Published by De Gruyter

Contemporary Drama in English Studies

Edited by: Anette Pankratz

ISSN: 2194-9069

eISSN: 2194-9077

Overview
Volumes

CDE STUDIES (GENERAL EDITOR: ANETTE PANKRATZ)
The book series is dedicated to contemporary anglophone playwrights and the analysis of the historical, political and aesthetic contexts of their work, thus seeking to advance the theoretical and methodological discourse on theatre and drama today.

Book 2021

Love in Contemporary British Drama

Traditions and Transformations of a Cultural Emotion

Korbinian Stöckl

Volume 31 in this series

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Despite the recent turn to affects and emotions in the humanities and despite the unceasing popularity of romantic and erotic love as a motif in fictional works of all genres, the subject has received surprisingly little attention in academic studies of contemporary drama. Love in Contemporary British Drama reflects the appeal of love as a topic and driving force in dramatic works with in-depth analyses of eight pivotal plays from the past three decades.
Following an interdisciplinary and historical approach, the study collects and condenses theories of love from philosophy and sociology to derive persisting discourses and to examine their reoccurrence and transformation in contemporary plays. Special emphasis is put on narratives of love’s compensatory function and precariousness and on how modifications of these narratives epitomise the peculiarities of emotional life in the social and cultural context of the present.
Based on the assumption that drama is especially inclined to draw on shared narratives for representations of love, the book demonstrates that love is both a window to remnants of the past in the present and a proper subject matter for drama in times in which the suitability of the dramatic form has been questioned.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110714708
ISBN:: 9783110714708
ISBN:: 9783111111230
ISBN:: 9783110714760
ISBN:: 9783110714647
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2021

Beyond Documentary Realism

Aesthetic Transgressions in British Verbatim Theatre

Cyrielle Garson

Volume 30 in this series

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Verbatim theatre, a type of performance based on actual words spoken by ''real people'', has been at the heart of a remarkable and unexpected renaissance of the genre in Great Britain since the mid-nineties. The central aim of the book is to critically explore and account for the relationship between contemporary British verbatim theatre and realism whilst questioning the much-debated mediation of the real in theses theatre practices.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110715767
ISBN:: 9783110715767
ISBN:: 9783110696691
ISBN:: 9783110715866
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2021

Performing Immanence

Forced Entertainment

Jan Suk

Volume 29 in this series

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Performing Immanence: Forced Entertainment is a unique probe into the multi-faceted nature of the works of the British experimental theatre Forced Entertainment via the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
Jan Suk explores the transformation-potentiality of the territory between the actors and the spectators, namely via Forced Entertainment’s structural patterns, sympathy provoking aesthetics, audience integration and accentuated emphasis of the now. Besides writings of Tim Etchells, the company’s director, the foci of the analyses are devised as well as durational projects of Forced Entertainment. The examination includes a wider spectrum of state-of the-art live artists, e.g. Tehching Hsieh, Franko B or Goat Island, discussed within the contemporary performance discourse.
Performing Immanence: Forced Entertainment investigates how the immanent reading of Forced Entertainment’s performances brings the potentiality of creative transformative experience via the thought of Gilles Deleuze. The interconnections of Deleuze’s thought and the contemporary devised performance theatre results in the symbiotic relationship that proves that such readings are not mere academic exercises, but truly life-illuminating realizations.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110710991
ISBN:: 9783110710991
ISBN:: 9783110710953
ISBN:: 9783110711028
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2017

Of Precariousness

Vulnerabilities, Responsibilities, Communities in 21st-Century British Drama and Theatre

Mireia Aragay, Martin Middeke

Volume 28 in this series

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Drawing primarily on Judith Butler’s, Jacques Derrida’s, Emmanuel Levinas’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on precariousness/precarity, the Self and the Other, ethical responsibility/obligation, forgiveness, hos(ti)pitality and community, the essays in this volume examine the various ways in which contemporary British drama and theatre engage with ‘the precarious’. Crucially, what emerges from the discussion of a wide range of plays – including Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, Caryl Churchill’s Here We Go, Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies and In the Republic of Happiness, Tim Crouch’s The Author, Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties, David Greig’s The American Pilot and The Events, Dennis Kelly’s Love and Money, Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur, Robin Soans’s Talking to Terrorists, Simon Stephens’s Pornography, theTheatre Uncut project, debbie tucker green’s dirty butterfly and Laura Wade’s Posh – is the observation that contemporary (British) drama and theatre often realises its thematic and formal/structural potential to the full precisely by reflecting upon the category and the episteme of precariousness, and deliberately turning audience members into active participants in the process of negotiating ethical agency.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110548716
ISBN:: 9783110548716
ISBN:: 9783110546743
ISBN:: 9783110546774
ISBN:: 9783110651591
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature, general
Subject:: 21st Century
Subject:: Literary Genres and Media
Subject:: Drama, Theater
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2017

