A Companion To Modern British And Irish Drama 1880-2005

• 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.

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.