaniel Lee (Union Theatre, London, 2001) | |
| Emily Rising [writer] (BBC Radio 4, 2001, rpt. 2003) | |
| Antique Silver [writer] (BBC Radio 4, 2000) | |
| Erskine May [writer] (BBC Radio 4, 2000, rpt. 2004) | |
| Crows translation of Les Corbeaux by Henry Becque (National Theatre Studio, London, 1997) | |
| Showstopper [writer] (Arts Theatre, London, 1997; Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds Community Tour, February - April 2006). | |
‘Theatre History in the Curriculum’ paper given at Palatine theatre history study day, Royal Holloway, June 2002. |
TheatreVOICE, Reputations: Martin Crimp, discussion held at Theatre Museum, 13 May 2005 |
Tel/Fax : +44 (0)1784 443922/431018