Download or read book The Political Theatre of David Edgar written by Janelle Reinelt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-14 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Edgar's writings address the most basic questions of how humans organize and govern themselves in modern societies. This study brings together the disciplines of political philosophy and theatre studies to approach the leading British playwright as a political writer and a public social critic. Edgar uses theatre as a powerful tool of public discourse, an aesthetic modality for engaging with and thinking/feeling through the most pressing social issues of the day. In this he is a supreme rationalist: he deploys character, plot and language to explore ideas, to make certain kinds of discursive cases and model hypothetical alternatives. Reinelt and Hewitt analyze twelve of Edgar's most important plays, including Maydays and Pentecost, and also provide detailed discussions of key performances and critical reception to illustrate the playwright's artistic achievement in relation to his contributions as a public figure in British cultural life.
Download or read book The Political Theatre of David Edgar written by Janelle G. Reinelt and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature written by Richard Bradford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 2453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE An insightful guide to the exploration of modern British and Irish literature The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature is a must-have guide for anyone hoping to navigate the world of new British and Irish writing. Including modern authors and poets from the 1960s through to the 21st century, the Companion provides a thorough overview of contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama by some of the most prominent and noteworthy writers. Seventy-three comprehensive chapters focus on individual authors as well as such topics as Englishness and identity, contemporary Science Fiction, Black writing in Britain, crime fiction, and the influence of globalization on British and Irish Literature. Written in four parts, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature includes comprehensive examinations of individual authors, as well as a variety of themes that have come to define the contemporary period: ethnicity, gender, nationality, and more. A thorough guide to the main figures and concepts in contemporary literature from Britain and Ireland, this two-volume set: Includes studies of notable figures such as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, as well as more recently influential writers such as Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. Covers topics such as LGBT fiction, androgyny in contemporary British Literature, and post-Troubles Northern Irish Fiction Features a broad range of writers and topics covered by distinguished academics Includes an analysis of the interplay between individual authors and the major themes of the day, and whether an examination of the latter enables us to appreciate the former. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature provides essential reading for students as well as academics seeking to learn more about the history and future direction of contemporary British and Irish Literature.
Download or read book David Edgar Playwright and Politician written by Elizabeth Swain and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1986 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Edgar: Playwright and Politician examines the British dramatist's forty stage plays written between 1971 and 1983, effectively providing a minihistory of Britain's sociopolitical climate since World War II and of Britain's post-1968 political theatre movement, with its various methods and changing venues. Swain discusses Edgar's use of dramatic form, his subject matter and his political viewpoint in order to examine different approaches to political playwriting, ranging from the blatant didacticism of agitprop to the subtler mimesis of social realism. Particular attention is given to Edgar's landmark plays, Destiny and Maydays, both produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company. A chapter is also devoted to Edgar's widely performed adaptations, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, Mary Barnes and Nicholas Nickleby.
Download or read book In Yer Face Theatre written by Aleks Sierz and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Strategies of Political Theatre written by Michael Patterson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-22 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a theoretical framework for some of the most important play-writing in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. Examining representative plays by Arnold Wesker, John Arden, Trevor Griffith, Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, Edward Bond, David Hare, John McGrath and Caryl Churchill, the author analyses their respective strategies for persuading audiences of the need for a radical restructuring of society. The book begins with a discussion of the way that theatre has been used to convey a political message. Each chapter is then devoted to an exploration of the engagement of individual playwrights with left-wing political theatre, including a detailed analysis of one of their major plays. Despite political change since the 1980s, political play-writing continues to be a significant element in contemporary play-writing, but in a very changed form.
Download or read book Maydays written by David Edgar and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Edgar's Trying It On is an autobiographical play, written to be performed by its author. It was first performed at Warwick Arts Centre on 7 June 2018, at the beginning of a tour which included dates at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre; the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham; the Royal Shakespeare Company's Other Place Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; and the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London. It was commissioned by Warwick Arts Centre and produced by China Plate theatre studio. The play is performed on a set designed to look like a study, full of clutter, with a stage manager's table to the side. David addresses the audience directly, reflecting on the journey he's taken from the twenty-year-old of 1968, experiencing worldwide student revolt and being immersed in radical politics, to the seventy-year-old of today. He wants to know if those two Davids share the same beliefs, and if not, whether it is the world that's changed, or him. He conducts straw polls to find out the audience's position on certain topics. He presents video testimony from several authors and political commentators. And as his delves deeper into his own history, and the apparently deepening rift between generations today, the Stage Manager, a young woman called Danni, steps in to challenge his perspective.
Download or read book Destiny written by David Edgar and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-14 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The production of this play established David Edgar as a major playwright, one of the most important of the young generation of dramatists to emerge out of the 'portable' theatre movement of the late sixties.
