Illustrated throughout with stage production photography, Played in Britain: Modern Theatre in 100 Plays presents a unique and visually stunning panorama of key dramatic works produced in Britain over the past seventy years. Photographs from the V&A's extensive collection illustrate each play, providing further insight into stage and costume designs, and include iconic images from the premieres of major plays such as Waiting for Godot and Look Back in Anger.
An essay on each period first sets the context and explores trends, while the commentary accompanying each play illuminates the plot and themes, considers its original reception and subsequent afterlife, and finishes by suggesting other plays to explore.
Arranged chronologically the featured plays illustrate and respond to a number of themes that animate post-war society: censorship and controversy race and immigration gender and sexuality money and politics. Priestley's classic play from 1946, An Inspector Calls, and ending with Laura Wade's examination of class privilege and moral turpitude in Posh over sixty years later, Played in Britain offers a visual history of post-war theatre on the British stage. It was awarded the 2014 David Bradby Award for research by the Theatre and Performance Research Association. Fully illustrated with photos from the V&A's collections and featuring a foreword by Richard Griffiths O.B.E., the book provides a sumptuous treat for theatre-lovers.
Published in collaboration with the Victoria & Albert Musuem, Played in Britain: Modern Theatre in 100 Plays explores the best and most influential plays from 1945 to date. This literary example has profound implications not only for literature and its attendant theories but also for philosophy - in particular, ontology and hermeneutics. Using the works of Shakespeare, Beckett and Wilde, Sampson contends that such a mediation, termed ‘the ludicity of Being’, takes place between literature and its audience. The book questions Heidegger’s idea that the univocity of Being is universal, instead maintaining that the relationship between the univocity of Being and equivocity of Being is real, and that ontological mediation is required to present them as a unified whole. These worlds are characterized simultaneously by sameness (univocity of Being) and difference (equivocity of Being). Sampson shows how ludic theory can be a game-changer in understanding the relationship between philosophy and literature, exploring the dynamic between the fictive and non-fictive worlds. It is this dynamic that could provide a solution in relation to the Gadamer/Habermas hermeneutics debate and the Gadamer/Derrida relativism debate, together with a theory of totality. Gadamer’s ludic theory, Sampson argues, reveals a dynamic of play that exists at the deepest level of philosophy. His book belongs on the bookshelves of players who want to find a game in which they can play well, who are looking for others with whom they can play well, and who have discovered the relationship between the well-played game and the well-lived life.Īre we being played? Is our understanding of the traditionally fixed and static concepts of philosophy based on an oversimplification? This book explores some of the theories of the self since Descartes, together with the rationalism and the empiricism that sustain these ideas, and draws some startling conclusions using Gadamer’s philosophical study of play as its starting point. De Koven-affectionately and appreciatively hailed by Eric Zimmerman as “our shaman of play”-explores the experience of a well-played game, how we share it, and how we can experience it again issues of cheating, fairness, keeping score, changing old games (why not change the rules in pursuit of new ways to play?), and making up new games playing for keeps and winning. This, he tells us, yields a larger concept: the experience and expression of excellence. De Koven explains that when players congratulate each other on a “well-played” game, they are expressing a unique and profound synthesis that combines the concepts of play (with its associations of playfulness and fun) and game (with its associations of rule-following). The digital game industry, now moving beyond its emphasis on graphic techniques to focus on player interaction, has much to learn from The Well-Played Game. De Koven's classic treatise on how human beings play together, first published in 1978, investigates many issues newly resonant in the era of video and computer games, including social gameplay and player modification. In The Well-Played Game, games guru Bernard De Koven explores the interaction of play and games, offering players-as well as game designers, educators, and scholars-a guide to how games work.
The return of a classic book about games and play that illuminates the relationship between the well-played game and the well-lived life.
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