Volume 8, Issue 2

Employing an interdisciplinary sociopolitical framework, I examine Philip Osment’s play This Island’s Mine (1988) and demonstrate how it interrogates and repudiates Margaret Thatcher’s neoconservative authoritarian populism. Specifically, I argue that Osment’s play constitutes not only a damning indictment of Thatcherism, but also an enduring work that speaks directly to our present sociopolitical conjuncture, which has witnessed varied forms of reactionary populism sweep nations throughout the international community.

This article explores Alan Bennett’s Single Spies (1988), an espionage double bill comprising “An Englishman Abroad” and “A Question of Attribution,” proposing that the personalizing of social, political, and historical themes, as well as the astute documentation of a decaying Englishness and its class system in both plays, are representative of the work of a playwright whose output deserves serious critical attention. The study focuses on how Bennett historicizes the actions of his infamous protagonists (Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt) while challenging assumptions regarding patriotism. Single Spies is a Cambridge Five franchise, demonstrating the playwright’s characteristic wit, irony, and reflection on personal and national identity, illusion, and sacrifice. The one-act plays each deal with a key figure in the notorious Cambridge spy ring, enhancing the dramatic effect through the use of onstage theatrical and visual allusions. In the first play, references to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c 1599), together with English music, highlight Burgess’s duality and the bitter reality of his post-defection life in Russia, while the second play is notable for its use of two paintings ( Titian and a Venetian Senator and Allegory of Prudence ) as key images and conceits suggesting the gradual uncovering of the Cambridge Five. The paper therefore suggests that Bennett’s ability to lift the veil of personal and institutional secrecy, while airing his own ambivalence, confirms him as a skillful, if academically undervalued, commentator on Englishness.

David Edgar’s The Shape of the Table (1990) is a near-contemporaneous dramatization of the process of regime concession and opposition conquest of power that characterised the negotiated transitions in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. It is interesting in and of itself as an example of how one of the UK’s most notable socialist playwrights saw the varying elements of accommodation and confrontation in roundtable dialogues around 1989. However, it has further interest because in adopting an agent-centred, voluntaristic, and bargained conception of transition, Edgar reflected and anticipated the initial scholarly response to these processes. Similarly, Edgar anticipated problems of democratic disillusionment, economic liberalisation, and ethnonationalism as post-Communist Eastern Europe undertook the unprecedentedly complicated triple-track transition in economy and society as well as politics.

While a most original and creative playwright in contemporary Ireland, Marina Carr is still unmistakably influenced by her male predecessors. This article will argue that her most renowned work By the Bog of Cats . . . (1998) is a bold rewriting of W. B. Yeats’s Purgatory (1938). Like Yeats’s play, By the Bog of Cats . . . focuses on abandonment, betrayal, and murder as its main sources of trauma. While Carr’s play is a direct descendant from Purgatory in terms of its theme, plot, and symbolism, Carr rewrites Yeats’s pathetic, shiftless Old Man into a daring, strong, and responsible woman who may be embittered by her domestic trauma, but instead of escaping, she eventually faces up to her own guilt and crime. Hester is not a flat, helpless victim but a complex, well-rounded woman full of agency, passion, and honesty as well as vices. This way, Carr rewrites both the stereotypical stage image of Irish women and the unredeemable Old Man.

In Dinner with Friends (1999), which received the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2000, Donald Margulies stages two couples – one of them impacted by the other’s divorce – and he uses food to evaluate the characters’ response to a marital breakup. Sociologically, food and eating rituals help characterize communities and identities, and in Dinner with Friends , the characters’ culinary choices become revelatory features of their bourgeois community. In the midst of a friendship crisis, Margulies uses culinary talks to examine East Coast intelligentsia. Beyond their specific approach to ethnic food, he sheds some light on the invisible consequences of their expertise as foodies, bearers of inflexible norms, who resort to soft power to assert their immutable principles. Viewed through the lens of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism , the enactment of eating strategies – not to mention people’s capacity to cook a good meal – will serve to analyze connections between food and power. Beyond thematic aspects illustrating a crisis, Margulies’s dramatic use of food may reveal his aesthetic strategies in performing crisis.

This article analyzes Anne Washburn’s wildly popular, and often controversial, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (2012) by focusing on the principal retellings that shape Mr. Burns and delineating how Washburn’s adaptations produce the thematic content of the play. Washburn deftly interweaves a variety of high and low culture source material within the plot. Pandemic and apocalyptic tropes provide the ecofictional narrative base to adaptations of Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), Euripides’s Orestes , Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), and a variety of episodes of The Simpsons (1989–). Through these retellings, Mr. Burns metatheatrically chronicles how stories shape listeners and their cultures. When the stories told simply pander to the materialism, greed, and commodification that permeate contemporary global capitalist culture, then society proliferates those solipsistic values. Washburn ultimately argues that, in what may seem like apocalyptic times, storytelling as embodied in the theater arts must instead advocate humanitarian collectivist values.

The paper situates current developments in British theatre within wider trends towards dystopia and (post-)apocalyptic writing. A central focus is on the role of posthuman elements in dystopian plays which are used to create a constant and pervasive, but mostly unspecific sense of crisis. Two recent works by female playwrights – Dawn King’s Foxfinder (2011) and Stef Smith’s Human Animals (2016) – are compared and related back to Caryl Churchill’s seminal Far Away (2000) to elucidate how the nonhuman comes to be perceived as a threat and how this leads to, and/or supports, a dystopian system and its violent measures. Moreover, both Foxfinder and Human Animals manage to combine absurdist elements that border on the surreal with more or less pronounced didactic implications for the audience, although these connections are realised in different ways by the two playwrights. In this manner, post-apocalyptic dystopian theatre of the early 21st century can become revolutionary rather than regressive.