Tony Gash

Tony Gash was a Demy at Magdalen College Oxford. He was appointed as a lecturer in English Literature at UEA, and went on to be co-founder of the B.A. Drama Programmes, which have recently come first in national league tables for University drama teaching, and was founder of the M.A. in Theatre Directing in 1993.  He continues to be the director of these courses. . He has also worked with philosophers in the field of aesthetics, particularly theatrical aesthetics, and has supervised PhDs in that field. His interests include Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, theatre and the novel, and theatrical theory in all periods (e.g. Nietzsche, Craig, Brecht)

Selected Publications:

• A.Gash. ed., Word and Image in the Theatre, Word and Image , Vol.4, Nos.3/4, July-December, 1988
• A..Gash, 'Bidding Farewell to Carnival: the Politics of Twelfth Night', (Q/W/E/R/T/Y, Arts, Litteratures et Civilisations du Monde Anglophone, l995), pp.ll-l9.
• A. Gash, Nights at The Circus, adaptation (with V. Sage) and direction of the novel by Angela Carter  (l995).
• A. Gash, Shakespeare, Carnival and the Sacred, The Winter's Tale and Measure for Measure, in: Ronald Knowles, ed.,Shakespeare and Carnival, After Bakhtin (Macmillan l998), pp.l77-210..
• "Plato's Theatre of the Mind" in Theatre Theories (ed. Frost).,2000
• Practical research projects on a) Directing and b) Voice Verse and Performance.
• The Voice of Grief in Shakespeare and Dowland (compact discs )
• A.Gash, The Substance of Shadows, Shakespeare's Dialogue with Plato (still to come: monograph commissioned by Routledge)
• A.Gash, director/adaptor: Mary’s Steps.(A new version of the N-Town plays, with a frame-play on Margery Kemp, Julian of Norwich and  the Norwich heresy trials), 2010

A continuing concern, straddling many genres and periods has been with the Menippean Tradition (Lucian,Erasmus, Rabelais,Cervantes, Sterne)  and on Saturnalia and festivity. Writings on the theory and practice of  ‘Carnival’ include: ‘Carnival against Lent: The Ambivalence of Medieval Drama ' in ed. David Aers, Medieval Literature, Criticism and Idelology,(Harvester 1986), Carnival and the Poetics of Reversal' in New Directions in Theatre, ed J. Hilton (Macmillan, 1995) and Shakespeare Carnival and the Sacred: The Winter's Tale and Measure for Measure in Shakespeare and Carnival after Bakhtin ed. R Knowles, (Macmillan, 1998)

His life’s work has been on  relations between Plato and Shakespeare, their shared concerns and structures, and their historical mediators.

Recently he has been looking into ways of bringing Medieval East Anglian drama back to the East Anglian community.