Staff Profiles

Modules taught

Undergraduate

• Texts in Performance
• Approaches to Performance
• British Theatre 1950 – Present
• Theatre and Theory: Modern and Postmodern
• Staging Riots, Resistance, and Power
• Final Production

Laura’s research and teaching reflect her interest in the continual dialogue between the theatrical past and contemporary theatre practice. Her work draws on theories from cultural geography to explore the complex interactions between actor, text and space in performance. She has published on Shakespeare in contemporary production and is currently working on a monograph about the staging and significance of ghosts in drama from Shakespeare to present day.

Her research interests include:

• Theatre history and historiography
• Shakespeare in contemporary production
• Theatre and geography
• Performance spaces
• Ghosts in theatre: concepts and performance

Research group membership

Research impact

Further information

Watch Laura's two research films Shakespeare and Love and Shakespeare and Spirituality.

https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/items/3b38475b-2f10-49aa-872b-ac09ba71bcbb/1/

Journal articles

• Higgins L, 'The “True King’s Queen”: Unlocking the Performance Potential of the Queen in Shakespeare’s Richard II'
  Shakespeare online first (2021)
  ISSN: 1745-0918 eISSN: 1745-0926
  Abstract

  Reviewing the Old Vic’s 1947 production of Richard II, W. A. Darlington commented “Margaret Leighton does what can be done with a Queen to whom Shakespeare gives no name and history no place”: an opinion endorsed by many reviewers across the twentieth century. More recently, however, theatre critics have identified hitherto unseen qualities in Richard II’s Queen, suggesting the need to reappraise her theatrical potential and recover her vitality and significance on the modern stage. Examining a selection of moments from contemporary performance, I present a gallery of contrasting faces that show the Queen is a prismatic figure of affective, political, and spiritual dimensions. By focusing on the contradictions that the Queen displays as she navigates the tensions inherent in balancing desires for personal fulfilment in affective relationships with social and political responsibilities and the need to survive in a volatile and male-dominated world, I avoid constructing her according to traditional gender binaries. I suggest that these contradictions render Richard II’s Queen meaningful for our contemporary moment which acknowledges ambiguities in the construction of identities and recognises the constructive possibilities of shifting between positions as a means of processing and judging complex issues.
  

  Website 
• Higgins LJ, 'The Strange Geographies of Ephesus: The Bell Shakespeare Company’s Comedy of Errors'
  Australian Studies 6 (2) (2014) pp.x-
  ISSN: 0954-0954 eISSN: 2042-5120
  Abstract

  The stage world created by John Bell’s 2002 production of Comedy of Errors captured both the hybridity of the play and the mix of contradictions embodied in the historical and Biblical Ephesus, where the play is set. This essay proposes a reading grounded in cultural geography which allows for a foregrounding of the production’s deployment of dreams and magic to generate a theatrical Ephesus which could speak to both Australian and English experiences of modern city life, via colour, movement and rhythm.
  

  Website 

'An English History Play in Spain: An Intervew with Adrián Daumas', Contemporary Theatre Review 19.4 (November 2009), 476-485.

'On the Trail of the Hero: Traces of the Mythological in Contemporary Screen Figures', in Popular Texts in English: New Perspectives, eds. Antonio Ballesteros and Lucia Mora (Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla y La Mancha, 2001), pp. 345-356.

Conferences

'Opening up Spaces of Hope: Rethinking the Politics of Empowerment in Theatre'. Paper presented at Whither Political Theatre?, University of Cambridge, September 2014.

'"the abstract and brief chronicles of the time": Redefining the History Play through Twenty-First century Drama'. Paper presented at Theatre and Stratification, IFTR, University of Warwick, July 2014.

'The "too too solid flesh" and the Body of the Ghost: The Role of Actors' Experiences in Interpreting the Perfromance of Spectrality'. Paper presented in the Theatre History and Historiography Working Group, TaPRA, University of Plymouth, September 2009.

'Placing the Memory, Remembering the Place: The Impact of Michael Boyd's Histories on Theatre Identity and Audience Experience'. Paper presented in the Theatre History and Historiography Working Group, IFTR, University of Lisbon, July 2009.

Locating Herself; Finding her Voice: Reasserting the Queen's Narrative in Shakespeare's Richard II'. Paper presented at Place Writing and Voice, University of Plymouth, September 2008.

'Journeys of the King: Adapting Shakespeare's Richard II from Page to Satge to Screen'. Paper presented at Journeys Across Media, University of Reading, April 2008.

'Building the Nation: Constructing England on Stage in the Twenty-First Century'. Paper Presented in the Theatre Architecture Working Group, University of Prague, June 2007.

'In Front of the Scenes at the Museum: Reappraising Perfromance and Record at Shakespeare's Globe on Bankside'. Paper Presneted at Researching Cultural Spaces, Royal Hollway University of London and Queen mary University of London, June 2006.

'Translating Spaces: The Realization of the World of Richard II in Two Productions (John Barton 1973 and Trevor Nunn 2005). Paper presented at the British Graduate Shakespeare Conference, Shakespeare Institute, June 2006.

'Adventurers, Stars, and Dreamers: Screening Heroism in Hollywood'. Paper presented at the First International Conference on Popular Texts in English, University of Castilla-La Mancha, November 1998.