Download or read book If Only written by David Edgar and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Edgar's 'If Only' is a political drama set around the 2010 UK General Election and its possible consequences for policymaking. It was first performed at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, on 20 June 2013.
Download or read book The Shape of the Table written by David Edgar and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1989. An Eastern Bloc government on the brink of collapse. As the old regime retreats, former political prisoners join banned writers around the negotiating table... The Shape of the Table is part of David Edgar's post-Cold War trilogy of plays, which also includes Pentecost and The Prisoner's Dilemma. Witty and informative, this play is both an intensely topical account of what actually went on in the corridors of power and a timeless analysis of revolution in action. In particular the play explores not only the challenge of seizing power, but also the difficulty of relinquishing it. The Shape of the Table was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in 1990.
Download or read book Theatre and Postcolonial Desires written by Awam Amkpa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the themes of colonial encounters and postcolonial contests over identity, power and culture through the prism of theatre. The struggles it describes unfolded in two cultural settings separated by geography, but bound by history in a common web of colonial relations spun by the imperatives of European modernity. In post-imperial England, as in its former colony Nigeria, the colonial experience not only hybridized the process of national self-definition, but also provided dramatists with the language, imagery and frame of reference to narrate the dynamics of internal wars over culture and national destiny happening within their own societies. The author examines the works of prominent twentieth-century Nigerian and English dramatists such as Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, Davd Edgar and Caryl Churchill to argue that dramaturgies of resistance in the contexts of both Nigerian as well as its imperial inventor England, shared a common allegiance to what he describes as postcolonial desires. That is, the aspiration to overcome the legacies of colonialism by imagining alternative universes anchored in democratic cultural pluralism. The plays and their histories serve as filters through which Ampka illustrates the operation of what he calls 'overlapping modernities' and reconfigures the notions of power and representation, citizenship and subjectivity, colonial and anticolonial nationalisms and postcoloniality. The dramatic works studied in this book embodied a version of postcolonial aspirations that the author conceptualises as transcending temporal locations to encompass varied moments of consciousness for progressive change, whether they happened during the hey day of English imperialism in early twentieth-century Nigeria, or in response to the exclusionary politics of the Conservative Party in Thatcherite England. Theatre and Postcolonial Desires will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of drama, postcolonial and cultural studies.
Download or read book Dreams and Deconstructions written by Sandy Craig and published by Ambergate, Derbyshire [England] : Amber Lane Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pentecost written by David Edgar and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Text of production first performed At The Other Place, Stratford-Upon-Avon, 12 October 1994.
Download or read book Written on the Heart written by David Edgar and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new play about biblical translation from a top UK playwright, marking the King James Bible's 400th Anniversary.
Download or read book Testing the Echo written by David Edgar and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative, satirical look at the overwhelming difficulty of defining what it is to be British.
Download or read book A Politic Theatre The Drama of David Hare written by Scott Fraser and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This analysis of twenty published texts by David Hare employs definitions from contemporary semiotic literary theory as a means of describing typologies of political drama. By tracing the incorporation of stylistic devices from agitational propaganda (caricature, self-referentiality, the frisson between oral and visual signification) throughout the typologies, the study illustrates how each text subverts audience expectation based on established dramatic genres. The collection of texts is seen as inherently self-referential and politically subversive. At the centre of each typology is a protagonist who functions as a martyr to or parodic emblem of contemporary society. Consistently, the hermeticism of public institutions which represent the political status quo makes them immune from any form of individual protest from the Left or Right. In the satirical anatomy, the emblem of political dissent is coopted by involvement within the institution, or the stage is dominated by a conservative who controls the action. In the demythology, private individuals are seen as incapable of altering the public frame of history; but here private suffering subverts the collective mythology of the historical construct. In the martyrology, the emblem of dissent is associated with a moral virtue which is inimical to contemporary society, the audience's expectation of the triumph of the individual being subverted when he/she is expelled from the onstage world on the grounds of political ideology. It is only in the final typology, the conversion, that a conservative emblem is seen as directly influenced by such martyrdom, and the audience is provided with an actual example of political change. Thus, the study describes how each typology builds on the construction of the previous, and all generate from agitational propaganda.
Download or read book Playing with Fire written by David Edgar and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When the defiantly northern Wyverdale District Council fails to satisfy a government audit, a New Labour fixer is despatched from the capital to formulate a robust recovery plan. But resources spent on websites, 'faith festivals' and council leaflets in Bengali seem beside the point to the Labour old guard, struggling as they are to provide basic services to an alienated and divided electorate." "What looks at first like a topical satire of contrasting attitudes between north and south, old and new Labour, mushy peas and guacamole, quickly becomes a chilling drama about multicultural Britain, in which racial tensions can soar and good intentions have fatal consequences." "Premiered in the National's Olivier Theatre, Playing with Fire marks a return to the subject matter David Edgar first explored in his breakthrough play, Destiny."--BOOK JACKET.
