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This essay characterizes a community of playwrights working in Britain across generational lines, and emphasizes the need to complicate customary distinctions between political (older) and politically sceptical (younger) writers, arguing that writers are connected through their responses to the discrete historical moments they experience and through a British writing culture that allows for mutual support. The current situation is seen as fluid and eclectic, containing space for a range of theatrical writing.
Philip Ridley’s three major works from the 1990s serve as powerful reminders of nostalgia’s origin as a physical affliction caused by an acute longing for home and the past. The recurrence of nostalgia in his The Pitchfork Disney (1991) and The Fastest Clock in the Universe (1992) reflects larger, ongoing debates about nostalgia in British culture, from Thatcher’s call for a return to Victorian values to the rise of Tony Blair’s New Labour party and its championing of Cool Britannia, which looked back to 1960s Swinging London. Yet, in his final play of the decade, Ghosts from a Perfect Place (1994), Ridley suggests that nostalgia can be transformed from a purely retrospective gesture into a prospective one.
A curious blind spot remains in the critical response to Sarah Kane’s Blasted : the rape of Cate by Ian. In a play famous for its onstage violence, why is this rape, one of its pivotal moments of brutality, left unstaged? My article seeks to worry this lacuna by exploring the theoretical and historical dimensions of the ‘‘missing’’ in Kane’s play. I argue that Kane’s representation of Cate’s rape as missing signals both her engagement with the history of rape’s representation – an elusive, evasive history rather than an outrageous, in-yer-face one – as well as a deft understanding of how the ‘‘missing’’ operates as realism’s menace, the ghost of what realist representations must garrison away in order to instantiate their truth-claims. I frame my reading of Kane’s critique of both genre and history by exploring how Blasted charges us, as contemporary spectators of realism, to recognize the schism between knowledge and the eye, the limits of our powers of sight.
This article shows how Crimp, in his 2005 trilogy of short playlets, both constructs meaning and explores the difficulties of constructing meaning. The article analyses the form and content of Fewer Emergencies in two contexts: what Hans-Thies Lehmann calls ‘‘postdramatic’’ theatre and what Frank Furedi calls the ‘‘culture of fear.’’ Crucially, both of these considerations feed into another, more important question: in what is sometimes seen as a ‘‘post-radical’’ or ‘‘post-human’’ world, what exactly are the politics of Fewer Emergencies? The article shows how Crimp’s trilogy is radical in both its form and its content, but that this radicalism is achieved at a cost.
Caryl Churchill’s play The Skriker explores the ravages and intoxications of globalization. Through the shape-shifting character of the Skriker, who commands space and time in a manner that recalls the fluidity of multinational capital, Churchill examines the relationship between time–space compression and the fragmented subjectivities of two young women, Josie and Lily. In this essay, I argue that, through the play’s formal exploration of the decentring forces of postmodern life, Churchill is able to demystify her subjects’ relations to the flows of multinational capital and, in doing so, to recover the affect that the pressure of time–space compression threatens to exhaust.
This article considers how Roy Williams’s 2003 play, which dramatises a black-on-black killing and the flawed police investigation which follows, represents contemporary British society, particularly in relation to the vexed question of multiculturalism. Some have described Fallout as limited and bleak, reinforcing stereotypes of black experience and identity. By contrast, this article demonstrates that the play, through its analysis of both a conflicted police service and the societal divisions that push black youths towards criminality, draws attention to the underlying systemic causes of inner city violence and makes a constructive and valuable contribution to ongoing public debate.
This essay considers David Hare’s Stuff Happens, Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Max Stafford-Clark and Robin Soans’s Talking to Terrorists as examples of a recent turn (or return) to documentary theatre in recent British drama.
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