Published since May 24, 2013

Journal of Contemporary Drama in English

ISSN: 2195-0164

Editor-in-chief: Anette Pankratz

Edited by: Ute Berns, Martin Middeke, Merle Tönnies, Clare Wallace

About this journal

Objective
The Journal of Contemporary Drama in English focuses on issues in contemporary Anglophone dramatic literature and theatre performance. It renegotiates the understanding of contemporary aesthetics of drama and theatre by treating dramatic texts of the last fifty years. The peer-reviewed journal publishes essays that engage in close readings of plays and also touch upon historical, political, formal, theoretical and methodological aspects of contemporary drama, theatre and performance. JCDE appears twice a year: volume one is a special issue based on the annual international conferences held by the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English, volume two invites individual essays on contemporary theatre and drama in English. The journal also contains a review section.

Topics

contemporary Anglophone dramatic literature
theatre performance

Article formats
Articles, Reviews

> Information on submission process

Your Benefits

Your benefits:

Wide range of aspects of contemporary drama and theatre
Theoretical and methodological contributions
Contemporary drama and theatre aesthetics in the context of other social phenomena
Rigorous peer-review

History

The Journal of Contemporary Drama in English (JCDE) was founded in 2013 and is run by the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English.

Other publications in the field:

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Supplementary Materials

Publication Ethics Statement

Topics

Volume 10 Issue 2

November 2022

Frontmatter

Publicly Available November 25, 2022

Frontmatter

Page range: I-IV

Download PDF

November 25, 2022

Introduction: Transnational Revision and Rewriting in Tanika Gupta’s Theatre

Christiane Schlote, Giovanna Buonanno

Page range: 261-265

November 25, 2022

The Country Wife, Southall Style: Restoration Comedy and the Multicultural Gaze

Sara Soncini

Page range: 266-282

Abstract

First performed at Watford Palace Theatre in 2004, Tanika Gupta’s version of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) relocates the Restoration classic to twenty-first-century London, reframing its libertine plot as a witty satire on sexual and gender mores in contemporary Britain. In this new setting, Wycherley’s comic masterpiece is revisited from a multicultural perspective, and his merciless exposure of social hypocrisies becomes infused with the adaptor’s keen awareness of diversity and its complexities. This article draws attention to Gupta’s play as a culturally significant intervention in the reception history of Restoration theatre culture. By opening up Wycherley’s comedy to the representation of Britain’s “new ethnicities,” I suggest, Gupta’s work has paved the way for the more inclusive, multiculturally conscious approach to the Restoration canon that is observable in the new spate of revivals and adaptations produced during the last decade or so.

Open Access November 25, 2022

“Through the Pen to Begin with”: Anticolonial Resistance in Tanika Gupta’s Adaptation of Great Expectations

Marlena Tronicke

Page range: 283-301

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Abstract

Tanika Gupta’s neo-Victorian, postcolonial rewriting of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (2011) examines how India and Britain’s colonial history continues to shape both countries until the present day. The play is set in and around Calcutta in the years following 1861. Gupta thus not only relocates Pip’s transformation from village boy to metropolitan businessman to nineteenth-century India but also to a particularly fragile moment in the history of the British Empire: a subcontinent grappling with the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, facing the early years of the British Raj. Gupta interrogates narrow understandings of “Victorian” as located within the British Isles, explicating the contrapuntal reading practice that Edward W. Said calls for when highlighting Victorian literature’s implicit endorsement of imperialist ideologies and politics. Examining the play’s engagement with imperial power structures, this article centres on those moments that hint at the destabilisation of, if not revolt against, British rule. Gupta juxtaposes canonised narratives of undisturbed imperial hegemony with a tale of incessant colonial resistance. In doing so, she challenges those historiographical as well as fictional (neo-)Victorian texts that silence the sustained efforts and influence of anticolonial movements and that frame the history of Empire in terms of continuity rather than rupture.

