As collections of essays, lectures, and interviews, these three volumes provide a valuable introduction to a decade of British political theatre, while also challenging the reigning critical accounts of the period. Billingham presents five playwrights who represent, as his title suggests, ‘the sharp’ as opposed to ‘the sedated’ end of the political spectrum. He identifies this edgy, oppositional, socially concerned ‘wave’ of new playwrights as following in the tradition of a post-1956 Royal Court generation. With the exception of Ravenhill, they were overlooked in Aleks Sierz's In-Yer-Face Theatre (2001), a work that had previously set the terms of critical discussion. Billingham opens each chapter with an interview transcript, followed by a brief critical essay charting ‘the development of the writer's dramatic voice’ (p. 3). While student aids (a timeline, ‘Short Cuts’ outlining the chapters, and ‘Downloads’ for further research) seem targeted at undergraduates, a substantial bibliography is lacking. Opening with David Edgar's work since the 1960s, Billingham implicitly acknowledges the existence of an older, still active, generation of political playwrights, and the chapter on Mark Ravenhill benefits from a discussion of his more recent plays. The strongest chapters, however, focus on artists not always recognized as political: the prolific Scotsman David Greig and Forced Entertainment's Tim Etchells. Defending their inclusion as unique and important writers, Billingham argues that a global, postmodern environment demands such new political sensibilities. In the final chapter, he pays respectful, but less enthusiastic, homage to Tanika Gupta as a ‘consistently articulate’ voice representing her community (p. 226).
As an anthology of interviews, British Theatre of the 1990s offers a broader, more nuanced look at the decade in question. Beginning with directors associated with the Royal Court (Stephen Daldry, Ian Rickson, Max-Stafford-Clark), the editors implicitly reconfirm the Court's centrality to the success, if not the development, of new writing of the 1990s. Interviews with playwrights follow (Neil Bartlett, Martin Crimp, Kevin Elyot, Joe Penhall and Mark Ravenhill), then critics (Michael Billington, Nicholas de Jongh and Aleks Sierz) and academics (Dan Rebellato, Graham Saunders and Alan Sinfield). Although they note with regret the ‘important absence’ of women playwrights (p. xi), the gap is less forgivable in the context of the all-male cast of directors, critics and academics as interview subjects. Although each transcript stands on its own, similar questions are raised throughout the volume, making it easier to see the editors' reflections upon certain literary critical categories. By the end, for example, an implicit connection has been made between ‘gay/lesbian/queer theatre’ and an ‘in-yer-face’ sensibility, which in turn helps explain the choice of interviewees. Especially instructive is finding playwrights pushing back against the labels being imposed, followed by the rearticulation and qualification of these same categories by critics and academics most responsible for their use.
The excellent collection Cool Britannia was developed from a 2002 Bristol conference that aimed to interrogate the critical vocabulary through which the debate about new writing in the 1990s had been framed to date. Editor Graham Saunders was disappointed that the majority of conference participants accepted, rather than reappraised, the ‘in-yer-face’ buzzword, and that papers about Sarah Kane ‘dominated the proceedings’ (p. 2). For publication, he excluded articles on Kane (on whom he himself has published a monograph), and solicited articles more squarely addressing the original intentions. Aleks Sierz's keynote so deftly recapitulates and ruthlessly critiques his own earlier book that it could replace that book for classroom use. Ken Urban follows with a look at the convergence of ‘cool’ and ‘cruel’ Britannia as it developed from New Labour's own political strategies, providing crucial historical background to a period that may not be as familiar to non-British readers. Mary Luckhurst's discussion of Harold Pinter's ‘poetic politics’ in light of his surprisingly political Nobel Prize speech implicitly argues the limitations of critical labels. Part Two, ‘Thatcher's Children and (Post-) Feminism’, addresses my concern with a historical narrative that tends to exclude women and minorities by providing articles on Judy Upton, Zindika, and Bonnie Greer. In her engaging ‘A Good Night Out, for the Girls’, Elaine Aston uses Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues and other popular entertainments to suggest that audiences, as much as playwrights, provide the progressive measure of a play's politics. Part Three opens out to consider how issues of nation, devolution, and globalization are taken up in work by playwrights we might otherwise think of as regional or intensely personal. For example, David Patty articulates the new stakes for Scottish playwrights writing after devolution, while Dan Rebellato connects the recurring motif of bodily mutilation in postmodern British plays to a critique of commodity capitalism. The book closes with David Greig's eloquent rumination on a life-changing experience of ‘rough theatre’ in Ramallah, the intensity of which reaffirms his belief in the transformative power of theatre. Somewhat counterintuitively, the editors' decision to keep open the definition of political theatre resulted in trenchant political analyses.
