A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama

by Holdsworth, Nadine; Luckhurst, Mary

• ISBN13: 9781405130530
• ISBN10: 1405130539
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-11
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Focusing on major and emerging playwrights, institutions, and various theatre practices this Concise Companion examines the key issues in British and Irish theatre since 1979. Written by leading international scholars in the field, this collection offers new ways of thinking about the social, political, and cultural contexts within which specific aspects of British and Irish theatre have emerged and explores the relationship between these contexts and the works produced. The collection analyses key issues such as globalization, genocide, migration, and national identity, forms such as verbatim theatre and site-specific performance, the use of new technologies, and the practice of physical theatre. It investigates why particular issues and practices have emerged as significant in the theatre of this period.

Author Biography

Nadine Holdsworth is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. She has recently published Joan Littlewood as part of the Routledge Performance Practitioners series and previously edited John McGrath's collected writings on theatre, Naked Thoughts That Roam About (Nick Hern, 2002) and his Plays for England (Exeter University Press, 2005).

Mary Luckhurst is Senior Lecturer in Modern Drama at the University of York. She has edited A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama (Blackwell 2006) and 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). In 2006 she was awarded a University of York teaching award and made a National Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in recognition of her outstanding contributions to drama teaching and research.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Notes on Contributors	p. x
Acknowledgements	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
National Politics and Identities	p. 5
Europe in Flux: Exploring Revolution and Migration in British Plays of the 1990s	p. 7
'I'll See You Yesterday': Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and the Captivating Past	p. 26
Black British Drama and the Politics of Identity	p. 48
Northern Irish Drama: Speaking the Peace	p. 66
Sites, Cities and Landscapes	p. 85
The Production of 'Site': Site-Specific Theatre	p. 87
Staging an Urban Nation: Place and Identity in Contemporary Welsh Theatre	p. 107
The Landscape of Contemporary Scottish Drama: Place, Politics and Identity	p. 125
The Body, Text and the Real	p. 147
The Body's Cruel Joke: The Comic Theatre of Sarah Kane	p. 149
Physical Theatre: Complicite and the Question of Authority	p. 171
Verbatim Theatre, Media Relations and Ethics	p. 200
Science, Ethics and New Technologies	p. 223
Theatre and Science	p. 225
From the State of the Nation to Globalization: Shifting Political Agendas in Contemporary British Playwriting	p. 245
Theatre for a Media-Saturated Age	p. 263
Index	p. 283
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