November 25, 2022

Indian Servitude(s) in Imperial London: Tanika Gupta’s The Empress

Christiane Schlote

Page range: 302-326

Abstract

Dramatic acts of retrieving marginalised stories and of rewriting imperial history from a transnational perspective have been essential for efforts at decolonising knowledge. In The Empress (2013), Tanika Gupta explores the neglected history of Indian communities and the nexus of imperial labour and mobility in late-Victorian London through interlacing the fictional story of the Bengali ayah Rani and the Indian lascar Hari; the true story of the relationship between Queen Victoria and her Indian munshi Hafiz Mohammed Abdul Karim; and the stories of Westminster’s first Indian MP, Dadabhai Naoroji, and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. By foregrounding the urban experiences of diverging Indian servant characters in the sense of a critical cosmopolitanism and by privileging a heterogeneous “history from below,” this article explores how The Empress presents a counterstory to notions of a Dickensian London “full of bonnets and white people” (Royal Shakespeare Company, “Emma Rice”) and a critical intervention in discourses relating to the ethical challenges inherent in the commemoration and teaching of the British Empire.

Open Access November 25, 2022

Transadaptation and Bollywoodisation in Tanika Gupta’s Hobson’s Choice and Wah! Wah! Girls

Jerri Daboo

Page range: 327-343

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Abstract

Tanika Gupta’s varied work as a playwright encompasses transadaptation in a range of forms. This article will focus on two of her plays, Hobson’s Choice (2003/2019) and Wah! Wah! Girls (2012), exploring the ways in which she depicts representations of South Asian communities in Britain in different ways. Hobson’s Choice reworks the original 1916 play to being set among the Bengali community working in the rag trade in Salford. The play focuses on the father of the family, Hari Hobson, who runs a clothing factory and lives with his three daughters. The 2019 reworking of the play changes the setting to a Ugandan Asian family in Manchester in 1987. Wah! Wah! Girls is set in East London, having been commissioned as part of the Cultural Olympiad. Focusing on a mujra -style dancing club and the different communities surrounding it, the play includes transadaptations of well-known dance routines from Bollywood films integrated into the action, playing on nostalgia and familiarity for South Asian communities, as well as offering a picture of contemporary multicultural London. Both plays, in different ways, use transadaptation of setting and form to examine what it means to be British and Asian in different contexts, and this article will analyse whether this is successful in creating a meaningful interrogation of the experience of British South Asians on stage.

November 25, 2022

Adapting British Asian Women’s Stories: Tanika Gupta’s Anita and Me

Giovanna Buonanno

Page range: 344-357

Abstract

Tanika Gupta’s engagement with the works of contemporary bicultural writers invigorates her longstanding project of “staging the intercultural” (Gupta and Sierz 38). This essay discusses the ways in which the author juxtaposes her voice with that of Meera Syal who, since the 1980 s, has helped to shape the burgeoning field of British Asian women’s writing, while also establishing a distinct British Asian presence in the media. Similar to Gupta’s own writing, Syal has addressed cultural hybridity in her work and exposed the faultlines within British society, thus bringing into the open a racialized sense of the nation that is embedded in the entanglement of its colonial and postcolonial history. This article discusses Gupta’s appropriation of Anita and Me (2015) as a significant contribution to consolidating an Asian British women’s writing tradition that through transmedial and intertextual strategies favours legacy and canon formation. By dramatizing Syal’s coming-of-age novel Anita and Me , originally published in 1996, Gupta expands this work beyond both its original narrative form and its context of publication. She infuses it with an afterlife that sheds new light on the novel, while strengthening its relevance for contemporary cross-cultural audiences.

November 25, 2022

The Politics of Experimental Drama: Unexpected Conformity and Weird Resistance in Alistair McDowall’s Pomona

David Barnett

Page range: 358-374

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between form, content, and politics. It challenges some significant positions by no lesser figures than Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller on the need for radical forms to function as a prerequisite for imagining alternatives to the prevailing sociopolitical order. The main focus for analysis is Alistair McDowall’s Pomona (2014), a much-produced and much-lauded play that certainly has an experimental dramaturgy, but one which serves more conservative political ends. The article goes on, however, to identify an instance of “the weird” in the play and argues that an element of content rather than an experimental form can call the world of the play into question.

November 25, 2022

Anja Hartl. Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama: Dialectical Theatre Today. London: Methuen, 2021, vii + 192 pp., £80.00 (hardback), £72.00 (EPUB/Mobi ebook), £72.00 (PDF ebook).

