Tom Cantrell

I am a Professor in Theatre and Associate Dean for Teaching, Learning and Students in the Arts and Humanities Faculty. As Associate Dean I lead on the management, strategic initiatives and development of learning and teaching across the faculty. Within the School of Arts and Creative Technologies, I teach on the BA in Theatre: Writing, Directing and Performance and the MA in Theatre-Making as well as supervising doctoral research students.

My research addresses questions of performance, approaches to theatre-making and acting processes. To date, I have published four books on acting. I am currently co-editing The Theatre-Maker’s R&D Sourcebook for Bloomsbury and researching the work of the National Theatre Studio. My recent publications have explored acting processes for television, including Acting in British Television and Exploring Television Acting, both written with Christopher Hogg, and documentary theatre, including Acting in Documentary Theatre and Playing for Real, alongside a number of articles.

I have held visiting professorships at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne and Concordia University, Montreal, where I was scholar-in-residence at the Acts of Listening Lab.

My research interests include: acting theory and practice, television performance, verbatim and documentary theatre and television, modern British political theatre, and approaches to research and development in theatre-making.

My research addresses questions of performance and, in particular, acting processes. To date, I have published four books on acting. Recently, I have been researching acting processes for television with Christopher Hogg (University of Westminster), and have published a number of articles on this theme. Our work is the first detailed research into how actors approach the specific demands of television. Most research views performance via textual analysis of the finished product. By contrast, we use interviews with celebrated television actors to focus on their process, and how they bring their skills to bear on this particular medium. We have recently published Acting in British Television (Palgrave, 2017) and an edited collection, Exploring Television Acting, for Bloomsbury (2018).

My previous research has focused on how actors approach playing real people. I co-edited Playing for Real with Mary Luckhurst (Palgrave, 2010), which is a collection of interviews with high-profile actors who have portrayed real people on stage and screen. Interviewees included Ian McKellen, Eileen Atkins, David Morrissey and Joseph Mydell. I continued to pursue my interest in the challenges of playing real people in my monograph, Acting in Documentary Theatre, which was published by Palgrave in 2013. Including new interview material with over forty actors, directors and writers, my book was the first to explore the challenges of acting in documentary theatre.