Re-Activating the Repertoire, 1660-1830

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The theatrical repertoire from the 1660s to the 1830s provides insights into the deep histories of race, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, and capital that have shaped - and continue to shape - our culture and world. These plays know things that we need to know about how and why our modern world came into being. Yet this repertoire has largely been forgotten by commercial theatre companies in Britain and North America. Only a handful of plays from the period are regularly staged professionally, and among audiences and theatre makers the prevailing view remains that "Restoration drama" is about lavish costumes and witty exchanges. Moreover, drama schools are now dropping the period's drama from their curricula, partly due to understandable concerns that they are ideologically problematic.Our international research network - "Re-Activating the Repertoire, 1660-1830" - recognizes that this situation can only be addressed through genuine and sustained collaboration between scholars and theatre makers. This collaboration will be mutually transformative. Researchers will share with directors and performers their knowledge of both the political and cultutal contexts of these plays and also the histories of movement and gesture that are crucial to an understanding of their intricate stagecraft. Our project will work with practitioners to find depth and resonance in 18th-century plays just as they are accustomed to doing with Shakespearean plays such as The Taming of the Shrew and Othello. At the same time, this process will enable researchers to learn from practitioners. Academic studies of this repertoire continue largely to read scripts in isolation from performance. This is understandable: unlike scholars working on Shakespearean or modern theatre, we rarely have an opportunity to see professional productions of the plays we research and teach. Working with directors and actors will immeasurably enrich our scholarly understanding of the period's theatre. The conservative performance tradition, which sees these plays as "comedies of manners", has in many ways cut us off from the vital socio-cultural knowledge they hold. Our emphasis on the histories of movement, language, and ideology is intended to enable professional theatre makers to engage with these plays in more experimental ways and, above all, to take them seriously as a body of drama that possesses conceptual and theatrical sophistication, and which necessarily involves exploration of our social and cultural landscape today. In turn, this will allow scholars to learn through performance; it will radically transform what we as researchers know about these plays - and how we engage with them. Our network's workshops and peformances will focus on process; they will test multiple ways of staging scenes and interpreting characters, and also recognize that failures often reveal more than successes. To explore how these plays work in embodied, spatial terms will enable researchers to address questions about relationships and interactions on stage; about how plays use gesture and movement as modes of political commentary; about what "character" is in these plays; and about how silence as much as dialogue invites audiences' emotional and intellectual responses. Equally, and most excitingly, the rehearsal and performance will generate questions about the practical dynamics and the deeper thinking of these plays that scholars haven't yet thought to ask. The aim of our network is ultimately to transform how both researchers and practitioners work with and think about plays from 1660-1830.