Messy, Various, Asymmetrical Forms: Research & Development in British Theatre
Event details
This research seminar amplifies a long collaboration between four members of the Theatre team (Tom Cantrell, Katherine Graham, Mark Love-Smith and Karen Quigley), culminating in a co-authored, co-edited book entitled Research and Development in British Theatre (forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2025), which is the first scholarly volume exclusively devoted to R&D as a specific approach to making theatre.
Our interest in writing about R&D arose in part out of our work co-designing and co-teaching a final-year undergraduate module (Independent Group Production Project), which positions a four-week R&D period as crucial to the pre-rehearsal process. The R&D period is not assessed, but rather we frame it as a period of experimentation and risk-taking that embraces failure as a crucial component. Sitting at the heart of this module, then, is our shared understanding of R&D as one of the most creatively fertile, collaborative and exciting periods in theatre-making. As theatre-makers and as researchers we have been struck by the richness and plurality of R&D practices across the theatre industry. Yet our students’ questions, seeking research which they might use to guide them or to contextualize their own work, reveal the relative paucity of literature on the subject.
Our book responds to this need for scholarship. It aims to uncover, analyse, celebrate and question the rich range of practices under the term ‘R&D’. Equally, we acknowledge that within this breadth of practice, R&D is not always utopian; there are political tensions around the term itself, and a complex funding landscape that raises additional questions about how the value of art(ists) is recognized. In our work, we commit to illuminating the depth and nuance of R&D’s many practices and manifestations, and the research seminar will draw out some of the key pluralities, contradictions, tensions and possibilities of R&D we have encountered along the way.
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About the speakers
Tom Cantrell (he/him)
Tom is Professor of Theatre and Head of the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York. He has published widely on acting processes, including Acting in Documentary Theatre (2013), Acting in British Television (2017) and Exploring Television Acting (2018), co-written with Christopher Hogg.
Katherine Graham (she/her)
Katherine is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the University of York where her research focuses on the agency of materials in performance. She has also worked extensively as a lighting designer for theatre and dance and has published work about light in Theatre and Performance Design Journal, Studies in Theatre and Performance and Contemporary Theatre Review. She is co-editor, with Kelli Zezulka and Scott Palmer, of Contemporary Performance Lighting: Experience, Creativity, Meaning (2023).
Mark Love-Smith (he/him)
Mark is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the University of York. He has research interests in devised and physical theatre, community theatre and the interplay of writing, directing and devising. His latest publication is the Routledge Performance Practitioners book on Frantic Assembly, co-written with Professor Mark Evans.
Karen Quigley (she/her)
Karen is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the University of York. She has published research on a range of subjects including site-specific performance, solo spectatorship, embodied voice, British television comedy and theatre-fiction. Her first monograph, Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure, was published by Bloomsbury in 2020.
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