A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama 1880-2005 (review)

Editing a collection of this kind is an unforgiving task. How to balance critical overviews with the treatment of individual writers and artists? How to blend literary and theatrical approaches? How to articulate familiar paradigms and new visions? Mary Luckhurst's Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama 1880–2005 earnestly blends a series of "life and works" essays on individual playwrights (thirty-two of the volume's forty-six essays) with a smaller number of topical ("Ibsen in the English Theatre in the Fin de Siècle"), thematic ("New Woman Drama"), and historical ("A Wounded Stage: Drama and World War I") interventions. While several essays attempt to chart new directions for the field, reassess the contours of a given playwright's career, or engage and revise established historical judgements, as a whole the volume promises a familiar itinerary.

Nonetheless, readers approaching the book according to the demands of their own curiosity or syllabi will find suggestive and occasionally transformative overviews. Each of Cary Mazer's "Granville Barker and the Court Dramatists," Mary Trotter's "Gregory, Yeats and Ireland's Abbey Theatre," and Susan Carlson's "Suffrage Theatre: Community Activism and Political Commitment" brings a fresh eye to a familiar story in a deft, informative, well-phrased essay. They are complemented by Susan Bennett's important revisionist essay, "A Commercial Success: Women Playwrights in the 1950s." Bennett counters the now-familiar tale of the conquest of the stage by the "Angry Young Men" – and the pervasively misogynist dismissal of women playwrights it has come to embody – with the counter-narrative of women's achievement on the post-war stage, epitomized by the worldwide success of Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden, which opened a few weeks before John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956. (If you read, or assign, only one essay in the book, it should be this one.) While David Pattie's "Theatre since 1968" represents the survey essay as a tendentious quick march via cliché, John Lennard's "Staging 'the Holocaust' in England" and Helen Lojek's "Troubling Perspectives: Northern Ireland, the 'Troubles' and Drama"' (taken in tandem with Lionel Pilkington's rather desultory reading of Brian Friel) help the collection to sketch out important, and sometimes overlooked, trends in the historical development of drama and theatre.

By and large, though, Modern British and Irish Drama stages the work of individual playwrights. In many cases, this decision leads to shrewd and original engagements with an important facet of a writer's work; as a consequence, though, the larger contours of an important career are sometimes invisible. Jan McDonald ably treats "Shaw among the Artists," but the other lines of Shaw's multifarious work are only occasionally traced in other essays. Katharine Worth's elegant "Beckett's Divine Comedy" is the only piece on Beckett, arguably the most influential figure in the volume. Pinter is represented by Luckhurst's own illuminating reading of "Torture in the Plays of Harold Pinter," necessarily focused on The Birthday Party, The Hothouse, One for the Road, and Mountain Language; The Homecoming is not mentioned anywhere in the volume.

Faced with a dilemma partly imposed by limitations of space – whether to focus on a few plays or to scan a writer's entire corpus – several essays successfully occupy a middle ground, staking a dynamic claim that enables a productive, sometimes surprising perspective on a career: D. Keith Peacock on Mustapha Matura, Gabriele Griffin on Winsome Pinnock, Anthony Roche on Stewart Parker, Maria DiCenzo on John McGrath, John Bull on David Edgar, Chris Megson on Howard Barker, Shaun Richards on Tom Murphy, Elin Diamond on Caryl Churchill, Cathy Leeney on Marina Carr, and Richard Rowland on Tony Harrison. The year 1956 remains a surprisingly important watershed, as writers coming of age after the war predominate: Luckhurst also includes pieces on Behan, Orton, Ayckbourn, Stoppard, Wood, Kane, Bond, Hare, Lochhead, and Roy Williams. Only a handful of figures from the first half of...