A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama »

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.

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 analyzes 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.

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