Contemporary British Drama Research Articles

(Re)Building a Museum, (Re)Worlding a Nation, (Re)Writing History

The premiere of Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad (2019) marks a critical juncture in the history of contemporary British drama. The play is informed by a decolonial dynamic, a longue durée vision, and an evental mode of memory; and renders the museum as a multivalent allegorical space. The complicities of culture, imperialism, and resource extractivism are revealed.

Shakespearean Resonances in Contemporary British Drama: Political and Adaptational Borders in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and David Greig’s Dunsinane

Abstract: Using Wai Chee Dimock’s theory of “resonance,” this article argues that the potential of Shakespeare’s works to reverberate across centuries and across contexts resides not so much in their universality as in their historical specificity and therefore in the ways in which the meaning and significance of the plays have necessarily changed over time. This argument is illustrated through Scottish playwright David Greig’s 2010 play Dunsinane , a sequel to Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Dimock’s concept of resonance helps to identify specific concerns that the two plays share—above all, an interest in nationhood that is expressed through the border. At the same time, it draws attention to Dunsinane ’s considerable dissonances with Macbeth , which are above all evident in Greig’s rewriting of major parts of Shakespeare’s plot. As such, the border is not only a central theme and aesthetic device in both plays, but also an apt metaphor for Greig’s adaptational approach. As an example of a textual borderscape (in Chiara Brambilla’s sense of the term), Dunsinane probes the borders of adaptation—and of adapting Shakespeare—in the current moment.

In Interview: Key Features of Contemporary British Drama

In this interview on 22 March 2022 in London, Mesut Gunenc talks to theatre critic and historian Aleks Sierz about how his work has influenced contemporary British drama, why he chose the name ‘in-yer-face theatre’ for 1990s avant-garde plays, and why some writers have rejected the label. They also discuss the differences between experiential and experimental theatre, especially focusing on the work of Anthony Neilson, and finish by considering the key themes that characterize 1990s new writing in Britain.Aleks Sierz is author of the seminal In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (Faber, 2001), as well as of other work about new writing and post-war British theatre history. His more recent books include Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today (Methuen Drama, 2011), Modern British Playwriting: The 1990s (Methuen Drama, 2012), and Good Nights Out: A History of Popular British Theatre Since the Second World War (Methuen Drama, 2021). He has co-authored, with Lia Ghilardi, The Time Traveller’s Guide to British Theatre: The First Four Hundred Years (Oberon, 2015). Mesut Gunenc is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Adnan Menderes University in Turkey. He is the author of Postdramatic Theatrical Signs in Contemporary British Playwrights (Lambert, 2017) and co-editor, with Enes Kavak, of New Readings in British Drama: From the Post-War Period to the Contemporary Era (Peter Lang, 2021). He is currently a visiting postdoctoral scholar at Loughborough University in the UK.

Crossing the Mirror into Maternal Waters: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Becoming-other in Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018)

ABSTRACT The past two decades of contemporary British drama have been marked by an upsurge of interest in the exploration of the ethics, aesthetics and politics of authorship along with the relational dynamics among the author, the work and audience/reader. One of the latest and paradigmatic examples of this trend is Ella Hickson's The Writer (2018), a play informed by a queer feminist sensibility and distinguished by its aesthetics, its form, and its political critique of theatre as an institute underpinned by phallogocentric and heteronormative discourses. Accordingly, the essay will demonstrate how the queering of gender and genre are indelibly intertwined in the play. The Writer queers conventional theatrical form not only by deconstructing its “economy” and “forms” of hegemonic subjectivity, expression, and desire; but also by incorporating a surreal scene and various metatheatrical moments – to develop a more evental (or feminine) form characterised by formal transgression, abstraction, and excess. The Writer queers gender by pondering the dynamics of an evental love-sex relationship between the female writer (the protagonist) and her female lover along with a surreal experience of intimacy between the writer and mythical Semele. To effectively ponder the thematic and formal preoccupations of The Writer, this essay develops a nuanced conceptual framework whose premises include Irigaray's “the female imaginary”, Deleuze's “becoming-other”, Cixous's “écriture feminine”, Lyotard's “the figural” and Derrida's “chora”.

