Open-Air Theatre: Concepts and Performance Practices

By Cathy Turner and Evelyn O'Malley

This open access book is the first to provide a detailed and historical account of what it means to make theatre out-doors, in the open air. Supplemented throughout with case studies of practice and interviews with theatre makers, this study traverses themes of the environment, climate, community, performance design, the performer's body and audience dynamics.

Spanning practices from antiquity to the present day, from Greek and Roman amphitheatre performances to al-fresco seaside entertainments, large-scale spectacle, street theatre, site-specific performance and contemporary live art, theatrical performance in the open-air has a rich past that underpins its vibrant present.

Open-Air Theatre draws on extensive interviews with contemporary practitioners from Britain and Ireland, contextualizing their experiences of making performance within these diverse histories and situating them in a global context. In doing so it addresses a range of questions: What are the sensible properties of the open-air and how do its textures or perceived moods affect a performance? In what ways is a body's capacity to perform shaped by the open-air? How does performance in the open air gather its audience together and create (or dissipate) a sense of community? How do chance events impinge upon or enhance the work? How do the places of performance, open to the sky, differ from the enclosed spaces of theatre buildings, or even the enclosed rooms of immersive work?

The book responds to these questions by uniting varied practices that are presented outdoors, highlighting their shared aesthetics, technologies of production, embodied experiences, effects, and responses as well as attending to their formal and material differences. Chapters conclude with a set of questions and suggestions for thinking about practice and making performance in the open-air, and the book ends with a series of provocations about the nature of the 'open' air and the function of performance within it.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1350474428
• ISBN13: 9781350474420
• Release Date: November 2026
• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.2"