Location, BSECS 2022, Online This was a contribution to a roundtable on ‘Eighteenth-Century Theatre Today’. Here are my notes for my contribution. ‘Read not Dead’, R18C revivals, ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’ are all – to a greater or lesser extent – inspired by Restoration and eighteenth-century texts. They are focussed on a ‘product’: it’s about getting…

Location: NUHRI Research Event, Northern Stage, Newcastle This talk consisted of a presentation of my forthcoming What Would Garrick Do? book, and my participation in a ‘fishbowl’ discussion. For the latter I, and two others had to respond to the question: What is the value of humanities research to performance practice and what are the…

Location: BSECS 2020, St Hugh’s College, Oxford University Recent work on this play – a companion to Centlivre’s The Gamester (1705) – has explored its critique of gambling, its representation of female agency, and its engagement with natural philosophy. My approach is a different: I propose to take the common eighteenth-century parallel between the stage…

Location: Department of Education, University of York I propose to do three things in this seminar. First I will briefly present the unprecedented quantity of writing about acting that appeared in England in the 1700s as a rich, but neglected, source of material for contemporary practitioners and teachers. Second, I will argue that unlocking the…

Location: Middle Modern Seminar, Newcastle University This work-in-progress session allowed me to share work on my book introduction, and to launch a debate on how we write introductions to research into the period 1700-1900. I identified three tensions as sources of difficulty: Familiarity and Alienation Summary and Preparation Change and Inertia

Location: International Congress on the Enlightenment, Edinburgh Aaron Hill’s translation of Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732) was first performed in 1735. Writing a preface to the English play in 1817, Richard Cumberland enumerated the work’s numerous faults: the verse was ‘not sufficiently diversified’, the plot ‘cannot boast of that intricacy which perplexes, and that denouement which surprises’,…

Location: Characterologies Roundtable, ASECS 2019, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Denver My aim in this short paper is to demonstrate how the essays of William Richardson (1743-1814), long read as an early example of ‘character criticism’, nevertheless remains sensitive to earlier, more theatrical ways of apprehending identity. In particular I show that Richardson shapes his critical commentary…

Location: ASECS 2019, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Denver I organized and chaired this roundtable session, which was built around the following five questions, each addressed to one of the speakers. For more information on my rationale, see here.  ‘”With madness, as with vomit, it’s the passerby who receives the inconvenience.”  Granting Orton’s premise, how did actors…

Location: Music, Literature and Performance Afternoon, Newcastle University This short talk argued that one of the great merits of recovering nineteenth-century melodrama as a subject of academic study is the way in which one might now trace a less contested progression between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century aesthetics. Histories of theatre in the 1700s tend to argue…

Location: ATNU Lunchtime Seminar, Newcastle University As prompter to the leading London acting companies in the Restoration, John Downes was responsible for everything from preparing scripts to coordinating scene changes.  One of the many tasks undertaken by Downes and his underlings was to write out the ‘parts’ of a play, which is to say sheets…