Key Concepts in Drama and Performance

Aimed at undergraduates in drama, theatre or performing arts, Pickering’s Key Concepts describes itself as ‘an informative and accessible guide to the subject’. Each of the five chapters (textual concepts, performance concepts, production concepts, staging concepts, critical concepts) begins with a brief introduction to the concepts it embraces, followed by an alphabetical listing of those concepts. For the most part, it does its job nicely, and is a genuinely useful reference book. But it is sometimes hard to understand the entry allocations under the given chapter separations: what, for example, makes ‘carnival’ a performance concept, and therefore in chapter two,’ site-specific’ a production concept (chapter three) and ‘street theatre’ a staging concept (chapter four)? Why is absurdism in chapter one and surrealism in chapter four? Wouldn’t it be easier just to place everything alphabetically? And there is far too great an emphasis on playwright-led theatre for this to be a truly comprehensive reference work: the entry on ‘dramaturg’, for example, gives no indication of any potential role within physical, devised or visual theatre. But interesting and informative, so worth having on the bookshelf.