Theatre in the Expanded Field

Alan Read is Professor of Theatre at King's College, London, UK. He was Director of the Council of Europe Workshop on Theatre and Communities, and Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop in the Docklands area of South East London, in the 1980s, worked as a freelance writer in Barcelona and as Director of Talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1990s and was the first Professor of Theatre at Roehampton University and then King's College London between 1997 and the present. He is the author of Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (1993) and Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue (2008). He is the founding consultant editor of Performance Research journal.

• To my ReadersPreliminaryThe Performance GeneAbandoned Practices & Endangered UsesTheatre in the Expanded FieldI Pre-Historical & Archaeological 38,550 BCEII Pastoral & Anthropological 429 BCEIII Theological & Historical 1613IV Digital & Technological 1720V Psychological & Legal 1889VI Social & Sensible 1964VII Tactical & Critical 2012EndnotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgements

Read’s discursive, unstintingly intelligent, rigorous, and spirited book is nothing less than necessary reading for anyone who cares about what theatre is, and can be . . . [This] beautifully researched, thoughtful dream of a book asks its readers in turn to dream what kind of theatre, and what kind of approaches to its making, we dare as practitioners, scholars, readers, and spectators ... I use the word ‘dream’ to describe this book not as a soft, sentimental noun but rather as a way to reflect how the book operates on the reader’s mind. It stops to dream. It asks us to dream. It provides some paths for us to consider, and space to wonder if there might be new paths left to forge