British South Asian Theatres
A Documented History (with accompanying DVD)

The book includes a complimentary DVD providing an album of rare and previously unpublished items from private collections: historical documents, programmes, designs, photographs, and clips from recordings of rehearsals and productions.

British South Asian companies have formed one of the most significant features of theatre throughout the world in the last thirty years.  Drawing on archive material and an extensive series of personal interviews, this exciting new book reverses the neglect of this vital element in the history of contemporary theatre – the vibrant presence of South Asians in theatre in Britain.

British South Asian Theatre provides a detailed picture of the activity of twelve remarkable theatre companies and one major arts centre, including Tara Arts, Tamasha, Kali, Rasa and Rifco, making use of a wide range of new interviews with the practitioners involved and extensive research in the archives of those companies, it also contains a survey of British based South Asian language theatres by Chandrika Patel.

This is a major contribution to the understanding of diasporic arts through one of the most impressive movements of its kind in the world.

Introduction; Naseem Khan - British Asian Theatre: the Long Road to Now, and the Barriers in-between; Colin Chambers - Images on Stage: A Historical Survey of South Asians in British Theatre before 1975; Susan Croft - Two Worlds?: Asian Theatre and Alternative Theatre in Tower Hamlets in the 1980s; Rukhsana Ahmad - Experiments in Theatre from the Margins: Text, Performance and New Writers; Christiane Schlote - Dramatising Refuge(e)s: Rukhsana Ahmad's Song for a Sanctuary and Tanika Gupta's Sanctuary; Chris Banfield - Directing Storytelling Performance and Storytelling Theatre; Claire Cochrane - Engaging the Audience: a Comparative Analysis of Developmental Strategies in Birmingham and Leicester since the 1990s; Victoria Sams - Patriarchy and Its Discontents: the 'Kitchen-Sink Drama' of Tamasha Theatre Company; Suman Bhuchar - The Marketing of Commercial and Subsidized Theatre to British Asian Audiences: Bombay Dreams (2002) and Tamasha's Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral (1998 and 2001); Jerri Daboo - Mixing with the Mainstream: Transgressing the Identity of Place; Giovanna Buonanno - Between Page and Stage: Meera Syal in British Asian Culture; Dominic Hingorani - Tara Arts (1997 - 2007): Mapping a 'Binglish' Diaspora; Chandrika Patel - Imagine, Indiaah...on the British Stage: Exploring Tara's 'Binglish' and Tamasha's Brechtian Approaches; Rajni Shah - On the Making of Mr Quiver; Bibliography.

Graham Ley is professor of Drama and Theory at the University of Exeter and leader for the AHRC project. His work has ranged from antiquity to the present day. He has been a joint editor of the Performance Studies series from its inception; he is also a joint editor of the series Performance Practises for Palgrave. Dr Sarah Dadswell is the full-time Research Fellow for the AHRC project; she is a cultural historian, with expertise in the twentieth century, notably in Russian and Soviet avant-garde theatre. Dadswell is also joint editor of “Victory over the Sun” for Artist BookWorks, with Rosamund Bartlett.