Theatre on Terror

Subject Positions in British Drama

Ariane de Waal

Volume 27 in this series

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In a moment of intense uncertainty surrounding the means, ends, and limits of (countering) terrorism, this study approaches the recent theatres of war through theatrical stagings of terror. Theatre on Terror: Subject Positions in British Drama charts the terrain of contemporary subjectivities both ‘at home’ and ‘on the front line’. Beyond examining the construction and contestation of subject positions in domestic and (sub)urban settings, the book follows border-crossing figures to the shifting battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. What emerges through the analysis of twenty-one plays is not a dichotomy but a dialectics of ‘home’ and ‘front’, where fluid, uncontainable subjects are constantly pushing the contours of conflict. Revising the critical consensus that post-9/11 drama primarily engages with ‘the real’, Ariane de Waal argues that these plays navigate the complexities of the discourse – rather than the historical or social realities – of war and terrorism. British ‘theatre on terror’ negotiates, inflects, and participates in the discursive circulation of stories, idioms, controversies, testimonies, and pieces of (mis)information in the face of global insecurities.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110517088
ISBN:: 9783110517088
ISBN:: 9783110635249
ISBN:: 9783110515435
ISBN:: 9783110515121
Subject:: History
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: Cultural History
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature, general
Subject:: 21st Century
Subject:: Literary Genres and Media
Subject:: Drama, Theater
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2015

Rethinking Character in Contemporary British Theatre

Aesthetics, Politics, Subjectivity

Cristina Delgado-García

Volume 26 in this series

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The category of theatrical character has been swiftly dismissed in the academic reception of no-longer-dramatic texts and performances. However, claims on the dissolution of character narrowly demarcate what a subject is and how it may appear. This volume unmoors theatre scholarship from the regulatory ideals of liberal humanism, stretching the notion of character to encompass and illuminate otherwise unaccounted-for subjects, aesthetic strategies and political gestures in recent theatre works. To this aim, contemporary philosophical theories of subjectivation, European theatre studies, and experimental, script-led work produced in Britain since the late 1990s are mobilised as discussants on the question of subjectivity. Four contemporary playtexts and their performances are examined in depth: Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue and Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND. Through these case studies, Delgado-García demonstrates alternative ways of engaging theoretically with character, and elucidating a range of subjective figures beyond identity and individuality. Alongside these analyses, the book traces a large body of work that has experimented with speech attribution since the early twentieth-century. This is a timely contribution to contemporary theatre scholarship, which demonstrates that character remains a malleable and politically-salient notion in which understandings of subjectivity are still being negotiated.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110333916
ISBN:: 9783110403909
ISBN:: 9783110333916
ISBN:: 9783110411225
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: 21st Century
Subject:: Literary Genres and Media
Subject:: Drama, Theater
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2014

Liveness on Stage

Intermedial Challenges in Contemporary British Theatre and Performance

Claudia Georgi

Volume 25 in this series

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Theatre is traditionally considered a live medium but its ‘liveness’ can no longer simply be taken for granted in view of the increasing mediatisation of the stage.

Drawing on theories of intermediality, Liveness on Stage explores how performances that incorporate film or video self-reflexively stage and challenge their own liveness by contrasting or approximating live and mediatised action. To illustrate this, the monograph investigates key aspects such as ‘ephemerality’, ‘co-presence’, ‘unpredictability’, ‘interaction’ and ‘realistic representation’ and highlights their significance for re-evaluating received notions of liveness. The analysis is based on productions by Gob Squad, Forkbeard Fantasy, Station House Opera, Proto-type Theater, Tim Etchells and Mary Oliver. In their playful approaches these practitioners predominantly present such media combination as a means of cross-fertilisation rather than as an antagonism between liveness and mediatisation.

Combining an original theoretical approach with an in-depth analysis of the selected productions, this study will appeal to scholars and practitioners of theatre and performance as well as to those researching intermedial phenomena.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110346534
ISBN:: 978-3-11-034590-2
ISBN:: 978-3-11-034653-4
ISBN:: 9783110395044
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: 20th Century
Subject:: 21st Century
Subject:: Literary Genres and Media
Subject:: Drama, Theater
Subject:: Topics in Literary Studies
Subject:: Mediality, Intermediality
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2013

Martin Crimp's Theatre

Collapse as Resistance to Late Capitalist Society

Clara Escoda Agusti

Volume 24 in this series

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This book reads Martin Crimp’s The Treatment (1993), Attempts on her Life (1997), The Country (2000), Face to the Wall (2002), Cruel and Tender (2004) and his adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull (2006) in the context of contemporary, late capitalist societies of control or of ‘spectacle’, and explores how female collapse in particular works as a form of denunciation of the violence of globalized, technological neo-liberalism.

