Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre: Writing and Directing in Contemporary Theatre Practice

In Acts of Resistance in Late-Modernist Theatre, Richard Murphet presents a close analysis of the theatre practice of two ground-breaking artists - Richard Foreman and Jenny Kemp - active over the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century. In addition, he tracks the development of a form of ’epileptic’ writing over the course of his own career as writer/director.
Murphet argues that these three auteurs have developed subversive alternatives to the previously dominant forms of dramatic realism in order to re-think the relationship between theatre and reality. They write and direct their own work, and their artistic experimentation is manifest in the tension created between their content and their form. Murphet investigates how the works are made, rather than focusing upon an interpretation of their meaning. Through an examination of these artists, we gain a deeper understanding of a late modernist paradigm shift in theatre practice.

Richard Murphet completed a Ph.D. (2018) at the University of Melbourne, where he is also an Honorary Lecturer in Performance. In addition to training actors, directors, playwrights and theoreticians and heading the Theatre Department, Murphet has worked as a director and writer in theatre over four decades.