Upon completion of this course students will be able to identify and apply vocabulary and techniques for analysing a play. They will have practiced their interpretative skills, engaged critically with a number of theoretical frameworks and their application to contemporary drama in English and demonstrated their proficiency in play analysis through written analyses of texts and productions as well as creative projects. Overall, this course is designed to enhance the students’ understanding and further their questioning of theatre, plays, and performance, and the ways in which they reflect, resist, and shift the cultural contexts from which they emerge.

In-depth discussion of textsShort lecture inputsPerformed readings and scene playOral presentations of creative student-projectsTheatre production visits

Tennessee Williams once wrote that “a play in a book is only the shadow of a play and not even a clear shadow of it […] The printed script of a play is hardly more than an architect’s blueprint of a house not yet built or built and destroyed” (“Afterword to Camino Real” in Where I Live: Selected Essays 68-69). In this course we will both read ‘plays in books’, practising principles of text- and context-oriented literary analysis as well as approach the plays with an eye towards production. We will grapple with the question of what political theatre might look like today from the perspectives of scholar and practitioner.Practical exercises will include stage and costume design projects, writing a review of a theatre production we've visited, and acting exercises.This course is designed to accompany the founding of a new students' theatre group. It will be followed up by a practical seminar the following semester in the course of which students will stage their own production of one of the plays dealt with in this course at the Kammerlichtspiele Klagenfurt.

All materials will be made available by the instructor on Moodle.

Participation: 25%Either written performance critique or oral presentation of design project: 25%Final Paper: 50% (5000 words)If a student fails one pillar of assessment (participation, critique/design project, or paper), they fail the entire course!

Students are free to choose their own topics for the final paper, as long as it relates to the context of the class. Deadline for submission: 30 April 2024.

Quantity and quality of task fulfillment; quantity and quality of theoretical literature used; quality of analysis, and quality of application of theoretical concepts and terminology; originality of thought.Active participation includes regular attendance (i.e. not missing more than 3 sessions in the course of the semester).The use of AI support or AI-generated text is prohibited in this course!In order to check whether this ban is respected, there is the possibility of a compulsory, individual, and oral follow-up defence of submitted or presented work. Should the use of AI be detected in any assignment, or a follow-up defence not be sufficient, the task concerned will automatically receive a fail-grade and your violation will be reported to university leadership, just as is the case with any other form of academic dishonesty or cheating.