Dan Rebellato

My research has often focused on post-war and contemporary British theatre. 1956 and All That (Routledge, 1999) is a rereading of the ‘theatrical revolution’ thought to have taken place at the Royal Court around Look Back in Anger. My short monograph Theatre & Globalization argues for the theatre as a source of cosmopolitan resistance to globalization. The book is part of Theatre &, a new series of books opening up the latest thinking in theatre and performance research. I have also edited Modern British Playwriting 2000-2009, The Suspect Culture Book, Contemporary European Theatre Directors, Contemporary European Playwrights and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945.

My current book project is Naturalist Theatre: A New Cultural History for Routledge, a large-scale interdisciplinary monograph exploring the emergence of Naturalist theatre in the last third of the ninteenth century.

I am also a playwright, and my work has been performed across Britain and in Europe and America, on stage and particularly radio, where my work has won awards and I am widely regarded one of the most innovative writers for the medium. In 2014-17 I was lead writer on Emile Zola: Blood, Sex & Money for BBC Radio 4, an epic 25-hour adaptation of Zola's 20-volume 'Rougon-Macquart' novel sequence. It is the most ambitious adaptation BBC radio have ever produced (and is therefore quite likely the most ambitious radio adaptation in the world). My play You & Me a formally experimental response to the #MeToo movement, was shortlisted for Best Original Drama in the BBC Audio Awards and won Silver at the ARIAs in the Best Original Storytelling category. I am currently working on three new plays addressing the legacies of slavery, the place of nationhood in the imagination, and the interplay of sound and memory.

I designed, with colleagues in English, two new joint degrees in Creative Writing, whose first students graduated in 2007. With other colleagues, I introduced degrees in Philosophy, whose first students graduated in 2010. As Head of the Department of Drama, I introduced the joint degree with Dance, whose first students graduated in 2017.

I've chaired numerous platforms for the National Theatre, Lyric Hammersmith, and Manchester Royal Exchange, have been a contributing editor for New Theatre Quarterly and Associate Editor of Contemporary Theatre Review.