Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing, 1995–2005 (review)

Amelia Howe Kritzer’s timely book on recent British political theatre deploys its periodization with strategy—its title references multiple historical frames on either side of the colon. Although it is debatable whether the term “Post-Thatcher” means post-1990 (when Britain’s first female prime minister stepped down from office) or post-1997 (when Labour leader Tony Blair unseated Thatcher’s designated successor, John Major), the label itself proves evocative. It reflects the belated yet resurgent cultural experience of the 1990s, extending that feeling across the turn of the century by using Britain’s most recognizable political figure to explain the events and sociological processes for which she metonymically stands. The book’s starting date, 1995, alludes to the premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at the Royal Court Theatre, but the title’s reference to Thatcher insists that Kane’s work be viewed in a sociopolitical context. This approach departs from that of Aleks Sierz and of Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders, who write about 1990s drama under the rubrics of, respectively, “in-yer-face” and “cool Britannia,” labels that emphasize the energy and attitude of the plays and their artists rather than their historical context.

Kritzer’s study also takes wider aim than Sierz or D’Monté and Saunders, who focus only on the decade of the 1990s. Sierz’s 2001 In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today breathlessly reported from the frontlines while the new wave was breaking and depends very much on the visceral sense of having “been there.” D’Monté and Saunders’s 2008 collection of essays includes the voices of British theatre scholars starting to put the 1990s into a critical framework. By picking a ten-year period that bridges the millennium, Kritzer allows herself to write in an entirely retrospective way about the rocky years between 1985 and 1995, when changes to arts funding and cultural changes in aesthetics and activism utterly altered the trajectory of Britain’s new writing scene. As a result of this periodization, Kritzer groups modes and attitudes of the late 1980s with 1970s theatre practice, eliding the profound differences between artists’ experiences and aims in those eras.

Kritzer is an American scholar of British theatre and her book’s distanced voice results in something like a textbook about British theatre and its social contexts at the turn of the twentieth century, illuminated by an extensive survey and analysis of play texts (over eighty plays receive coverage). This textbook-like quality is not necessarily a failing, but it follows that Kritzer does not take the opportunity to critique ideas or follow up on certain threads. (There is more to explore about how Hans-Thies Lieberman’s ideas on postdramatic theatre really help or hinder an argument about political theatre, for instance.) Her first chapter, however, fully demonstrates one benefit of this approach: it provides a sophisticated definition of and approach to political theatre in a patient, sequential, and thorough way that will make the chapter useful not only for teaching British theatre but for addressing wider topics in theatre and politics.

In her first two chapters, Kritzer defines political theatre and sets up a continuum of activism and disengagement through which she makes her overall argument that political theatre is not dead in post-Thatcher Britain. In chapter sections titled “Generational Politics” (which treats the generation of writers who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s and are still writing today) and “Intergenerational Dialogue” (about writers from the 1990s onward), she ably defines millennial political theatre, in contrast to that of the 1970s. Kritzer argues that in the 1970s, activism held high appeal for young theatre artists, but that current political theatre works differently, because its writers must address a world where disengagement has become the norm.

Following the twin ideas of generational difference and disengagement, Kritzer aims to answer Sierz’s query about whether in-yer-face plays succeed in not...