Diane Atkinson

Viv Gardner

This is the npublished autobiography of Kitty Marion, an actress, music hall performer, suffragette arsonist and campaigner in the American birth control movement. Written in the 1930s, Marion’s story of activism offers a unique insight into a lifetime dedicated to the improvement of women’s lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Actor and activist

Kitty Marion

Peter Thomson

This is the first comprehensive study of Brecht's Mother Courage. Peter Thomson locates the sources of the play in Brecht's own experience and heritage, and provides a detailed account of Brecht's own production with the newly formed Berliner Ensemble in 1949. Thomson then explores how the play has been transmitted in the English-speaking theatre from Joan Littlewood's production with the Theatre Workshop Company in 1956 to the Royal National Theatre, with Diana Rigg as Mother Courage, in 1995. The book also examines such influential interpretations as those by William Gaskill, Judi Dench, and Glenda Jackson in the English theatre, and by Herbert Balu and Richard Schechner in America. Seminal productions in France and the Germanies are also discussed. A final chapter highlights the new urgency of the text in light of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and closes with an account of a triumphant staging in Uganda.

Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children

Maggie Barbara Gale

Kate Dorney

Maggie B B. Gale

This collection addresses key questions in women's theatre history and retrieves a number of previously "hidden" histories of women performers. The essays range across the past 300 years--topics covered include Susanna Centlivre and the notion of intertheatricality; gender and theatrical space; the repositioning of women performers such as Wagner's Muse, Willhelmina Schröder-Devrient, the Comédie Français' "Mademoiselle Mars," Mme. Arnould-Plessey, and the actresses of the Russian serf theatre.

New Histories, New Historiographies

Women, Theatre and Performance

Vivien Gardner

Arguing that women use autobiography and performance for expression and as a means of controlling their public and private selves, the contributors of these 11 essays examine the lives and work of a variety of artists ranging from actors as working women in the eighteenth century to monologists and performance artists today. Subjects include several performers, including Alma Ellerslie, Kitty Marion, Ina Rozant, Susan Glaspell, Adrienne Kennedy, Emma Robinson, Lena Ashwell, Tilly Wedekind, Clare Dowie, Janet Cardiff, Tracey Emin, and, in an interview, Bobby Baker, as well as essays on Latina theater and lesbians as performers constructing themselves and their community. Annotation : 2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Viv Gardner

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