The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre of the First World War

Helen Brooks is Professor of Cultural and Creative History at the University of Kent. Prior to working on First World War theatre she published widely on eighteenth-century theatre. Her book Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women was published in 2014. She is an editor of the Exeter Performance Studies series and was associate editor of the Wiley Encyclopaedia of British Literature: 1660–1789. She was a co-investigator with the Gateways to the First World War centre (2014–2019). Michael Hammond is Emeritus Fellow in Film History at the University of Southampton. His international reputation rests on a large body of work that spans both silent film history and contemporary film and television studies. In the field of silent film history he is known for his monographs, The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War, 1914–1918 (2006) and The Great War in Hollywood Memory, 1919–1939 (2019). He is co-editor of British Silent Cinema in the Great War (2011) and The Great War and the Moving Image (2017).

• Introduction: British theatre and the first world war Helen E. M. Brooks; Part I. Mobilising for War: 1. Foreshadowing the war: future war and invasion plays, 1900–1914 Ailise Bulfin; 2. Mobilising the nation: the comic revue in wartime Robert Dean; Part II. Theatre During the War: 3. Challenging times: making theatre during the war Claire Cochrane; 4. Everyone's a playgoer now!: theatregoing and theatregoers 1914–1918 Viv Gardner; 5. Theatre in the war zone Emma Hanna; 6. The classics at war Ailsa Grant Ferguson; 7. War on the popular stage: 'spy' plays and the one act domestic comedy Maggie B. Gale; 8. Cinema and theatre in the great war Michael Hammond; 9. American invasions Philippa Burt; 10. European theatre on the British stage 1914–1918 Eva Krivanec; 11. Resistance and objection Anselm Heinrich; Part III: The Memory of War: 12. Reflecting on the war Rebecca D'Monté; 13. Re-imagining the war Helen E. M. Brooks; 14. Commemorating the war Rebecca Benzie; Chronology of events and productions; Further reading; Index.

'This kaleidoscopic volume offers a welcome re-evaluation of the ways in which the First World War changed theatre-making and play-going in Britain. There will be much here for students to explore and more seasoned researchers to discover, from how the theatre supported, resisted, and dealt with the many challenges of the conflict to how theatre has continued to respond to the war in the century that has followed.' Brad Kent, Université Laval