Harry Derbyshire

Page range: 375-378

November 25, 2022

Ian Ward. The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021, 221 pp., £80 (hardback), £75 (PDF ebook).

Sidia Fiorato

Page range: 379-383

November 25, 2022

Selina Busby. Applied Theatre: A Pedagogy of Utopia. London: Methuen Drama, 2022, xv + 247 pp., £72.00 (hardback), £22.49 (paperback), £57.60 (PDF ebook).

Tim Prentki

Page range: 384-387

November 25, 2022

Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan, ed. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics. London: Routledge, 2019, xx + 364 pp., £190.00 (hardback), £39.99 (paperback), £35.99 (ebook).

Julia Rössler

Page range: 388-391

November 25, 2022

Michael Billington. Affair of the Heart: British Theatre from 1992 to 2020. London: Methuen Drama, 2021, 303 pp., £25.00 (hardback), £22.50 (ebook).

Aleks Sierz

Page range: 392-396

Open Access November 25, 2022

Alan Read. The Dark Theatre: A Book About Loss. London: Routledge, 2020, viii + 342 pp., £120.00 (hardback), £34.99 (paperback), £29.74 (ebook).

Marlena Tronicke

Page range: 397-400

Download PDF

November 25, 2022

Carina E. I. Westling. Immersion and Participation in Punchdrunk’s Theatrical Worlds. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2020, vi + 200 pp., £65.00 (hardback), £21.99 (paperback), £19.79 (PDF ebook).

Gareth White

Page range: 401-404

Volume 10 (2022)

Volume 9 (2021)

Volume 8 (2020)

Volume 7 (2019)

Volume 6 (2018)

Volume 5 (2017)

Volume 4 (2016)

Volume 3 (2015)

Volume 2 (2014)

Volume 1 (2013)

Cite Score	0.5
Journal Citation Indicator	1.86
SCImago Journal Rank	0.116
Source Normalized Impact per Paper	1.032

Submit

Submission
Essay manuscripts should be sent to the General Editor:

Prof. Dr. Martin Middeke
Chair of English Literature
Faculty of Philology and History
University of Augsburg
Universitätsstraße 10
D-86159 Augsburg, Germany
Email: martin.middeke@philhist.uni-augsburg.de

Review copies and request should be sent to
Christina Wald, University of Konstanz
christina.wald@uni-konstanz.de

Your benefits of publishing with us

Optional open access publication
Accepted papers will be published online first as DOI-citable, forward-linked articles for quickest possible visibility for the scientific community
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Submission process

Submission of your paper
Peer review process
If accepted: you have the option to publish it open access
Publication online and in print

Please note

Manuscripts must be written in clear and concise English
Before submitting your article please have a look at our Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement and our Copyright Agreement
Once your article is accepted you have the option to publish it open access
Our Repository Policy allows you to distribute 30 PDF copies of your published article to colleagues (the PDF has to include the information that it is an author's copy). Please also feel free to distribute the link to the online abstract
If you have any general questions please visit our FAQ page for authors

We look forward to receiving your manuscript.

Editorial

Editor-in-Chief
Annette Pankratz, University of Bochum, Germany

Editors
Ute Berns, University of Hamburg, Germany
Martin Middeke, University of Augsburg, Germany
Merle Tönnies, University of Paderborn, Germany (Reviews)
Clare Wallace, University of Prague, Czech Republic

Advisory Board
Mireia Aragay, University of Barcelona
John Bull, University of Lincoln
Johan Callens, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Tobias Döring, LMU München
Jill S. Dolan, Princeton University
Nicholas Grene, Trinity College Dublin
Stephen L. Lacey, Glamorgan
Deirdre Osborne, University of London
Dan Rebellato, University of London
Bernhard Reitz, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Anthony Roche, University College Dublin
Annette J. Saddik, New York City College of Technology
Elizabeth Sakellaridou, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki
Aleks Sierz, Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance, London

(Deutsch)

Online ISSN: 2195-0164
Print ISSN: 2195-0156
Type: Journal
Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
First published: May 24, 2013
Publication Frequency: 2 Issues per Year
Audience: researchers in the field of drama and theatre studies, cultural and English studies