Theatre and Dramaturgy

Description:

What is a dramaturg? What is dramaturgy? What are the political implications for the way that plays produce meaning in performance?
Over the last decade, the role of the dramaturg has become more common in the theatrical process, but it is still a new term for many theatre-goers. Theatre & Dramaturgy offers a working definition of what dramaturgy means, and asks how understanding theatre from the perspective of dramaturgy can help us understand the world around us.

This concise study examines how western histories and practices of theatre have functioned to achieve their effects, through understanding dramaturgy as the arrangement or structure of the work in time and space - both at the fictional level and in relation to performance. Exploring the relationship between plays and their meaning in production, this guide focuses on how understanding dramaturgy is critical to understanding how plays achieve their effects.

Brief description: Margherita Laera is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Kent, where she serves as Deputy Head of the School of Arts and Architecture. She is the author of Playwriting in Europe: Mapping Ecosystems and Practices with Fabulamundi (Routledge Focus, 2022); Theatre & Translation (Methuen Drama, 2019) and Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy (Peter Lang, 2013), and editor of Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat (Methuen Drama, 2014). Margherita also works as a theatre translator from and into Italian and English. She is co-editor of the 'Theatre &' book series for Methuen Drama, and founder of Performing International Plays, an organization promoting theatre (in) translation in secondary schools.