Nadine Holdsworth & Mary Luckhurst 
A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama [EPUB ebook] 

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.

Table des matières

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

A propos de l’auteur

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 Mc Grath’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.