Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990-2000 by Elaine Aston (review)

Reviews 151 nessing the appearance of the lowest elements of society speaking their own virtually unintelligible languages, on the stage" (167). A hidden life of London , beyond the control of the respectable, was emerging. But, as with Bartholomew Fair, we have to look elsewhere for its re-emergence. Bratton suggests that it is within the vulgarity of the music halls and of musical theatre that we will find the spirit of Tom and lerry, together with the parodic, alternative, and experimental theatre of the Victorian period. Bratton 's study concludes with a fascinating study of genealogy and family history as a source for our study of the theatrical past and as one of a number of ways in which the history of women in theatre can be reclaimed. Overall, the book continually challenges the way we think and write about theatre history and makes clear how carefully we need to engage with our sources. Conceptually sophisticated, it is written very accessibly and will surely become essential reading for all students of theatre historiography and of nineteenthcentury British theatre. ELAINE ASTON . Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 238. $65 (Hb). Reviewed by Maria DiCenzo, Wilfrid Laurier University Elaine Aston's latest book is a welcome and necessary contribution to feminist theatre studies. In many ways, it picks up where the collection she coedited with Janelle Reinelt, The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (2000), left off. Not only does it take a closer look at the 1990s, but it does so here from the perspective of a particular critic. The Companion has been a significant resource, especially for those who teach in the field, because it brings together in one volume essays by a variety of contributor > on women playwrights spanning the whole of the twentieth century, each including lists of first productions and primary and secondary sources. Feminist Views on the English Stage allows Aston broader scope to offer her own observations on the larger shifts and developments in feminist discourses over roughly the last thirty years and to focus on the roles played by specific playwrights . It is precisely this per>pective - the informed insights gained through years of teaching, researching, and seeing feminist plays - that makes the book so valuable. Aston's strategy in the book is to "make sense of the 'present' within the context of the immediate, contemporary past" (9), suggesting that "[wIhat was contemporary for the I 970S is no longer contemporary in the 1990s, and what needs to be acknowledged is that structures offemillisl feeling are a matter of REVIEWS evolution; a response to differently lived lives and experiences of women in the 1990S that were not those of an earlier generation of 1970S feminist women" (1 0). She uses the 1970Sand 1980s as points of reference to illustrale the ways in which the treatment of themes and dramatic strategies changed in the 1990s, as well as to respond to commentators, like Natasha Walter, who see second-wave feminism as displaced by "new feminism."This framework allows Aston the scope to analyse the work of playwrights, like Caryl Churchill, whose writing careers bridge these decades, and to assess the contribution of a younger generation of playwrights, including Rebecca Pritchard and Judy Upton. She acknowledges the degree to which she has had to be "selective" in order to accommodate detailed analysis of the plays, foregrounding the fact that this is her view of the English, not British, stage. As a result, imponant figures like Liz Lochhead, Rona Munro, and Christina Reid are missing. The nine chapters that make up the book cover a variety of topics, ranging from the specific social issues addressed in the plays themselves to the shifting ways in which feminism came to be articulated and situated in relation to masculinist culture in the 1990s. She considers the tensions inherent in concepts such as "girl power" and the active rejection of gendered labels by younger writers. In the chapter on Sarah Kane, Aston addresses the critical controversies surrounding her plays, as well as the problematic classification of Kane as pan of a new generation of angry young men. At points...