Contemporary English Plays

Contemporary English Plays
Author: James Graham
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2015-02-26
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1472588002

Edited and introduced by leading cultural and theatre critic Aleks Sierz, this bold and urgent collection of contemporary plays by England's newest and most relevant young writers explores the various cultures and identities of a nation that is at once traditional, nationalistic and multicultural. Eden's Empire, by James Graham is an uncompromising political thriller exploring the events of the Suez Crisis, and the tragic story of its flawed hero – Churchill's golden boy and heir apparent, Anthony Eden. Alaska, by D. C. Moore features Frank, an ordinary bloke who likes smoking, history and playing House of the Dead 3. He can put up with his job on a cinema kiosk until a new supervisor arrives who is younger than him. And Asian. A Day at the Racists, by Anders Lustgarten is a timely examination of the rise of the BNP which attempts to understand why people might be drawn to the BNP and diagnoses the deeper cause of that attraction. Shades, by Alia Bano shows Sabrina, a single girl-about-town, who is seeking Mr Right in a world where traditional and liberal values sit side-by-side, but rarely see eye-to-eye. The Westbridge, by Rachel De-lahay begins with the accusation of a black teenager which sparks riots on South London streets. Among it all, a couple from very different backgrounds navigate the minefield between them and their disparate but coexisting neighbourhood.

Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas

Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas
Author: Esther Kim Lee
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2012-08-21
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0822352745

By bringing the plays together in this collection, Esther Kim Lee highlights the themes and styles that have enlivened Korean diasporic theater in the Americas since the 1990s. Some of the plays are set in urban Koreatowns. One takes place in the middle of Texas, while another unfolds entirely in a character's mind. Ethnic identity is not as central as it was in the work of previous generations of Asian diasporic playwrights.

Contemporary British Drama

Contemporary British Drama
Author: David Lane
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2010-09-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748686797

This book offers an extended analysis of writers and theatre companies in Britain since 1995, and explores them alongside recent cultural, social and political developments. Referencing well-known practitioners from modern theatre, this book is an excelle

Contemporary Black British Playwrights

Contemporary Black British Playwrights
Author: L. Goddard
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2015-02-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137493100

This book examines the socio-political and theatrical conditions that heralded the shift from the margins to the mainstream for black British Writers, through analysis of the social issues portrayed in plays by Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams, and Bola Agbaje.

Rethinking Character in Contemporary British Theatre

Rethinking Character in Contemporary British Theatre
Author: Cristina Delgado-García
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2015-11-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110333910

The category of theatrical character has been swiftly dismissed in the academic reception of no-longer-dramatic texts and performances. However, claims on the dissolution of character narrowly demarcate what a subject is and how it may appear. This volume unmoors theatre scholarship from the regulatory ideals of liberal humanism, stretching the notion of character to encompass and illuminate otherwise unaccounted-for subjects, aesthetic strategies and political gestures in recent theatre works. To this aim, contemporary philosophical theories of subjectivation, European theatre studies, and experimental, script-led work produced in Britain since the late 1990s are mobilised as discussants on the question of subjectivity. Four contemporary playtexts and their performances are examined in depth: Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue and Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND. Through these case studies, Delgado-García demonstrates alternative ways of engaging theoretically with character, and elucidating a range of subjective figures beyond identity and individuality. Alongside these analyses, the book traces a large body of work that has experimented with speech attribution since the early twentieth-century. This is a timely contribution to contemporary theatre scholarship, which demonstrates that character remains a malleable and politically-salient notion in which understandings of subjectivity are still being negotiated.

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights
Author: Martin Middeke
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2011-10-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1408122782

This is an authoritative single-volume guide to the work of twenty-five British playwrights from the 1980s to the present written by an international team of twenty-five eminent scholars. It is the perfect companion for students of Theatre Studies and English Literature.

Contemporary European Playwrights

Contemporary European Playwrights
Author: Maria M. Delgado
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2020-07-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1351620533

Contemporary European Playwrights presents and discusses a range of key writers that have radically reshaped European theatre by finding new ways to express the changing nature of the continent’s society and culture, and whose work is still in dialogue with Europe today. Traversing borders and languages, this volume offers a fresh approach to analyzing plays in production by some of the most widely-performed European playwrights, assessing how their work has revealed new meanings and theatrical possibilities as they move across the continent, building an unprecedented picture of the contemporary European repertoire. With chapters by leading scholars and contributions by the writers themselves, the chapters bring playwrights together to examine their work as part of a network and genealogy of writing, examining how these plays embody and interrogate the nature of contemporary Europe. Written for students and scholars of European theatre and playwriting, this book will leave the reader with an understanding of the shifting relationships between the subsidized and commercial, the alternative and the mainstream stage, and political stakes of playmaking in European theatre since 1989.

Contemporary American Playwrights

Contemporary American Playwrights
Author: C. W. E. Bigsby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 454
Release: 1999
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780521668071

A leading writer on American theatre explores the works and influences of ten contemporary American playwrights.

Love in Contemporary British Drama

Love in Contemporary British Drama
Author: Korbinian Stöckl
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2021-01-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110714760

Despite the recent turn to affects and emotions in the humanities and despite the unceasing popularity of romantic and erotic love as a motif in fictional works of all genres, the subject has received surprisingly little attention in academic studies of contemporary drama. Love in Contemporary British Drama reflects the appeal of love as a topic and driving force in dramatic works with in-depth analyses of eight pivotal plays from the past three decades. Following an interdisciplinary and historical approach, the study collects and condenses theories of love from philosophy and sociology to derive persisting discourses and to examine their reoccurrence and transformation in contemporary plays. Special emphasis is put on narratives of love’s compensatory function and precariousness and on how modifications of these narratives epitomise the peculiarities of emotional life in the social and cultural context of the present. Based on the assumption that drama is especially inclined to draw on shared narratives for representations of love, the book demonstrates that love is both a window to remnants of the past in the present and a proper subject matter for drama in times in which the suitability of the dramatic form has been questioned.