Ralph Yarrow

Dramatic theory and practice, esp. improvisation; 19th and 20th century European theatre; theatre in India and South Africa applied theatre and performance; performance and ecology.

Research and teaching in European theatre, Indian theatre, South African theatre, consciousness and reception in performance, absurd theatre, performance theory, feminist theatre, improvisation, Modernism and Postmodernism, theatre and development. I’ve written on fantasy theory, reception theory, performance theory, improvisation, Modernism and Postmodernism, English poetry, French and Indian theatre, the French New Novel, etc.

I’ve adapted for the stage, translated from German and French, directed in Norwich and India, acted in English, French and German. I have undertaken thorough training in teaching methodologies, practical drama skills, listening and counselling skills.

Teacher, theatre director, performer, actor trainer, writer, editor, translator, project leader.

Final post: Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature. Previously Head of French and (for a long time) Chair of Drama programmes.

My career spans an engagement with language and cultural production from Europe to India, from comparative criticism to postcolonial theory, from teaching innovations to directing practice; theatre and performance in France, Germany, Poland, the UK, India and Asia, South Africa.

 I made a founding international contribution to research into consciousness and the arts; developed further specializations in improvisation, Indian and Asian theatre; and in theatre in and as development, which comes out of theatre practice as training for personal and communal creativity, but also opens out into democracy as practice. I work currently in many of these areas as well as on performance and ecology; including close co-operation with India’s leading Forum Theatre/Theatre of the Oppressed organisation, Jana Sanskriti.

 Books include Improvisation in Drama, Indian Theatre, and Sacred Theatre and a translation (from German) of Birgit Fritz’s InExactArt: the Autopoietic Theatre of Augusto Boal.

 Directing includes many productions for UEA Drama, many in French for my UEA-based company Sacré Théâtre (probably the only permanent French-language company in the UK), others for Sewell Barn Theatre Norwich and for institutions and venues in Wales, India and South Africa (e.g. Beckett, Ionesco, Sartre, Genet, Pirandello, Strindberg, Rózewicz, Kokoschka, Dickens, Orton, Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Shakespeare, Tanvir).

 Among other things, I have been a clown (Feste in Twelfth Night), a saint (Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral), a French homosexual speaking bad German (in Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson), a colonial wife (Betty in Churchill’s Cloud Nine), a witch (in Macbeth), a cricket-loving Jewish Godfather (Goldberg in The Birthday Party) and a sado-masochistic erotomaniac fantasising as a French General (in Genet’s The Balcony).

 Two principles have evolved as conclusions arrived at through practice: that leadership works best as collaborative co-creation, and that real advances always involve sorties across borders: hence a commitment to cross-disciplinary and cross-systemic exploration, and to taking co-creators along as a teacher, a director, a writer and a planner.