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 Documentsfeatures 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.

Fintan Walsh is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, Co-Director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre and Director of BiGS/Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality. His books include Writing Queer Performance: Contemporary Texts and Documents (2024), the collection Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama 2020), and Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland ( 2016). Fintan is a former editor of the Theatre Research International, and Editor of the book series Contemporary Performance Texts.