The Department of Drama takes a materialist approach to performance. We emphasise the question of social justice within theatre and performance practices, in areas such as pay, education, hierarchy, backstage and onstage labour, funding, property development, and the economic contexts of theatrical production. We investigate infrastructures and logistics in the production of performance. Our materialist approaches include scholarship on the previously neglected areas of backstage work and performance materials, such as costume, garments, light, and atmosphere.

Initiatives

• QMUL Centre on Labour and Global Production
• Sexual Cultures Research Group

Publications

• Scenes from Bourgeois Life by Nicholas Ridout
• Theatre in Market Economies by Michael McKinnie
• Shakespeare and Costume in Practice by Bridget Escolme
• Postdramatic Theatre and Form edited by Shane Boyle (and Matt Cornish and Brandon Woolf)
• Special issue on Contemporary Feminisms and Performance, Contemporary Theatre Review edited by Jen Harvie (and Sarah Gorman and Geraldine Harris)
• Voice and New Writing 1997-2007: Articulating the Demos by Maggie Inchley
• Derek Jarman and ‘the Renaissance’, special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin edited by Catherine Silverstone
• Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre edited by Martin Welton (and Adam Alston)

Projects

• Costume at the National Theatre exhibition by Aoife Monks
• Audiencing Atmospheres by Martin Welton
• Relative Values by Paul Heritage (People’s Palace Projects)

Reports

• Jen Harvie, Specialist Advisor on the 2017 House of Lords Select Committee of Communications Inquiry into the Theatre Industry