The book contends that Crimp is a post-Holocaust writer, whose dramaturgy is pervaded by the ethical and aesthetic debates that the Holocaust has generated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its main claim is that, by interpellating spectators through the defamiliarized language of collapse and testimony, Crimp invites spectators to contribute to detecting the seeds of ‘barbarism’ as they may detect them in their context, thus warning them about the introduction of violence in supposedly civilized relationships and thereby also contributing to overcoming the contemporary ethical impasse.

The book finally argues that female characters who pass on their testimony are shown to the audience in the ‘process of becoming’ ethical bodies – namely, they are emerge as ethical out of the perceived necessity to integrate both the Other as essential parts of their beings, thus recovering an innate, Baumian sense of responsibility towards the Other.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110309959
ISBN:: 978-3-11-030907-2
ISBN:: 978-3-11-030995-9
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Holocaust
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: 20th Century
Subject:: 21st Century
Subject:: Literary Genres and Media
Subject:: Drama, Theater
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2013

Sublime Drama

British Theatre of the 1990s

Elzbieta Iwona Baraniecka

Volume 23 in this series

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British drama of the 1990s is most commonly associated with the term in-yer-face theatre, which was coined by Aleks Sierz to describe the shocking and provocative work of emerging playwrights such as Mark Ravenhill or Sarah Kane. Taking a cue from Sierz’s own suggestion that what still remains to be researched more thoroughly in this field is the particular relationship between the stage and the audience, this monograph undertakes precisely that task.

Rather than use the term offered by Sierz, however, the study proposes a different concept to account for the dynamics of communication within the particular theatre of the 1990s, namely the aesthetic category of the sublime. Coupled with elements of Reader Response Theory, the sublime proves to be a more fruitful term, as it provides more precise tools for the analysis of the audience’s aesthetic response than does in-yer-face theatre.

With the help of four representative plays by four key playwrights of that time, Closer by Patrick Marber, Normal by Anthony Neilson, Faust is Dead by Mark Ravenhill and 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, the book details the consecutive stages in the process of the plays’ reception that the members of the audience go through while forming their aesthetic response to them. Looking through the prism of the sublime, the study not only offers a detailed analysis of each play but also suggests an entirely new approach to British drama of the 1990s.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110309935
ISBN:: 978-3-11-030115-1
ISBN:: 978-3-11-030993-5
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: 20th Century
Subject:: Literary Genres and Media
Subject:: Drama, Theater
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2023

The New Wave of British Women Playwrights

2008 – 2021

Elisabeth Angel-Perez, Aloysia Rousseau

Volume 33 in this series

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It is a fact that today’s British stages resound with powerfully innovative voices and that, very often, these voices have been those of young women playwrights. This collection of essays gives visibility and pride of place to these fascinating voices by exploring the vitality, inventiveness and particularly strong relevance of these poetics. These women playwrights sometimes invent radically new forms and sometimes experiment with conventional ones in fresh and unexpected ways, as for example when they re-energize naturalism and provide it with new missions.

The plays that are addressed are all concerned with the necessity to grasp the complexity of the contemporary world and to further investigate what it means to be human. Intimate or epic, and sometimes both at once, visionary or closer to everyday life, these plays approach the contemporary world through a multitude of prisms – historical, scientific, political and poetic – and open different and visionary perspectives.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110796322
ISBN:: 9783110796322
ISBN:: 9783110796377
ISBN:: 9783110796223
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature, general
Subject:: Literary Genres and Media
Subject:: Drama, Theater
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2022

Twenty-First Century Anxieties

Dys/Utopian Spaces and Contexts in Contemporary British Theatre

Merle Tönnies, Eckart Voigts

Volume 32 in this series

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The volume uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine how 21st-century British theatre increasingly intercuts dystopian and utopian elements to create innovative strategies for addressing current social and political concerns. In the case studies, a key role is given to the ways in which the selected plays use real and fictional spaces on stage and thereby manage to construct interactional spaces which the spectators are invited to share.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110758252
ISBN:: 9783110758252
ISBN:: 9783110758368
ISBN:: 9783110758191
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Anglo-American Literature
Subject:: 21st Century
Subject:: Literary Genres and Media
Subject:: Drama, Theater
Publisher:: De Gruyter