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Animal Studies in Contemporary British Drama: The Divide between Stef Smith’s Non-Human and Human Animals

Scottish playwright Stef Smith’s Human Animals (2016) recounts the fictional story of a government exterminating all animals in London with the pragmatic pursuit of building commercial construction sites on their natural habitats. In line with recent trends of thought, dramatic texts are getting more engaged with different natures of the relationship between human animals and non-human animals. In this context, animal studies posit a focal place in the analysis of Smith’s contemporary play, Human Animals. Animal studies take into account the interconnections between humans and animals, thereby making it possible to problematise the concepts of anthropocentrism and speciesism in works of literature. This study aims to analyse Stef Smith’s Human Animals as an example by using critical animal studies perspectives with an emphasis on the essentialist human-animal divide. In a more specific context, the article reveals the impact of anthropocentrism through a case study that exemplifies humanity’s vicious plans to eradicate all non-human beings for the sake of profit and personal interest. Stef Smith presents different characters which embody disparate viewpoints and exposes the anthropocentric nature of humanity. Smith’s portrayal of a dystopian setting not only aims at criticising anthropocentric line of thought but also exposes humanity’s tendencies towards speciesism.

Art as Symptom or Symptomatology? Performative Subjects, Capitalist Performativity, and Performance-Based Therapy in Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things

Abstract What a survey of contemporary British drama reveals is a plethora of plays concerned not only with psychological and medical issues, but with precarious individuals, whose symptomatic condition is presented in terms of schizophrenia or schizoid states. Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things (2015) can be considered as a distinctive play in this trend, where not only a rehabilitation center features as its setting, but its main character is afflicted with a complex cluster of symptoms: a schizoid personality, addiction, melancholic loss, and Oedipal tension with parents. Taking People, Places and Things as its focal point, and situating its arguments in the context of “Therapy Culture” (Furedi), this article demonstrates that what distinguishes Macmillan’s approach is his deconstructive understanding of the aporias besetting three chief spheres of human action, cognition, and affection: the epistemological, ontological and moral position of (1) his own art/work and its methods/techniques, (2) the (psycho-)therapeutic disciplines and institutes, (3) contemporary social-cultural discourse and political hegemony. Scrutinizing Macmillan’s treatment of the foregoing triad, it will be argued how his method can be characterized in two terms: symptomatic-symptomatological and critical-clinical.

“Who’s Going to Mobilise Darkness and Silence?”: The Construction of Dystopian Spaces in Contemporary British Drama

Abstract This article examines the recent explosion of British dystopian plays, analysing their changing characteristics from the 1990 s to the 2010 s. After an initial brief look at precursors, it then focuses on examples of new writing which tackle the idea of dystopia in the absurdist manner typical of the 2000 s. In a third step, the focus is on the dystopian drama of the 2010 s and its more conventionally structured plots, which at the same time increasingly include ironic and parodistic elements. It becomes clear how this comparatively new genre is able to shake off the constraints of traditional dystopian writing and develop recognisable characteristics of its own. Throughout, emphasis is put on the “reality” of the plays’ fictional worlds, on the usage of the stage space, and on how the audience’s relationship with the stage is constructed as a double bind of distance and closeness.

Graham Saunders. Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriations in Contemporary British Drama: “Upstart Crows.” London: Palgrave, 2017, xii + 194 pp. €96.29 (hardback), €74.96 (PDF ebook).

Graham Saunders. <i>Elizabethan and Jacobean Reappropriations in Contemporary British Drama</i>: <i>“Upstart Crows</i>.<i>”</i> London: Palgrave, 2017, xii + 194 pp. €96.29 (hardback), €74.96 (PDF ebook).

The Fascination with Crisis and the Crisis of Perception in Contemporary British Drama

AbstractBased on considerations of the connection between fascination, crisis, and the “Medusa effect,” this paper argues that contemporary drama tends to challenge the audience’s sense of safe spectatorship by stimulating perceptual crises, returning the spectators’ gaze, and exposing their tendencies of (in)attentional blindness. Besides plays by Martin Crimp, Carol Ann Duffy, and Rufus Norris, the analysis focuses on James Graham’s Quiz (2017), which dramatizes one of the most popular scandals in the history of British game shows and challenges the audience’s capacity of moral attention. As I argue, Quiz engages the audience in multi-levelled crises (a crisis of knowledge, a crisis of perception, and a crisis of judgement), which stimulates conceptual blending, tests spectators’ response-ability on an ethical, aesthetic, and political level, and eventually allows them to overcome the perceptual crisis created in the course of the play.

