British Theatre Conference

The British Theatre Consortium is pleased to announce a new conference entirely dedicated to the art of creating punning titles for theatre conferences. The first session ‘Welcome to the House of Pun’ will centre on a keynote address by David Edgar and consist largely of telling the history of British theatre through song titles. The [...]

In 2008, the British Theatre Consortium were commissioned by the Arts Council to carry out some research into the effectiveness of their ‘new writing’ policies over the last decade. The project was, in fact, split between us and a group comprising Emma Dunton, Robin Nelson and Hetty Shand. Broadly, we were looking at the larger [...]

University of Birmingham, Selly Oak Campus
Saturday March 13th- Sunday March 14th 2010
20 years of the Birmingham Playwriting MA/MPhil(B)
20 new plays by graduate playwrights
20 papers on the pedagogy of playwriting
2009-10 marks the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of what was then the MA in Playwriting in Birmingham, the first course of its kind in Britain. [...]

Many thanks to everyone who came to speak or to listen. 120 delegates from across the world gathered at the Warwick Arts Centre to address a range of questions around the debates about British theatre and multiculturalism - from the promise and perils of theatre as social engineering, the way theatre can explore the histories [...]

Under Labour, the arts were charged with challenging social exclusion, celebrating diversity and reasserting Britishness. But is there a contradiction between diversity and national identity? Should theatre foster cohesion or challenge it? If multiculturalism is dead, should theatre be promoting it? Is the theatre’s role to encourage tolerance or provoke outrage?
This two-day conference at Warwick [...]

In 1997, Tony Blair became Prime Minister in a wave of renewed cultural confidence. The new government abolished entrance charges to museums and galleries, encouraged widening access to the arts, and made a generous new settlement to regional theatre. The newlyd-devolved Scottish Executive made real the long-held dream of a National Theatre of Scotland.
So what [...]