A Life of Ethics and Performance

Product Description Ethics is, in an important sense, a matter of 'being good' but it is also a question about how to live a 'good life'. This book's emphasis on the theatrical and performative and their relationship to ethics, highlights that being good is, a matter of acting good and that acting good is a question of performing (or not-performing) certain roles and duties. This book surveys the most recent work in the field of ethics and performance, organizing this research through the metaphor of 'the good life'. Each chapter explores a question about what it means to 'act good' at a different point in life and thus the book moves from natality to fatality, and beyond in its meditation on the relationship between performance and life itself. In this, it offers an important contribution to the contemporary debate about the relationship between ethics, theatre and performance studies. About the Author Dr. John Matthews is a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of Plymouth. He is a performer and theatre-maker and, as Research Fellow for The Stanislavski Centre, he taught at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. John publishes research on training in sites including the rehearsal room, the clinic and the cloister and he is the author of Training for Performance: A Meta-disciplinary Account (Methuen Drama, 2011). Dr. David Torevell is Associate Professor in the department of Theology, Religious Studies and Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University. He has written two books on Christian worship Losing the Sacred: Ritual, Modernity and Liturgical Reform (T&T Clark, 2000) and Liturgy and the Beauty of the Unknown: Another Place (Ashgate, 2007). He is presently completing a study of the performative dimension of contemplative theology in dialogue with a new interpretation of Samuel Beckett's masterpiece, 'Waiting for Godot'.