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Cover13; -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of Illustrations -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction -- Part I Contexts -- 1 Domestic and Imperial Politics in Britain and Ireland: 13;The Testimony of Irish Theatre -- 2 Reinventing England -- 3 Ibsen in the English Theatre in the Fin de Si232;cle -- 4 New Woman Drama -- Part II Mapping New Ground, 19008211;1939 -- 5 Shaw among the Artists -- 6 Granville Barker and the Court Dramatists -- 7 Gregory, Yeats and Ireland's Abbey Theatre -- 8 Suffrage Theatre: Community Activism and Political Commitment -- 9 Unlocking Synge Today -- 10 Sean O'Casey's Powerful Fireworks -- 11 Auden and Eliot: Theatres of the Thirties -- Part III England, Class and Empire, 19398211;1990 -- 12 Empire and Class in the Theatre of John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy -- 13 When Was the Golden Age? Narratives of Loss and Decline: John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Rodney Ackland -- 14 A Commercial Success: Women Playwrights in the 1950s -- 15 Home Thoughts from Abroad: Mustapha Matura -- 16 The Remains of the British Empire: The Plays of Winsome Pinnock -- Part IV Comedy -- 17 Wilde's Comedies -- 18 Always Acting: No235;l Coward and the Performing Self -- 19 Beckett's Divine Comedy -- 20 Form and Ethics in the Comedies of Brendan Behan -- 21 Joe Orton: Anger, Artifice and Absurdity -- 22 Alan Ayckbourn: Experiments in Comedy -- 23 'They Both Add up to Me': The Logic of Tom Stoppard's Dialogic Comedy -- 24 Stewart Parker's Comedy of Terrors -- Part V War and Terror -- 25 A Wounded Stage: Drama and World War I -- 26 Staging 'the Holocaust' in England -- 27 Troubling Perspectives: Northern Ireland, the 'Troubles' and Drama -- 28 On War: Charles Wood's Military Conscience -- 29 Torture in the Plays of Harold Pinter -- 30 Sarah Kane: From Terror to Trauma -- Part VI Theatre since 1968 -- 31 Theatre since 1968 -- 32 Lesbian and Gay Theatre: All Queer on the West End Front -- 33 Edward Bond: Maker of Myths -- 34 John McGrath and Popular Political Theatre -- 35 David Hare and Political Playwriting: Between the Third Way and the Permanent Way -- 36 Left in Front: David Edgar's Political Theatre -- 37 Liz Lochhead: Writer and Re-Writer -- 38 'Spirits that Have Become Mean and Broken': Tom Murphy and the 'Famine' of Modern Ireland -- 39 Caryl Churchill: Feeling Global -- 40 Howard Barker and the Theatre of Catastrophe -- 41 Reading History in the Plays of Brian Friel -- 42 Marina Carr: Violence and Destruction -- 43 Scrubbing up Nice? Tony Harrison's Stagings of the Past -- 44 The Question of Multiculturalism: The Plays of Roy Williams -- 45 Ed Thomas: Jazz Pictures in the Gaps of Language -- 46 Theatre and Technology -- Index. This Companion provides a set of provocative agendas for investigating modern drama. It offers the most comprehensive challenge to existing constructions of the canon and examines in detail the dialogue between developments in Britain and Ireland. Contributors investigate radical postcolonial readings, offer revisionist feminist critiques, and reflect on why certain playwrights have been written in and others written out. Why have certain institutions dominated the constructions of dramatic canons? What role have female playwrights adopted in challenging stage conventions and modes of production? These are among the questions addressed by the "Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama". The volume analyses a wide range of plays and performance traditions, and explores the political, cultural, economic and institutional frameworks that readers require in order to get to grips with them. The Companion plots continuities and discontinuities, innovations, and resistances to the new. Its authoritative contributions highlight different treatments of realist conventions, investigate anti-realist experiments, and examine representations of war, terrorism, comedy, trauma and sexuality by playwrights from Shaw and Wilde to the present. Contributors also discuss the contending forces that have influenced the construction of the modern dramatic canon, engaging with contemporary discourses that challenge the dominance of London as well as of white English males and realism
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