Nova dramaturgia na Grã-Bretanha: como definir o teatro contemporâneo?

Artigo sobre a nova dramaturgia na Grã-Bretanha, acompanhada por uma definição de «teatro contemporâneo»

Attempts on (writing) her life: ethics and ontology in pro-feminist playwriting.

Does a feminist dramaturgy exist for male playwrights? The post-1990s work of British playwrights Simon Stephens, Tim Crouch and Martin Crimp variously enact an attrition between female protagonists and male writers. Appraising these "attempts on (writing) her life" requires a feminist criticality that can incorporate the unique, intersubjective relation of playwright and character. What is the gendered relationship of these actors? In the manner of Performance/Philosophy, this essay finds that Levinasian fecundity answers this call – finding a crucial space for continental philosophy in the pro-feminist movement. Drawing on the philosophical significance of “objectification”, this essay argues that ethical portrayals of gender - in Peggy Phelan’s notion of the ‘representational economy’ - bestow a responsibility upon male playwrights to explore the potential to contribute to feminist critical writing. Whether this is a matter of ontology – and the essentialism of sexual difference that accompanies such a position – is weighed against the ethics of men-writing-women

Caryl Churchill’s 21st Century Poetics: Theatre form and feminism from far away to Ding Dong the Wicked

This article considers the six 21st century plays Caryl Churchill has written up to 2012: Far Away, A Number, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Seven Jewish Children, Love and Information and Ding Dong the Wicked. It considers each in relation to the vision of feminist theatre offered in Sue-Ellen Case's classic 1998 study Feminism and Theatre to consider how far the aims and values of second wave feminism remain evident in Churchill’s 21st century work. Through this discussion the article attempts to more sharply define the formal characteristics of each play and their relationship to its subject matter, and to place this discussion in the context of contemporary notions of the 'post-feminist' and of 'feminist residue'. It is one of the first scholarly considerations of Love and Information and Ding Dong the Wicked, both first performed in 2012

No Such Thing as Society: The Novel under Neoliberalism

Because literature always depends on evoking a sense of community between writers and their readers, there can be no flourishing of literature without society. Indicative of this axiomatic is the novel’s contribution to how any specific ‘social imaginary’ or ‘structure of feeling’ comes to crystallize in the first place. Complementing Raymond Williams’ influential encapsulation of ‘structure of feeling’ as each new generation’s response to ‘the unique world it is inheriting, taking up many continuities [...] yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently’, Manfred Steger defines social imaginaries as the ways in which ‘“we” – the members of a particular community – fit together, how things go on between us, the expectations we have of each other, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie those expectations’. The final two decades of the twentieth century are no exception in this regard, as they too constitute a singular slice of history with its own particular set of common understandings, expressions and practices of culture and community. Importantly, the perceived distinctiveness and newness of the period was the result not so much of a gentle generational shift as a wholescale political revolution, the enormity of which would jolt society into a hitherto inconceivable direction of socio-economic change and cultural transmutation. As Colin Hutchinson puts it, the inception of Thatcherite neoliberalism in Britain is best understood as a violent ‘assault […] on the public realm [leading to] the erosion of civic sensibilities and collective allegiances’. Another point of interest for us is the formative implication of ‘The Individual’ in the symbiosis of society and the novel. Nancy Armstrong describes individualism as ‘the ideological core’ of the novel; in her view, ‘novels think like individuals about the difficulties of fulfilling oneself […] under specific cultural historical conditions’. Armstrong’s proposition assumes special significance in the light of Margaret Thatcher’s announcement in 1987 that ‘there is no such thing [as society]! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.’ Thatcher’s eradication of society and her hyperbolic championing of the individual instigated a fundamental ideological recasting of late twentieth-century Britain’s social imaginary, which in turn significantly influenced the development of the British novel

“This Disgusting Feast of Filth”: Meat Eating, Hospitality, and Violence in Sarah Kane’s Blasted

Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) scandalised its early audiences with its staging of sexual violence, war crimes, and cannibalism. One reviewer famously described it as a ‘disgusting feast of filth’, an appraisal which unwittingly captures the centrality of questions of appetite to the play’s ethical project. In this essay, I argue that attention to the consumption of meat is crucial to a fuller understanding of the play’s well-documented interest in sexual violence and militarism. I trace how Kane brings meat into an economy of exchange, hospitality, and gift-giving which, while ostensibly driven by care, is nonetheless thoroughly structured by violence

In yer face theatre : interpreting new writing for British theatre in the 1990s and after

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