Seduz-me. Deseja-me. Ou talvez não - A voz dramática do desejo

Since ancient times, sexual desire has been the object of multiple philosophical reflections and has served as a magnetic compelling force for the creation of the most diverse artistic oeuvres. In the theatrical context, its potential has been explored and (re)presented not only through a dramaturgical tradition, but also through its performative materialization. Therefore, this article proposes a brief approach to the subject of sexual desire, its significance and meanings within contemporary British drama, having has an example the voice of the post‑in‑yer‑ face generation of playwrights such as Nick Payne, Anya Reiss Penelope Skinner, among others. The chosen authors disclose a portrait of the 2000’s society (2000‑ 2015), and their plays were transformed into shows that premiered at the Royal Court Theater in London. This article also aims to understand how sexual desire is communicated within a dialogue and how its characters convey (or not) a naturalistic approach of the playwrights’ perspective on their contemporary society. SEXUAL DESIRE / ROYAL COURT THEATRE / UK / CONTEMPORARY THEATRE

The Dystopian Near-Future in Contemporary British Drama

AbstractThis paper addresses the theme of fear and anxiety in contemporary drama and performance through a consideration of the trope of the dystopian near-future as it has re-occurred in a significant number of recent British plays. It takes as its starting point the contention that the prevalence and persistence of this motif makes it worthy of investigation. The plays under discussion do not re-inscribe socio-political problems, or the status quo, by pretending to be objective records of the real world. Instead they create alternative fictional near-future worlds, exploratory dystopias that deliberately perform anxiety-inducing and estranging critical interrogations of current cultural and political concerns. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams this essay seeks to show that the critical and emotional insights offered by these play-worlds are made possible only through the process of our pondering their strangeness. Each example stages its own particular disruption of theatrical realism and in so doing engages critically both with the British realist theatrical tradition, and also with the wider cultural discourses about ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ that haunt our contemporary neoliberal moment and the emotions these discourses produce.

The Uncomely Comedy: Celebrating the Divided Subject in Contemporary British Drama

Dans le théâtre britannique traditionnel, la comédie, qu’elle se donne comme comédie de mœurs ou plus tard comme pièce « bien faite », se caractérise par son aspect divertissant allié à une légèreté de ton. Péripéties et rires francs se succèdent pour culminer en un dénouement heureux et festif (bien souvent un mariage). Mais la Seconde Guerre mondiale a constitué un tournant décisif pour le genre comique, confrontant les dramaturges à un questionnement éthique autour de la possibilité même de rire dans ces nouvelles conditions. La comédie n’est pas sortie indemne de l’épisode de l’Holocauste, comme le révèlent les mises en scène de fêtes, devenues de pâles reflets spectraux voire lugubres de cette légèreté qui caractérisait jadis le genre. Les rassemblements festifs, désormais mornes voire inquiétants, n’ont plus vocation à célébrer le dénouement heureux de la pièce ni à faire valoir un quelconque retour à l’équilibre. En nous intéressant à un corpus de pièces contemporaines britanniques mettant en scène des fêtes de Noël ( Absurd Person Singular d’Alan Ayckbourn, Harry’s Christmas de Steven Berkoff et In the Republic of Happiness de Martin Crimp), nous analyserons le statut du comique dans ces festivités bien particulières où l’épuisement et la destruction ne sont jamais loin, où l’excès vient paradoxalement célébrer le rien. Nous nous attacherons à montrer que ces fêtes ( part-ies ) paradoxales s’efforcent de faire advenir sur scène un nouveau sujet contemporain, essentiellement divisé. L’exaltation et la célébration de cette division contribuent dès lors à un renouvellement de la forme dramatique et engendrent un nouveau type de comédies.

Testimonies of absence: Trauma and forgetting in The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

Edyta Lorek-Jezińska (PhD, D. Litt.) is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland, where she teaches British drama, theatre, gender and cultural studies. She has published on site and environment in theatre as well as gender, intertextuality, corporeality and hauntology in British drama. She is the author of The Hybrid in the Limen: British and Polish Environment-Oriented Theatre (2003, Toruń) and Hauntology and Intertextuality in Contemporary British Drama by Women Playwrights (2013, Toruń).

How Diasporic?: Psychogeographies of the New Britain in (Post-)Millennial British Theatre

Around the millennial years it was a priority for both the British Government and the Media to promote the changing, multicultural face of Britain. Contemporary British drama and its critics have also been largely preoccupied by the same agenda. How far are such spectacular representations of “new nationhood” indicative of actual, fundamental changes in the way Britishness is conceived today? How much of these aspirations has been fulfilled?

