New Readings in British Drama

Postcolonial criticism of the British theatre focuses on the theatres that appeared in the immediate post–Second World War period. It offers the critiques of theatrical works on or from the ex-colonies such as India and the Caribbean as well as countries such as Canada, America and England. Postcolonial criticism in theatre, therefore, explores the colonial past and its relation to the current White, Black and mixed communities through dramatic portrayals of individuals and their subjective experiences. However, a group of new Black playwrights such as Roy Williams, Jackie Kay, Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Winsome Pinnock and Bola Agbaje have brought a new sensibility to the British stage with their plays on contemporary issues of the Black diaspora in the United Kingdom. These plays go beyond the confines of postcolonial tradition and offer us a unique window into the lives and experiences of Black people in multi-ethnic and multicultural urban centres of British society in the new millennium.

Posthumanism, which was conceptualized around the 1990s, puts forward that an anthropocentric future and its social, political and moral circumstances are longer sustainable and sensible in a technologically and scientifically forward-looking world. It, thus, proposes that it is possible and reasonable for humans to exceed their corporeal and mental boundaries physiologically, politically and philosophically. The progressive mentality of the theory has offered a new critical realm for theatre writers and critics to discover the unexplored aspects of posthuman possibilities and related philosophical disputes in theatre. Plays such as Mark Ravenhill’s Faust Is Dead (1997), Sarah Kane’s Crave (1998), Katie Mitchell’s The Waves (2006), Lucy Prebble’s The Sugar Syndrome (2003) and Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2007) displayed a posthumanist stance in contemporary theatre.

All these post–Second World War theories provided a fertile ground for the critical analyses of dramatic, postdramatic and avant-garde plays written and produced by contemporary British playwrights from new and diverse perspectives. In this respect, each chapter of the book aims to answer the following:

• how the theories of the postwar period are essential to our understanding of contemporary drama and theatrical performances;
• what critical genealogies of the theory are relevant to theatre and its criticism today;
• in what ways these theories offer new insights into contemporary drama, dramaturgy and theatre performances today;
• in what ways key literary theories and discourses subvert previous readings of British drama.

Our contributors recognize that the question for theatre writers and critics today lies precisely in how to pinpoint, conceptualize and examine what is to be qualified/disqualified, essential/non-essential, potential/non-potential and meaningful/empty in contemporary theatre, the productions and scripts of which mostly emerged as a reaction to the notable literary theories of the twentieth century. We have attempted to answer the posed questions by examining the works of Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, Roy Williams, Mark Ravenhill, Thomas Eccleshare, Anders Lutsgarten and Jackie Kay from the perspectives of the critical theories. Accordingly, as the scholars working in the field of English Literature and Drama Studies in Turkey, we would like to stress the criticality of literary theories in our valuation and understanding of dramatic works and express our keen interest in drama and theatre criticism, which, we hope, will generate further interest in the field.

The contributions to this study have taken up different perspectives into post–-Second World War theories and offer new critical insights into a select collection of British plays as summarized below.

In the second chapter, Gül Kurtuluş writes on Caryl Churchill’s Theatre and reassesses her place in the contemporary theatrical world through her play Cloud Nine, which marks a significant point in the epoch of the postmodern theatre. The author tries to reflect how Churchill’s plays are very much compatible with the new theatre forms such as postmodern and contemporary experimental alternatives in the 1970s. The chapter argues that Cloud Nine offers a link between postmodernist theory, specifically post-Brechtian theatre, and current theoretical discussions.

In the third chapter, Mesut Günenç examines Phaedra’s Love, which reflects the tragic side of postdramatic theatre and features a more rapeful and disordered structure than theatrical form. The study analyses one of the most distinctive contemporary British playwrights, Sarah Kane, by drawing on the philosophy of Hans Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic theatre and his theory of postdramatic tragedy.

In the fourth chapter, Enes Kavak and Gökçe Akarik contribute the volume with a study on Roy Williams’ The No Boys Cricket Club, which looks into contemporary Black British theatre with its portrayal of nostalgia and unique Black characters who go through personal crises. The play presents an imaginative quest instigated by nostalgia and existential anxieties of two female Black characters in East London in which the past is envisioned as a liminal space for reclamation and transformation of self away from personal disillusionments and intra-family rifts. The chapter thus examines the Black characters’ search for meaning and coherence in the contemporary multicultural society and the theatrical strategies of Black theatre as an offshoot of diaspora literature in the new century.