The New Wave of British Women Playwrights: 2008 – 2021

Description

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. Acknowledgements Table of Contents Introduction: “Are We Not Over That?” I Ecodramaturgies and Global Crisis Population Concerns, Reproductive Justice, and Gendered Perspectives in Florence Keith-Roach’s Eggs (2015), Vivienne Franzmann’s Bodies (2017) and Maud Dromgoole’s 3 Billion Seconds (2018) Sexual and Gender-Based Violence on Female Bodies: Ecofeminism in Lucy Kirkwood’s Maryland (2021) and Ellie Kendrick’s and RashDash’s Hole (2018) Lucy Prebble’s Enron (2009): The Financial Crisis as Theatrical Spectacle in the Era of Liquid Modernity How To Survive a Crisis: Forming a New Self in Zinnie Harris’s How to Hold Your Breath (2015) II The Politics of Intimacy Ella Hickson’s ANNA (2019) and Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes (2017): Staging the Female Body Electric debbie tucker green’s ‘troumatic’ dramaturgy “Who Gets to Speak and How?”: Staging Autofiction in Debris Stevenson’s Poet in da Corner (2018) and Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018) III Experimenting with Forms “I Want the World to Change Shape”: Form and Politics in Ella Hickson’s The Writer (2018) Challenging Realism: The Confines of Domesticity in Morna Pearson’s Plays Alice Birch – A Poet in the Theatre Alecky Blythe and “Headphone Verbatim”: a Study of The Girlfriend Experience (2008) IV In Conversation with… Feeling a Responsibility to Art: An Interview with Ella Hickson The Gordian Knots of Theatre: An Interview with Lucy Kirkwood by Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Aloysia Rousseau Notes on Contributors Index of playwrights, theatre practitioners and key concepts