Contemporary British Theatre Breaking New Ground

Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground brings together a team of internationally prominent academics and delivers cutting-edge discourse on the strongly emerging tradition of experimentation in contemporary British theatre to redefine what the dramatic stands for today. The chapters focus on influential plays, playwrights and theatre practitioners to produce original and rigorous critical perspectives on the key debates informing theatre practice and scholarship today. This book places the spectator at the heart of the enquiry and examines the radical redefinition of form and content in the context of society, politics, authorship and intentionality, the metaphysical turn in drama, social interventions and resonance, expressive unpredictability, race and identity, ethics/responsibility and the boundaries of representation. Featuring contributors such as Dan Rebellato and Chris Megson, the volume discusses contemporary theatre by a range of playwrights including Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill and Debbie Tucker Green.

Vicky Angelaki is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Birmingham, UK. Previous publications include The Plays of Martin Crimp: Making Theatre Strange (Palgrave, 2012). She publishes on modern and contemporary theatre specializing in performance, critical theory and philosophy, as well as perception, affect and ethics in the context of active spectatorship.

Foreword
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
1. Exit the Author; Dan Reballato
2. 'And I was Struck Still By Time': Contemporary British Theatre and the Metaphysical Imagination; Chris Megson
3. Politics for the Middle Classes: Contemporary Audiences and the Violence of Now; Vicky Angelaki 4. Language Games and Literary Constraints: Playing with Tragedy in the Theatre of Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp; Elisabeth Angel-Perez
5. Racial Violence, Witnessing and Emancipated Spectatorship in The Colour of Justice, Fallout and Random; Mireia Aragay and Enric Monforte
6. Old Wine in a New Bottle or Vice Versa? Winsome Pinnock's Interstitial Poetics; Elizabeth Sakellaridou
7. Acting In/Action: Staging Human Rights in Debbie Tucker Green's Royal Court Plays; Marissia Fragkou and Lynette Goddard
8. Children and the Limits of Representation in the Work of Tim Crouch; Helen Freshwater