The Quarry Theatre at St Lukes, 26 St Peters Street, Bedford MK40 2NN

4.30pm

The ‘war of images’ is a field of combat that can be as powerful as armed conflict. Spectacle, rhetoric, décor, choreography and mise en scène are essential weapons in warfare. Moreover, today, spectacle and conflict have joined forces via audio-visual technologies in ways that are more powerful than ever.

How, then, has theatre ‘reclaimed’ these theatrical components? In this talk, Clare Finburgh, author of Watching War on the Twenty-First-Century Stage: Spectacles of Conflict (2017), asks how can theatre present possibilities for a more informed engagement with how spectacles of war are produced and circulated.

Clare Finburgh is a researcher and teacher at the University of Kent. She has published widely on modern and contemporary French and UK theatre and performance. Co-authored and co-edited volumes include Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage (2015), Jean Genet (2012), Contemporary French Theatre and Performance (2011), and Watching War: Spectacles of Conflict in the Twenty-First Century (2017), which further develops the ideas explored in this talk.

www.quarrytheatre.org.uk