Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and: Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, and: John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, and: Patrick Marber’s Closer (review)

Continuum Publishing recently released a new series of companion volumes for modern and contemporary plays. Presenting an in-depth and digestible approach for either a literature class or a cast and director exploring a production, the Continuum Modern Theatre Guides provide a convenient “dramaturgy in a volume” approach to study. Currently, the guides are available for Death of a Salesman, Look Back in Anger, Closer, Top Girls, Fences, Oleanna, Waiting for Godot, Blasted, Arcadia, and Angels in America. For the purposes of reviewing this series, Continuum provided the following volumes for examination: Death of a Salesman, Top Girls, Look Back in Anger, and Closer. Featuring authors that come from a variety of scholarly backgrounds that include theatre, African American literature, and English, this high-quality series provides a valuable new resource for directors, teachers, and dramaturgs. These guides are thorough and well written, and they have the potential to serve a number of different purposes in the classroom or in production.

These texts are aimed at providing contextual information and assisting with the analysis of well-known and often-produced European and American plays. Each of the volumes includes chapters covering Background and Content, Analysis and Commentary, Production History, and Workshopping the Play. The Background and Content sections offer biographies of the playwrights and discuss the worlds in which the plays were written and originally performed in order to explore the social, historical, and political contexts for each play. The Death of a Salesman guide, for example, provides background information on the early interpretation of the play as a communist indictment of the American Dream and as a Semitic play wrapped in a more generic American family. The Top Girls guide discusses the work as a “direct response to political events” (13) and reveals the play’s opposition to Thatcherism. This allows the reader to garner a broader understanding of each play and helps productions and classes to connect theatre art to history and society.

The guides present several persuasive arguments as to the importance of each play. These are particularly interesting for some of the more contemporary works covered by the volumes, although admittedly less necessary for plays like Death of a Salesman. The guides also address theatrical innovations each play introduced, such as the overlapping dialogue found in Top Girls or the exploration of new technology in Closer where “mobile phones . . . made one of their first [theatrical] appearances” (8). Look Back in Anger’s guide reveals the play’s position at the forefront of the “first New Wave of what came to be known as Kitchen-Sink Drama” (1). The script’s introduction of the Angry Young Man character and its revolutionizing of British dramatic literature are placed in the broader context of British theatre before and since. Indeed, each of the ten plays included thus far in the series can well claim to have intrinsically changed the face of modern theatre and drama. These guides’ attention to both dramatic literature and theatrical production make them especially valuable for a number of purposes.

The Analysis and Commentary section of each text provides a focus on the script primarily as literary texts. Most open with a plot summary/synopsis and follow up with literary analyses from a variety of schools of thought. The Top Girls guide examines the script through several lenses by targeting various influences: feminism, the Joint Stock Theatre Company, Brecht, and postmodernism, as well as by revealing the source material for the characters in...