Böcker i Methuen Drama Engage-serien

Benjamin Poore argues that contemporary British playwriting that invokes history can be positioned on a spectrum that ranges from recovering untold stories, which offer an additional narrative to dominant understandings of history, to challenging the very foundations of historical knowledge itself.The Contemporary History Play asks what happens when a new mode of interpretation is applied to contemporary history plays and tracks the evolving uses of history in 21st-century playwriting across the UK.In the middle of this range sits a more experimental type of theatre - the liquid or porous postmodern history play - which experiments with form; de-emphasises narrative; collapses spaces and time; problematises traditional characterisation and heritage; debunks the notion of history as teaching lessons; and ultimately offers a counter narrative to history.Featuring a detailed consideration of 30 plays and productions, from Moira Buffini's Silence (1999) to Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's Emilia (2019), the book interrogates the work of playwrights such as Zinnie Harris, Moira Buffini, Rona Munro, Rory Mullarkey, DC Moore and Ella Hickson. It draws on original interviews and archival material held by organisations such as the V&A, Shakespeare's Globe, the Almeida, the RSC and the National Theatre and identifies a tradition of new writing over the past twenty years that has not been accounted for previously.

This book explores how avant-garde directors in French theatre play on their audiences' frustration to generate an encounter with the real.Focusing on the work of directors such as Gisèle Vienne, Jan Lauwers, Rodrigo Garcia, Jan Fabre and Romeo Castellucci, the book looks at how these directors manipulate their audiences to experience a raw perception of materiality and physical bodies on stage, set within narratives of mystery and the uncanny. This approach has led to these directors' work described as 'obscene', 'pretentious', 'demagogic' and 'provocative'. Because of this, the act of spectating and the nature of spectatorship itself becomes complicated and tends to leave French audiences doubting traditional codes and practices. It leads to the directors' work being misjudged and to contradictory discourses between critics, researchers and directors. The book examines how directors implement strategies on stage to trigger such experiences, while evaluating how problematic these strategies are. It develops critical and philosophical tools that help spectators extend their field of perception and better engage with these contemporary practices. And, in doing so, it analyses a fascinating paradox: the French theatre scene hosting both active avant-garde practices, especially when it comes to spectator experience, and strong rejections from audiences.

Sarah Kane was one of the landmark playwrights of 1990s Britain, her influence being felt across UK and European theatre. This is the first book to focus exclusively on Kane's unique approach to mind and mental health. It offers an important re-evaluation of her oeuvre, revealing the relationship between theatre and mind which lies at the heart of her theatrical project. Drawing on performance theory, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, this book argues that Kane's innovations generate a 'dramaturgy of psychic life', which re-shapes the encounter between stage and audience. It uses previously unseen archival material and contemporary productions to uncover the mechanics of this innovative theatre practice. Through a radically open-ended approach to dramaturgy, Kane's works offer urgent insights into mental suffering that take us beyond traditional discourses of empathy and mental health and into a profound rethinking of theatre as a mode of thought. As such, her theatre can help us to understand debates about mental suffering today.

This book considers arousal as a mode of theoretical and artistic inquiry to encourage new ways of staging and examining bodies in performance across artistic disciplines, modern history, and cultural contexts. Looking at traditional drama and theatre, but also visual arts, performance activism, and arts-based community engagement, this collection draws on the complicated relationship between arousing images and the frames of their representability to address what constitutes arousal in a variety of connotations. It examines arousal as a project of social, scientific, cultural, and artistic experimentation, and discusses how our perception of arousal has transformed over the last century. Probing "what arouses" in relation to the ethics of representation, the book investigates the connections between arousal and pleasures of voyeurism, underscores the political impact of aroused bodies, and explores how arousal can turn the body into a mediated object.

Forty years after Britain's entry to the European Economic Community, the country's political and cultural landscapes are still marked by scepticism or resistance to 'continental' Europe. Encountering Europe on British Stages is the first book-length study of the ways in which British theatre and performance have engaged with Europe and European identities since the end of the Cold War. The book explores images and ideas of Europe and Europeanness as produced on British stages and studies the reactions to works that have negotiated Europe, its past and present, its peoples and their experiences. It also investigates the determining effects of British and European cultural policies and structures. What can we learn from the British performing arts scene of the last quarter-century about what Europe, as a cultural construct and political formation, means for Britain today? It considers the work of dramatists and theatre companies which engaged with the emerging reality of the 'New' Europe in the 1990s: including Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, David Edgar, David Greig, Sarah Kane, Harold Pinter and companies Complicite and Suspect Culture. Against a changing context that covers the narratives of expansion and utopian feelings at the turn of the millennium; the 'failure' of multiculturalism; the transformations precipitated by the global recession in 2008 and the 'Eurozone crisis'; the migration crisis and the referendum on Britain's European Union membership, the work of playwrights including Mark Ravenhill, Simon Stephens, Zinnie Harris, Tena Stivicic, Caire Bayley and Anders Lustgarten is examined.