Replay: Classic Modern Drama Reimagined spans over a century of great theatre to explore how iconic plays have been adapted and versioned by later writers to reflect or dissect the contemporary zeitgeist. Starting with A Doll's House, Ibsen's much-reprised masterpiece of marital relations from 1879, Toby Zinman explores what made the play so controversial and shocking in its day before tracing how later reimaginings have reworked Ibsen's original. The spine of plays then includes such landmark works as Strindberg's Miss Julie, Oscar Wilde's comic The Importance of Being Earnest, Chekhov's Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, the Rattigan centenary revivals, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, ultimately arriving at Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Taking each modern play as the starting point, Zinman explores the diverse renderings and reworkings by subsequent playwrights and artists –including prominent directors and their controversial productions as well as acknowledging reworkings in film, opera and ballet.Through the course of this groundbreaking study we discover not only how theatrical styles have changed but how society's attitude towards politics, religion, money, gender, sexuality and race have radically altered over the course of the century. In turn Replay reveals how theatre can serve as both a reflection of our times and a provocation to them.

An alphabetical listing of plays that have been banned throughout history with a short synopsis and reason for banning as well as profiles of the playwrights and other resource material.

Irony and theatre share intimate kinships, not only regarding dramatic conflict, dialectic or wittiness, but also scenic structure and the verbal or situational ironies that typically mark theatrical speech and action. Yet irony today, in aesthetic, literary and philosophical contexts especially, is often regarded with skepticism - as ungraspable, or elusive to the point of confounding. Countering this tendency, William Storm advocates a wide-angle view of this master trope, exploring the ironic in major works by playwrights including Chekhov, Pirandello and Brecht, and in notable relation to well-known representative characters in drama from Ibsen's Halvard Solness to Stoppard's Septimus Hodge and Wasserstein's Heidi Holland. To the degree that irony is existential, its presence in the theatre relates directly to the circumstances and the expressiveness of the characters on stage. This study investigates how these key figures enact, embody, represent and personify the ironic in myriad situations in the modern and contemporary theatre.

Stokes offers studies of Wilde's place in the Romantic tradition, and of his relationships with such legendary figures of the fin de siecle as Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Jarry, and Arthur Symons. And always, as part of the process of historical inquiry, Stokes considers those who came after: humanitarian disciples who kept Wilde's memory sacred, performers in his plays, actors who impersonated the man himself.