Twenty-First Century Drama : What Happens Now

Within this landmark collection, originalvoices from the field of drama provide rich analysis of a selection of the mostexciting and remarkable plays and productions of the twenty-first century. But what makes the drama of the new millenium so distinctive? Which events, themes, shifts, and paradigms are marking its stages? Kaleidoscopic in scope, Twenty-FirstCentury Drama: What Happens Now creates a broad, rigorously criticalframework for approaching the drama of this period, including its forms,playwrights, companies, institutions, collaborative projects, and directors. The collection has a deliberately British bent,examiningestablished playwrights – such as Churchill, Brenton, and Hare – alongside anew generation of writers – including Stephens, Prebble, Kirkwood, Bartlett,and Kelly. Simultaneously international in scope, it engages with significant new work from the US,Japan, India, Australia, and the Netherlands, to reflect atwenty-first century context that is fundamentally globalized. The volume’scentral themes – the financial crisis, austerity, climate change, new forms ofhuman being, migration, class, race and gender, cultural politics and issues ofnationhood – are mediated through fresh, cutting-edge perspectives.