A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama

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. It investigates why particular issues and practices have emerged as significant in the theatre of this period.

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published widely on twentieth and twenty-first century British theatre and is the author of Joan Littlewood's Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Theatre & Nation (Palgrave, 2010) and Joan Littlewood (Routledge, 2006). She has also 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 Professor of Modern Drama and co-founder of the prestigious new Department of Theatre, Film and Television 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) and Playing for Real (Palgrave 2010). She is a National Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and in 2012-13 was among 14 leading UK scholars to be awarded an international scholarship in recognition of her outstanding contributions to theatre pedagogy and research.

List of Illustrations ix

Notes on Contributors x

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1
Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst

Part I National Politics and Identities 5

1 Europe in Flux: Exploring Revolution and Migration in British Plays of the 1990s 7
Geoff Willcocks

2 'I'll See You Yesterday': Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and the Captivating Past 26
Claire Gleitman

3 Black British Drama and the Politics of Identity 48
D. Keith Peacock

4 Northern Irish Drama: Speaking the Peace 66
Tom Maguire

Part II Sites, Cities and Landscapes 85

5 The Production of 'Site': Site-Specific Theatre 87
Fiona Wilkie

6 Staging an Urban Nation: Place and Identity in Contemporary Welsh Theatre 107
Heike Roms

7 The Landscape of Contemporary Scottish Drama: Place, Politics and Identity 125
Nadine Holdsworth

Part III The Body, Text and the Real 147

8 The Body's Cruel Joke: The Comic Theatre of Sarah Kane 149
Ken Urban

9 Physical Theatre: Complicite and the Question of Authority 171
Helen Freshwater

10 Verbatim Theatre, Media Relations and Ethics 200
Mary Luckhurst

Part IV Science, Ethics and New Technologies 223

11 Theatre and Science 225
David Higgins

12 From the State of the Nation to Globalization: Shifting Political Agendas in Contemporary British Playwriting 245
Dan Rebellato

13 Theatre for a Media-Saturated Age 263
Sarah Gorman

Index 283

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