A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama, 1880 - 2005

This wide-ranging Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama offers challenging analyses of a range of plays in their political contexts. It explores the cultural, social, economic and institutional agendas that readers need to engage with in order to appreciate modern theatre in all its complexity. An authoritative guide to modern British and Irish drama. Engages with theoretical discourses challenging a canon that has privileged London as well as white English males and realism. Topics covered include: national, regional and fringe theatres; post-colonial stages and multiculturalism; feminist and queer theatres; sex and consumerism; technology and globalisation; representations of war, terrorism, and trauma.

This wide-ranging Companion to Modern British and IrishDrama offers challenging analyses of a range of plays in theirpolitical contexts. It explores the cultural, social, economic andinstitutional agendas that readers need to engage with in order toappreciate modern theatre in all its complexity.* An authoritative guide to modern British and Irish drama.* Engages with theoretical discourses challenging a canon thathas privileged London as well as white English males andrealism.* Topics covered include: national, regional and fringe theatres;post-colonial stages and multiculturalism; feminist and queertheatres; sex and consumerism; technology and globalisation;representations of war, terrorism, and trauma.

Acknowledgements.List of Illustrations.Notes on Contributors.Introduction (Mary Luckhurst).Part I Contexts.1 Domestic and Imperial Politics in Britain and Ireland: The Testimony of Irish Theatre (Victor Merriman).2 Reinventing England (Declan Kiberd).3 Ibsen in the English Theatre in the Fin de Siecle (Katherine Newey).4 New Woman Drama (Sally Ledger).Part II Mapping New Ground, 1900 - 1939.5 Shaw among the Artists (Jan McDonald).6 Granville Barker and the Court Dramatists (Cary M. Mazer).7 Gregory, Yeats and Ireland's Abbey Theatre (Mary Trotter).8 Suffrage Theatre: Community Activism and Political Commitment (Susan Carlson).9 Unlocking Synge Today (Christopher Murray).10 Sean O'Casey's Powerful Fireworks (Jean Chothia).11 Auden and Eliot: Theatres of the Thirties (Robin Grove).Part III England, Class and Empire, 1939 - 1990.12 Empire and Class in the Theatre of John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy (Mary Brewer).13 When Was the Golden Age? Narratives of Loss and Decline: John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Rodney Ackland (Stephen Lacey).14 A Commercial Success: Women Playwrights in the 1950s (Susan Bennett).15 Home Thoughts from Abroad: Mustapha Matura (D. Keith Peacock).16 The Remains of the British Empire: The Plays of Winsome Pinnock (Gabriele Griffin).Part IV Comedy.17 Wilde's Comedies (Richard Allen Cave).18 Always Acting: Noe¨l Coward and the Performing Self (Frances Gray).19 Beckett's Divine Comedy (Katharine Worth).20 Form and Ethics in the Comedies of Brendan Behan (John Brannigan).21 Joe Orton: Anger, Artifice and Absurdity (David Higgins).22 Alan Ayckbourn: Experiments in Comedy (Alexander Leggatt).23 'They Both Add up to Me': The Logic of Tom Stoppard's Dialogic Comedy (Paul Delaney).24 Stewart Parker's Comedy of Terrors (Anthony Roche).Part V War and Terror.25 AWounded Stage: Drama and World War I (Mary Luckhurst).26 Staging 'the Holocaust' in England (John Lennard).27 Troubling Perspectives: Northern Ireland, the 'Troubles' and Drama (Helen Lojek).28 On War: Charles Wood's Military Conscience (Dawn Fowler and John Lennard).29 Torture in the Plays of Harold Pinter (Mary Luckhurst).30 Sarah Kane: From Terror to Trauma (Steve Waters).Part VI Theatre since 1968.31 Theatre since 1968 (David Pattie).32 Lesbian and Gay Theatre: All Queer on the West End Front (John Deeney).33 Edward Bond: Maker of Myths (Michael Patterson).34 John McGrath and Popular Political Theatre (Maria DiCenzo).35 David Hare and Political Playwriting: Between the Third Way and the Permanent Way (John Deeney).36 Left in Front: David Edgar's Political Theatre (John Bull).37 Liz Lochhead: Writer and Re-Writer: Stories, Ancient and Modern (Jan McDonald).38 'Spirits that Have Become Mean and Broken': Tom Murphy and the 'Famine' of Modern Ireland (Shaun Richards).39 Caryl Churchill: Feeling Global (Elin Diamond).40 Howard Barker and the Theatre of Catastrophe (Chris Megson).41 Reading History in the Plays of Brian Friel (Lionel Pilkington).42 Marina Carr: Violence and Destruction: Language, Space and Landscape (Cathy Leeney).43 Scrubbing up Nice? Tony Harrison's Stagings of the Past (Richard Rowland).44 The Question of Multiculturalism: The Plays of Roy Williams (D. Keith Peacock).45 Ed Thomas: Jazz Pictures in the Gaps of Language (David Ian Rabey).46 Theatre and Technology (Andy Lavender).Index.