Rebellato - Modern British playwriting: 2000-2009: voices, documents, new interpretations

MODERN BRITISH PLAYWRITING: 2000 2009

VOICES, DOCUMENTS, NEW INTERPRETATIONS

Dan Rebellato is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and head of the Drama and Theatre department at Royal Holloway University of London, UK. He is the author of Theatre & Globalization (2009) and 1956 and All That (1999), The Suspect Culture Book (2013) and co-editor with Maria Delgado of Contemporary European Theatre Directors (2010). He is on the editorial board of Contemporary Theatre Review and is a contributing editor for New Theatre Quarterly. He is also a playwright, and his work (plays and translations/adaptations) has been performed on stage and radio in Britain, Europe and America.

In the same series from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama:

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 Edgar, Howard Brenton and David Hare

MODERN BRITISH PLAYWRITING: THE 1980s

by Jane Milling

Includes detailed studies of works by Howard Barker, David Lane, Sarah Daniels and Timberlake Wertenbaker

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: 2000 2009

VOICES, DOCUMENTS, NEW INTERPRETATIONS

Edited by Dan Rebellato

Series Editors: Richard Boon and Philip Roberts

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

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Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2013

Dan Rebellato, Jacqueline Bolton, Michael Pearce, Nadine Holdsworth, Lynette Goddard, Andrew Haydon, 2013

All extracts in chapter 3 Documents are copyright the respective authors.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Dan Rebellato, Jacqueline Bolton, Michael Pearce, Nadine Holdsworth and Lynette Goddard have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work.

The moral right of Andrew Haydon to be identified as the author of chapter 1 has been asserted.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN: 978-1-4081-7787-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

CONTENTS

by series editors Richard Boon and Philip Roberts

This book is one of a series of six volumes which seek to characterize 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 2000s 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 recognize 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 organization 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 60 years; and we offer new, original and often surprising perspectives on both established and developing dramatists.

Richard Boon and Philip Roberts

Series Editors

September

Richard Boon is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Hull, UK.

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

Thanks are due to all the contributors to this book for their rigour and timeliness and to Tim Crouch, David Greig, Simon Stephens and Roy Williams who so generously gave me access to unpublished works. Particular thanks go to Jacqueline Bolton for putting together Simon Stephenss unpublished material and to Andrew Haydon for stepping in to provide a punchy survey of the decade. I am very grateful to Richard Boon and Philip Roberts for the invitation to contribute to this series and to Mark Dudgeon for guiding it on its way thanks, in particular, for not insisting that this volume be called The Noughties. My colleagues and students at Royal Holloway have informed my thinking about the theatre of this period and I find it almost impossible to separate my thought from theirs.

For me the best thing about this fascinating decade was meeting Lilla, who has been there through this books evolution, and to whom I gratefully dedicate it.