Postfeminist construction of women's sexuality in The village bike by Penelope Skinner

Penelope Skinner's drama The Village Bike deals with issues ranging from pregnancy to sexuality, pornography and sexual exploration. In this article I focus on the way these issues are presented and explain why pornography and sexual exploration belong to the postfeminist ideology. Namely, the author uncritically deals with these issues, objectifies a woman's body and favours gender constructs. Contemporary British drama by women playwrights is not marked by its engagement with feminism even though it might declare itself as pro-feminist or feminist. Penelope Skinner is one of the contemporary playwrights. I try to present that even though her drama seems to appear provocative at first sight this is not really the case. The provocation does not offer a critical insight and distance. I argue that this drama is postfeminist because it mainstreams pornography and presents a peculiar view on the part of sexual liberation, which is very limited.

A Concise companion to contemporary British and Irish drama

A Concise companion to contemporary British and Irish drama

“On the radio the pictures are better”

Michal Lachman: There is a tendency to think about British postwar drama exclusively in terms of realism. Did you want to redefine this tradition in Cavalry?Dan Rebellato: Yes. The basic idea for the play was a story of someone interviewing four men who at some point turn out to be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And I thought it would be interesting to do it in a magic realism genre where you have the biblical story but at the same time you try to treat it very realistically. So the language in Cavalry is hyper-realistic; for example, consider the way she speaks in the first half of the recording; she is stumbling over words, she is finishing sentences half way and starting another thought. All that is scripted and the actress, Francis Gray, played it wonderfully well. So the formal point of departure was a juxtaposition of realism of a journalist and ins-and-outs of that profession with the extremity of an apocalyptic story.ML: When listening to your play, it came to me that you can hardly find plays in the history of contemporary British drama that refer to the future or the end of the world. The theme rather features in science-fiction or dystopian literature but not necessarily in modern drama. More often it can be found in medieval drama, like morality plays. Was medieval drama an important context in composing the play?DR: There are some examples, actually; Caryl Churchill has written some dystopian plays like Far Away; Simon Stephens, David Eldridge, and Robert Holman cowrote an end-of-the-world play called A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky. There are others. I think they are responding to climate change, globalization and more, and I am interested in the way they do so through apocalyptic imagery. In my case, though, the play is deeply anchored in the present. I wonder at what point you guessed that the four jockeys are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Some people guess it very early on and some do not until one of the characters admits that. In that way, the play is completely in the present and it also should seem quite banal; the first five minutes listeners keep asking themselves what kind of an incompetent journalist it is, making a real mess interviewing some jockeys, which, for starters, sounds like the worst idea possible for a play. That is also the reason why we have the initial poor quality of the recording; I wanted people to go and check if the radio is broken.In addition, I am not at all religious and had no commitment to tell a real tale of the end of the world. So in a way it is an alternative take on the present rather than a projection of the future.ML: Right, and, unlike listeners who sooner or later guess the identity of the characters, the journalist is the last to believe that the four horsemen are the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Was it your intention to depict modern man as an individual who is unable to comprehend or tolerate irrationality, metaphysics or the supernatural?DR: The journalist is very much me, in the sense that she denies the possibility of the horsemen being the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. If I were in that bizarre situation I would also be quite reluctant to believe someone saying that they are the Four Horsemen. The play is therefore a mechanism to test the limits of our rationality.What is more, I was interested in the whole context of the fundamentalist Christian millenarianism and the apocalyptic view in some of the extreme American Christian groups for which all the conditions for the Last Judgement are in place and the Rapture is coming soon and we will be leftin chaos. So the play is recognition of the imperfection in the world and a totally fictional attempt to find a solution for it.ML: So is the play a critique of beliefs such as millenarianism?DR: Not really, at least not expressly. The play obviously does write on the iconography and associations of the Four Horsemen, although I did not strictly follow the Book of Revelation in the respect of presenting those characters. …

Brian Friel: theatre and politics

AcknowledgementsIntroduction Escaping Containment: The Early Plays Friel and the Director: Tyrone Guthrie and Hilton Edwards Fantasy in Friel Brian Friel and Contemporary British Drama: The Missing Dimension The Politics of Space: Friel's Drama of the 1970s Translations: 'An Inquiry into the Disappearance of Lt George Yolland' Memory and History Negotiating the Present Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Mediated class-ifications

This article takes, as its point of departure, recent debates about the representation of working-class life, especially the lives of the 'feckless poor', on reality television in the UK. These issues are contextualized by reference to a set of wider-ranging historical debates about: a) the category of class as a mode of social determination (and as an explanatory model); b) the relations of language, class and culture in educational sociology and in community publishing; and, c) in relation to classical Marxism's theorization of both the 'respectable' working class and the lumpen proletariat. The article concludes with a consideration of debates about the representation of the working class in the contemporary British TV drama series Shameless.