The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science Cambridge Companions to Theatre and Performance Series

Theatre has engaged with science since its beginnings in Ancient Greece. The intersection of the two disciplines has been the focus of increasing interest to scholars and students. The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science gives readers a sense of this dynamic field, using detailed analyses of plays and performances covering a wide range of areas including climate change and the environment, technology, animal studies, disease and contagion, mental health, and performance and cognition. Identifying historical tendencies that have dominated theatre's relationship with science, the volume traces many periods of theatre history across a wide geographical range. It follows a simple and clear structure of pairs and triads of chapters that cluster around a given theme so that readers get a clear sense of the current debates and perspectives.

Introduction Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr; 1. Objectivity & observation Dan Rebellato; 2. Staging consciousness: Metaphor as thought-experiment in McBurney's staging of beware of pity Jane Goodall; 3. The experimental/experiential stage: extreme states of being of and knowing in the theatre Carina Bartleet; 4. A cave, a skull, and a little piece of grit: theatre in the anthropocene Carl Lavery; 5. The play at the end of the world: deke weaver's unreliable bestiary and the theatre of extinction Una Chaudhuri and Joshua Williams; 6. Bodies of knowledge: theatre and medical science Stanton B. Garner, Jr; 7. Pathogenic performativity: urban contagion and fascist affect Fintan Walsh; 8. Theatres of mental health Jonathan Venn; 9. Devised theatre and the performance of science Mike Vanden Heuvel; 10. Theatre and science as social intervention Michael Carklin; 11. Acting and science Rhonda Blair; 12. Staging cognition: how performance shows us how we think Amy Cook; 13. Clouds and meteors: recreating wonder on the early modern stage Frédérique Aït-Touati; 14. The stage hand's lament”: scenography, technology, and off-stage Labour Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr.

Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford. Her publications include Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (2006), Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015), Modern Drama: A Very Short Introduction (2016), and Twentieth-Century Approaches to Literature: Late Victorian into Modern (2016), coedited with Laura Marcus and Michèle Mendelssohn and shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association book prize.