Of the many dynamic, young playwrights to be associated with the "In-Yer-Face" burst of creative talent on the British stage in the mid-1990s, Joe Penhall has challenged Britain's status quo the most. Penhall believes his plays should constantly provoke and enrage not only the institutions he targets, but also his audience. This critical book discusses the argumentative nature of Penhall's plays, while also placing them within the context of contemporary British society and the modern dramatic tradition. His eight plays are discussed in detail, and particular attention is paid to male identity, the nature of grief, the variety of females, domestic drama, and the role of autobiography in his work.

An expertly annotated edition of Joe Penhall's compelling drama: a dark, exhilarating tale of race, madness and power in the midst of a struggling National Health Service.

This book considers the representation of madness in contemporary British theatre, examining the rich relationship between performance and mental health, and questioning how theatre can potentially challenge dominant understandings of mental health. Carefully, it suggests what it means to represent madness in theatre, and the avenues through which such representations can become radical, whereby theatre can act as a site of resistance. Engaging with the heterogeneity of madness, each chapter covers different attributes and logics, including: the constitution and institutional structures of the contemporary asylum; the cultural idioms behind hallucination; the means by which suicide is apprehended and approached; how testimony of the mad person is interpreted and encountered. As a study that interrogates a wide range of British theatre across the past 30 years, and includes a theoretical interrogation of the politics of madness, this is a crucial work for any student or researcher, across disciplines, considering the politics of madness and its relationship to performance.

This study traces key developments in theatre’s engagement with mental health since the 1970s. It introduces and applies the concept of the ‘mental health play’ as accurate and timely in addressing the way mental distress and mental illness have been brought to the stage. The study argues that the theatre is a central calibrator for reflecting developments and tensions in, as well as attitudes towards, mental health care, and thus opens up a domain that still has stereotypes and myths attached to it. Theatre’s representations of mental distress inform and shape cultural production and vice versa. Mental health plays are central in encouraging and fostering conversations about mental health, and they thus intervene in ongoing debates. Due to its interdisciplinary approach, this study contributes to and extends existing research in multiple fields, including theatre and science, performance studies, and the medical humanities.

This book revisits In-Yer-Face theatre, an explosive, energetic theatrical movement from the 1990s that introduced the world to playwrights Sarah Kane, Martin McDonagh, Mark Ravenhill, Jez Butterworth, and many others. Split into three sections the book re-examines the era, considers the movement’s influence on international theatre, and considers its lasting effects on contemporary British theatre. The first section offers new readings on works from that time period (Antony Neilson and Mark Ravenhill) as well as challenges myths created by the Royal Court Theatre about the its involvement with In-Yer-Face theatre. The second section discusses the influence of In-Yer-Face on Portuguese, Russian and Australian theater, while the final section discusses the legacy of In-Yer-Face writers as well as their influences on more recent playwrights, including chapters on Philip Ridley, Sarah Kane, Joe Penhall, Martin Crimp, Dennis Kelly, and Verbatim Drama.

This is the first book to examine how the concept and disagreements around post-truth have been explored in the world of theater and performance. It covers a wide spectrum of manifestations and expressions-from the plays of Caryl Churchill, Anne Washburn, and David Henry Hwang, to the inherent theatricality of press conferences, FBI interviews and protests that embrace the confusion created by post-truth rhetoric to muddy issues and deflect blame, to theatrical performance, where the nature of truth is challenged through staged visuals which run counter to what the audience hears, provoking a debate about where the truth actually lies. With contributions by scholars from around the world, Theater in a Post-Truth World considers a wide array of examples from American and British drama and politics, Australian theater, and the work of performance artist Marina Abramovic. Together these provide a glimpse into how the theater in its many forms provides a venue to raise awareness and encourage critical thinking about the contemporary ubiquity of post-truth.

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.