Writing Queer Performance: Contemporary Texts and Documents

This anthology documents a decade of some of the UK’s most exciting queer performance, through a combination of retrospective scripts, development material and visual documentation. Queer performance is expected to live a brief, bright life without leaving any textual record. Indeed, it rarely begins with a complete script at all, being often developed instead by performance practices designed to fill noisy bars, clinking cabaret venues and fringe theatres, typically for short runs. This lack of textual documentation underplays the importance of writing to contemporary queer performance, while rendering it vulnerable to disappearance in the diaphanous archives of memory. Writing Queer Performance: Contemporary Texts and Documents features eight seminal works, captured through performance texts and visual documentation, that ensures their accessibility long after the event of live performance. Supported by a contextualizing introduction, the anthology provides a panoramic view of contemporary preoccupations, processes and practices.

Sh!t Theatre are Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole. They have been writing, performing and drinking together since May 2010. They've won some awards and toured to some places and their shows Letters to Windsor House and DollyWould are also published by Oberon Books.

Fintan Walsh is Professor of Performing Arts and Humanities and Director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. His recent books include the collection Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama 2020) and the monograph Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland (2016). He is a former editor of the Theatre Research International, and editor of the book series Contemporary Performance Texts.