New Books in Performing Arts

How are working class women represented in contemporary culture? In Slags on Stage: Class, Sex, Art and Desire in British Culture (Routledge, 2025), Katie Beswick, a Senior Lecturer in Arts Management at Goldsmiths, University of London, examines this question by analysing the figure of the ‘slag’ across a range of cultural forms, including theatre and television. Alongside a history of the idea of the ‘slag’, the book draws on deep case studies of key artists, including Tracey Emin, Cash Carraway and Michaela Coel to understand both the meaning of ‘slags’ in British culture and how class, race and gender all intersect in Britain’s unequal society. Blending memoir, poetry, close reading, and history, the book is essential reading across the arts and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in culture today.
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Adi Nester is an Assistant Professor of German and Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first monograph, Unsettling Difference: Bible, Music Drama, and the Critique of German Jewish Identity, appeared with Cornell University Press. The book studies the discourse of Jewish difference in the first half of the twentieth century through its expressions in biblical-themed musical dramas, their literary sources, and the intellectual debates surrounding the works. Adi’s research and teaching concentrate on the interrelations between music, literature, and philosophy in the German and German Jewish traditions. She has published essays on topics ranging from the music philosophies of Theodor Adorno and Vladimir Jankélévitch, the role of Wagner’s music in Thomas Mann’s literature, and the language philosophy of Walter Benjamin, to the treatment of memory culture in the poetry and social critical writings of contemporary German-Jewish activist Max Czollek.
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Caper movies aren’t like others involving criminals: there’s an aesthetic to a caper that’s as important to the thieves as it is to the viewers. Heist is David Mamet’s 2001 caper film that stands as his Singin’ in the Rain—an apt comparison, since “caper” meant “to dance” long before it took on its criminal meaning. Join us for an appreciation of one of Gene Hackman’s best yet least-discussed performances and of Mamet’s highly unrealistic dialogue. (Yes, you read that correctly–and we love David Mamet.)

David Mamet’s short book On Directing Film is a great companion to Heist.

Incredible bumper music by John Deley.

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Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953 (Cornell UP, 2024) explores a neglected period in the history of Soviet cinema, breathing new life into a body of films long considered moribund as the pinnacle of Stalinism. While film censorship reached its apogee in this period and fewer films were made, film attendance also peaked as Soviet audiences voted with their seats and distinguished a clearly popular postwar cinema.

Claire Knight examines the tensions between official ideology and audience engagement, and between education and entertainment, inherent in these popular films, as well as the financial considerations that shaped and constrained them. She explores how the Soviet regime used films to address the major challenges faced by the USSR after the Great Patriotic War (World War II), showing how war dramas, spy thrillers, Stalin epics, and rural comedies alike were mobilized to consolidate an official narrative of the war, reestablish Stalinist orthodoxy, and dramatize the rebuilding of socialist society. Yet, Knight also highlights how these same films were used by filmmakers more experimentally, exploring a diverse range of responses to the ideological crisis that lay at the heart of Soviet postwar culture, as a victorious people were denied the fruits of their sacrificial labor. After the war, new heroes were demanded by both the regime and Soviet audiences, and filmmakers sought to provide them, with at times surprising results.

Stalin's Final Films mines Soviet cinema as an invaluable resource for understanding the unique character of postwar Stalinism and the cinema of the most repressive era in Soviet history.
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In the twenty-first century alone, women filmmakers have succeeded at directing every size, genre, and style of motion picture. Their movies have won Oscars (Free Solo), made actors into household names (Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone), received induction into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry (Real Women Have Curves), and become worldwide box office phenomena (Captain Marvel, Deep Impact). Nevertheless in 2023, the year of Barbie, women directed only 12% of the top 250 movies in America. demonstrating how far moviemaking remains from gender parity. When women filmmakers succeed, they do so against these odds.

Break the Frame (Oxford UP, 2025) is a collection of 24 career-spanning interviews with America's celebrated, reigning, and rising women filmmakers. Each conversation considers the director's complete filmography as a map of their evolving artistry and evidence of their unassailable contributions to a historically misogynist industry. Author Kevin Smokler listens as women filmmakers speak to the struggle and triumphs of developing and directing movies that are shaping how the film business sees women in the director's chair, and how their audiences see themselves and each other. This book is both an opportunity and invitation to devote one's time, admiration and enthusiasm to movies directed by women.
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