The New Wave Of British Women Playwrights

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.

This Companion, first published in 2000, addresses the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century.

Breaking new ground in this century, this wide-ranging collection of essays is the first of its kind to address the work of contemporary international women playwrights. The book considers the work of established playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Marie Clements, Lara Foot-Newton, Maria Irene Fornes, Sarah Kane, Lisa Kron, Young Jean Lee, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Djanet Sears, Caridad Svich, and Judith Thompson, but it also foregrounds important plays by many emerging writers. Divided into three sections-Histories, Conflicts, and Genres-the book explores such topics as the feminist history play, solo performance, transcultural dramaturgies, the identity play, the gendered terrain of war, and eco-drama, and encompasses work from the United States, Canada, Latin America, Oceania, South Africa, Egypt, and the United Kingdom. With contributions from leading international scholars and an introductory overview of the concerns and challenges facing women playwrights in this new century, Contemporary Women Playwrights explores the diversity and power of women's playwriting since 1990, highlighting key voices and examining crucial critical and theoretical developments within the field.

From the late 1960s until the present day, a significant number of women playwrights have emerged in Scottish theatre who have made a pioneering contribution to dramatic innovation and experimentation. Despite the critical reassessment of some of these authors in the last twenty years, their invaluable achievement in playwriting, within and outside Scotland, still deserves more thorough investigations and fuller acknowledgement. This work explores what is still uncharted territory by examining a selection of representative texts by Ann Marie di Mambro, Marcella Evaristi, Sue Glover, Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead, Sharman Macdonald, and Joan Ure. The three macro-thematic areas of the book – the rewriting of the Shakespearean canon; the representation of female communities and minorities; and the conflicts between the self and society – find significant and paradigmatic expression in their dramas. All seven writers examined in this book have explored new theatrical methods, introduced aesthetic innovations and opened new perspectives to engage with the complexities of national, community and individual identities. This study will surely contribute to wider recognition of their achievement, so that their work can never again be described as “uncharted territory”.

The influence of the women’s movement has long been a scholarly priority in the study of British women’s drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but previous scholarship has largely clustered around two events: the New Woman in the 1890s and the suffrage campaign in the years before the First World War. Women’s Playwriting and the Women’s Movement, 1890–1918 is the first designated study of British women’s drama from a period of exceptional productivity and innovation for female playwrights. Both the British theatre and women’s position within British society underwent fundamental changes in this period, and this book shows how female dramatists carefully negotiated their position in the heated debates about women’s rights that occurred at this time, while staking out a place for themselves in an evolving theatrical landscape. Farkas also identifies the women’s movement as a key influence on the development of female-authored drama between 1890 and 1918, but argues that scholarly prioritizing of the "radicalism" of work associated with the New Woman and the suffrage campaign has had a distorting effect in the past. Ideal for scholars of British and Victorian theatre, Women’s Playwriting and the Women’s Movement, 1890–1918 offers a new perspective which emphasizes the complexity of women playwrights’ engagement with first-wave feminism and links it to the diversification of the British theatre in this period.

This collection of essays recovers the names and careers of nineteenth-century women playwrights.

Focusing on post-1956 British women playwrights, this book questions to what extent transformations in women's lives have impacted on theatre. Contributing to a range of discourses, including gender studies, cultural studies and theatre and performance studies, this timely volume is crucial to our understanding of women's drama in this period.