Helen Brooks is Professor of Cultural and Creative History at the University of Kent. Prior to working on First World War theatre she published widely on eighteenth-century theatre. Her book Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women was published in 2014. She is an editor of the Exeter Performance Studies series and was associate editor of the Wiley Encyclopaedia of British Literature: 1660–1789. She was a co-investigator with the Gateways to the First World War centre (2014–2019). Michael Hammond is Emeritus Fellow in Film History at the University of Southampton. His international reputation rests on a large body of work that spans both silent film history and contemporary film and television studies. In the field of silent film history he is known for his monographs, The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War, 1914–1918 (2006) and The Great War in Hollywood Memory, 1919–1939 (2019). He is co-editor of British Silent Cinema in the Great War (2011) and The Great War and the Moving Image (2017).
'This kaleidoscopic volume offers a welcome re-evaluation of the ways in which the First World War changed theatre-making and play-going in Britain. There will be much here for students to explore and more seasoned researchers to discover, from how the theatre supported, resisted, and dealt with the many challenges of the conflict to how theatre has continued to respond to the war in the century that has followed.' Brad Kent, Université Laval 'Helen Brooks' and Michael Hammond's Companion to Theatre of the First World War is a significant milestone in critical scholarship on British theatre and the First World War. The Companion brings together fifteen expert scholars who range widely over the topic, and collectively remind us of the importance of remembering 'ordinary' people's lives during wartime. The essays in the Companion offer original and thoughtful approaches to a period of European history all too often subject to kneejerk patriotism and pompous memorialisation. The Companion to Theatre of the First World War is about more than the Great War: it is a guide to the foundations of twentieth-century popular modernity.' Kate Newey, University of Exeter