A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama, 1880 - 2005

by Luckhurst, Mary

• ISBN13: 9781405122283
• ISBN10: 1405122285
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-10-16
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This wide-ranging Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama offers challenging analyses of a range of plays in their political contexts. It explores the cultural, social, economic and institutional agendas that readers need to engage with in order to appreciate modern theatre in all its complexity. An authoritative guide to modern British and Irish drama. Engages with theoretical discourses challenging a canon that has privileged London as well as white English males and realism. Topics covered include: national, regional and fringe theatres; post-colonial stages and multiculturalism; feminist and queer theatres; sex and consumerism; technology and globalisation; representations of war, terrorism, and trauma.

Author Biography

Mary Luckhurst is Senior Lecturer in Modern Drama at the University of York. She is the author of Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (2006), co-author of The Drama Handbook: A Guide to Reading Plays (2002), and co-editor of Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660-2000 (2005). She has also edited The Creative Writing Handbook: Techniques for New Writers (1996), On Directing: Interviews with Directors (1999), and On Acting: Interviews with Actors (2002). She was awarded a University of York outstanding teaching award in 2006 and is also one of the Higher Education Academy's National Teaching Fellows.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	xi
List of Illustrations	xii
Notes on Contributors	xiii
Introduction	1	(4)
Mary Luckhurst
Part I Contexts	5	(56)
Domestic and Imperial Politics in Britain and Ireland: The Testimony of Irish Theatre	7	(15)
Victor Merriman
Reinventing England	22	(13)
Declan Kiberd
Ibsen in the English Theatre in the Fin de Siecle	35	(13)
Katherine Newey
New Woman Drama	48	(13)
Sally Ledger
Part II Mapping New Ground, 1900--1939	61	(90)
Shaw among the Artists	63	(12)
Jan McDonald
Granville Barker and the Court Dramatists	75	(12)
Cary M. Mazer
Gregory, Yeats and Ireland's Abbey Theatre	87	(12)
Mary Trotter
Suffrage Theatre: Community Activism and Political Commitment	99	(11)
Susan Carlson
Unlocking Synge Today	110	(15)
Christopher Murray
Sean O'Casey's Powerful Fireworks	125	(13)
Jean Chothia
Auden and Eliot: Theatres of the Thirties	138	(13)
Robin Grove
Part III England, Class and Empire, 1939--1990	151	(60)
Empire and Class in the Theatre of John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy	153	(11)
Mary Brewer
When Was the Golden Age? Narratives of Loss and Decline: John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Rodney Ackland	164	(11)
Stephen Lacey
A Commercial Success: Women Playwrights in the 1950s	175	(13)
Susan Bennett
Home Thoughts from Abroad: Mustapha Matura	188	(10)
D. Keith Peacock
The Remains of the British Empire: The Plays of Winsome Pinnock	198	(13)
Gabriele Griffin
Part IV Comedy	211	(88)
Wilde's Comedies	213	(12)
Richard Allen Cave
Always Acting: Noel Coward and the Performing Self	225	(12)
Frances Gray
Beckett's Divine Comedy	237	(10)
Katharine Worth
Form and Ethics in the Comedies of Brendan Behan	247	(11)
John Brannigan
Joe Orton: Anger, Artifice and Absurdity	258	(11)
David Higgins
Alan Ayckbourn: Experiments in Comedy	269	(10)
Alexander Leggatt
'They Both Add up to Me': The Logic of Tom Stoppard's Dialogic Comedy	279	(10)
Paul Delaney
Stewart Parker's Comedy of Terrors	289	(10)
Anthony Roche
Part V War and Terror	299	(84)
A Wounded Stage: Drama and World War I	301	(15)
Mary Luckhurst
Staging 'the Holocaust' in England	316	(13)
John Lennard
Troubling Perspectives: Northern Ireland, the 'Troubles' and Drama	329	(12)
Helen Lojek
On War: Charles Wood's Military Conscience	341	(17)
Dawn Fowler
John Lennard
Torture in the Plays of Harold Pinter	358	(13)
Mary Luckhurst
Sarah Kane: From Terror to Trauma	371	(12)
Steve Waters
Part VI Theatre since 1968	383	(180)
Theatre since 1968	385	(13)
David Pattie
Lesbian and Gay Theatre: All Queer on the West End Front	398	(11)
John Deeney
Edward Bond: Maker of Myths	409	(10)
Michael Patterson
John McGrath and Popular Political Theatre	419	(10)
Maria DiCenzo
David Hare and Political Playwriting: Between the Third Way and the Permanent Way	429	(12)
John Deeney
Left in Front: David Edgar's Political Theatre	441	(13)
John Bull
Liz Lochhead: Writer and Re-Writer: Stories, Ancient and Modern	454	(12)
Jan McDonald
'Spirits that Have Become Mean and Broken': Tom Murphy and the 'Famine' of Modern Ireland	466	(10)
Shaun Richards
Caryl Churchill: Feeling Global	476	(12)
Elin Diamond
Howard Barker and the Theatre of Catastrophe	488	(11)
Chris Megson
Reading History in the Plays of Brian Friel	499	(10)
Lionel Pilkington
Marina Carr: Violence and Destruction: Language, Space and Landscape	509	(10)
Cathy Leeney
Scrubbing up Nice? Tony Harrison's Stagings of the Past	519	(11)
Richard Rowland
The Question of Multiculturalism: The Plays of Roy Williams	530	(11)
D. Keith Peacock
Ed Thomas: Jazz Pictures in the Gaps of Language	541	(10)
David Ian Rabey
Theatre and Technology	551	(12)
Andy Lavender
Index	563