Dr Alex Watson

Dr Alex Watson is a researcher, writer, and tutor specialising in contemporary British theatre. He has presented work at numerous national and international academic conferences, worked as an editor for a theatre and performance journal, and has published several articles and chapters.

His monograph, Staging Systemic Violence: British Theatre 2010-2019 is published with Bloomsbury, and he is currently working on the next volume in the Decades of Modern British Playwriting series, as well as books on monologue plays and climate crisis theatre respectively. He has also performed in two site-based performances for the BBC, and performed in and directed work for the Lincoln Company.

Select publications:

‘Strange Temporalities, Everyday Violence: The Continuum of Gender-Based Violence in the Plays of Alistair McDowall’

Theatre, Performance and the Fantastic: vol. 1: Stages and Scripts (Bloomsbury Methuen: 2026), edited by Ian Farnell.

Centre-Stage Unsettlings of Anthropocentrism: The "Posthuman" Plays of Pipsa Lonka', Revealing Posthuman Encounters in Performance (Routledge: 2025), edited by Stefano Boselli and Sarah Lucie.

Animal Cyborgs: Audiovisual Technology & Anthropocentric “Immediacy” in 2020s Anglophone Climate Crisis Theatre’, JCDE: Conference Special Issue (2025), edited by Dorothee Birke and Anja Hartl.

Site-Specific and Site-Based Theatre', The Routledge Companion to 20th Century British Theatre (Routledge: 2025), edited by Trish Reid, Claire Cochrane, and Lennox Goddard.

Staging Systemic Violence: British Theatre 2010-2019 (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2024).

Satires of Eco-Consciousness and Crises of Childbirth: Florence Keith-Roach's Eggs, Maud Dromgoole's 3 Billion Seconds, and Vivienne Franzmann's Bodies', The New Wave of British Female Playwrights (CDE studies: 2023), edited by Élisabeth Angel-Perez and Aloysia Rousseau.

Contemporary Catastrophes: 2010s British Climate Crisis Theatre and Performativity', Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 32, no. 2 (summer 2022).

Neoliberal (Dis)Possession in Rose Lewenstein's Cougar', Theatre Notebook, vol. 75, no. 3 (Dec./Jan. 2021).

Theatre's Dark Matter: Pinter’s “Staging” of Systemic Violence and its Influence in Contemporary British Theatre', Staging Pinter: Stages, Networks, Collaborators (Bloomsbury: 2021), edited by Catriona Fallow and Basil Chiasson.

Crave at the Chichester Festival Theatre - a performance response', co-authored with Kit Narey, Platform, vol. 15, no. 1 (Oct. 2021).