Signs of Performance provides the student with working examples of theatrical analysis. It ranges across the spectrum of twentieth-century theatre, covering practitioners as diverse as Stanislavski and Brecht, Samuel Beckett and Robert Wilson. Colin Counsell takes a historical look at theatre as a cultural practice, clearly tracing connections between key practitioners' own ideas about performance; the theatrical practices prompted by those ideas; the resulting signs which emerge in performance; the meanings and political consequences of those signs. Signs of Performance is the first book to answer the question 'How does theatre work?'. It provides an understandable, theoretical framework for the study of theatre as a signifying practice and offers vivid explanations in clear, direct language. This book tells you everything you want to know about how performance works, and opens up this fascinating field to a broad audience.