Sex & Violence in Performance

Welcome to MUTH 201: Sex and Violence in Performance! My name is Craig Walker, and I am your instructor for this course.

Here is a bit of background about me.

I am a Professor and Director of the School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, where I had taken earlier degrees in English. I have been working at Queen’s University since 1992, having taught courses in ancient and modern theatre history, world drama, Canadian drama, theory of drama, theatre for young audiences, acting, directing and devised theatre. I have also taught a Queen’s summer course at the Shaw Festival for ten years.

My most recent publication is a chapter on Canadian drama in The Oxford Handbook to Canadian Literature (Oxford UP, 2015).  I am also the author of The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001) and co-editor (with Jennifer Wise of the University of Victoria) of The Broadview Anthology of Drama: Plays from the Western Theatre, Volumes I and II (Broadview Press, 2003) and The Broadview Anthology of Drama, Concise Edition (Broadview Press, 2005). I have also edited Shakespeare’s King Lear (Broadview Press, 2011) in a version that features parallel Folio and Quarto texts. My other publications include numerous articles in various journals and chapters in books including four volumes of the Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre series (Playwrights Canada Press, 2005-11).

Prior to graduate school, I worked as a professional actor, spending seasons with companies such as Stratford Festival, Shaw Festival, and the National Arts Centre English Company, as well as appearing at various Toronto theatres ranging from the Poor to the Royal Alex. Since graduate school, my acting appearances have been less frequent, although I have acted for Theatre Kingston, Tarragon Theatre, Thousand Islands Playhouse and St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival.

From 1997 to 2007, I was Artistic Director of Theatre Kingston, during which time I directed a few shows every season. I also directed many shows for Queen’s University.  My other work as a director includes seasons in the 1990s as an Intern Director at The Shaw Festival and an assistant director at The Stratford Festival, Much Ado About Nothing (2008) for DreamNorth Theatre, and Death and the Maiden (2012) and Private Lives (2013) for Plosive Productions at the Gladstone Theatre in Ottawa.  For the St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival in Prescott, Ontario, I have directed Romeo and Juliet in 2007, As You Like It in 2008, Measure for Measure in 2009, Trouble on Dibble Street (John Lazarus’s adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor) in 2010, Twelfth Night in 2011 (a production which won the 2012 Prix Rideau Award for Outstanding Production) and The Tempest in 2014.

My writing for the theatre includes an adaptation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, book, music and lyrics for Chantecler: a musical and new versions of several foreign plays, including Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, Bertolt Brecht’s Drums in the Night and Ödön von Horvàth’s Judgement Day.  My most recent work includes These Deeds, a play about Henry Irving, Bram Stoker and “Buffalo” Bill Cody, and One Last Night with Mata Hari, a music drama for which he wrote book and lyrics in collaboration with composer John Burge.

Contact information: (613) 533-6000, Ext. 74333 / craig.walkerj@queensu.ca