Barker Howard - Modern British playwriting: voices, documents, new interpretations. The 1980s

Jane Milling is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter. She is co-author, with Deirdre Heddon, of Devising Performance: A Critical History (Palgrave, 2005) and series editor, with Graham Ley, of Theatre and Performance Practices (Palgrave). Her articles on Restoration and eighteenth-century performers and women writers have been published in Theatre Survey, Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre and Theatre Notebook.

Dr Milling has also worked on a series of Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded projects under the Connected Communities programme, including Participatory Arts for Well-Being: Past and Present Practices and Understanding Everyday Participation.

MODERN BRITISH PLAYWRITING: THE 1950s
by David Pattie
Includes detailed studies of works by T. S. Eliot, Terence Rattigan, John Osborne and Arnold Wesker

MODERN BRITISH PLAYWRITING: THE 1960s
by Steve Nicholson
Includes detailed studies of works by John Arden, Edward Bond, Harold Pinter and Alan Ayckbourn

MODERN BRITISH PLAYWRITING: THE 1970s
by Chris Megson
Includes detailed studies of works by Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Howard Brenton and David Edgar

MODERN BRITISH PLAYWRITING: THE 1990s
by Aleks Sierz
Includes detailed studies of works by Philip Ridley, Sarah Kane, Anthony Neilson and Mark Ravenhill

MODERN BRITISH PLAYWRITING: 20002009
by Dan Rebellato
Includes detailed studies of works by David Greig, Simon Stephens, debbie tucker green, Tim Crouch and Roy Williams

Methuen Drama

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First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Methuen Drama

Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Methuen Drama
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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Copyright 2012 by Jane Milling

General Preface copyright 2012 Richard Boon and Philip Roberts
Howard Barker copyright 2012 Sarah Goldingay
Jim Cartwright copyright 2012 David Lane
Timberlake Wertenbaker copyright 2012 Sara Freeman

The rights of the author and contributors to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988

eISBN: 978 1 4081 5710 7

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This book is one of a series of six volumes which seek to characterise the nature of modern British playwriting from the 1950s to the end of the first decade of this new century. The work of these six decades is comparable in its range, experimentation and achievement only to the drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. The series chronicles its flowering and development.

Each volume addresses the work of four representative dramatists (five in the 20002009 volume) by focusing on key works and by placing that work in a detailed contextual account of the theatrical, social, political and cultural climate of the era.

The series revisits each decade from the perspective of the twenty-first century. We recognise that there is an inevitable danger of imposing a spurious neatness on its subject. So while each book focuses squarely on the particular decade and its representative authors, we have been careful to ensure that some account is given of relevant material from earlier years and, where relevant, of subsequent developments. And while the intentions and organisation of each volume are essentially the same, we have also allowed for flexibility, the better to allow both for the particular demands of the subject and the particular approach of our author/editors.

It is also the case, of course, that differences of historical perspective across the series influence the nature of the books. For student readers, the difference at its most extreme is between a present they daily inhabit and feel they know intimately and a decade (the 1950s) in which their parents or even grandparents might have been born; between a time of seemingly unlimited consumer choice and one which began with post-war food rationing still in place. Further, a playwright who began work in the late 1960s (David Hare, say) has a far bigger body of work and associated scholarship than one whose emergence has come within the last decade or so (debbie tucker green, for example). A glance at the Bibliographies for the earliest and latest volumes quickly reveals huge differences in the range of secondary material available to our authors and to our readers. This inevitably means that the later volumes allow a greater space to their contributing essayists for original research and scholarship, but we have also actively encouraged revisionist perspectives new looks on the older guard in earlier books.

So while each book can and does stand alone, the series as a whole offers as coherent and comprehensive a view of the whole era as possible.

Throughout, we have had in mind two chief objectives. We have made accessible information and ideas that will enable todays students of theatre to acquaint themselves with the nature of the world inhabited by the playwrights of the last sixty years; and we offer new, original and often surprising perspectives on both established and developing dramatists.

Richard Boon and Philip Roberts
Series Editors
September 2011

Richard Boon is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Hull

Philip Roberts is Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds

I would like to thank series editors Richard Boon and Philip Roberts for their unflagging wit and wise advice. The guest contributors Sara Freeman, Sarah Goldingay and David Lane have been a source of great insight and scholarship, and Cathy Turner and Graham Ley generously offered ideas, critique and their well-stocked libraries. I would like to thank Mark Dudgeon for his patient care, and the staff at Methuen Drama. And grateful thanks should go to Howard Barker and to Sarah Daniels for their generous gift of time and creative words, and to Jim Cartwright, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Mel Kenyon and A.J. Associates.

• UK population increased from 56.4 million in 1981 to 57.4 million in 1991; today it stands at around 60 million.
• There were 350,000 marriages in 1981, only 306,800 in 1991. The number of cohabiting couples doubled from 13 per cent in 1986 to 25 per cent in 1998.
• In 1987, in the vast majority of households the cleaning (72 per cent), washing and ironing (88 per cent), and cooking (77 per cent) were done by women. Yet the divorce rate has remained fairly steady since the early 1980s at around 145,000 divorces per year.