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Crisis Theatre and The Living Newspaper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2024

Sarah Jane Mullan
Affiliation:
University of Northampton
Sarah Bartley
Affiliation:
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

Summary

Crisis Theatre and The Living Newspapers traces a history of the living newspaper as a theatre of crisis from Soviet Russia (1910s), through the Federal Theatre Project of the Great Depression in America (1930s), to Augusto Boal's teatro jornal in Brazil (1970s), and its resonance with documentary forms deployed in the final years of apartheid in South Africa (1990s), up until the present day in the UK (2020s). Across this Element, the author is interested in what a transnational and transhistorical examination of the living newspaper through the lens of crisis reveals about the ways in which theatre can intervene in our collective social, economic and political life. By holding these diverse examples together, the author asserts the Living Newspaper as a form of Crisis Theatre.
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Online ISBN: 9781009525800
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 11 April 2024

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