I was a graduate of the first year of the single honours Drama degree at Exeter University in the West of England and took a PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle. My first work involved coordinating the Council of Europe Workshop on Theatre and Communities for Dartington College of Arts in Devon and co-editing with Peter Hulton the publication Theatre Papers. I was Director of Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop in the Docklands area of South East London in the 1980s working with David Slater, a freelance writer on performance in Barcelona and then Director of Talks at the Institute of Contemporary Talks in the 1990s, and was appointed Roehampton University’s first Professor of Theatre in 1997.
Since 2006 I have been Professor of Theatre at King’s College London where, from within the English Department and through my project the Performance Foundation, I have been developing King’s approach to performance and theatre from the ground up with my departmental and school colleagues. As part of this work and in collaboration with the Centre for e Research and King’s Estates I conceived and developed the Anatomy Theatre and Museum on the Strand and the Inigo Rooms in the East Wing of Somerset House to provide King’s with publicly accessible venues for performance and cultural practice, forming the King’s Cultural Partners in 2012. In December 2013 I completed a Leverhulme supported project Engineering Spectacle: Inigo Jones Past & Present Performance at Somerset House.
I am the author of Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (Routledge: 1993/1995) and Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue (Palgrave: 2008/2009). In 2013 Bloomsbury published my collection of essays: Theatre in the Expanded Field: Seven Approaches to Performance (2013). I am the editor of The Fact of Blackness (Bay Press: 1996) and Architecturally Speaking (Routledge: 2000). As a founding Consultant Editor of Performance ResearchI have edited two issues of the journal “On Animals” (2000) and “On Civility” (2004).
Work over the last decade includes a concentration on the relations between Performance and Law with my book, Theatre & Law, published in 2016. I have been building an interdisciplinary project from within the Performance Foundation, Performance Law, which as the title suggests is dedicated to exploring with artists, activists and advocates relations between cultural practices and law. We have three areas of concentration for our work: Arbitration, Restitution and Compensation.
During this period I began to attend regular hearings at the Royal Courts of Justice on Strand. From this first hand experience of witnessing what Colina Dayan refers to as ‘sinkholes of the law’ I have assembled material histories of contemporary legal cases that evidence what I call ‘Cultural Cruelty’. Here legal process falters at the interface between the limits of jurisprudence when settling cases concerning suffering, loss and damages. In 2020 I published The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss with Routledge, returning to the four-decade interregnum of communities of expulsion at the behest of capital in London’s Docklands, and the consequent ‘claims’ which are interrupted by the lack of an agreed-upon discursive grid for compensation.
Throughout the last four decades I have worked closely with and written for, and about the theatrical and performance work of: Het Werkteater, Els Comediants, Alvin Hermanis, Romeo Castellucci and Societas Raffaello Sanzio and Goat Island. I have worked as an advisor and collaborator with: the Royal Society of Arts, Centre for Performance Research, London International Festival of Theatre, Live Art Development Agency, Forced Entertainment and Platform.
There are various examples of my broadcast writing available on line including, for BBC Radio 4, Plato’s Cave here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01k28wj
and, again for BBC Radio 4, Dreadful Trade, here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b051rnlg
Over the last year I have been working on an unreliable memoir titled: Man with the Reason of History Missing.
BBC Radio 4 broadcast a short excerpt from the book under the title: Soul Estuary: The Mouth of the River. You can find extracts from the book on the Writing page and listen to it here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07npx3c
You will find some concise information on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Read_(writer)